Niall had spent the past few hours trying to relieve his stress by roughhousing with Pope and Martha.
His conversation with Peter had been telling enough for him to know in his gut that Forensic Instincts would take what the professor gave them, combine it with analyses he couldn’t generate without having the tapestries, and make inroads toward finding the hoard.
His hoard.
He’d taken precautions to make sure that didn’t happen. He’d contacted Donald and asked him to surveil the Forensic Instincts team. He wasn’t worried about when one of them went out alone. He was focused on any indication that the team was heading somewhere en masse. Should that happen, he needed to know exactly where they were going. And whether or not it turned out to be a false alarm, he’d follow them.
He glanced at the clock on his mantel. Despite the specifics that Peter had been able to pass along, he’d only heard snatches of the meeting from outside the door, not to mention that his understanding of what he’d overheard was limited. There was only one person who could explain the full extent of what had taken place, as well as what it all meant.
The professor had been asleep long enough. It was time to wake him up so they could talk.
***
Niall glanced both ways as he made his way down the corridor. All was quiet. He reached the professor’s apartment door and raised his hand to knock. He frowned when he saw that the door was slightly ajar. Peter would never have made that error.
No sounds coming from inside, so there were no visitors. Which left open the possibility that the professor had gone out.
Why? More unsettling: with whom? Had someone from Forensic Instincts been here to collect the old man while Peter was out?
Niall wasn’t waiting to find out. He shoved opened the door and strode inside. “James?” he called out.
He was greeted by nothing but silence.
Shit. Where is he?
Niall was on his way to the bedroom when he caught sight of his answer. Crumpled on the floor at the far end of the living room, blood still oozing out of his head, lay the professor.
Even as Niall hurried to his side and squatted down, he knew the man was dead. Just as he knew what he’d find when he examined the body.
Two shots behind the ear at the soft part of the skull. No exit wounds. Fired, he knew, by a .22 caliber pistol that used long rifle rounds. An excruciating death.
Cobra.
“Fuck,” he ground out, forcing his teeth to stay clenched to muffle the sound. The last thing he needed was a swell of apartment dwellers to rush in and see that a murder had just taken place in his building. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“Niall?” Peter’s voice came from the entranceway. “Why are you on the floor… Shit.” Having walked close enough to see what his friend was examining, he tossed aside the bags of takeout food he’d been carrying and hurried over to squat down beside him.
It didn’t take him long to assess the situation, not when this signature kill was common IRA knowledge.
“What the hell—Cobra?” he exclaimed in disbelief. “Why…?”
“He’s after the hoard.” Niall waved away Peter’s questions, rising quickly to his feet. “No time to explain.” He tossed his apartment keys at Peter. “Go upstairs and wait for me.”
“You’re not taking care of this body alone.”
“I’m not taking care of it at all. Just do as I say.”
Hearing the steely edge in Niall’s tone, Peter nodded, grabbing the keys and taking off.
Niall waited a heartbeat. Then he pulled out his private phone and called Donald.
“He’s been here,” he said tersely, aborting code words in light of the urgency involved.
“Victim?” Donald asked.
“Blythe. His apartment. I need cleaners—now.”
“I’ll take care of it. Just get out of there.”
***
Niall joined Peter in his apartment, where they’d met mere hours ago.
Peter perched at the edge of the living room sofa, scratching Pope’s and Martha’s ears as he watched his friend pace furiously around the room.
“So you knew Cobra was in New York,” he said.
“Not when you told me, but later,” Niall replied.
“You said he’s after the hoard.”
“Yeah.” A long pause. “And he knows that Niall Dempsey is one step ahead of him.”
Peter’s brows went up. “How?”
Niall sank down into a chair, propping his elbows on his knees and steepling his fingers beneath his chin. He had to be careful. There was one piece of his life as Sean Donovan that even Peter couldn’t know. And that was his identity as Silver Finger. No one but Donald could ever know that.
“I’m not sure how he figured things out,” Niall answered with as much candor as he could. “Certainly not about the existence or whereabouts of the hoard. As for the rest, I can only speculate. I was a regular customer of Rose Flaherty—the antiquities expert whose cremains you took Blythe to visit this morning. She was researching the tapestry panels for Fiona McKay. And I was keeping a close eye on that research, paying frequent visits to Rose’s shop and asking lots of questions. For all I know, he was there. I have no idea what he looks like or what identity he’s assumed.”
