A Fool and His Monet

by Sandra Orchard

  “Mr. Burke?”

  “Oh, right. He was really upset, because his wife took a turn for the worse. I was trying to tell him everything would be okay, but I don’t think he believes it anymore. The poor man. I feel so sorry for him.”

  “Yes, it must be hard for him to know a kidney could save his wife’s life and yet be powerless to make that happen.”

  Petra let out a heavy sigh. “Yeah, if my husband had been half as devoted, we’d still be together.”

  “Oh?”

  She flushed, shook her head. “I really wanted a baby. He didn’t. Not enough, anyway. Hardly compares to what the Burkes are facing.”

  On the way out of Forest Park to drive back to headquarters, I radioed dispatch to have CBP look into Cody Stafford’s travel history. Except with open borders between the European countries, I wasn’t sure how helpful it would be. He could’ve easily slipped out of France without being detected.

  As I pulled onto I-64, I was about to put in a call to the legat in Paris when a black pickup charged up behind me. What was it with guys in black pickups?

  I lifted my foot off the gas, but the driver kept hugging my bumper. “C’mon, guy, the highway’s practically empty. Pass me already.” I squinted in my rearview mirror, but he was too close for me to make out his plate. “Buddy. You picked the wrong car to play this game with today.” I flipped on my lights and siren.

  The truck slowed.

  I flashed a smug smile at my rearview mirror. “Yeah, I thought you’d see it my way.” I flipped off my equipment and flicked on my turn signal for my exit ramp. The next instant, the idiot clipped my rear bumper, throwing me into a spin.

  15

  The instant my car swerved into a spin, my defensive driving training kicked in. Yeah, would’ve helped if it’d kicked in a mile back. I tunnel-visioned the direction I wanted to go and steered, resisting the impulse to overcompensate. My instructor’s voice echoed in my head—“power, power, power”—and I realized I’d reflexively eased off the gas. I lowered my foot and the car pulled out of the skid and up the ramp. Yes!

  I pulled over on Jefferson Ave., my heart clamoring to make a jailbreak from my chest, and radioed in a description of the idiot’s vehicle. Then I gave myself another two minutes to coax my blood pressure out of the burst-a-valve zone. Drawing a deep breath, I dropped my head and thanked God for protecting me. My gaze landed on one of the notes Zoe had left on the passenger seat—Sorry I missed you.

  My throat thickened. He hadn’t missed me this time.

  I shifted the car back into Drive. It was time to talk to Tanner.

  I climbed the stairs to headquarters’ second floor a tad slower than usual. Tanner backed up around the corner he’d just turned and gave me a once-over. “You look like—”

  I leveled a silent warning at him not to finish the thought. “We need to talk.”

  He trailed me into an empty conference room and closed the door behind him. “What’s going on?”

  I tossed the notes on the table. “You write these?”

  “No.” He separated them on the table with the eraser end of a pencil and scrutinized them.

  I don’t know what unnerved me more, his silence or the flinch in his cheek muscle.

  “Where did you find them?”

  “I found the ‘All work and no play’ one under my windshield wiper last night, outside the art museum, shortly after closing. My cat was batting the other one around my kitchen floor this morning. I assume someone slipped it under my apartment door, but I have no idea when.”

  “Who else has handled them?”

  I hadn’t thought about preserving fingerprints until Tanner pulled out his pencil. “Me and Zoe.”

  “Any ideas who T. H. is?”

  “Thank you, I told Zoe it was T. H. She thought it was T. R., and since your middle initial is R . . .” I let the rest of the explanation trail off. I’m sure he got the picture.

  “Who is T. H.?” he pressed.

  “Right”—I reined in my stray thoughts—“Trent Hodges is the name of the guy I bought the Kandinsky from in Buffalo.”

  “So he’s found you already?” Tanner captured my gaze, his own both softly concerned and fiercely warriorlike. “Toying with your mind.”

  I stifled a shiver. “I think we might be past mind games.”

