A Study in Seduction

by Eva Chase

  A tendril of scent crept into my nose: a dry sour smell like old rot. My heartbeat stuttered. I glanced around surreptitiously, but my eyes couldn’t make out even a glimmer of the shrouded one in the darkened gallery room. That reassurance didn’t stop my chest from constricting.

  Bog was here. Too weakened from the massive hallucination he’d wrapped me in yesterday night to make much of an appearance, maybe, but the fact that he’d followed me this far from the hotel through the mortal world meant he’d gotten some strength back. If he recovered enough before we were finished…

  I couldn’t afford to let that fear distract me.

  Sherlock peered at the device’s screen as several more seconds slipped by. Finally, the numbers froze on a code. I held my breath as he tapped it in. With a sigh, the steel door slid open.

  We’d only just crossed the threshold when the security lights blinked out. “Quick, now!” Sherlock said, flicking on an electric lantern and setting it in the middle of the floor.

  We all had squares of the thick black material in our jacket pockets, designed to block the sensor functions so they wouldn’t pick up the heat of our bodies. John boosted me up to fix one and then another over the devices high on the walls, keeping his weight on his good leg. Sherlock managed to reach them on his own with his great height. We moved through both rooms, covering all of them.

  A sliver of my attention lingered on the glass case that held my prize. A tingle raced over my skin. So fucking close now. I could almost feel it in my hand, feel the relief of its release.

  But Bog’s scent trailed after me too. A glimmering streak of movement caught my eye in a corner. My head jerked around, but at the same moment, the lights gleamed back on, dimmer than before. The building had a backup generator someone off-site had turned on.

  John drew the blowtorch from his bag. Nothing that generator was powering could tip the security team off now as long as we handled the display case just right. He braced himself in front of the section where the jade figurine lay, his shoulders loose but the muscles in his forearms tensed, exactly like when he’d practiced.

  He’d insisted that he be the one to carry out this part of the heist since he was the one who’d suggested it. His eyes glinted with anticipation, but his jaw had tightened.

  For him, taking on this task wasn’t just about pulling off this one heist, was it? It was about proving he could play an equal part despite his lingering injury in everything he and Sherlock did together.

  The spurt of the torch’s fire made his eyes spark even brighter. I readied myself with the chunk of glass we were going to use to offset the removed weight, watching him and the line of flame. A thin pang of emotion fluttered through my chest.

  I was going to miss his earnest recklessness too, just a bit.

  Heat grazed my face. John drew the lines of the rectangle again and again, a sheen of sweat forming on his forehead. Then he stopped, set the blowtorch aside, and nodded to me.

  He tugged, and the edge of the case gave. As he tipped that chunk out, I slid my piece onto the top of the case at exactly the same speed. Then I slipped closer beside him, a piece of jade in one hand, a fake golden etching tucked inside my other sleeve. Fixed to my baby finger, I held a metal pick coated in two different sets of blood, just out of view.

  I moved even faster than I had in practice. One hunk of jade swapped for another, two quick swipes of the pick inside the grooves, flicking the pick back into the nook in my sleeve as I handed the figurine to John. Sherlock stepped closer to him, his face lit with eagerness now. As I turned, I dipped my other hand into the case behind my back to complete the second switch.

  My fingers closed around a cool gold surface marked with lines etched with mathematical precision and speckled jewels perfect in their symmetry. Joy trembled up my sternum as I tucked my real reward away as quickly as I’d taken it. The shrouded one’s smell touched my nose a little more strongly, and the lights overhead wavered faintly, but the men were too absorbed in their score to think it was anything other than a fault of the generator.

  The relic I’d needed was mine. Bog’s tricks, the trio’s smarts—none of it had stopped me. All I had left to do was complete my escape.

  John eased the piece of the display case back into place while I removed the extra weight. We gathered our things in a concentrated flurry of movement and hustled to the back door where Garrett was waiting.

  “Call it in,” Sherlock said. We all shed our wigs and security uniform jackets and stuffed them into John’s duffel bag. He handed the bag to me. I was the only one unneeded for the last part of their plan; I was the ideal person to dispose of the evidence. Which worked out perfectly for me.

  As Garrett pulled out his phone, I raised my hand in friendly farewell and set off around the van.

  “Jemma,” Sherlock called after me, keeping his voice low. I stopped just past the van with a hitch of my pulse and turned as he caught up with me. Had he noticed part of my larger ploy or caught on to Bog’s attempts at signaling them? Did he suspect something?

  He reached toward my face and eased off the glasses that had been part of my disguise. “You were in such a hurry you forgot about removing these,” he said.

  He didn’t miss much even in the middle of the craziest scheme he’d ever gotten wrapped up in. I gazed into his sharp blue eyes and wondered once more what it might be like to work with a man with a mind like that instead of against him.

  I was never going to know.

  “You pulled it off,” I said. “It was brilliant. I guess I got too focused on making sure the rest goes off without a hitch.”

  “There’s always a necessary balance between caution and speed,” he said, so perfectly Sherlock that an unexpected urge rose up inside me despite my sense of the time slipping away. Then a waft of Bog’s scent filled my nose, giving me the perfect excuse to indulge myself. Just as another streak of light shuddered into being above us, I bobbed up on my toes and brushed my lips to Sherlock’s.

