When Devine had gone back to the spot he had more accurately gauged the distance at over fifteen feet from witness to corpse. And the body had been sprawled on black rocks and partially submerged.

Palmer seemed confused for a moment. “No, I... I mean, I learned afterward it was her. I just saw a body at that point. I had my phone with me and I called the police. I waited till they got there. They rushed to pull her up. Young man went down there on a rope. The tide was coming in fast. They got a truck with a winch. She was half-covered with water. Much longer and she’d have been out to sea. But they got her out all right. Or her body at least. Jenny was long gone.”

“So it was just a coincidence that you happened upon that spot and looked down?”

“Yes, sir, it was. But I wish it hadn’t happened to me. Lost my son and daughter-in-law to a damn fire years back, then Bertie. Seen enough death. Just... seen enough...”

His voice trailed off and he swiveled his head and stared at the fire behind the glass.

Devine watched him for a few moments, trying to take in the true, full measure of the man. “Once you learned it was Jenny, what did you think?”

“I didn’t think nothing, really. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. Who’d want to hurt her?”

“That was my next question to you.”

“Must’ve been a stranger, like who killed Bertie.”

Devine thought Palmer very much wanted to believe that. “So anything else you can tell me that might help?”

“Nothing I can think of, son. Sure hope you figure all this out.”

“Well, that’s why I’m here,” he said.

Devine left him with his card and a request to call if Palmer remembered anything else helpful. He did not expect the man to ever take him up on that offer.

As he reached the doorway Palmer stirred.

“I know it don’t seem like much to you, son, but Putnam is all I got. It’s my home. Only one. Bertie’s buried here. So’s my son. I can’t never leave this place. Not ever.”

“Yes, sir,” said Devine.

Palmer swiveled his head back around and returned his attention to the fiery pellets locked behind glass. To Devine it seemed that the man was also in a prison of sorts, not of his own making, but just how the life cards had been dealt for him.

Devine veered around the house to the small building with the curtains. The door was locked, and the window coverings made it impossible to see inside. He could go back in and ask the man directly what was in there, but something in his gut said not to. At least right now.

He drove off, firmly convinced that most if not all of what Palmer had told him regarding finding Jenny’s body was a lie.

Now the question became why.

Chapter 21

Devine drove back to the inn and hurried through the rain to his cottage. He checked his little booby traps and they were, once again, undisturbed. He sat down at the small desk by the window, clicked on the lamp, which had been set off to one side to provide some illumination against the gloomy day, and opened up his laptop.

He needed to dig deeper into Jenny’s CIA career. Devine had attained top-secret clearances in the military, then reupped those and supplemented them with SCI-level security clearances after joining Campbell at the Office of Special Projects.

Since his time in New York while working at the investment firm Cowl and Comely, Devine, in his new role with Campbell’s outfit, had traveled to five countries on three separate missions over the course of several months. In China he had used his business analytical skills to help bring down a shadowy cryptocurrency trader whose ties to the communist government had alerted U.S. intelligence services. Devine had learned a little about crypto while laboring on Wall Street. Now he felt as though he were a full-fledged expert.

His next mission, in the Middle East, had involved an Arab state that was doing its level best to crash the U.S. economy. It was forcing its fellow petrochemical-producing states to agree on a three-million-barrel-a-day pullback in oil production. That would have sent oil prices soaring, crippled the U.S. and other Western countries dependent on oil, and added hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth to the rogue oil producer, while inducing misery across the globe in the form of higher energy prices. It wasn’t simply to make money, Devine and his colleagues had discovered; it was to promote unrest in western democracies, as citizens there protested against higher prices. The weaponization of everything seemed to be in vogue these days.