The Whisper by Carla Neggers

them—nieces, nephews, birthday parties, holidays.
    The air still tasted and smelled of charred wood and metal. He walked over to the edge of his vegetable garden. He’d been weeding when Fiona O’Reilly had arrived that day and offered to help him pick tomatoes.
    That was what they’d been doing when the bomb went off. Picking tomatoes.
    “Hell,” he breathed, remembering.
    The bomb had to have already been in place under Abigail’s grill when they’d all gotten up that morning.
    It was constructed with C4. Nasty stuff.
    He, Bob, Abigail, Owen and Fiona had made lists of people they’d seen at the house in the days before the bomb. Everyone. Cops included.
    Maybe especially cops, Scoop thought, sighing at the weeds that had taken over his garden. He could still see where firefighters and paramedics had trampled his neat rows in the rush to save his life and keep the fire from spreading to neighboring homes. He’d trampled a few gardens in his years as a police officer. He noticed a couple of ripe tomatoes and squatted down, pulling back the vines, but the tomatoes had sat in the dirt too long. The bottoms were rotted.
    “What the hell,” he said, “they’ll make good compost.”
    He yanked up a few weeds, aware of the scars on his back, his shoulders, his arms. He’d grabbed Fiona, protecting her as best he could from the shards of metal and wood as he’d leaped with her for cover—the compost bin Bob and Abigail had moaned and groaned about when Scoop had been building it.
    He got to his feet and looked up at the sky, as gray and drizzly as any he’d seen in Scotland and Ireland. He had no regrets about being back home.
    He had a lot of work to do.
    He headed back out to the gate, picked up his stuff and unlocked his car, sinking into the driver’s seat. He’d have no problem readjusting to driving on the right. He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. He looked as if he’d flown on the wing of the plane instead of in an aisle seat. He needed a good night’s sleep.
    Where? Should he take Lizzie Rush up on her offer to put him up at her family’s five-star Boston hotel—the one where Sophie Malone used to work?
    “Might as well,” he said aloud, and started the car.

7
    Boston, Massachusetts
    Sophie’s iPhone jingled, signaling an incoming text message. She’d texted Damian when she’d landed in Boston. She checked her screen as she emerged from her subway stop onto Boston Common. Her brother’s response was about what she’d expected:
    Nothing new. Go dig in the dirt.
    She smiled. The Malones were known for not mincing words, Damian especially.
    After the long flight, she welcomed the walk up to Beacon Hill. The narrow, familiar streets and black-shuttered town houses helped her to shake off the odd feeling that she was out of her element, on strange and unpredictable ground. She’d gone to college in Boston. She had friends there. It wasn’t as if she’d just landed in a foreign country or a city where she didn’t know anyone.
    She descended steep, uneven stone steps to a black iron gate between two town houses. Since giving up her apartment in Cork, she’d felt uprooted, but unlike Scoop Wisdom and his detective friends, her homelessness was by choice and finances.
    No one had blown up her house.
    Using the keys Taryn had given her, Sophie unlocked the gate and went through a tunnel-like archway that opened into a small, secluded brick courtyard, one of Beacon Hill’s many nooks and crannies. Passersby would never guess it was there. The owners of a graceful brick town house had converted part of their walk-out basement into an apartment, with its own entrance onto the courtyard. Taryn had rented it when she was performing Shakespeare in Boston and hadn’t let go of it.
    Sophie unlocked the door, painted a rich, dark green, and set her backpack on the floor of the small entry. The tiny apartment, with its cozy Beacon Hill atmosphere, suited Taryn’s personality and unpredictable