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“Here?”
I nodded.
“You’ve been looking in the wrong place, then. Jimmy Mallory is in Kinsale.”
“Did you say Kinsale?” Wasn’t that where Smoke had said his mother’s family was from?
“Aye. Just so you know, lass, his father was good friends with yours. Best of friends, in fact.”
23
Smoke
I took Casper with me when I went to interview the older of the two girls whose mother and father had been killed in La Chapelle-Saint-Maurice. I was an intimidating motherfucker, and that was by design. It wouldn’t serve me well, though, in trying to get a kid to talk about the death of her parents ten years ago.
Casper could be pretty damn intimidating herself when she wa
nted to be, but she also had a soft side.
“What’s the girl’s name?” she asked on the ninety-minute drive from Lyon to Lac du Bourget, where the young woman lived.
“Colette. Her younger sister is Emelie.”
“Will she be there?”
“I’m not sure.”
Casper nodded and looked out the window. “I love this part of France,” she murmured. “Beau did too.”
“You honeymooned in Paris, right?”
She laughed. “We spent one night there. Beau hated it. I mean, he was impressed by the Eiffel Tower, but otherwise—nope.”
I reached over and took her hand in mine. “You doin’ okay, kiddo?”
“Better than you are.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Smoke, you’re miserable. Admit it.”
I shrugged my shoulder. “Pretty much always have been, I guess.”
“Now you’re just full of shit.”
“Don’t hold back, Casper.”
She laughed. “Everyone saw it. There wasn’t a person on that op either on Mallorca or in the Seychelles who didn’t know that the minute you and Siren stopped arguing, you’d be all over each other.”
“She hates me.”
“Right.”
“The minute her memory came back, she took off. Didn’t even say goodbye.”
Casper turned in her seat to face me. “Here’s the thing, I know the two of you wanted to tear each other’s eyes out as much as your clothes off, but Siren isn’t like that. I don’t see her as the kind of person who would just up and leave.”
“Don’t know what to tell you since that’s exactly what she did.”
