It was a picture of Malcolm in a bar, with his arm slung around the back of a dark-haired beauty, posted six hours ago. “She works at the reception desk at the museum. How’d you access his photos?”
“His friend posted it.”
Clearly another non–privacy-savvy friend.
“Do you know her name?”
“She’s not tagged?”
“No.”
I closed my eyes, straining to put a name to the face. Petra. My eyes popped open. “Petra Horvak. I’ll have to move her to the top of today’s interview list, find out what Malcolm’s been saying to her.”
Nate hitched his thumb over his shoulder toward the door. “I’d better get going. Leave you two to your investigating.”
“Thanks for checking on me.” I gave him a quick hug. At least it was meant to be quick. I wasn’t even sure why I hugged him. It wasn’t as if I came from a huggy family, which probably explained why the unexpected zing that jolted through me as his arms encircled my waist and his bristly cheek grazed my hair short-circuited my brain.
“Yeah,” Tanner added. “I’m sorry I roughed you up.” Although he didn’t really sound sorry.
Nate stepped back, gave Tanner a terse nod, his jaw squared, clearly not appreciating the reminder, then returned his attention to me. “I’ll bring you a couple of mousetraps later.”
I eyeballed Harold, who’d fallen asleep with the toy mouse tucked under his paw. “Good plan.”
As I held the door open for Nate, Tanner glanced at the lightening sky. “I should go too. We can follow this up on Monday.”
I shut the door before he could wedge through. “Not so fast. I want to know what you were doing outside my apartment in the wee hours of the morning.”
Tanner leaned back against the counter, crossing his long legs in front of him.
“Oh, you know. I had a sudden burning urge to figure out which movie actor your apartment maintenance man looked like. It was giving me insomnia.”
“Cute.” I crossed my arms.
“No, I don’t think he is.” Tanner rubbed his jaw as if in deep thought. “In fact, now that I’ve gotten to know him a little better, I’m gonna go with . . . Shrek.”
“Ha ha.” Nate was a long way from a green ogre. “Answer the question.”
He sighed, dropping his pose. “Fine. I was making sure your burglar didn’t come back.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Part of me wanted to be irritated with Tanner for watching my place, as if I couldn’t defend myself. But another part of me turned warm and fuzzy at the thought.
I squelched that part as fast as it rose. “So you don’t think the attempted break-in was simply a crime of opportunity?” I asked.
“I don’t like coincidences.”
“Neither do I. Oh, you won’t believe who I found at Lou’s restaurant last night.”
“Who?”
“Linda Kempler. Unfortunately, before I could get much information out of her, her date called Benton.”
“Who was her date?”
“State Senator Doug Reed.” I still couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him.
Tanner whistled. “The image her brother painted of her is looking truer by the minute. She sounds like a real gold digger.”
“Yeah, I just hope she doesn’t have plans with the senator today too.”
“Take the day off. If she’s the senator’s girlfriend, she’s not going anywhere.”
I rolled my eyes. “This from the man who spent the night sitting outside in his freezing cold vehicle watching my door.”
He shrugged.
“Can you spell double standard?”
Tanner squeezed my shoulder. “What you need to do is take the day off. It’s Sunday. Twenty-four hours isn’t going to make a difference on a case this cold. Go to church. Have dinner with your folks. Start fresh first thing Monday morning.”
“The museum’s closed Mondays. I need to do more interviews today.”
“No. You don’t. If you harass Linda on a Sunday and the senator’s there, guaranteed you’ll get another call from Benton.”
“What I need is less unsolicited advice and someone to keep an eye on my aunt. Last night she asked a mobster where she could get a kidney donor.”
Tanner burst into laughter.
“I’m not joking. I don’t know what to do with her. If she’s not careful, she could wind up the donor.” I choked up on the last word, despite making light of it. Lately danger was hitting way too close to home.
8
“Hey, Miss Jones, hold up.”