“You think he killed Rose Flaherty?”
“Without a doubt. He probably got whatever information he could out of her and then gave her a good hard shove. No need to waste fanfare on the old woman.”
“You’re a high-profile guy who was showing interest in the tapestry. He must have interrogated her about you. She could have told him anything before she died.” Peter paused, then carefully spoke the words Niall had been anticipating. “He must know what you did back in Ireland. Otherwise, why would he kill your professor the way he did—shoving his signature style in your face?”
“He definitely knows I’m former IRA.” Niall didn’t skirt the question or sugarcoat his response. He owed the truth about Cobra to Peter. Regardless of his friend’s ambivalence toward the prick, he’d lost friends to his lethal hand, as well. “This is the second such kill he’s taunted me with,” Niall said. “The first was one of the guys I’d hired to stay on top of Fiona McKay and Forensic Instincts. I found the body. That’s when I knew you were right about his being here. The fucking tout wanted to leave his calling card to let me know he was after what I wanted.”
“So this is a double victory for him—part personal and part greed.”
“The personal part’s a sick game to him. But the rest? He wants that hoard and the fortune that goes along with it. And somehow he knows I’m close to finding it.” Niall’s eyes glittered with hatred. “The question is, what did the professor tell him while he was begging for his life? And how much of it did Cobra even understand? He knows the tapestries exist. But there’s no way he’d make sense of the babblings of a terrified old man. No, he’s counting on my leading him to his prize.”
Peter nodded slowly in agreement. “So what now?”
“Now we lie low while the professor’s body is disposed of. By sometime tomorrow, Forensic Instincts is bound to reach out to him. And they’re going to get suspicious and alarmed when they realize he’s vanished.”
“Can they tie him to you?”
Niall shook his head. “Not a prayer. The only name they have is the fake one you used. So let them wear themselves out. As long as they keep looking for the hoard. Which, no matter what, they will. And we’ll be right there to take it from them.”
***
Claire awakened with a strangled cry.
The whole team had gone to their respective chill-out spots in the brownstone and conked out for the night, having worked on their assignments for hours. It had been days since any of them had slept, and as Casey had decided, they need to recoup.
Tossing and turning on the futon in Ryan’s lair, Claire had been unable to fall asleep, plagued by a dark feeling that had pervaded her since early evening. Now she gave a strangled cry, bolting upright with sweat dripping down her back.
“Claire, what is it?” Ryan jolted awake beside her, pivoting to gently grip her shoulders and turn her to face him. She looked dazed and terrified—a state he’d seen her in before. And it didn’t bode well.
“Death,” she whispered. “Violent death.”
Ryan swallowed hard. “Who?” he asked.
Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at him. “Oh, Ryan, I think it was the professor.” She could barely speak. “His face keeps flashing in and out of my mind, interspersed with flashes of blood, fear, and suffering.” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the image. “So much pain.”
Ryan felt bile rise in his throat. “Is Dempsey there? Is he the killer?”
“I… I can’t see.” Claire was trembling like a leaf. “I never can when it comes to that bastard. It’s like there’s a cloak covering him, even now that I know his past.”
Ryan held her for a moment. Then, he eased her away. “Let’s assemble the team.”
The conference room was dead silent as Claire spoke.
Fiona, who’d been included in this emergency meeting, began to openly weep. “If it is the professor, it’s my fault. He came to help me.”
“He came to pay his respects to Rose and to search for the hoard he’d been fascinated by for decades,” Marc responded, trying to assuage Fiona’s sense of guilt.
Ryan had been pounding away at his laptop. “Do you know how many Thomas Murphys there are in Manhattan?” he muttered. “If we knew a damn thing about this aide, I could narrow down my search. But I’ve got a whole lot of nothing.”
“Maybe he’ll contact us,” Emma suggested. “When he goes to the professor’s hotel and doesn’t find him…”
“What hotel? Do we even know where he was staying?” Patrick interrupted. He was clearly angry at himself for not having put security on the elderly man.
