The final guests had all left the gathering, and Casey, Claire, and Fiona had just finished transferring the tapestry panels from the McKays’ house to Casey’s car.
Casey laid the last of the tapestries flat on top of the others in the trunk and took an extra minute to make sure they were secure before placing a blanket over them. She then slammed the hatch shut, walked around to slide behind the steering wheel, and shut the door.
“Well done,” Claire said from the passenger seat, intentionally looking straight ahead so whoever was watching them wouldn’t realize they’d been made. “Open and visible. There’s no doubt we have the tapestry panels with us.”
“Nope.” Casey turned over the ignition, waiting as Fiona gave her mother another hard hug and some quiet reassurance. “And it certainly helped our cause that Maureen followed us out, wringing her hands in distress over parting with the panels. It was clear she’d never let us take them unless it was absolutely necessary, both for their safety and for FI’s investigation. It was an all-around win.”
As Casey spoke, Fiona jumped into the back seat.
“All set,” she said. “I don’t think my mom is going to get any calmer than she is now. Until this insanity is resolved and we’re all out of danger, she’s going to worry. Parting with the tapestries freaked her out more because of why we’re taking them, not so much that we’re taking them. Our talk with her hit home, even if we kept the information to a minimum.”
What they’d told Maureen was a microcosm of the truth: that she and Colin were in immediate danger and that someone wanted their tapestries badly enough to become violent in order to get them. Even though they’d avoided the word kill, Maureen had made the connection.
“Fiona’s townhouse… Rose’s murder… and now this…” she’d said, her face drained of color. “They’re all connected.” She hadn’t waited for a reply. “But why the tapestry panels? They’re not valuable. I don’t understand.”
“Nor do we,” Casey had replied. “But we’ll figure it out.”
Maureen had clasped Casey hands between hers, clearly aware that there was much being left unsaid. “Please keep my children safe,” she’d begged, first and foremost a mother—a mother who was putting aside her concern for herself and her husband and focusing on her children.
“We’ll keep everyone safe,” Casey had promised.
They’d gone on to fill Maureen and Colin in on the security detail watching them at home and following them whenever they went out, and concluded by giving strict instructions for how they should behave and how to contact Al and his arriving backup if they so much as suspected they were being watched or followed.
Both the McKays had listened and nodded grimly.
There was very little Casey could do to ease their concern.
“Your mother is a very smart woman,” she said to Fiona now, pulling out of the parking spot to start their drive back to Tribeca. “She’s already trying to put together the pieces.”
“So am I,” Fiona muttered. “And I know a lot more than she does—like how every time I touch my laptop or cell phone, I’m being tracked through spyware.”
“Speaking of that, Ryan pinged me a few minutes ago,” Casey said. “He wanted to know where the hell we were and what we found out.”
Fiona rolled her eyes. “Impatient as ever.”
Casey shook her head. “That’s not impatience, that’s worry. I’ve never seen Ryan so unhinged.”
“He’s freaking out,” Claire confirmed with that utter certainty that said she wasn’t guessing.
Fiona sighed. “I know. I hate that everyone is so focused on my safety. Any news from the FI end of things?”
“Nope. But they’re all still at it.”
“I never doubted that. What did you tell Ryan?”
“That we’d be back soon and we’ll talk then.” Casey slanted a sidelong look at Claire. “Because there’s a lot even I don’t know yet—Claire?”
Claire leaned back against the headrest, visibly drained. “The two panels inside the house were revealing,” she said. “Each for a different reason.”
“Stop,” Casey said, holding up a palm. She knew Claire and her gift, and how it sometimes sucked away all her energy. That was visibly the case right now. She looked like hell. “You’re exhausted. There’s no point in going through this now when you’re going to be doing the same thing in an hour when the whole team is gathered around the conference room table.”
“Thanks.” Claire shut her eyes. “Someone handled the Galway sheep tapestry,” she murmured. “They took photos. They didn’t touch the panel in the master bedroom because they didn’t know it was there.”
“But you did—and I said to rest,” Casey replied firmly.
“So much dark energy.” Claire was zoning out. “If I relax and let my mind wander now, more might come to me. The images are still fresh.”
“Then relax. I’ll let you know when we’re at the brownstone.”
***
The warehouse door swung open with barely a touch.
“Someone picked the lock,” Donald said, glancing over his shoulder at Niall.
Both men pulled out pistols and Donald pushed open the door with his foot.
Silence greeted them as they marched inside, weapons ready.
Donald flipped on the light and they both saw the crumpled body lying in a puddle of blood on the floor.