I stopped in the middle of the church parking lot and turned to see who’d called after me. A middle-aged guy with a receding hairline waved, helped a young girl into the minivan he was standing next to, then hurried toward me. He was five ten, five eleven maybe, neatly dressed in tan jeans and a white dress shirt under a brown leather bomber jacket. I’d attended the church for a few months now, but I didn’t recognize him, so how did he know me?
He thrust out his hand. “We haven’t met. I’m Dave Sparrow.”
I shook his calloused hand. From all appearances, he was a hard-working family man. “How may I help you?”
“My wife pointed you out to me. I work for Russ Bailey’s General Contracting. He said you’d want to talk to me because I worked at the art museum last summer.”
“Yes, I do. Thank you for introducing yourself. I hadn’t received the list of names yet from Mr. Bailey.” Which made me wonder if Bailey was worried one of his subcontractors had lifted the paintings and alerted them to give them time to get rid of any evidence if they hadn’t already. I pulled a notebook and pen from my purse and jotted down his name. “When would be a convenient time to meet with you?”
“You’re welcome to join my family and me for lunch if you don’t already have plans.”
“Oh.” Mr. Sparrow was growing more unpredictable by the second. I ignored the niggling memory of my promise to Tanner to take the day off. Interviewing Sparrow in front of his family was not ideal, but then again, children had a way of conveniently exposing the truth when their parents least wanted, and it wasn’t really working so much as accepting a fellow church member’s hospitality. “I’d love to join you. Thank you.”
He rattled off the address and invited me to follow their van. The house was a modest bungalow in West County, an area favored for its high-quality public schools. His furnishings were nice but not high-end. The art on the walls was the kind one would pick up from Walmart, not an art museum. All very tasteful and innocent. From all appearances, he looked like a squared-away family man that I’d be able to move to the bottom of my suspect list.
Over dinner, we talked about the Blues’ latest win—his girls were avid hockey fans—and their upcoming winter retreat with the church’s youth group. When they started to quiz me on what it was like to be an FBI agent, their dad shooed them off to do dishes so the adults could talk.
I consider myself a pretty good judge of character and even better at reading body language, so I got straight to the point. “Did you steal the missing pieces from the art museum?”
They both laughed. Not a nervous I-have-something-to-hide laugh but a genuinely amused laugh. “Dave’s conscience won’t even let him walk out of a store if the clerk gives him too much change,” his wife explained.
“My father got really sick when I was a young boy and my mom had to take on two jobs to get us through. One of them was working at a gas station, and one day a punk drove off without paying. The station’s owner took the money out of Mom’s pay. Money we needed.” Dave shook his head. “I was furious. Wanted to go out and steal food to make up for it. But my parents made me promise that I’d remember how much the theft hurt us and that I’d never steal, no matter how easy it looked.”
“Who else were you working with at the art museum?”
“Norman Fellowes.”
I wrote down the name. “You see him do anything suspicious?”
Dave exchanged a look with his wife, then scrubbed his palm over his whiskered jaw as if trying to come to a decision. “I didn’t see him take anything.”
Okay, that sounded like an evasion if I’d ever heard one. Tilting my head, I studied him in silence.
He soon started squirming. “I’m not saying he couldn’t have done it. He could’ve hid a canvas between the scraps of drywall he carried out or something. But I didn’t see him do it.”
“Norm has problems,” Dave’s wife chimed in, and Dave sent her a silencing glare.
“What kind of problems?” I pressed.
Dave let out a resigned sigh. “He has a bit of a drinking problem. And I suspect gambling. I don’t work with him that often, but when I have, he’s been a good worker. Doesn’t slack off like some do.”
His wife gave him a tell-her-the-rest look.
“I figured if Russ told me you’d want to talk to us, he’d also tell Norman, and . . .”
“That I should talk to him sooner rather than later.”
He flinched. “Yeah, maybe.”
His wife reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Dave doesn’t like to speak ill of anyone.”
