The Angel (19 page)

“You want to know more as a Boston detective.”

She sighed. “I guess I do. Can’t help it.”

“Simon’s on the case. He’s got contacts even I don’t know about.” Owen stepped into the room and kissed her softly.

“You know you could paint this room chartreuse for all I care, don’t you? I’m not looking at the walls when I’m in here.”

She laughed. “I should call that bluff and exchange my pretty blue for a really ugly chartreuse and see how you like it.”

He left, and thirty seconds later, Abigail did exactly as he predicted and gave up on painting. She placed the top back on the can, tapped it down tight and got to her feet, part of her wishing he’d kicked over the paint can and swept her off to the beach for the day. They could be in southern Maine in less than two hours, depending on traffic. Getting out of her way, going off to Beacon Hill, had nothing to do with painting the bedroom or her preoccu

pation with the drowning in the Public Garden. Owen was simply giving her room to figure out what was going on with her.

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And wasn’t that part of why she’d fallen in love with him? She headed through her small, IKEA-decorated kitchen out to the backyard. Hers was the first-floor and the smallest of the three apartments in the Jamaica Plain tripledecker she’d bought with Bob and Scoop Wisdom, an internal affairs detective. Abigail had heard Scoop leave early for work and thought Bob had gone off, too, but she found him out back drinking coffee and cleaning the grill.

“I just saw Owen,” Bob said. “Why aren’t you with him?”

“I’m painting the bedroom.”

“No, you’re not. You’re messing with that accidental drowning.”

She knew he’d said “accidental” deliberately to get under her skin. “You know damn well it hasn’t been deter

mined—”

“Officially it hasn’t.” He dug his grill scraper into a baked-on hunk of black gunk. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Owen, but you two need to talk before someone besides me notices it’s affecting your work.”

“Nothing’s going on with Owen and me, and my work’s fine. Since when are you the relationship expert, anyway?”

He ignored her, flipping the black glob onto a paper towel. He wore shorts, a Red Sox T-shirt and sports sandals—not an outfit he’d wear to work. “Take it from someone whose had two marriages go sour on him. It’s worse when you’re lying in bed alone again, and you know you should have just let it out, talked. Maybe it would have helped save things, maybe it wouldn’t have, but you’d know you’d done everything you could.”

Abigail didn’t want to talk to him about relationships.

“You’re not going in today?”

“Nope. Abigail, you need to listen to me.” He pointed his grill-cleaning brush at her. “You were on your own for

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seven years. You spent those years focused on becoming a detective and finding your husband’s killer.”

“I lived my life, Bob,” she said quietly, knowing he wasn’t going to quit until she said something.

“Yeah, but your life revolved around finding Chris’s killer. Everything else came second. You know it did. You got your answers last summer, but you didn’t have a chance to absorb them before you and Owen fell like bags of rocks for each other.” Bob attacked the grill again.

“I don’t think you know if you want to stay a detective.”

“That’s insane. What else would I do?”

“Wrong question. Ask yourself if being a detective matters to you today as much as it did last summer before you got that tip that sent you to Maine.”

To Mount Desert Island, she thought, where her husband had been born and raised. Where he’d died on his honey

moon, on the rocky coastline between his childhood home and Owen’s summer home. Chris’s killer had lain in wait for him, shot him, left him to die. Owen found his dead friend the next morning. Now, eight years later, Abigail had what people called—awkwardly, inadequately—closure.

“I’m not asking myself anything,” she told Bob.

“Then you’ve been hanging around me too long. This job doesn’t make it easy to talk. We get used to just not going there. To bottling it up.” He managed a grudging grin. “Only, I’m not that deep. Nothing to bottle up.”

“Owen and I are fine,” Abigail said, feeling her prick

liness return. “I’m almost finished with the book Charlotte Augustine loaned me. You know, Lucifer is a fallen angel.”

Bob glared at her. “So?”

