Christina managed a laugh, although Zoe felt only marginally better when she hung up. She didn’t have a lot of stuff. She’d never owned much. It wouldn’t take her a half hour to pack—it’d take her fifteen minutes.
Perry’s waterfront bar was located on the southern end of Goose Harbor’s Main Street. Its bank of windows overlooked the docks; its barn-board walls were decorated with wooden lobster traps, fake lobsters and framed black-and-white pictures of lighthouses and Maine days gone by. J. B. McGrath nursed a beer at a small corner table. He was thirty-six, tall, lean, black-haired, blue-eyed and had a face that would look right at home on a wanted poster. He was good at undercover work, and he’d been doing it a long time. Maybe too long. That was why he was in Goose Harbor, Maine. He was on vacation. Not his idea.
No darts tonight. He’d pissed off enough locals. He was from Montana but could handle himself in a lobster boat. He was an FBI agent but argued lobstering with people who’d done it all their lives. He was a guy on vacation who didn’t have the grace to lose at darts once in a while. None of which endeared him to the good people of Goose Harbor.
Bruce Young pulled out a chair and plopped down across from him with a frosty beer glass. “Eight o’clock and nobody’s ready to kill you? Slow day, McGrath.”
Bruce grinned and unzipped his Carhartt canvas jacket. He was built like a rock cliff, a big, red-faced man with scars and nicks on his hands from working his string of lobster pots day after day. His blue eyes were so like J.B.’s own, J.B. wouldn’t be surprised if he and Bruce were distant cousins. But that was another thing—the locals didn’t believe J.B.’s ancestors hailed from Goose Harbor. They thought he’d just made that up.
J.B. hadn’t made it up. His grandmother was a Sutherland, as in Sutherland Island off the Olivia West Nature Preserve—as in Olivia’s best friend, Posey Sutherland, who ran off with drifter Jesse McGrath after World War I and ended up in Montana and dead at twenty-seven.
Her father, Lester Sutherland, disowned her.
Hence, Mr. Lester McGrath, Jen Periwinkle’s evil nemesis. A combination of two men Olivia West hated because of what they had done to her friend Posey.
“I heard some of the guys talking about setting fire to your boat. They think you’re obnoxious.” Bruce took a long drink of his beer. “I reminded them it’s my damn boat.”
“Old, wooden, practically leaking.”
“That’s a great boat. The guys said if you don’t get out of town or get an attitude adjustment, they’re going to tie your hands and feet together and throw you in the drink.”
J.B. shrugged. “Wouldn’t do them any good.”
“Uh-huh. You’re a highly trained federal agent, drown-proofed and everything.”
Skepticism had crept into Bruce’s tone. He obviously had his doubts about J.B.’s credentials, too. J.B. didn’t mind. He hadn’t produced an I.D. or really confirmed one way or the other he was with the bureau. Bruce had guessed it. His truck had backfired, and J.B., still on edge from his last investigation, had gone for his weapon—not that he was carrying one. Bruce nailed him then and there. “You a cop? A fed?” J.B. just said he was on vacation. Period.
The talk about tossing him overboard wasn’t serious—he’d invaded these men’s turf, and they were re-marking their territory, letting him know they didn’t care if he was on edge or why. He was bad company. They weren’t going to give him an inch.
“Nobody believes you’re here on vacation,” Bruce said.
“Why not?”
“You don’t look like you take vacations.”
J.B. didn’t disagree. He looked as if he’d spent the past year working on an undercover operation that had ended badly, leaving him with his throat half slit and the searing memory of killing a man in front of his own children. Not what J.B. had envisioned when he’d infiltrated a group of violent criminals who used their virulent antigovernment beliefs to justify robbery, murder and the possession and distribution of illegal assault weapons and explosive devices.
“I’m doing genealogical research on my Maine roots,” J.B. said.
“Uh-huh. You a Mainer. I like that. You ever been to Maine?”
“This week.”
“There you go.”
“My ancestors helped settle Goose Harbor in the seventeenth century.”
“So did mine.”
“You see? We could be cousins.”
Bruce wasn’t amused. “Yeah, right. Listen, Mc-Grath—” Bruce sighed, staring at his nearly untouched beer. “Christina West’s house was broken into today. The police think it was some idiot looking for cash, but I’m wondering—you didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?”
J.B. shook his head. He hadn’t heard about the break-in. “No.”
“Because, you know, some people think you’re here because of her father’s murder last year—”
“Bruce, I’m on vacation. I know about the murder, but that’s it.”
Bruce rubbed a big hand across his face. “I know. It was stupid. I just—Chris is so damn young, and she’s here on her own.”
“What about her sister?”
But J.B. knew about the sister. Zoe West was a screwup. The rising star, the local hotshot pushed hard and fast because she made everyone else look good, too. She should have gotten her ass kicked along the way, but instead she got accepted into the FBI Academy for new-agent training. It was only natural she’d think she could solve her father’s murder—only natural she’d come unglued and fallen apart when she’d had to face his death, her aunt’s death, her own limitations, the kind of real-world experience she must have known was out there but hadn’t had to confront herself.
Zoe West had bowed out of the academy, moved to Connecticut and got herself fired from what was likely her last job in law enforcement.
A screwup.
J.B. thought of the man he’d killed. The looks on the faces of his three children. Nine, eleven and fourteen. They were horrified, furious, filled with hate. J.B. didn’t know what would become of them. Their father, a murderer and a rapist, a man who’d taught other people how to build bombs and convert legal weapons into illegal weapons, had attacked J.B. from behind, without warning, and stuck a knife in his throat, and J.B. fought back. It was self-defense. But nothing, he thought, was ever that simple.
He’d been forced on vacation by his superiors. “Take a break, McGrath. As long as you need.”
Bruce drank more of his beer. J.B. could tell Zoe West wasn’t Bruce’s favorite subject. “Christina’s just twenty-four. Zoe shouldn’t have left her here on her own. I don’t know what the hell she’s still doing in Connecticut—she doesn’t have a job. I think everyone in town’s told her about you by now.”
And