Dave gave his wife an appreciative smile. “Growing up poor, I was accused more than once of being in on something I wasn’t. Makes me hesitant to rush to judgment.”
“I understand. I appreciate you seeking me out. Do you know where Norman lives?”
“In Dogtown. With his girlfriend, Cara O’Brien. I don’t know the address.” I jotted down the girlfriend’s name. I thanked him and his wife for lunch and said good-bye to the girls, then sat in my car and called dispatch. “Can you run Norman Fellowes through NCIC, see if anything pops? He’s a tradesman. Lives in the south end.” I looked up Cara O’Brien and plugged her address into my GPS, then, just for fun, changed the voice to a male Australian. Nothing like the lilt of a masculine foreign accent to make you not mind so much being told where to go.
Not that I had to interview Norman now, but if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to get him out of my head.
The dispatcher checked back in as I turned onto his street. “He looks clean.”
“Okay, thanks.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same for the street, which was surprising, because for the most part St. Louis was an impressively clean city. Instead the street looked like the day after St. Patty’s Day—Dogtown’s favorite holiday, thanks to its Irish roots. A local party must’ve gotten out of hand last night and spilled onto the sidewalks, because the houses themselves were small, neat bungalows, probably of post–World War II vintage, sitting on raised lots separated by the quintessential white picket fence—or in Norman’s case, graying.
I climbed the cement stoop to his door and knocked.
A woman in spandex workout pants and a tank top swung open the door as she took a swig from a water bottle.
“Is Norman Fellowes home?”
Her gaze swept over me, her straw-colored hair bobbing in a high ponytail that exposed her dark roots. “Who’s asking?”
“Special Agent Serena Jones.” I slid my badge from the outside pocket of my purse and held it at eye level.
She laughed. No, roared. A bent-over, knee-slapping roar. “What’d he do? Renege on a debt to Manny the Masher?”
Manuel Lamonte, affectionately known by those who avoided him as Manny the Masher, was St. Louis’s most notorious loan shark. Although it was never proven, he’d allegedly crushed more than one deadbeat client with the compactor at his wrecking yard. A reputation that had served him well in ensuring his current clients made timely payments. If Norman was in debt to him, that’d be a prime motive to snatch the paintings. “Is Norman having financial problems?”
The woman snorted. “He makes enough money. But he’s a lousy gambler.” She took another swig from her bottle. “Ain’t my problem no more. I kicked him out when he didn’t pay his share of the rent.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Friday night.”
“Do you know where he’s living now?”
“Don’t know and don’t care. But by now you can probably find him at O’Shaunessy’s, watching the football game with the boys. You can’t miss him. He’s six six and as skinny as a rail.”
“When Norman left, did he leave behind any belongings? Clothes? Furniture? Art?”
She spurted water as she let loose another laugh. “Norman, art? His idea of art is a poster of a shiny red muscle car. You’re welcome to it. It’s still on the wall in the basement.”
“He never showed you, or mentioned, any paintings?”
She squinted, her gaze drifting. “Now that you mention it, when he was doing the job at the art museum, he did say he was gaining a whole new appreciation for art.” She shook her head. “He showed me pictures he’d snapped of his favorites.”
“Can you describe them?”
“Let’s just say my mother would’ve fainted dead away if I’d let him hang them on the wall.”
Okay, so not pastoral landscapes. But if he’d been noticing paintings and Manny the Masher was putting the squeeze on him, he could have been tempted to make off with a couple.
I drove around to O’Shaunessy’s. Cars lined both sides of the street for a block. Stake a cop at either end, and the place would be a ticket gold mine by the time the Super Bowl ended. I parked on the next block and walked.
The bar was loud and dimly lit and smelled like a locker room. I spotted a tall, slim man at the end of the bar, his gaze fixed on the big screen.
I weaved around the packed tables and sauntered to his side. “Norman Fellowes?”
He spared me a half-second glance. “Who’s asking?”