“I didn’t do that much damage,” Donald muttered, sweeping the place before determining they were alone and then lowering his gun. “He’s dead. Someone got to him.”
“That stranger he was working with shut him up for good.” Niall walked straight over to the body, kicked it with his foot. “Which means we’ll never know…” He broke off, abruptly squatting down and staring at the dead man’s skull, his entire body going rigid with shock. “Fuck.” He kept staring, as if trying to make the obvious go away. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“What is it?” Donald was at his side in three strides.
Niall pointed at the hole behind the dead guy’s ear. “That’s Cobra’s work. The stranger is Cobra.” He came to his feet, rubbing the back of his neck as the implications shot through his mind. “Peter was right about him being here. Is this why he came? Is he hunting for the same thing I am? Or does he know who I am and is enjoying toying with me before he kills me? Or both?”
Donald was just as thrown as Niall. “You were the only one to get away,” he muttered. “Probably the only failure the sociopath ever had.”
With Cobra here, Niall was in grave danger. Everything had changed, and all their priorities had to shift. Rose Flaherty’s death, Fiona McKay—all of it had to take a back seat to protecting Niall’s life.
Clearly, Niall wasn’t thinking along those lines, because, abruptly, his head came up. “Maybe our guys weren’t lying when they said they didn’t kill Rose Flaherty. Maybe she was already dead when they got there. Maybe Cobra killed her.”
Donald processed that thoughtfully. “If he did, it wasn’t in his usual style.”
“That’s probably because he wasn’t ready to be recognized.”
“But he is now—by you.” Donald pushed to get inside Niall’s head, to make him realize what really mattered. “If what you’re saying is true, it’s all the more reason to think that Cobra knows that Sean Donovan, a.k.a. Silver Finger, is now Niall Dempsey. And that his signature kill here is a taunting announcement of that.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Niall nodded, more combative than afraid. He’d faced death before, too many times to count. He’d defied them all. He wasn’t about to die at Cobra’s hands. Quite the opposite. He’d finally get his chance to have his revenge, to torture and kill his brother’s killer. Cobra had made a fortune betraying his IRA mates to the RUC. He was too greedy not to want the treasure that Niall himself was hunting, even if his ultimate goal was to kill Silver Finger. Niall could use that to his advantage, use his findings as bait, and ultimately reel in his quarry.
“Don’t get any stupid ideas,” Donald cautioned him. “If we’re right, he knows who you are. You have no idea who he is.”
Niall ignored the warning. “I’ll use all my resources. I’ll find him. And then I’ll blow his head apart.”
***
“Okay, Claire. Before we even get started here, why did you react so violently to Niall Dempsey?”
Casey cut to the chase as the entire FI team gathered around the conference room table, standing and waiting for Fiona to lay out the thirteen tapestry panels. “You turned sheet white and reacted as if you’d been scalded when you shook his hand.”
Claire grimaced. “I really screwed up. I’m sorry. I hope he didn’t make the connection.”
“You covered nicely with the whole about-to-faint thing,” Casey reassured her. “Judging from his response, I doubt he suspected anything. I, on the other hand, was pretty stunned. In situations like that, you’re always able to hide your emotions. Obviously, this time whatever you picked up on was too intense to contain.”
“So much evil,” Claire murmured. “A black past shrouded in secrecy.” Her shoulders lifted in a frustrated shrug. “I can’t tell how much of that evil bleeds into the present. And even if it does, I can’t tell if it relates to Rose’s death or anything else about this case. Maybe if I’d lingered with the handshake…”
“That wasn’t an option.” Casey waved that away. “You couldn’t stand there holding the man’s hand for fifteen minutes. That would have been a whole lot weirder than your pulling away. Maybe when you handle the tapestries there’ll be a link to him.”
“I hope so.”
“Hey,” Ryan interjected. “Would you mind filling the rest of us in on what you’re talking about?”
Claire proceeded to tell them everything she could about Niall Dempsey, as well as her experiences touching the two panels at the McKays’ house.
“Do you think Niall Dempsey is the one who moved the Galway sheep panel?” Patrick asked.
Another shrug. “I just don’t know, at least not yet.”
Marc looked at Fiona. “How well do you know this Dempsey guy?”
“Not very well,” she replied. “Obviously, I know what everyone else does. He was born in Ireland—I have no idea where or when, or when he came to New York. Somewhere along the line, he built a multimillion-dollar real estate development business. Besides that, I know he collects antiquities and that he was a frequent customer of Rose’s. She was very fond of him; he gave her that expensive bottle of whiskey she was drinking when she…” Fiona broke off, swallowing. “Anyway, that’s pretty much it. He’s always been nice to me, like tonight when he offered me one of his vacant apartments to stay in until my place is cleaned up. I’ve never seen the evil Claire is talking about. Then again, he and I are just acquaintances. So I have no real knowledge of him as a human being. And I certainly know nothing about his past.”