  When I released him a second later, Bog’s final effort had faded. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it for far more than he could guess right now.

  Sherlock blinked at me, momentarily startled—not a look I saw on him often. My throat tightened, but his hesitation gave me just enough opening to pat his arm and lope away.

  John had left his car at the other end of the alley for me to use. I dropped the fob he’d given me on the pavement just behind one of the front wheels, where I expected Sherlock would spot it easily enough in the morning, and headed in the opposite direction from what we’d planned.

  The farther I got from the gallery, the faster I picked up my pace. The desiccated shrouded folk scent licked after me, growing thicker by the moment. When I switched to breathing through my nose, it coated my mouth.

  I came up on the shadowy spot of bank I’d picked, the darkly glinting waters of the Thames ready to meet me. The weight of the piece of glass should be enough to sink the bag, but I stuffed in a few large rocks for good measure while retrieving a couple items from my jacket. Then I hurled the whole lot as far as I could over the depths. The bag hit the surface with a splash and dropped like a stone.

  I couldn’t wait any longer, not with Bog hovering nearby trying every play it could. I dug into the pouch I’d fastened under my sweatpants and drew out the three other etched golden shapes I’d collected over the last year.

  As I tugged down my pants, another wave of the shrouded one stink washed over me. A glow crackled through the air. I fumbled with the pieces. They fit together, end to end, around my mid-thigh like a metal cuff. Bog’s light seared brighter as it closed around me, the mark on the back of my neck burned—and I clicked the last section, the one that had once belonged to Richter, into place.

  The supernatural glow vanished into the night, and the burning faded away. A quiver of energy raced over my skin from the cuff. It lingered there, a gentle tickle that brought a choked but ecstatic laugh to my lips.

  Bog couldn’t find
me now, couldn’t reach me now. Not one of its shrouded one skills could penetrate the cloak this relic gave me. I’d just bought myself my freedom.

  With a smile stretching my lips, I tugged my pants back up and loped off toward the spot where Bash would be waiting to drive us to the airport. In a few short hours, I’d be far away from here. Far from anywhere Bog knew to look for me, and far from the three men who’d helped me in more ways than they knew.

  They might not have known how final that farewell was at the time, but I’d even gotten to wave my trio good-bye.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Sherlock

  Sometimes I enjoyed taking the lead with an interrogation, but often it was more instructive to stand back and watch the questioning play out, studying the suspect’s reactions. Especially today.

  On the other side of the one-way glass, Garrett leaned his hands onto the interrogation room table. Richter sat across from him, his hands in cuffs, his long-nosed face held at a haughty angle.

  “If you didn’t have anything to do with the murder, then how did your DNA and the victim’s end up on an object you own that’s a perfect match for the killing blow?” Garrett said, his voice turned slightly tinny by the speaker system. “Please, let’s hear your explanation.”

  He might not have as incisive a mind as some, but our little detective inspector made up for it in tenacity. Richter scowled at him. His lawyer in the chair beside him, a stout mole-faced man, started to raise a protest, but Richer waved him quiet. When he replied, he sounded just as certain as he had before.

  “I don’t know. Maybe you planted it there. Maybe she did. I didn’t even know this councilor who apparently died, and that statue was packed away in its crate for hours before the plane took off.”

  Garrett raised his eyebrows. “Who’s this ‘she’?”

  “I don’t know that either,” Richter snapped. “There’s a woman who’s been trying to steal one of my pieces since my last exhibit—and not that jade one. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and chat about it with her. Why do you think I had so much security set up?”

  Beside me, John shifted his weight to lean on his walking stick. “I suppose some criminals will do whatever they can to displace the blame.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s what’s happening here.” I wrinkled my nose against the lingering odor of sweat and stale coffee in the room—and against what my instincts were telling me. “His body language suggests he’s telling the truth.”

  John stared at me. “What? You don’t think he’s our murderer, after all this?”

  “I’m still forming my impressions. Watch, and see what you make of him.”

  Richter had switched to a different tactic. He was nodding to his lawyer, who shuffled his papers. “Your evidence will be inadmissible in court regardless of the details. My client can attest that you or a Sherlock Holmes broke into the gallery and stole the artifact from its display case, eliminating the correct chain of custody completely.”

  Garrett chuckled. We’d worked out our story together, and I’d heard him give it to his colleagues more than once since last night without missing a beat.

  “You’re going to have a hard time swinging that as your defense.” He fixed his gaze on Richter. “Sure, the gallery was robbed. You’re lucky my esteemed colleague Mr. Holmes happened to be passing through the area and noticed the warning signs. He alerted the police, but the robbers fled before we arrived. They dropped the statue they’d stolen, so we took it back to the lab for testing, and it was a total surprise when it matched up with an unsolved crime all the way over in Germany. Pretty ballsy, leaving your murder weapon out in plain view, I’ve got to say.”

  Richter glanced toward us—toward what to him would look like a mirror. He was familiar enough with police investigations to be aware someone was on the other side. If he’d expected an interruption declaring Garrett’s story untrue and releasing him from custody, he was disappointed. His posture deflated, but he jerked his chin up even higher.