  “You mean the attack on your aunt?”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  “What do you mean ‘too’?” The hard edge to Tanner’s voice would’ve been almost amusing if my heart hadn’t started doing that prisoner rant on my rib cage again.

  “A guy in a black pickup just tried to run me off the road.” I raised my hand to cut off the questions I could see coming. “I called the police, but I didn’t get the plate number and I can’t ID him, so I’m not holding my breath. I suspect it was the same guy who tried to take me out yesterday.”

  “What? Why am I only hearing about this now?”

  “Because at the time, I thought it was a case of road rage, not personal. Now I’m not so sure. Two incidents involving a black pickup, two days in a row, is a little too coincidental.”

  Tanner flexed his hand open and shut, his jaw working back and forth in time with it. “We can send the notes to the lab to see what they can pull off of them.” He turned the note that had been under my windshield wiper over with the tip of his pencil. “This one was written on a coffee shop receipt. The shop probably doesn’t have a security camera, but nearby businesses might.” He pulled out his notepad and jotted down the date and time from the receipt. “I’ll check it out. You check Hodges’ file. Call Buffalo. Find out if they’ve got eyes on this guy. Known associates. You know the drill.”

  Yeah, I knew the drill.

  I did the research, made the calls, all the while managing to disassociate myself from the thought that the creep I was trying to track down was tracking me. It hadn’t made me feel any better to learn that Baldy hadn’t left Buffalo in the past five days. Guys like him hired muscle to teach their lessons. Although it did make me wonder about the initials on the note. Maybe the note had been innocent. Maybe old Mrs. Hudson on the first floor had stopped by for a cup of tea. Her name was Katrina, but her husband always called her Trina—T. H.

  I shook my head. The intentions of that pickup driver hadn’t been innocent.

  “Serena.”

  I whirled my chair around at the sound of my name, with the sinking feeling it wasn’t the first time Tanner had said it.

  The concern in his eyes intensified. “Aren’t you going to answer that?” He motioned to the phone on my desk.

  The ringing phone. I snatched it up. “Special Agent Serena Jones.”

  The customs agent on the other end of the line informed me that Cody Stafford hadn’t left the US at all, at least not legally.

  You’ve got to be kidding me. I curled over my desk and buried my head under my arms.

  “Serena, you okay?”

  Tanner. I uncurled and swiveled my chair around.

  “I take it that wasn’t good news?”

  “Apparently my prime suspect never left the country.” I shook my head at my pipe dream. “The only reason I’d suspected him was because he was supposed to have been in Paris at the time the Monet was sold. I didn’t have a shred of evidence to connect him to the actual theft.” Except that curious argument with Burke, and Malcolm’s claim that he’d been chummy with Linda, neither of which was proof of anything.

  “But you’ve got other leads, right? And an analyst is going through the names on your suspect list.”

  I let out a heavy sigh. “I’ve got other theories, but without hard evidence, that’s all they’ll ever be.”

  “Hey, don’t beat yourself up over it. No one really expects you to catch the guy. Art crime investigation is primarily about recovery.”

  Yeah, what had made me think I could change that reality?

  “And you’ve already got a lead on where the Monet is,” Tanner went on, but my brain was stil
l stuck on the no-one-expects-you-to-catch-the-guy part.

  I’d trained for this job to track down my grandfather’s murderer. If there was no hope, why was I here?

  In middle school, there’d been a kid who made it her mission to make my life miserable. She’d trip me during intramural soccer games. She’d bump me in the cafeteria, making me spill chocolate milk all over my clothes. She’d sabotage my art projects. And all the while she’d innocently proclaim to the teacher that these were accidents.

  This went on for weeks until my classmate, Matt Speers, came up with a brilliant plan to bait her into acting when the teacher would see her. These days Matt patrolled the streets for the St. Louis PD, so I figured that by now, he’d probably become a pro at baiting and netting. He’d sounded eager to give it a shot when I’d called him, anyway.

  I climbed into my car behind FBI headquarters, my stomach as fluttery as it’d been fifteen years ago as I’d waited for the teacher on yard duty to round the corner.

