Thief's Mark. Carla Neggers

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СКАЧАТЬ one in here or outside. I wasn’t here when he broke in and I didn’t get my throat slit. And,” he added emphatically, “the glass could have been a practical consideration. A tool rather than a weapon, in case he needed to cut something.”

      Emma frowned. “Cut something?”

      He motioned with one hand. “Come.”

      Emma felt Colin’s tension as they followed her grandfather to his study, now his home office and where he spent most of his time. When the weather was dank and chilly, he’d have a fire going, but not today, given the lingering warm, dry June weather. It had rained only a few times during her and Colin’s stay in Ireland, but the occasional lazy, drizzly day hadn’t gone to waste.

      “I turned over most of my physical files to Lucas when I shut down my outside office,” her grandfather said. “He went through them when he was here last fall and took what he wanted back to Maine with him.”

      Lucas, Emma’s older brother, had taken over the reins of Sharpe Fine Art Recovery and worked out of its offices in Heron’s Cove, a picturesque village on the southern Maine coast. He’d just completed a massive revamp of the offices, located in the same Victorian house where a young Portland security guard had launched his career as a private art detective. Six decades later, Wendell Sharpe was world-renowned, and Sharpe Fine Art Recovery was a thriving business, but still small in terms of staff. His only son—Emma and Lucas’s father—had cut back on his role with the company after a fall on the ice had left him in chronic, often debilitating pain.

      “Lucas is considering reopening a Dublin office now that I’ve retired.” Wendell shrugged, waved a hand. “More-or-less retired, anyway. I work when he needs me or I land on something interesting on my own. The rest of my files are here.” He tapped his right temple. “I told Lucas what he needs to know for the business. Everything else can go to the grave with me.”

      “The stuff you want to hide,” Colin said.

      Wendell snorted. “Damn right but not from the FBI. You and your lot wouldn’t be interested. Neither would my family. Most of it’s memories, ideas, suppositions, speculations, conspiracy theories...mistakes I’ve made, people whose reputations might be harmed unfairly because of their association with me. I’m an old man. I’ve done a lot.”

      Emma sat on the couch. She’d spent countless hours here in her grandfather’s study when she’d worked for him before she’d left Dublin for the FBI. She’d wanted to learn everything—about the business, art crimes, his contacts, his methods, his resources. She’d been a sponge. But she eyed him with measures of skepticism, anticipation, curiosity—the usual mix when she was dealing with her grandfather. “What do your files and memories have to do with the break-in?”

      He hesitated. “Maybe I jumped the gun.”

      “Granddad, just tell us everything, okay? Don’t make me pry it out of you.”

      “Rusty after your honeymoon?”

      Colin took in an audible breath. “Quit stalling, Wendell.”

      “All right, all right. It’s tricky timing, dealing with a break-in and having your FBI granddaughter and her FBI husband show up. It looks as if my intruder had a look around in here. He didn’t toss the place, but there are signs.” He pointed to a small, dark wood box on a shelf by the fireplace. “He got in there. It doesn’t have a lock but there’s no label saying what’s inside. Never occurred to me anyone...” He didn’t finish, instead plopping onto a chair across from Emma.

      Colin remained on his feet. “What’s in the box, Wendell?”

      He clearly didn’t want to answer, but Emma knew. She sighed. “It contains the stone crosses our serial art thief sent Granddad after his heists.”

      “Oliver York,” her grandfather said. “I don’t mind saying his name out loud.”

      Emma noticed a muscle work in Colin’s visibly tight jaw but he said nothing. For most of their Irish honeymoon, they’d managed to avoid talking about, thinking about or dealing with Oliver, a wealthy Englishman with a tragic past. He was a self-taught expert in mythology, folklore and legends, a black belt in karate, a sheep farmer, a dashing Londoner with an apartment on St. James’s Park and an international art thief. He’d launched his art-theft career on a bleak November night ten years ago when he’d slipped into a home in Declan’s Cross, a small village on the south Irish coast. He’d walked off with paintings—including two prized Irish landscapes by Jack Butler Yeats—and an extraordinary sixteenth-century silver mantel cross. The police came up empty-handed in their investigation.

      Six months later, after a small Amsterdam museum was relieved of a relatively unknown seventeenth-century Dutch landscape, Wendell Sharpe received a package containing a brochure of the museum and a polished stone, about three inches in diameter, inscribed with a Celtic cross, a miniature version of the one stolen in Declan’s Cross. More thefts followed in at least eight cities in England, Europe and the US. After each brazen heist, another package with another cross-inscribed stone arrived at Wendell Sharpe’s Dublin home.

      Last fall a murder in Boston put Emma and Colin in contact with an eccentric mythology consultant advising on a documentary—Oliver York, it turned out, working under an alias. He was their elusive art thief. Without question. That didn’t mean he would ever face prosecution. He knew it, and they knew it. Over the winter, the stolen art—every piece except an unsigned landscape stolen on that first heist in Declan’s Cross—had been returned to its owner, anonymously and intact. Oliver, in the meantime, had put his unique skills, knowledge and experience to work for British intelligence.

      Given the unique relationship he and her grandfather had, Emma wasn’t surprised to hear Oliver York’s name, but she’d have preferred not to.

      She shifted back to her grandfather. “Is anything else in the box?”

      “A few photographs I took years ago in Declan’s Cross.”

      “Would they explain to an intruder the significance of the stone crosses?”

      Her grandfather shrugged. “Probably not by themselves. They’d be a clue, though. There’s nothing specific in the box or anywhere else in here that connects the stones and the photographs to the thefts or to Oliver. Nothing’s missing. The box lid was on crooked. That’s the only reason I know the intruder got into it.”

      “Had the box been sealed?” Colin asked.

      “No. Our perp didn’t need to use his glass shard to cut through tape.”

      Emma forced herself to stay focused. Her grandfather was restless, fidgety. “You’re sure the box was opened during the break-in?” she asked. “Could someone else have opened it on a different occasion and you didn’t notice?”

      “I’m positive,” he said without hesitation. “And I didn’t leave the lid on crooked and forget.”

      Colin’s gaze steadied on her grandfather. “You have a soft spot for Oliver.”

      “He’s an interesting character.”

      “You visited him at his farm in January. You stay in touch.”

      “So?”

      Stubborn as well as fidgety and restless. Emma eased onto her feet. “Granddad, as you pointed out, СКАЧАТЬ