  “I’d like to consult with my lawyer before I answer any further questions.”

  John tapped his stick against the linoleum floor. “We should ask him about Jemma. If one of his men was watching the area around the gallery and spotted her leaving, who knows what they’ve done to her. We shouldn’t have let her go alone.”

  The concern in his voice snagged sharp as a hook on something inside me. It dredged up a flash of memory: her sly smile, sitting at the table in John’s hotel room. A hand on my—

  I shoved that fragment back into the compartment I was keeping sealed tight. It wasn’t important and certainly didn’t bear any relevance to our current situation.

  “If Richter caught her, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because he’d have all the evidence he needs,” I said. But perhaps Jemma had seen reason to fear for her safety and had gone to ground. She hadn’t returned to her hotel room last night. We hadn’t received a single text or call. The more hours passed, the more her disappearance weighed on my gut.

  I knew how sharp she was. Surely she’d have found some way to contact us?

  If she wanted to, that was.

  One of Garrett’s colleagues ambled past us. “Did you hear the latest about his victim?” he remarked, nodding to Richter through the window.

  “His victim?” I repeated.

  “Yeah.” He worked his jaw as if chewing on something. “This morning, someone raised a complaint out in Germany that this city councilor abused him as a kid when he was part of a youth program. Seems like a few have come forward now. Maybe this knob here did us a favor twice over, taking that guy out of commission and then getting caught for it.”

  John frowned as the officer sauntered off. “Richter’s older than the councilor, and he has no children. This couldn’t be revenge. Do you think he might have been a partner in the abuse? That would be blackmail worthy.”

  The threads of suspicion that had been unfurling in my mind tightened into a starker image. “I think our councilor died in part because no one would end up sorry to have seen him gone.”

  Before John could ask what I meant, Garrett emerged from the interrogation room. “What a piece of work Richter is,” he said. “But we’ve got him. He hasn’t produced an alibi, and with the circumstantial evidence alongside the DNA and his history—I doubt he’ll even get bail.”

  “I’d like to take another look at the gallery,” I said.

  The detective investigator gave me a puzzled look. “Right now?” he said, in a milder tone than I expect he’d have used if there hadn’t been officers around who might overhear.

  “If they can spare you. Or if you can arrange official permission for us to enter the crime scene without accompaniment.”

  “No, if you’re tracking down an additional lead, I want to be there for it too.” He ducked out of the room to speak to one of his superiors and returned a few minutes later. “All right, let’s go.”

  This once, Garrett drove in his official duty vehicle, leaving John to tap his walking stick restlessly in the back seat.

  “What’s this about?” Garrett said as soon as we’d pulled out of the parking lot. “What the hell could you possibly want to look at there now?”

  “Richter is claiming that someone was targeting his gallery,” I said. “Trying to steal a different one of his artifacts. Indulge my curiosity.”

  The gallery’s entrances were taped off, with no one inside other than one officer ensuring the crime scene remained secure. She exchanged a nod with Garrett. We walked straight to the rooms that housed Richter’s special exhibit.

  I studied the area around the display case that had held the jade statue and then stepped closer. With the pressure alarms off, I could come right up to the glass.

  The cut piece of the case had been removed, along with the piece of uncarved jade we’d used to balance the statue’s weight. My gaze came to rest on an object farther down the display: a rectangular strip of etched gold set with tiny gemstones.

>   My heart sank as I studied it. “I’m going to take a closer look at this,” I said to Garrett, pointing to it and then pulling on my gloves.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” he muttered, but he didn’t try to stop me.

  I eased the piece out and turned it to catch the light. My thumb rubbed one corner. I lowered it with a grimace.

  “This is a fake. Plated gold—cheaply done, even. Richter couldn’t have missed the signs. It’s been switched since he last saw this display.”

  John went still. Garrett’s eyes widened. “What?” the smaller man said.

  “I think we’d better discuss this matter in more detail in private.”

  My thoughts whipped through my head as we headed back to the car. I sank into the passenger seat and got out my phone. As before, when I dialed the number Jemma had given me days ago, the phone on the other end rang and rang. No voicemail. No indication of its owner. Just a blank.

  “What’s going on?” Garrett demanded. “Who are you calling?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said slowly.

  “Sherlock thinks Richter might be telling the truth,” John put in. “He might not have been involved in the murder.”

  “What? But we have all the pieces—all the evidence leads to him.”

  “Where did we get most of that evidence?” I said. “Or at least the start of the trail, like that scrap of photograph?”

  “From Jemma,” Garrett said. “What does that have to do with anything? Of course she—”

  “Did you ever confirm with the Freising police that they have an officer on staff by the name of Jemma Moriarty?”

  He hesitated. “Well, no—she was worried there’d be repercussions for her if they thought she’d asked the London police to get involved. I made it sound as if we stumbled on the case ourselves. But there was an article about her in the internet, with a photograph and everything. Some award she’d won. You said you’d seen it too.”

  There’d been a few mentions of Jemma in articles I’d had to translate from German. “See if you can find it now,” I suggested.