Page 44

Stella

Siren Song, Maine

R en walked through the bedroom door, held up his phone, and showed Stella the pictures Twitch had sent. “Look familiar?”

Stella hoped Ren was back for more or maybe wanted to steal a cat nap with her.

Stupid. The sex was clouding her judgment.

How many times had Theo warned her not to confuse sex with intimacy?

Now Stella understood why he was so adamant—it was hard not to.

She shrugged off the hurt at Ren’s callousness and looked at the grainy photos.

“It’s hard to see anything,” she said.

“Any ideas?”

Stella sat up with a sigh. She grabbed Ren’s T-shirt from the floor and pulled it over her head. “I might know who he is. He’s an independent contractor; calls himself ‘The Priest.’ He’s Norwegian, I think, or Danish.”

“I think he was at that party in England.”

“Did you get a good look at him?” she asked.

“No, but I pegged him as an operator; he used all the standard tricks to conceal his identity—like he does in these photos. He stayed in the shadows, probably knew surveillance blind spots.”

“So nothing.”

“One thing. My primary got into a drunken fistfight at the party.”

“Yes, I saw.”

“I noticed the guy when I hauled my client out to his car. He’d pulled off a glove to use his phone. His fingers and the back of his hand were tatted.”

“Could you make it out?”

“Not well, but it looked like bats, like a flock of bats.”

“A cloud.”

“What?”

“A group of flying bats is called a cloud, but I don’t think the tattoos were bats. I think they were crows.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw him once. I was eighteen, on assignment in Rwanda, evaluating the influence of an East African warlord. Two days into the job, a local religious leader was assassinated, and I was pulled. I was in the Kigali airport, posing as a backpacker, and I saw him sitting at a bar, chain-smoking—crow tats on both hands.”

“I do know what a flock of crows is called,” Ren commented.

Together, they said, “A murder.”