No need to go into my uneasiness over the way Baldy had glared at me after the takedown.
Tanner shook his head as I concluded my slightly edited recap. A SWAT guy himself, he’d no doubt seen his share of foul-ups. “I’m glad to hear the operation was a success. I know how much you wanted to join the Art Crime Team.”
“Hmm.” Yes, I’d been single-minded in my pursuit of that goal.
My insides churned. Too bad I’d been in fairyland when I’d imagined what it would actually be like.
Yup, definitely going the ignore-your-fears route.
Tanner pulled to the curb in front of my apartment building, oblivious—I hoped—to the fact that his protégé was a quaking mass of nerves. “Get some rest. You deserve it.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you Monday.” If I live that long.
Mr. Sutton, my seventy-eight-year-old neighbor, greeted me in the hallway as I dropped my overnight bag in front of my door and dug my key from my purse.
“Discombobulated.”
I fumbled the key. “Pardon me?”
Every morning he ambled to the corner to buy a newspaper. He tucked today’s edition under his arm and squinted at me through his Coke-bottle glasses. “Our word for the day. It’s discombobulated. Means disconcerted, unsettled, out of sorts.”
“Right. Thank you.” Sutton was a retired English professor who’d made it his mission to help everyone in the neighborhood expand their vocabulary. He couldn’t have known that I’d spent half the night eyeballing passengers in the Buffalo airport or that the being-watched feeling hadn’t gone away when I climbed off the plane seven hundred miles later.
“Don’t forget to use it in a sentence.”
“I won’t.” His theory was that using the new word in a sentence helped cement it into our brains. But my brain was too discombobulated to form a coherent sentence.
“You going to answer that?” Mr. Sutton pointed to my purse.
I stared at it dumbly a second before registering the ringing. “Oh, yes, thanks.” I waved good-bye and then pulled out my cell phone and glanced at the screen. My parents’ number.
I hesitated. I didn’t have the energy to parry Mom’s questions right now. Only . . . I did make that foxhole promise about listening to her. Not to mention, Mom never called my cell phone number. She was too afraid she’d distract me from my work and get me shot.
Possible reasons why she’d break her own code suddenly paraded through my mind. None of them good.
I clicked on the phone. “Mum, is everything okay?” My parents are British, and when we were kids, there’d been a few words, like Mum, that they’d been adamant about our not Americanizing, which was all fine and good until my first-grade teacher told me I’d spelled it wrong and docked a mark off my paper. After that, I’d doggedly insisted on using Mom, but somehow, at the moment, using Mum felt right.
“Everything is now that I know you’re okay,” she said. “Are you still in New York? Did you see your brother?”
“I’m fine.” Or I would be after a hot shower, a power nap, and a lobotomy to help me forget the icy glint in Baldy’s eyes. “I just got home. And no, I didn’t see Shawn. I was in New York State, not New York City.” My brother flies all over the world, leading excursions for a big travel company, and was currently in his fourth week in the City, arranging for a spring tour. I secretly think it’s his way of avoiding Mom’s “You need to settle down and give me grandchildren” pleas. I mean, how long does it take to plan a tour? Not that I blamed him for staying away. Except that it doubled the pressure on me.
“You sound tired. Your uncle Harry said there’s an opening at the Tums factory. The hours are good. Weekends and evenings off. You’d have time to date.”
“Mum, I . . .” I blanked on a good excuse. I didn’t need to get to work. I’d already put in over fifty hours this week and had no urgent cases I needed to get back to.
“I know. I know. You need to go. Come for dinner. We’ll talk then.”
“Okay,” I heard myself say as I clicked off. Agreeing was just easier.
A third-floor neighbor stepped off the elevator. Assuming she’d pushed the wrong elevator button, I called out, “This is the second floor,” then picked up my overnight bag and reached for the doorknob.
She lifted a plastic bread bag stuffed with tufts of fur. “I’m bringing my cat’s shed fur to Theresa. She spins it into yarn and knits scarves with it.”