Casey gave a grim shake of her head. “It’s not just you who screwed up this time, Patrick. We all did. We didn’t ask a single question. Not about where the professor was staying. Not any details about his aide. Not about a damn thing.”
“His cell phone’s dead,” Ryan announced. “That number was the only tie we had to him, other than his contact info in Ireland.”
“And Thomas Murphy,” Marc reminded them with a frown. “Does anyone but me wonder if it’s a coincidence that the professor’s aide has such a common Irish last name?”
Patrick met his gaze. “You think he was a plant.” He nodded in answer to his own question. “My instincts say the same. Fiona found him wandering around outside our closed meeting door. He said he was stretching his legs. I’d say he was eavesdropping.”
“I’ll be willing to bet he was working for Dempsey,” Ryan said. “In which case, I wouldn’t waste time waiting for his frantic phone call saying the professor is missing. We can check the footage from our outdoor cameras to see if they caught his license plate. If so, I’ll do some digging. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. The plates were likely fake.”
“I agree,” Claire said, her eyes still damp. “It’s not an insight, but it feels true. This was all a setup. Maybe I would have gotten a sense of that if I weren’t so focused on the professor helping us with the tapestries.”
Casey’s sadness was laced with frustration. “Not only is this a tragedy, but there’s almost nothing proactive we can do. We can’t hunt for a body—we don’t even know for sure that the murder has taken place or, if it did, where. And we can’t call the police with nothing to go on but a feeling from Claire.” She pursed her lips, considering what steps might be taken. “Ryan, when we’re done here, follow up on those license plates. Emma, call the professor’s assistant at University College Dublin and see if she’s heard from him. Chat her up enough to casually ask if he has any family. Don’t send up any red flags.”
“Okay.” Emma nodded, coming to her feet. “I’ll report back the minute I have something.”
“Thanks.” Casey turned up her palms. “Is there anything I’m not thinking of?”
“No.” Marc shook his head. “Unfortunately, after that, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place—at least until we can prove Niall Dempsey is both an IRA terrorist and a killer. Once he’s been arrested, then we’ll get our answers.”
The whole team looked grim.
Heartsick or not, Casey rose to her leadership role. “In the meantime, the best way to honor Professor Blythe is to finish what we started. Let’s go back to the tapestries, use what he told us, and find that hoard.”
Hutch got a call from the FBI’s London attaché just before nine a.m.
The facts were indisputable.
Sean Donovan and Niall Dempsey were the same person.
In addition to that, the PSNI’s forensic team had found two separate blood samples on the shirt they’d tested—samples that had shown DNA elements that were close enough to indicate that Donovan was related to the other victim.
MI5 had collaborated with the PSNI, providing Hutch with the necessary intel. Donovan, a.k.a. Silver Finger, had a brother, Kevin, who’d been the spotter on his older brother’s final assignment. The RUC’s top informant, code name Cobra, had alerted his handler to the planned hit. Reinforcements had arrived. The mission had been aborted. Shots were fired. Silver Finger had survived. His brother had not.
From that moment on, Sean Donovan had disappeared off the grid—until now.
Hutch read the long list of Donovan’s hits, and his gut clenched. This conscienceless assassin was the animal that was at the heart of Casey’s ongoing case.
And Hutch’s role in what was an official, highly classified bureau investigation meant he couldn’t say a word to her about what he’d learned. Not that it mattered. His silence would tell her all she needed to know. And it wouldn’t do a damn thing to stop her or FI from following through on their work.
As for the federal investigation, this would be just the beginning. An arrest warrant based on information from Ireland would take a long time. Plus, the Irish authorities wanted to build an airtight prosecution case. If there were other IRA terrorists connected to Dempsey or who had, in fact, escaped the way he had through a network of sympathizers here in the US, it was essential that that be discovered. Dempsey was not a flight risk. He was a well-respected member of the community. More would be gained by taking the time to surveil him and find out who he met with and if they, too, had IRA connections. In addition, it would be essential to investigate his financials and see if funds had been sent to support IRA causes that might be simmering beneath the surface.
The good news was that Hutch could now officially initiate surveillance on the bastard.
And Hutch planned on being an integral part of that surveillance himself.