“Keira went to Ireland to investigate an old story about a stone angel twenty-four hours after finding Victor Sarakis—”

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“You want to jerk my chain, fine,” Bob said, dropping his wire brush onto the grill. “But you just remember. I’m a senior detective who can kick your ass from here to Bunker Hill if you don’t straighten out.”

Abigail didn’t back down. “My gut tells me there’s a connection between Victor Sarakis’s death and what happened to Keira in Ireland. Your gut would, too, if you weren’t emotionally involved.”

She knew questioning his judgment and instincts—

telling him outright that he was, in fact, emotionally involved in her case—would set him off, and it did. He glared at her, his entire face turning red. “I’m getting you pulled off this investigation.”

“Just try it. See what I do.”

He turned purple, swore under his breath and thundered up the outside stairs to his third-floor apartment. Abigail exhaled, feeling lousy. Bob was her friend, and he’d had a rough couple of days. She had no business baiting him that way.

She debated following him upstairs to apologize, but rejected the idea. They’d just end up in a bigger fight. Neither one of them could get along with anyone these days.

She went back inside, grabbed her car keys and headed out. Jay and Charlotte Augustine’s Back Bay showroom was located above an upscale health club with lots of sweating, intense, skinny people on treadmills, stair-climbers, ellip

tical machines, exercise balls. The treadmills had their own televisions, and most of the machines were placed in front of tall windows that overlooked the street. Abigail used the BPD gym. It wasn’t bad, but it was perfunctory. She took a claustrophobic little elevator up to the ren

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ovated brick building’s third floor. It let her out into a re

ception area that consisted of an oak rolltop desk, an un

occupied ergonomic swivel chair and a library table that held a telephone, computer and crates of manila files. Behind the desk was a floor-to-ceiling partition and a locked door that, presumably, led to the main room. The door opened, and Liam Butler, Victor Sarakis’s graduate student assistant, poked his head out. “Hey, Detec

tive,” he said. “I thought I heard the elevator. What’s up?”

“I wanted to stop by and thank Mrs. Augustine for a book she gave me.”

“I know the one—I suggested it. Fascinating, isn’t it? Believe it or not, there are entire college courses on the devil. Victor could have taught one—he was that knowl

edgeable on the subject.”

“What about you?”

“I’m not that wild about it, to be honest. I had night

mares when I first started working for him, but I got over my resistance after a while. Victor understood. He said it was natural to be reluctant to confront evil, even on an intellectual basis. Part of the deal, really.”

“A defense mechanism,” Abigail said casually, then nodded to the open door. “Mind if I have a look in there?”

“If I said no, you’d need a warrant, right?”

“If you said no, I’d leave.”

“Gee, don’t tempt me. But it’d be provocative, wouldn’t it? If I just told you to get lost?”

She didn’t answer. She’d need more time with Liam Butler, she decided, to have a better sense of him. The outfit he had on looked like the same one he’d worn the other day, but she couldn’t tell for sure. His hair was greasier—she doubted he’d showered. She didn’t know if that was the norm for him or if the sudden death of his 178

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landlord, friend and employer had yanked him out of his routines. He seemed as easygoing as he had been at their first encounter with Jay Augustine in Victor’s devil room. Abigail knew from personal as well as professional ex

perience that not everyone handled loss in the same way. From what she’d seen so far, Liam’s behavior—even tweaking her over a search warrant—wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary.

“I have a key, in case you’re wondering,” he said. “I check on the place when Jay and Charlotte are out of town—once or twice a week, at most.”

“They don’t have employees?”

“Sometimes they hire a tempt to sit at the front desk, but that’s only if paying customers are coming by and they need the extra help. They don’t keep regular hours. Most of the people who come here have appointments.”

“Do the Augustines know you’re here now?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen them. I guess we’re all still trying to get our heads around what’s happened.” He held open the door and motioned with one arm. “Care to have a look around? I was only joking around about the warrant. No one’s got anything to hide, Detective.”