  I rolled up the street to turn onto Market and surreptitiously scanned every which way for signs of the black pickup. Matt was idling in an unmarked cruiser in the small lot in front of the main entrance and raised a single finger from the top of his steering wheel as I passed by.

  Not spotting any suspicious vehicles, I merged onto I-64 and got off at Forest Park to circle around past the art museum—the second most likely place the guy would watch for me.

  No black pickups, and along the way, I’d apparently lost Matt too.

  I parked in front of the art museum where anyone looking wouldn’t miss my car and then called his cell phone. “You still with me?”

  “Yup. You going inside?”

  “Yeah, I thought I’d give him a chance to make a move.”

  I crossed the street and glanced at the view of the Grand Basin from the museum steps. The fact I still couldn’t see Matt’s car had me a little unnerved. If black-pickup dude was as adept at hiding, we might not spot him until it was too late.

  I meandered into the museum and eyeballed employees’ reactions to my appearance. Some nodded, then turned their attention elsewhere. Some pretended not to see me at all. Malcolm swaggered right over to me and asked how the investigation was going.

  “It’s coming along.” I headed to Zoe’s office and caught her up on the new development, then perused a few employee files to kill more time.

  After ten minutes I strolled back outside. Across the street a crowd of tourists spewed from a trolley bus. Still no sign of a pickup, black or otherwise. I took a detour to the lookout, leaned on the rock wall, and faced up to the futility of my not-so-brilliant idea. This wasn’t junior high. And black-pickup dude wasn’t an impetuous twelve-year-old. Who knew how long he’d bide his time before he acted again?

  If he acted again.

  Speers couldn’t spend the next twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight hours following me around on the off chance the guy might take another run at me. He had a wife and two kids who expected him home at night, not to mention real police work to do. I dialed his number to end the exploit.

  “Didn’t they teach you anything at the academy?” Speers barked back, then muttered, “First Bunch of Idiots,” his pet name for the FBI. “Bad guys have been known to change cars, you know. Tan, two-door sedan at your nine o’clock. Parked three cars behind yours. Guy followed you inside, then came back and sat in his car.”

  “A sedan?” I pulled out my car keys and surreptitiously glanced down the street, but I couldn’t see the driver, thanks to the sun’s glare on the windshield. “Did you run the plate?”

  “I couldn’t make it out on my drive-by.”

  “Okay, just a second.” I turned and tossed my head with a laugh as if he’d said something hilarious. “L, nine, H—”

  The driver sprang from his car.

  “Stan? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Stan Johnson slammed the door of the car in question and stalked toward me.

  I pocketed my phone without explaining who the guy was. After all, what was I supposed to say? That he’s the brother of a suspect I’ve been forbidden to investigate? “Hey, Stan, what’s up?”

  “Where’s my sister?”

  Matt pulled up alongside Stan’s car, blocking it in, and jumped out.

  I lifted my hand to signal him to stand down, then ran my fingers through my hair so Stan wouldn’t notice. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying,” Stan seethed, and Matt started toward us.

  I shot him another glance that arrested his forward momentum. “If you want me to help you, Stan, calling me a liar isn’t the way to do it. Makes me think that Linda’s hiding from you for a reason. Like maybe she’s scared you’ll hurt her.”

  Stan visibly deflated. “I just want what’s mine. She said you talked to her. Told her I was looking for her. She said she’d meet me back home in Kansas. Then she never showed up, and by the time I got back here, she’d cleared out her apartment.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know where she disappeared to any more than you.”

  “They told me inside she took a leave to care for a sick aunt.”

  I nodded.

  Stan threw up his arms. “We don’t got an aunt!” He stalked back to his car.

  Matt pulled his car ahead of mine to allow Stan to leave, then sauntered over to me. “Wrong guy?”

  “Yeah, he’s harmless. I’m sorry to take up so much of your afternoon. We might as well call it quits on my crazy plan.”

  “Let me see you home. That’s where the creep’s more likely to wait for you. Although he’d probably prefer to catch you after dark.”

  My heart hiccupped. “Are you trying to scare me?”