“Cool.” In a crazy kind of way. But who was I to judge? I mean, she could at least ride the elevator.
I loved my eccentric neighbors. Along with the three-story brownstone’s historic character and its proximity to Forest Park—almost twice the size of New York’s Central Park—they had reeled me in when Aunt Martha begged me to sublease the two bedroom from her so that her beloved cat could stay in his home when her hip surgery forced her out of it. I pushed open the door. Home.
One step into the apartment, I glanced at the key in my hand—the key I hadn’t used—and my heart missed a beat or three.
I soundlessly set down my luggage and palmed my gun. I knew I shouldn’t have asked Baldy about the Blacklock stolen from my grandfather. He might’ve been smart enough to look up who it was stolen from and discovered there was an FBI agent in the family. A female agent.
The fridge’s motor kicked out, plunging the apartment into an eerie quietness.
Okay, maybe I was overreacting. Thinking too much about Baldy and the vengeful glint in his eyes. Zoe could have forgotten to lock up after she stopped in to feed the cat. Except . . . the slightest of scents—a masculine mixture of spice and soap—teased my nostrils.
And it didn’t belong to my cat.
Pressing my back to the wall, I peered around the arched opening into my kitchen. Nothing appeared disturbed. I edged forward and peered around the corner of the living room. Again nothing.
By now, Harold should’ve been twining about my legs. Even when he was mad at me, he’d at least show his face and let out a disgruntled huff.
An odd scruffling sound came from the other end of the apartment.
My gun grew slick in my hands. Using the end of the living room wall for cover, I aimed my gun down the hall. “Come out with your hands up.”
A shadow darkened the bathroom’s doorway and my breath lodged in my throat.
A second later, a man stepped out, his hands in the air, one palm flat, the other clutching a litter scoop.
I blinked. “Nate?”
His gaze skittered from my Glock to my face, his lips curving into a grin. “Is today’s word of the day paranoid?”
“Cute.” Ignoring my hammering heart, I slipped my gun into my pocket as nonchalantly as I could manage. Nate, Nathan Butler, was the building superintendent. Although with his tousled brown hair and the scarcely grown-in beard that made him look as if he’d carelessly decided to stop shaving for a week, he could easily be mistaken for a movie star—and definitely a leading man, not the bad guy. “What are you doing in my apartment?”
He lowered his hands. “Your friend couldn’t make it and called your aunt, who called me and asked if I could take care of Harold until you got back.”
“Is she okay?” It wasn’t like Zoe to bail. She worked at the Forest Park Art Museum, which made stopping by my place to feed Harold the minorest of detours.
“Yeah, your aunt said she had a work emergency.”
Relieved to hear she was okay, I dragged my knit hat from my head. “She must’ve been swamped with getting ready for the special Valentine’s Day show next weekend. It—”
A dimple peeked through Nate’s whiskers and made me forget what I’d been about to say.
“What?”
“I’m afraid I frightened you more than I realized.” His gaze flicked to my hair—my chalked gray hair.
I pulled out my hair clips and shook free the locks in a model-worthy flourish. “Haven’t you heard? Gray is the new blonde.” Resisting the impulse to explain the disguise, I added, “I r
eally appreciate you stepping in while I was gone.”
Harold ambled out of my bedroom and twined around Nate’s legs, as if it was perfectly natural for me to have a man in my apartment. If the litter scoop in Nate’s hands was anything to go by, he’d taken his cat-watching duties very seriously.
Suddenly my heartfelt thanks didn’t feel like nearly enough compensation.
Nate slanted a troubled glance at my bulging jacket pocket. “You okay?”
“Yes.” Releasing the gun still bunched in my hand, I jerked my hand from my pocket and flattened it against my side, then brandished a self-deprecating grin. Who was I kidding? I’d been on one undercover assignment and was already so freaked out that scoring a job at the antacid factory sounded like a good move. At least I’d get a product discount. And I could use some antacids about now. I’d been fooling myself to think I could handle being an FBI agent. I should just quit like Mom wanted.