Abigail entered a room that looked as if it took up all or most of the third floor of the narrow building. Larger items—furniture, statues, trunks—were arranged on the floor in what looked to be an orderly fashion. She peeked at deep shelves filled with colorful pottery vases, small statues of animals and naked warriors, an ornately carved box and an ancient-looking bronze falcon.

“Jay and Charlotte keep good records,” Liam said. “They know everything in here, right down to the mice turds.”

Abigail smiled at his infectious humor. “Do they have a specialty?”

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“They have to be pragmatic, but they’d deal exclusively in Classical and early Medieval works if they could.”

“European?”

“Ideally, I guess.”

She wandered between stacks of wooden crates. “Give me some examples.”

“I don’t know—I have a hard enough time keeping track of Victor’s collections. Jay and Charlotte don’t keep their really good stuff here. I know that much. A lot of it’s museum quality, and they just don’t have that level of security in this showroom. Their most valuable items are specially handled and go right from the seller to the buyer. They’re known for being knowledgeable and trustworthy.”

“Do they do a good business?”

“They make most of their money on a handful of deals a year—according to Victor, at least.”

Abigail had no reason to doubt Liam’s information.

“The history I read says that anthropomorphic images of Satan didn’t take hold until around the sixth century. Would the Augustines be interested—”

“They aren’t into the devil the way Victor was. Most of their customers aren’t, either.”

“So a Medieval statue of Lucifer wouldn’t interest them?”

“I doubt it, but I guess it’d depend. There are alterna

tive religious subjects—happier ones. They deal in a lot of jewelry and household items.” Liam gave an irreverent grin. “You’d be surprised how popular chamber pots are.”

Abigail heard the elevator open.

“Oops,” Liam said. “Guess you’re caught. The pesky de

tective returns with more questions.”

She ignored him, and he followed her back out to the re

ception area.

Both Augustines looked startled to see her, but Jay re

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covered first, greeting Abigail politely. “Detective Brown

ing, it’s good to see you. What can we do for you?”

She didn’t give him a direct answer. “It’s an interesting business you have. Do you deal in Irish-Celtic pieces?”

“When we can get them,” Charlotte said, obviously awkward.

Abigail doubted Charlotte had told her husband about giving the detective investigating her brother’s death a book on the devil. Clearly, it would be simpler for the Au

gustines if Victor’s death were ruled an accident.

“Any Celtic work is in high demand,” her husband added. Abigail didn’t pursue the subject and guiltily wondered if she would have if Bob had been with her. “Could Mr. Sarakis have stopped by here—”

“The night he died?” Charlotte asked, gulping in a breath. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Did he have his own key?” Abigail asked. Liam shook his head. “Not on him. I had it.”

Jay sat at the rolltop desk and spun the chair around, turning on the computer. “Anything else, Detective? Please feel free to look around as much as you’d like, but if you don’t mind, we have work to do.”

“I’m done for now.”

“Where’s your partner?” Charlotte asked. Jay tapped the computer keyboard. “She’s here on her own,” he said, giving Abigail a cool look. “Aren’t you, Detective?”

She didn’t answer. “If you think of anything else, you know how to reach me.”

When she headed back down the elevator, Abigail checked with the health club to ask a few questions. The manager wasn’t in, but she left her card with a skinny kid at the front desk. “Please ask him to call me.” She

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pointed to the computer. “Do people who use the club sign in and out?”

“Just in,” he said.

“You keep the records?”

“Uh-huh. They’re all on computer.”

“Do the Augustines belong to the club?”

The kid nodded. “Mrs. Augustine comes in more than her husband. When he does, though—man, he goes at it like you wouldn’t believe. Uses every machine in here.”

Abigail couldn’t help but smile. “Thanks for your help.”

“You bet.”

As she left, he gave her a little salute. She laughed and headed out to her car, realizing she’d just accomplished exactly nothing. She drove the few blocks to Beacon Street and parked in front of the Garrison house. When she opened her car door, she heard Irish music and remem

bered it was her day off. She didn’t have to be talking about devils and Medieval art and health club procedures. She could be dancing with Owen, even if neither of them could dance.