  He shrugged. “Just call ’em how I see ’em.”

  I let out a loud sigh. “Yeah, okay. It’s not far. Let’s go.” I pulled onto the road, and Matt let a couple of cars fill the space between us before following. Of course, if black-pickup dude had been watching me back there, he’d have made Matt and wouldn’t be paying me a call now. Turning onto my street, I scanned the interiors of the cars parked curbside. All empty.

  I turned down the driveway and spotted a guy in gray dress slacks and an overcoat standing on the iron stairs outside my kitchen door, three floors up. He turned and waved.

  Jax? What was he doing here? I slowed and pointed to the back lot to indicate I had to park first. I wedged my car between Mr. Sutton’s ’77 Buick and the fence. If Jax was hankering to go ice-skating again, perhaps I could steer him in Zoe’s direction and end her dateless streak. I tore a page from my notepad and jotted down her name and number before climbing out of the car. Jax’s head bobbed into view over the roof of a car. Then he disappeared with a loud wumph.

  Thinking he’d slipped, I rushed out from between the cars. “Are you okay?”

  Billy had Jax pinned to the ground with his knee digging into Jax’s back.

  “Billy? What are you doing? Get off him.”

  “He was coming after you.”

  “He was coming to talk to me. He’s a friend.”

  “You sure? He’s been casing the joint for the last twenty minutes.”

  Jax reared up, knocking Billy off balance. “I was waiting for her to come home, moron.”

  Billy drew back his fist, looking ready to plow Jax to the next county.

  “Freeze,” Matt yelled, his Taser bobbing from Jax to Billy.

  Billy’s fingers immediately stretched into flattened palms. Jax didn’t seem to think the order was directed at him as he disgustedly swiped at bits of gravel and mud on his slacks and overcoat.

  “It’s okay, Matt. I know these guys too.”

  Matt shook his head and jammed his Taser back in his holster. “Is there any guy in this city not trying to impress you?”

  I gave an exaggerated shoulder shrug. “What can I say? I’m popular.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’ll leave you to them. Give me a call if you spot the truck trolling the area.”

  “Will
do.”

  Jax spun toward me, looking aghast. “Some guy is following you?”

  “Yeah, I imagine that’s who Billy thought you were.”

  I introduced the pair and they grunted hellos as they reluctantly shook hands. Except . . . “Billy, how did you know someone’s been following me?”

  “Ma overheard Mable telling Mary Margaret at the hair salon that her husband heard on his police band radio that a guy in a black truck tried to take you out on the highway this morning.”

  Jax’s face paled. “Are you okay?”

  Did I look okay? I felt about as okay as my mouse must’ve felt dashing across the living room in front of Harold. Maybe worse, considering Harold was a wuss at mouse catching. “Sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Liar,” Billy whispered behind my back.

  Ignoring him, I kept my attention on Jax. “Why were you wanting to see me?”

  “I was wondering how you got along with that search warrant you were after. I guess you didn’t get my note.”

  “Your note?” My heart thumped. “When did you leave a note?”

  “Monday night. You weren’t home yet, so I slipped it under your door.”

  “Oh, J. K.” What I’d thought was a cursive capital T was really a J, and K and H were pretty similar. “That explains a lot. I thought it was signed T. H. so I didn’t know who sent it.”

  “I guess I have to work on my penmanship.”

  “Did you leave the note on my windshield outside the art museum too?”

  “Yes, sorry, I had no idea you didn’t realize they were from me. I saw you go in when I was heading to the skating rink.”

  “Oh, that reminds me.” I pulled Zoe’s number from my coat pocket. “My friend Zoe was just telling me how much she missed skating at Forest Park, and I mentioned you.”

  Jax’s expression went rigid, his gaze fixed on the slip of paper in my hand.

  What’d I say wrong?

  I looked helplessly to Billy.

  “You talking about Zoe Davids?” With a wink, Billy snatched the paper from my hand, sounding utterly smitten. “Oh, man, if you don’t want to take her out, I will. She’s gorgeous.”