For a heartbeat, I was tempted to not mention what I did for a living, to cozy up to him and feign interest in his plans for after the game. From the smell of his breath, he already had one sail to the wind. A little sweet talk would no doubt loosen his lips.
But that half-second glance told me that as long as there were men in twenty pounds of padding smashing into each other on the big screen, the act would be lost on him. And it was still the first quarter. I flashed my badge. “Special Agent Serena Jones.”
The guy on the stool next to me paused with his long-neck bottle halfway to his lips, took one look at me, and vamoosed.
I slid onto the stool he’d vacated, between Norm and the big screen. “I need you to answer a few questions.”
As providence would have it, the network chose that moment to break for a commercial.
“What about?” Norm scooped a handful of peanuts from the bar, seemingly undisturbed by the prospect of being questioned by an FBI agent, which made me wonder if he’d even registered what I’d said.
“Items missing from the Forest Park Art Museum.”
His head jerked back, his eyes wide, a frown tugging down the corners of his lips. “I don’t know anything about any missing paintings.”
“I didn’t say they were paintings.”
He choked on a peanut, then stalked to the restroom, pounding his chest.
“Hey, you okay? I don’t want you choking to death in there.” Remembering what Burke said, I wondered if he was choking on the idea of doing five to ten in the federal pen. I stationed myself outside the door, figuring as long as I could still hear him coughing, he hadn’t pulled a Stan-out-the-window on me.
Cheers rose from the bar and Norman raced out, still zipping his pants. “What’d I miss?” He reclaimed his stool at the bar, tossing me a glare as if I was to blame.
“Listen,” I said in my friendliest I-want-to-help-you tone. “If you cooperate, I’ll talk to the prosecutor, see if he’ll cut you a deal. I’m just interested in recovering the items. Tell me who you sold them to and—”
Norman surged to his feet, knocking his stool into my leg in his hurry to put distance between us. “I didn’t steal nothing.”
All eyes shot our way.
I didn’t care. “I know you’re in deep with Manny the Mas
her.”
“Shh.” He looked around, waved nonchalantly to those still looking, and sat back down.
Okay, so apparently Norm cared. Interesting.
“You talked to my ex-girlfriend?” he hissed. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I paid Manny back.”
“With a painting?”
“No! I don’t know nothing about any painting.”
Of course, what else would he say? Trouble was, I believed him. Believing people was becoming a bad habit and getting me nowhere in this investigation.
By the time I got home Sunday afternoon, I was more than ready to R & R with my paintbrush and canvas. Pablo Picasso once said that “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” and my soul was feeling very dusty.
I dropped my keys and purse on the kitchen table and put a mug of milk in the microwave to heat up for hot cocoa, but as I reached for the handle of the cupboard where I kept the cocoa tin, visions of a twitching nose and beady eyes popping out from behind it flashed through my mind. “Harold!” I strode to my bedroom and found the freeloader curled up in the middle of my bed. I scooped him up and carried him back with me to the kitchen. “Here’s the deal. I ward off two-legged intruders. You handle the four-legged ones. Okay?”
Harold meowed, but it didn’t sound like he agreed.
Too bad. I was trained to take down two-hundred-pound men, not two-ounce rodents. I held Harold up to the cupboard and gingerly opened the door.
Nothing moved inside. And thankfully there was no telltale evidence that anything had paid the cupboard a visit. “Okay.” I dropped Harold to the floor. “You’re off the hook for now, but no more Stuart Little videos for you. Mice are not a part of this family.”
I headed to the bedroom to change, rethinking having kicked off my shoes at the door as my gaze swept the hall for any kamikaze mice tempted to cross my path. My unwelcome houseguest turned out to be smart enough to stay out of sight. I dragged on a pair of faded blue jeans and an old Wash U jersey. “Time to relax,” I said to Harold, who’d reclaimed his spot in the center of my bed and gave me his I-was-relaxing-fine-until-you-came-home look. Must be nice to be a cat and not feel guilty about lazing around doing nothing but shedding fur.
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