Heron's Cove. Carla Neggers

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      WITH THREE DONOVAN brothers and an Irish priest watching her, Emma Sharpe choked back her sample of the smoky single-malt Scotch—her sixth and last tasting of the night. “Intense,” she said, managing not to slam the tulip-shaped nosing glass on the table and grab the pitcher of water. Give it a few seconds. She was an FBI agent, after all. Tough as nails. She smiled at the four men. “People pay to drink this one, huh?”

      “Dearly,” Finian Bracken, the Irish priest, said. “You’re not one for a heavily peated whiskey, I see.”

      Emma tried to distinguish the other flavors of the sample—spices, fruits, whatever—but only tasted the peat. “I don’t know if I’m one for a lightly peated whiskey, either.”

      A cold wind penetrated Hurley’s thin walls and sprayed the old windows with salt water and rain. The restaurant, a fixture on the Rock Point harbor, was basically a shack that jutted out over the water. Now only a few lights penetrated the dark night and fog. Finian had organized the impromptu tasting, setting up on a back table away from what few diners were there on a windy, rainy late-October Friday. He and Michael, Andy and Kevin Donovan were already gathered over a half-dozen bottles of high-end whiskey when Emma had arrived in southern Maine an hour ago, up from Boston and her job with a small, specialized FBI unit.

      Only Colin, the second-born Donovan, wasn’t in Rock Point. Mike was a Maine guide, Andy a lobsterman and Kevin a state marine patrol officer, but, like Emma, Colin was an FBI agent.

      Not like me, she thought.

      She specialized in art crimes. Colin was a deep-cover agent. He’d left his hometown a month ago, pretending to return to FBI headquarters in Washington. The true nature of his work was known to only a few even within the FBI, but his brothers had guessed that he didn’t sit at a desk. Initially he’d kept in touch at least intermittently with his family and friends—and Emma—but for the past three weeks, no one had heard from him.

      The silence was far too long, not just for his family and friends but for the FBI.

      And for Emma.