The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  Semple could write a brilliant introduction to the catalog, because that was what the first rank of art historians did. They were trained to do it on demand. And in this catalog he would mention the usual two hundred names in their historical places, only this time it would be two hundred and three names.

  It would be even better if the exhibit traveled. Assuming the three artists weren’t atrocious, they would soon begin picking up converts—people who would find the new old artists refreshing and people who felt they should. People in smaller cities with less influential museums might be inclined to accept what was presented to them from afar.

  Elle estimated that it wouldn’t take more than a couple of years of unobtrusive advocating to bring an artist from utter obscurity to being known by the elite. After that, it was an easy transition to the point where not knowing the artist would make a person’s claim to knowledge seem shallow and suspect.

  Even if other critics and scholars disliked the paintings, called them unworthy or derivative imitations of something better, as soon as they mentioned a painting, it was in the record. It was more than just art, it was art history.

  At that point, the question that would arise was where one could see more of the artist’s work or obtain an example of it. And the answer would be that there were a few astute private collectors who had seen and purchased the best pieces years ago. For these three artists, there would be Valerie McGee Teason and Anne Satterthwaite Mannon.

  Elle was sure that she was right about the outline of the scheme. She knew that Anne and Valerie, the two close friends, had conspired with each other to get their friend Nick Kavanagh, the gallery owner, to buy for them a significant number of paintings by three artists of different periods who were not widely known. Maybe he was in on the scheme from the start. And then she guessed that somehow they had conspired with Jeffrey Semple to get one or two works by each painter into the museum’s permanent collection.

  There was only one way to check her theory. Elle went back to the LACMA website. She went to the museum’s listing of works of art in the permanent collection. In a short time she found that the institution owned one work each by Wilbertson, Prestmantle, and Stolkos.

  This scheme was not crude or violent, with apelike men using razor blades to cut paintings out of their frames at night and escaping in a van. It was a scheme worthy of a group of people who were educated, well connected, sophisticated, and at least moderately rich already. As far as Elle knew it wasn’t even a crime. Nothing would be taken from the museum. No money would disappear from its endowment or operating budget.

  The museum had, in fact, received three authentic old paintings, probably through a transfer or donation of some kind. Elle was sure of that, because museums received things that way all the time. They liked to stockpile their cash for the rare bidding wars for any of the genuine world-class masterpieces that came up at auction now and then. The museum’s three works would become important, then essential, and they would gain in monetary value the more they were mentioned. The museum would gain and then keep gaining.

  But Elle’s lifelong study of ways money was made dishonestly didn’t tell her what each person in the scheme actually had done, if anything. Nick Kavanagh had served as broker in the purchase of the twenty-five paintings that were going to be held in reserve and sold after they were worth enough. But was he aware that the purchase was a scheme? Elle guessed instinctively that he wasn’t in on the conspiracy on the day of his death. Someone would have mentioned it while the three were alone, and nobody had.

  It was possible that the real reason the two women were willing to have a threesome with him was to induce him to join and help them in the rest of the plan. They had needed him to remain discreet and loyal. While sex didn’t have a perfect record of ensuring loyalty, the hope of more sex could accomplish wonders.

  They needed his silence, if nothing more. If you had a collection of paintings that was going to skyrocket in value, you wouldn’t want anyone to know you had it until you were ready. If getting the three artists accepted into the museum collection required voting money for them or engaging in some form of advocacy, owning the artists’ works could discredit you. It would actually be best if, when you sold, your broker could handle the sale without revealing your name. Auction houses often kept people’s names secret, both bidders’ and sellers’.

  It was even more difficult to be sure of the role that Jeffrey Semple had played in the whole operation. Elle thought she knew what a curator would need to do to get the paintings into the collection, but she didn’t know whether he had done it, or didn’t need to do it. She didn’t even know if he was a paid helper or a partner. It was possible that he had been seduced by one of the two women in order to get him involved, but it was also possible he was an absolutely innocent bystander.

  Elle knew everything, and yet she knew nothing. She went back to her computer to scan a few hours of recordings from the Nemesis office. When she was finished, she planned the next phase of her murder investigation. The people at Nemesis were so prolific that it was difficult to keep up with the list of people they had murdered. Tomorrow she would begin to make studies of the two dead burglars, and of Jeffrey Semple, and of anyone else whose fate might tell her something.

  26

  Elle woke up in the dark, glanced toward the screen of her computer, then sat up fast. The screen had gone black. In place of the nine small squares showing what her pinhole cameras could see, there was a single black square, like an empty blackboard.

  She scrambled out of bed and stared at the screen, then moved her hand back and forth over the pad, but the computer hadn’t gone to sleep. She clicked on the BBC news site and it came up clear and bright. She clicked on CNN and watched the face of a newswoman talking and the headlines scrolling across the red stripe at the bottom.

  She went back to the screen with the images from the pinhole cameras. Still black. She retyped and connected to the address of the site she had created for the recordings and then repeated the setup procedure. The attempt to reestablish contact with the cameras and microphones brought her the same black screen.

