The Whisper by Carla Neggers Page A

business with Augustine. The wife—I forget her name…”
    “Helen,” Scoop supplied.
    Bob lifted his glass. “Yeah. Helen. She worked at an auction house in New York before she married Percy. There are no missing Carlisles or auction house workers or anyone else to tie Augustine to them.”
    “As a killer,” Scoop said.
    “As opposed to what?”
    “What if he was involved in pushing stolen art?”
    Bob set his glass down and sighed. “Don’t complicate my life more than it already is, Scoop, all right?”
    “Cliff Rafferty’s been out to our place.”
    Bob didn’t respond right away. Finally he pushed aside his glass as if Scoop had just ruined his evening. “Hell, Scoop, what are you doing? You’ll make yourself crazy. You’ll make me crazy. Anyone could have planted that bomb. You said it yourself. Norman Estabrook could have slipped a few bucks to the meter reader to stick it under Abigail’s grill. Said it was a present. A surprise. Who knows?”
    “Estabrook was caught up in Jay Augustine’s obsession with evil. There could be a stronger connection between those two than we realize.”
    Bob’s eyes—the same shade of blue as those of his three daughters and niece—narrowed on Scoop. “What’s going on? What do you have?”
    Scoop drank more of his Guinness, remembering evenings alone on the Beara Peninsula when he’d force himself not to speculate, not to lose himself in the possible scenarios and suspects. He and Bob weren’t on the investigation. They couldn’t be. They were personally involved.
    Victims.
    He hated that word.
    “Nothing,” he said finally. “Grasping at thin air. You ever run into an archaeologist named Sophie Malone? She used to work here.”
    Bob sighed. “Archaeologist, Scoop? What the hell?”
    “We met in Ireland yesterday and ended up on the same plane back to Boston today. Just one of those things.”
    “Yeah. Imagine. That’s the short version?”
    Scoop nodded and looked at the sandwich placed in front of him. He’d lost his appetite.
    “You need sleep,” Bob said. “Jet lag makes me feel like I have dryer lint in my head. Keira had me try some scheme she readabout on the Internet. Basically you don’t eat for about twelve hours on the day you travel. You just drink a lot of water.”
    “Did it work?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t make it past four hours. Did you run into Keira in Ireland?”
    It was a blatant ploy for more information, not that Scoop blamed him. “I saw her and Simon yesterday before I headed to the airport.” He decided not to mention the Brits. “They’re good.”
    “The fairy prince and princess,” Bob said, only half joking.
    “I could believe in fairies after going out to Keira’s ruin.”
    “Cathartic being there, wasn’t it?”
    “Yeah.” He almost could hear the dog splashing in the stream, Sophie’s laughter. “Yeah, it was.”
    Bob scratched one side of his mouth, looking the experienced homicide detective he was. “I’m not an enemy, Scoop. What else happened in Ireland?”
    “It rained a lot my last week there.”
    Bob stood up. “Go to bed.”
    “Your beer’s on me.”
    “Yeah. Good. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
    He thumped up the stairs. Morrigan’s had emptied out. Scoop ate a few bites of his sandwich and drank more of his Guinness. It was true that anyone could have planted the bomb. The triple-decker had no alarm system. There wasn’t much of a lock on the gate. There was often no one at home, although he, Bob and Abigail had unpredictable schedules—which could be a deterrent to some stranger walking out back with a pipe-bomb stuck under his shirt or hidden in a backpack.
    Another cop could have found out their schedules.
    Scoop gave up on his sandwich and took his beer upstairs with him. His room was on the third floor, small, understated, withupscale towels and bath products and a fussy little table that he could use as a desk. He didn’t care. The water was hot and the bed had clean