“I’ll rectify that,” Ryan said. “I’ll dig into Niall Dempsey until we know everything down to what toothpaste he uses.” He tipped his head toward the conference room table. “We’ve got a shitload of stuff to do. So let’s speed things up and scrutinize the tapestries.”
With that, everyone watched as Fiona laid out the thirteen panels, the large one in the center.
Casey shook her head in amazement. “How exquisite. Your great-grandmother was an incredibly talented woman. I’ve never seen such attention to detail. I saw just the one panel in your parents’ living room, and even that I saw from a distance. But seeing these all up close—the workmanship is astonishing.”
“Thank you,” Fiona replied. “And, yes, she was amazing. I’ve seen these tapestries dozens of times and I still catch my breath each time.” She finished her task and stood back.
“I’ve placed these randomly since I have no idea what order they should go in,” she said. “Although some of them seem to be grouped together.” She pointed. “This old brick farmhouse surrounded by the green fields is clearly set in Ireland, so I’m guessing it belonged to my great-grandparents. They lived in a tiny village in County Kilkenny. My great-grandfather was a stonemason, so I’m sure he had a hand in building that stone wall out front. See the artistry of the wall and the farmhouse being cast half in light, half in shadows? That’s what gave me the name of my new collection.”
“The Galway sheep would belong in that grouping, too,” Casey noted.
Fiona nodded. “So would the panel of the stones in a field. All part of the landscape.”
“And these two crosses.” Marc pointed at another panel. “One smaller than the other, the smaller in front, creating that light and shadows image you’re referring to. The greenery and rolling hills suggest they’re in Ireland.”
“They’re Celtic high Irish crosses.” Fiona had studied all the tapestry panels long enough to have done her research. “One of the best-known symbols of Ireland. They’re ornamental stones that were cut from either sandstone or granite and are over eight hundred years old.” She pointed. “They have geometric carvings, which are hard to make out here because of the woven material. But they’re truly beautiful, and, yes, that puts them in the Ireland grouping.”
Ryan leaned over her shoulder. “The panel of the passenger ship on the ocean—which I’m assuming is the Atlantic—and the panel of the Statue of Liberty obviously illustrate our great-grandparents’ journey to the US.”
“And the awesome evening skyline panel is of Manhattan,” Emma said. “Maybe it’s the first thing they saw as they arrived. Regardless, it’s got to be grouped with the journey to New York panels.”
“That makes sense.” Casey was staring from one panel to the next. “Then come all the random depictions. The Waterford bowl and lotus leaves, which are stunning but tell us nothing. A gravestone with a tiny border woven into it and a tree beside it, a long, dark corridor lit by torches leading who knows where, a decorative stone carving that obviously means something but I have no idea what, and some ancient coins from who knows what civilization.”
“Viking,” Fiona supplied. “I based a pair of earrings on those coins.”
“That’s interesting… but it doesn’t fit anywhere in particular.” Emma sighed in frustration. “So even with the couple of groupings we have, we’re still clueless. How do all these panels fit together?”
“Before we can figure that out, we need to interpret the significance of each panel,” Marc answered. “That way we can start to determine the order in which they fit together. After that, we’ll get to why they’re so important and what they lead us to.”
Claire tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Nothing else specific about the tapestries had come to her since she left the McKays’ house, but she was still in heightened sensory mode.
Her gaze was drawn back to the center panel. The shield. The Tree of Life. The bejeweled crown. And the tiny fist clutching either a trophy or a goblet.
“The end goal is shown in the large center panel—but we can’t get to it without understanding the whole of what we’re looking at.” She reached out to touch it, then changed her mind. “I can’t do this process half-assed. I need to take all the panels to my yoga room and handle each of them, one by one, and then maybe collectively. So let’s all do our thing together first, and then I’ll go do mine alone.”
“As a team, I think we’ve gone as far as we can with the tapestries for now,” Casey said. “My recommendation is to turn things over to you.”
Claire nodded, turning to Fiona. “No great revelation at this point, but the jewelry from your new collection has made you a walking target. Whoever has you in their sights gets the connection between Light and Shadows and the tapestries. That’s part of why he had guys break into your townhouse—not only to install that spyware and to search for the tapestries but, if they didn’t find them, to take photos of everything in your workshop—particularly all the pieces in your new line.” Claire paused thoughtfully. “Were the pearl-drop earrings you’re wearing tonight out in the open during the break-in?”