  Elle went to the closet and took out her night burglary outfit and dressed—belly band with the Rohrbaugh R9 and ammunition, black pants, shirt, socks, shoes, baseball cap, and denim jacket. In about five minutes she was out the door.

  She got her car out of the hotel garage and drove toward the Nemesis building. She worked on calming her heartbeat and her breathing. She had been preparing herself for this moment since she had planted the cameras. At some point, somebody in the bugged building was going to find the mics and cameras, and apparently this had been the night. Even stupid people saw things. She kept her phone on the site and set it on the seat beside her. Now and then she would look again, but the screen stayed black. She put her earbuds in to listen for the sound from the microphones, but she heard nothing.

  It had been inevitable that somebody in the kitchen would open a cabinet that wasn’t right by the sink and see a white insulated wire or a pinhole camera. They had lasted a long time, much longer than she’d had a right to expect. When she’d found the pinhole cameras that Nemesis had installed at Kavanagh’s house, she had seen immediately that they were the same as hers. Any Nemesis person who saw hers would know what they were.

  That was almost certainly what had happened. She had to know, for several reasons. She wasn’t a great computer person. She didn’t know if the Nemesis people were capable of tracing the signals of the cameras to her site. If they could do that, could they trace the signal to her hotel? She thought they couldn’t, but they were the sort of people who might be much more sophisticated than she was. Being wrong might mean being dead.

  In spite of her fear she had another hope. If the cameras had gone off because someone at Nemesis had found them and taken them out, she might be able to fool Nemesis by putting in new ones. It was something people like them would never expect her to do. They would assume that because they’d solved
the problem it would stay solved. Spying on killers was a crazy, risky thing to do. Would anybody try to do it twice? Nemesis people might even see a lens or a wire and assume it meant nothing because someone in their organization had already neutralized it. She still had a pinhole camera in her jacket. If the first ones were destroyed, maybe she could at least install the spare.

  She parked beyond the deserted building where she had parked the first time. She knelt by the dumpster, pulled out the metal sheet she had left beneath, and took it with her. She walked along the back of that building to the high chain-link fence that separated the airport’s empty acreage from the civilian buildings along the road, then across two lots toward the Nemesis building. She stared at the building from the airport side. She counted eight Tahoes parked there. As she moved closer, she could see the building’s double doors. They were black. There seemed to have been a power failure. Maybe they hadn’t found her cameras after all.

  She kept going until she reached the corner of the building, then watched and listened for a time, trying to see if anyone was in evidence. The eight Tahoe SUVs parked in the lot didn’t look like a sign of life. Nobody was near them. She looked up at the surveillance cameras on the corners of the building and wondered if they were off too. She noticed that in the field across the highway there were three black SUVs parked, but they didn’t look like the ones Nemesis used.

  Elle made her way along the building’s side wall to the spot where she had cut a hole to enter. She knelt beside the hole and examined the plywood sheet she had spray-painted white and left as a cover. Nobody had moved it or nailed it shut or done anything else to it.

  She moved the sheet and crawled in through the opening, then pulled the sheet back toward her to cover the spot again. She was now inside the empty cabinet space beneath the kitchen counter. Farther along the counter, she remembered, were the sinks and the U-shaped drainpipes. She quietly crawled a few feet and felt for the sockets where she had left pinhole cameras and microphones plugged in. She could see through the cracks at the cabinet doors that there was near darkness in the room. She remained still and tried to understand what was happening.

  She had assumed that the reason her transmission was interrupted was that the Nemesis people had found the cameras and torn them out, but here they were, still plugged in.

  A voice Elle recognized from the recordings as Hernandez the dispatcher said quietly, “I should have known something like this was going to happen. I just didn’t get it.”

  “What are you talking about?” It was the other woman, Shar.

  “They were watching us. I found a pinhole camera in a corner of the hall aimed into the communications room about a week ago.”

  “Why didn’t you do anything?”

  “At first I thought I should run and tell Ed. I actually got up to do it, and then I realized I was doing what stupid people do.”

  “What do smart people do?” said Shar.

  “They leave the camera there and pretend not to see it. Then they do the best work they can do. I thought the one who was watching us was Ed. I did two months of paperwork in about one week, and I was sweet to everybody I talked to, came in early, and left late. I was showing him what a great worker I was. I figured he might even give me a raise.”

  A male voice from outside the doorway said, “I told you two not to talk. So shut up.”

  “What are you going to do, shoot us?” Shar said.

  “Just one. Then the other won’t have any reason to talk. Who is it going to be?”

  The two women fell silent. Elle began to crawl as quietly as she could toward the sink. She knew it was dangerous to venture far from the exit she had cut, but the place was dark. There were no windows, and the only light seemed to be coming from the glass doors at the far end of the hall, which admitted the dim glow from the airport taxiways.

  She slithered under the U-shaped pipes beneath the sink and reached the end of the counter. She heard Hernandez say, “Do you think he would shoot?”

