“What did you tell him?” I mutter.
“That you were a high-ranking official within the McCarthy Clan, and that you’d just as soon cut him up into little pieces and toss him in the Irish Sea as you would look at him.”
I shrug. “Swimming with the fishes again?”
“Exactly.”
“I know you’ve been recovering from what happened,” she says. “So I haven’t told you much. And I didn’t want to really plant false hope, or worse, make accusations that could hurt anyone.” She winces. “Especially after all that I’ve done to all of you.”
I nod. “Go on.”
“Sooo,” she begins, as we walk over the charred remains of the entryway door, “I had to really, really dig deep. I’ve spent so much time thinking this over, talking with my contacts,researching online. And I have a few suspicions now, but I still don’t want to plant false hope.”
She winces.
False hope?
“Turns out… well, quite a few things. But I’ll show you first,” she says, leading the way.
When we enter the large room, I can’t imagine what she’s looking for. There’s nothing but piles of boxes of destroyed books, some burnt beyond recognition and some half burned but soaked in flame retardant and water. She takes one large box that’s still half intact and tosses it onto a table.
Before I know what she’s doing, she’s up on the table and prying at the water sprinklers embedded in the ceiling.
Wait a minute. Water sprinklers?
“See?” she says. “They didn’t activate, did they?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“The only water in here was after the fire brigade showed up, right?”
“Aye.”
“And you’d have thought that was because the Welsh were planning to set the fire. I’d have thought the same,” she says. “In fact, at first, I did. But after I put a few more things together, I came up with another hypothesis.” She sticks her tongue out, still digging through the charred remains of the ceiling. A moment later, her face lights up and her eyes go wide. “Ta-da!”
She pulls out a broken piece of equipment. “See?”
I shake my head. “No, I don’t bloody see.”
She hops straight down off the table and runs to me. “It’s recording equipment. Someone put that here. Now riddle me this. If the Welsh were merely planning to attack you, why would they record it?”
I shake my head.
“They wouldn’t,” she supplies. “And furthermore, someone would have disabled the water sprinklers perhaps so they could set the fire more efficiently, or perhaps for another reason altogether.”
“So they wouldn’t destroy their equipment,” I mutter.
“Precisely.”
“So who put this here?”
“The Welsh were here,” she says, mulling it all over. “We know they were here a few days before anything happened, at least according to Islan. She was here with her man.”
“Was she?” What the bloody hell is that all about? “I can’t believe she did that.”
“Tate,” Fran says, blowing out an impatient breath. “I can. And for a while, I thought she was just infatuated with the bloke, and even when he had her in here restrained, I thought that he merely deceived her. But your sister’s no fool, is she?”
“Of course not. She’s bloody brilliant, but love can make people blind.”