Fiona nodded. “Why?”
“Because that means they have photos of them. And yet, I’m not sensing they’ve made the connection to the Waterford panel. Somehow I don’t think they’ve seen that one yet.”
“But my texts to Ryan, and his to me…”
Claire looked to Ryan for corroboration. “I don’t think they’ve gotten far enough along in the analysis of Fiona’s hard drive to find those photos. Is that possible? Because when I touched the Waterford panel, I sensed that I was the first one seeing it, other than the family.”
“More than possible, it’s probably a sure thing,” Ryan replied. “You weren’t in my lair when I changed the password on Fee’s iCloud account to something extremely long and random that would take even a professional hacker considerable time to crack. So my guess is we stopped them before they could see the photos and now they’re SOL.”
Marc’s brows were knit as he continued to study the tapestry as a whole. “Interlocking pieces of a puzzle. Why do I feel as if we’re looking at not only a story but a pictorial map leading to… something?”
There was a long moment of silence as the significance of Marc’s observation sank in.
“You’re right,” Claire breathed in a vital moment of realization. “That’s exactly what we’re looking at.”
“Wow. It must be some big-ass discovery if someone’s willing to kill for it.” Ryan frowned. “Which makes absolutely no sense. Fee’s and my great-grandparents were poor immigrants with virtually nothing when they got to the States. So what could they possibly have been leading us to? And why didn’t they just keep whatever it is themselves? Why hide it? And if they did hide it, why not tell my grandparents where it was? Why put it in code and wait for an arbitrary generation of McKays to discover it?”
“No answers yet,” Patrick said. “Not to any of it.”
“So what do we do?” Emma asked.
“We go back to the basics of what we have,” Casey responded. “We reread the book pages and the Post-it that Rose sent to Fiona while looking at the tapestries. We call the right professional contacts of Rose’s and see what they can tell us about the research she was doing for Fiona. Even if they don’t know the answers, they’ll know the questions she was asking.”
“I never had a chance to talk to Glenna,” Fiona said. “I forgot all about it when my place was trashed. Other than coming to my mom’s gathering, she’s been staying at her sister and brother-in-law’s house in Westchester. I think she feels safer being with family than all alone and vulnerable. And she’s got nieces and nephews to keep her focused on something other than the murder investigation.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ryan told her. “I accessed Rose’s contact list and pulled the names of her most recent phone calls to fellow antiquities experts,” Ryan said. “There were a bunch of repeat calls. To University College Dublin—which, incidentally, is where she went to school—to London, and to New York. All the calls were made the week before she died.”
“That’s the direction we were headed in before this evening sidetracked us,” Casey said. “Ryan, send me the names and the numbers. I’ll get in touch with all of them and see what I can find out. I’ll try the New York number now, in the hopes that this person is a night owl. It’s the middle of the night in Dublin and London, so I’ll have to wait before reaching out to them. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’re early risers.”
She glanced around the table. “In the meantime, I suggest that Ryan goes down to his lair and researches Niall Dempsey. Marc, Patrick, and Emma resume reviewing the files Yoda set up for us. Once I’ve made my New York call, I’ll join you guys in the War Room.”
She turned to Claire. “You take the tapestries up to your yoga room and see what happens.”
“I’ve been itching to do that since I first saw them.” A respectful glance at Fiona. “May I?”
“Please.” Fiona gathered up the panels, placing one on top of the other, and handed them to Claire. “If you pick up on anything, no matter how small, please come and get me. I know a ton about my family history. Something that might not seem significant to you could mean a lot to me.”
“I will.” Claire stiffened as the tapestries touched her palms. “So much energy.” She was already walking out the door. “I don’t want it to fade.”
Casey watched Claire disappear around the corner to the staircase, confident that they’d soon have more to go on.
“Fiona, I think you should get some rest,” she said. “We’re trained to go twenty-four seven. You’re not. Plus you’re wiped. Take a nap.”
“Not a prayer,” Fiona replied, shaking her head. “I’m not wiped, I’m wired. I need to be part of this process, for the same reason I just gave Claire. I’m personally connected to everything you’re poring over. I may have answers you need.” She forced a smile. “Plus if my cranky-without-sleep brother can do twenty-four seven, so can I.”
Ryan rolled his eyes.
Casey chuckled. “Actually, you haven’t seen your brother when he’s in high-gear work mode. He’s spot-on with little or no sleep. But I have a feeling you’ll also hold up just fine. So to work it is.”