  Shar said, “Probably. They’re from the Virginia office, and they’re pissed. They might make an example of somebody before they take over.”

  Hernandez fell silent again, but the fact that the two had spoken meant the man was out of earshot.

  Elle opened the cupboard door a quarter inch and peered out. The two women were sitting in two of the steel chairs that had been around the third table. Now the chairs faced the wall, and they both appeared to have their ankles duct-taped to the legs and their arms pulled behind them and joined.

  Elle crawled out of the cupboard and closed the cupboard door, rose to her feet and crouched at the doorway. The man had moved on, but she could hear other noises in the darkened building. From the front doorway she heard a man snarl, “Hands up.” There were grunts and the sound of the impact of a body being hurled against a wall. “Get his wrists.”

  Elle turned the other way and hurried to the one place she thought would be empty—the ladies’ room. It was at the end of the hall with the men’s room on one side of it and Ed the boss’s office on the other.

  She pushed the door in only a few inches because she had noticed on her recordings that when it was pushed all the way in, the spring-restrained closer squeaked. When she was inside, she let the door close slowly so it wouldn’t flap.

  On her first visit she had not tried to go this deep into the building. Now the room was pitch-black. She turned on the screen of her phone and was surprised. This wasn’t just a sink and a couple of stalls with toilets in them. It was a locker room with a two-fixture shower and a large mirror above the three sinks. There were two rows of lockers, eight lockers in all, with two benches for sitting down to tie shoes.

  The two women seemed to have taken full possession of the place. There were two hair dryers and a curling iron on the shelf above the sinks and under the mirror, each with its own extension cord, and bottles of shampoo and lotion and cans of hair spray. Some of the lockers had white adhesive tape with the women’s names on them—two lockers each.

  She turned from the mirror to the left and oriented herself to the door. The boss’s office had to be past the lockers and on the shower end of the room. The showers consisted of a plastic shell with two showerheads on the wall about a foot above it.

  Elle stepped into the shower and put her ear to the wall. She heard rumbling voices that belonged to men, but the sounds could not be separated into words. She was about to go back the other way when she saw something peculiar in the light from her phone. It was a well-chewed piece of pink bubble gum stuck to the side of the wall just above the upper edge of the white shower shell. She looked hard at it and thought it was disgusting that some woman—either one of the two tied up in the kitchen or some earlier one—would stick her gum there.

  It also made no sense. It was stuck—not to the shower, as though somebody had wanted to keep it and then came to her senses—but to the painted wallboard above. Elle picked up one of the benches near the lockers, brought it back, and stood on it so her eyes would be level with the gum.

  She took out her knife and popped the gum off the wall. She could see a faint glow and realized she was looking into the boss’s office. She quickly put her phone away. The spot the gum had covered was a small hole drilled in the wall. Either some voyeur had drilled it so he could watch women in the shower, or some woman had drilled it so she could spy on the boss.

  Elle took out the pinhole camera she had kept in her jacket pocket. She carefully pushed the tiny camera lens into the hole. Next she stepped to the row of sinks, unplugged a white extension cord from a hair dryer, and brought it back with her. The power to the whole building seemed to be off. Apparently the people taking over had turned off the main circuit breaker to throw the occupants into confusion so they could be overpowered.

  But when Elle had come in she had noticed that on the ceiling there was a three-inch pill-shaped device with a red light on it glowing steadily. The smoke detectors in the building were apparently hardwired into
their own circuit, and that circuit was still working. Elle put her bench under the smoke detector and used her knife to pry off the cover. She could see that the wiring consisted of a pair of wires coming from above the ceiling spliced with twist-on insulation caps to a pair of wires from the smoke detector. She stepped down and picked up the extension cord. She used her knife to cut off the plug end, sliced the two wires of the cord to separate them, and bared an inch of copper on each.

  She climbed back up to the smoke detector, disconnected it from the power wires, used the twist-on caps to splice the extension cord to the power wires, and then restored the cover. She used the adhesive tape from the door of an unused locker and cut it into short strips to tape the white cord along the ceiling to the raised side edge of the shower stall. The cord ran as far as the bottom of the shower, where it ended with a socket.

  She took the white insulated wire of her pinhole camera and ran that along the raised top edge of the shower and then down to the socket at the end of the extension cord. She held her breath while she plugged the camera into the socket. The plug didn’t fit the socket very well, but she got it in most of the way. Then she picked up the bench and took it back to the lockers where she’d found it. She sat on the bench and turned on her phone again.

  She connected to the website that received and recorded the images from her pinhole cameras. There was a signal and a clear picture of three men in the office on the other side of the shower wall. The room was still dark, but there was a tactical flashlight sitting on the desk that threw a bright circle on the ceiling and lit up the room. One man she recognized as Ed, the boss of this office. He was bound to a chair with wire and duct tape, as the women in the kitchen had been. The other men she had never seen before. They both looked big and athletic. One was young, with the build and bearing of a wrestler. The other was much older, at least sixty. He no longer had the beefy look of the other man, but had a trim, erect body and a hard face.