“You sure you’re okay?” Nate pressed.
I fluttered my hand to dismiss his concern. “I’m fine. Mr. Sutton caught me before I came in. Our word of the day is discombobulated.” I grinned. “I was just practicing.”
My quip didn’t earn the chuckle I’d hoped for. In fact, Nate’s smile disappeared altogether. “I imagine all that FBI training keys you up to always anticipate the worst.”
“Nah. That’s my mother’s job. She’s petrified I’ll get shot by a bad guy before I can give her grandkids.” My cheeks flamed, and I whirled toward the kitchen, mentally blaming my lack of filter on my tiredness. “Uh, did you want some lunch before you go?” I pulled a pound of bacon and carton of eggs from the fridge. “I mean, you cleaned the cat’s litter box. The least I can do is feed you.”
Nate leaned against the kitchen doorway, looking amused once more. “That’s okay. My arteries have already had their quota of cholesterol for the week.”
“I’ll have you know my granddad ate bacon and eggs every morning of his life and he lived to be seventy-two.”
“That’s not that old,” Nate teased.
“He was shot.”
Nate’s grin dropped, along with my heart.
Ugh, why’d I have to shoot my mouth off?
Nate looked at me as if I was a minefield and one wrong move might set me off. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Of course he didn’t, and I didn’t want to explain. Didn’t want to tell him my grandfather was killed trying to stop a burglar from taking a painting. That his murder was the reason I’d become an FBI agent.
I stuffed the uncooked lunch fixings back into the fridge. “It’s okay.” Except it wasn’t. How could I have almost considered quitting at the first hint of trouble? What kind of dedication was that?
A knock rattled the window, and I all but pounced on the kitchen’s exterior door to end the awkward exchange. The door opened onto a metal staircase, and my friend Zoe Davids stood on the landing, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her winter coat, her shoulders hunched up to her ears, looking as desperate as she had the time we were ten and got caught skipping school. “I need your help.”
The work emergency. “Of course.” I motioned her inside. Due to her boss’s sudden death last summer, Zoe had been appointed the temporary head of the art museum’s security, and I had a bad feeling her midday appearance on my doorstep didn’t bode well for her hopes the appointment would soon be made permanent.
She stepped inside and did a double take. “Your hair’s gray.”
“It’s a long story.”
Zoe’s problem looked far more important at the moment. Her chestnut-colored hair was feathered around her face in a blunt cut that did nothing to soften the worry lines pinching her lips. Her gaze slammed into Nate’s and her face went white. “Oh.” She backed out the door. “I . . . He . . .”
“Zoe, what’s wrong?” I glanced at Nate for his take on her odd reaction.
Back-stepping toward the hall door, he hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “I, um, need to go. I’ll see you later.”
As the door closed behind him, my attention jerked back to Zoe clattering down the stairs. “What’s going on?”
2
I grabbed my coat and raced down the outside stairs after Zoe. “What was that about? Why did you react that way to Nate?”
Zoe had already yanked open her car door but stopped short of climbing in. “That was your apartment superintendent?”
“Yes.”
Zoe groaned. “Your whole building could’ve found out inside half an hour. This is why they didn’t want me to come.”
“Why who didn’t want you to come?”
Her gaze darted about the parking lot. “Get in.”
I quickly rounded the hood and joined her in the front seat of her twelve-year-old sedan.
Without a word, she turned the key in the ignition, and the instant the car sputtered to life, she sped out of the lot. “The art museum’s board didn’t want me to come,” she said, turning onto Skinker Boulevard. “They’re afraid if word gets out, our benefactors will think twice about loaning their personal pieces for future shows.”
“Word about what?”
“We’ve been robbed!”
“Are you serious? When? How?” I was sure I would’ve heard if someone had stormed into the museum wielding firearms and ripping priceless art off the walls, so I suspected the museum had actually been burglarized, not robbed—a distinction Tanner had drilled into me my first week on the job. Not that the distinction made a hill of beans of difference to Zoe. All that mattered was it had happened on her watch.
