Settling in?”
“Doing just fine, thanks.”
Huck didn’t have a solid read on the Riccardis, athough the task force had provided Huck with a brief workup on them. They were married last summer right there at Breakwater. Sharon’s first marriage, Joe’s second. He had two kids in college in Colorado. Nothing in their backgrounds shouted vigilante.
“Mr. Crawford is arriving from his Washington home in the morning,” Sharon said. “He’ll want to see what all we’ve accomplished in the week since his last visit. Joe will go over the details with you tonight at dinner.”
Huck had yet to meet Crawford. He and Diego had read a write-up on him, too, but nothing in it indicated any wing nut vigilante propensities. Then again, who knew what a terrifying ordeal like a kidnapping could do to a man.
A towheaded kid of maybe twenty-two burst out of the barn. Sharon Riccardi gave an impatient sigh, but her husband greeted him pleasantly and shook his hand, welcoming him to Breakwater. The kid all but saluted. Joe couldn’t stop a smile. “Relax, O’Dell. You’re not in the army anymore. Boone, Glover—meet Cully O’Dell, our newest recruit. He’s from the Neck. A local boy. He can tell you the best fishing spots, and you can show him around the property.”
O’Dell shook hands with Vern, then Boone. The kid seemed to have a sunny disposition and was obviously excited about entering the high-stakes, high-possibilities world of private security. Vern didn’t look thrilled at having to help show Cully O’Dell around Breakwater, but one thing Huck had discovered in his two days in Yorkville—he was never left to wander around the property on his own. Someone was always watching.
Being senior, Vern gave O’Dell the quick rundown of the various buildings and what was up and running and what was only in the planning stages.
No mention of private interrogation chambers and thumbscrews.
No mention of a plot to destroy the federal government, to assassinate judges or to snatch bad guys off the streets and toss them into their own private jail cells.
Vern talked about maintaining the highest standards of professionalism, ethics and training as they provided individual and corporate security ranging from routine background checks and threat assessment to investigations, protection, surveillance and crisis management. Those who started now, when the company was still more dream than reality, would have the opportunity to move up as Breakwater Security grew.
“Cool,” the new recruit said under his breath.
Huck grimaced. If Cully O’Dell was a budding psycho vigilante, Huck would cut off his big toe. In the meantime, he’d try to make sure nothing happened to the kid.
They started up the stone path to a new, perfunctory structure that was out of keeping with the aesthetic of the estate. It housed classrooms and the gun vault. Huck figured if Breakwater had any shoulder-fired missiles, illegal explosives, illegal chemicals or vials of anthrax, they’d be in the vault. He wanted to get in there on his own, but it wouldn’t be easy.
On the other hand, if he’d wanted easy, he would never have worked undercover at all.
They ran into the Riccardis again on their way down to the indoor firing range.
“I forgot to ask,” Huck said. “Any word on the woman who was out here this morning? Miller—Alicia Miller, right?”
“She went back to Washington,” Sharon said stiffly.
“That’s what I heard. Did she drive herself?”
“I don’t know if she did or didn’t drive herself. She objects to Breakwater Security having its headquarters and training facility out here. This morning’s histrionics were nothing but a rude, inappropriate protest.”
“Was she drunk?”
“I have no idea.” Sharon caught herself, softening. “I don’t mean to sound cruel. Obviously Alicia Miller’s a troubled woman.”
Joe touched his wife’s elbow. “We should get back to the house. Didn’t you say Oliver was calling at seven?”
“Right. Yes, of course.” She shifted her attention to Vern and O’Dell. “Mr. O’Dell? What do you think of Breakwater so far?”
The kid beamed. “Awesome.”
Quinn buttoned her sweater and crossed her arms against the cold early-April wind as she stood at the water’s edge across from her bayside cottage. Even in the small cove, the bay was choppy after the line of thunderstorms had blown across the Northern Neck and off to the northeast. The heavy rain had slowed her drive to Yorkville but left behind dry, fresh, much cooler air.
She’d arrived thirty minutes ago, parking her silver Saab practically in the branches of her huge holly, her hope of finding Alicia’s ten-year-old BMW in the driveway or even the black sedan that had picked her up immediately dashed. The side door to the cottage was locked. Alicia had cleared out of the cottage—the only traces of her weekend stay were the hastily made bed in the guest room, towels in the bathroom hamper and an unopened nonfat, sugar-free strawberry yogurt in the refrigerator.
Quinn had walked next door to the only other cottage on the quiet, dead-end road, but the Scanlons, the couple who’d retired to Yorkville just before Quinn bought her place, were still not home.
A wasted trip, she thought, watching an osprey—a female—swoop up from the marsh into the clear sky above the bay. In spite of her concern for Alicia, Quinn felt some of her tension ease at the familiar sight of the huge bird. Once facing extinction, ospreys had become opportunistic in choosing their nesting sites, using channel markers, buoys, old dock posts and even the occasional bench on a quiet private dock. The nests could only be removed with a permit.
The two young ospreys that had constructed the oversize mess of a nest on a marker at the mouth of Quinn’s cove had returned. The nest had survived several fierce winter storms. With luck, the ospreys, mates for life, would have baby ospreys in a matter of weeks.
But they were raptors—birds of prey. Although they dined primarily on fish, if Alicia had indeed walked out to the water early one morning and saw an osprey scoop up an unsuspecting duckling in front of her, she would have been horrified. Stressed out as she was from the pressures of her job, perhaps on the verge of a breakdown, she could have latched onto such a gruesome sight as she’d melted down, twisting it into a metaphor for all her fears and troubles.
Speculation, Quinn thought, turning away from the water.
Built in the 1940s, her cottage occupied a half-acre lot with lilacs and azaleas, not yet in bloom, and a vegetable garden out back that she meant to revive. Right now, it was mostly weeds. Alicia had promised to rent a tiller and dig up the garden, but Quinn had known it was just well-meaning talk. She loved Yorkville for its simplicity. A picnic, kayaking, walking on the beach, prowling mom-and-pop shops for books and antiques, sitting on her porch and reading. What Quinn enjoyed most about Yorkville, Alicia found lacking. Quinn grew up in the Washington suburbs, but Virginia’s Northern Neck, with its wide, shallow rivers, its marshes and inlets, its beaches and rich history, spoke to her soul.
She walked across the road and up the stone walk to her cottage, the grass, which needed mowing, wet from the pounding rain. She stepped onto her porch, no railing to impede the view of the water from her wicker chairs. On one of her weekends on the bay, Alicia had put out a blue