I almost felt guilty for my unexpected surge of eagerness to investigate.
“That’s the problem. We’re not sure when it happened or how. It’s a nightmare. If not for the FBI’s press conference this morning touting that Kandinsky recovery in Buffalo, I’d probably still be trying to convince the board to let me talk to you.”
Unfortunately, a reluctance to report thefts wasn’t uncommon for museums and art galleries, precisely for the reason she’d stated. Between that and a desire for the art to appear accessible to patrons, security tended to have a few unplugged holes. But those were what Zoe had spent the past six months addressing with surveillance and determent systems updates. “Do you think it could’ve happened before you started the security updates?”
She swerved into Forest Park and the engine sputtered out. “Not now!” She cranked the key once, then again. The third time the engine turned over, and she raced toward the museum as if she was on borrowed time, which she probably was.
“Don’t you think it’s time you replace this thing?”
“Sure, but first I have to make sure I still have a job to pay for it.”
“You’re not going to lose your job.”
“Don’t be so sure. Especially if it turns out the paintings went missing after all the updates I pestered the board to allow me to make!”
“Is that what you think?”
Zoe shook her head. “All we know for sure is that the paintings were there last May, and now they’re gone.”
May? That meant we were looking at a nine-month window! This case was already colder than Buffalo. “Okay, why don’t you start by telling me what’s missing?”
“Two paintings—a small Monet and a Rijckaert. Except . . .” She wrung her fingers around the steering wheel. “There’s a slight chance they could have been misplaced.”
“Misplaced? You misplace a remote control, your car keys, maybe even a tagalong little brother in the mall. You don’t misplace a six-figure Monet.”
“I know. I know. It’s wishful thinking. But you know how it is with museums. Budgets are tight and we barely have the resources to deal with the pieces on display, never mind taking regular inventories of the pieces in storage.”
“So the Monet and Rijckaert went missing from storage?”
“Yes, from vault B-11.” She turned her sputtering car into the parking lot and gave it an extra kick of gas to propel it into a parking spot. �
�C’mon, I’ll show you.” She led me inside through a back entrance.
A young man in dark slacks and a blue, museum-logoed polo shirt, which flagged him as security to those who knew the color codes, appeared in the hall ahead of us and gave me a once-over.
“It’s okay, Malcolm,” Zoe said. “She’s with me.”
He nodded, then disappeared around the corner.
Zoe led me down a back staircase and used a key card to get through the door at the bottom.
“Who else has access to the vault area?”
“My security team. Cleaning staff have access to the floor, not inside the vaults. We occasionally get requests from students to study some of the stored pieces. I can ask records to pull up those requests. But we always bring the pieces up to a study room.” Zoe stopped in front of a door labeled B-11 and thumbed through the keys on her key ring. “We stumbled onto the theft by accident when we were searching for a painting for the Valentine’s show.”
“Why didn’t you change these out for electronic locks during the upgrades?”
“The board was worried that an electricity outage would make them more vulnerable than mechanical locks.”
“Too bad. If they’d been electronic, we could’ve checked the records to see when the door had been opened and by whom. Could’ve helped us narrow down the window of opportunity and suspects considerably.”
“We have records for the locked doors at either end of the wing, but unfortunately, they only go back thirty days.” Zoe unlocked B-11’s door.
It opened into a windowless room that thankfully was large enough to not make me break into a claustrophobic panic. Like the rest of the institution, the room was a comfortable 70 degrees with a relative humidity of about 50 percent—the stable temperatures and humidity essential to prevent a breakdown in organic materials.
Zoe flicked on a light and walked over to one of the many specially designed storage racks that held framed paintings. “The two missing paintings were supposed to be on this rack.”
“Were they the most valuable pieces down here?”
“The Monet would’ve been up there for sure. I was surprised to hear we had one squirreled away. But there are a lot of other pieces here more valuable than the Rijckaert, so the thief either didn’t know his artists too well or—”
A Fool and His Monet Page 2