A Fool and His Monet

by Sandra Orchard

  Uh-oh. Mom must’ve heard the m word. She was hurdling baby blankets and teddy bears to get to me. “You want to get married?” she exclaimed, nearly tumbling into my lap.

  The buzz of conversations around the room came to an abrupt stop and ev-er-y-one gaped at me.

  I laughed. Except it sounded a tad maniacal, so I pressed my lips together and looked pleadingly to Zoe.

  “Of course, she wants to get married someday,” Zoe, my dearest, true-blue friend jumped in. “She’s just waiting for the right guy. Although,” she added under her breath for my ears only, “I don’t see what’s wrong with the ones you keep turning away.”

  Mom squeezed my arm and let out the most contented sigh. “I’m so happy to hear this.”

  Uh-oh. She had that look. The one she got whenever she thought she’d found the perfect young woman for my brother. The sudden bursts of “Oh, I know just the young man for Serena” from my aunts scattered about the room confirmed it.

  “I don’t need any help finding the right guy,” I said. “Okay? Please.”

  Mom patted my arm and nodded. “We understand,” she said in that mother-knows-best voice that sounded as if she was already making plans.

  22

  “Owwwww!” I reached over my pillow and grabbed whatever had landed on my wounded head and flung it off.

  A banshee-sounding “yeeee-oooow” followed by a thud in the vicinity of the bedroom floor jolted me fully awake.

  I jackknifed out of bed and could just make out the silhouette of a cat in the faint morning light slanting through the blinds. “Harold? What is wrong with you?” I clutched my now pounding head. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you didn’t mean”—I cocked my ear toward the bedroom door. The pounding wasn’t in my head. It was in my apartment.

  I sucked in a breath. Asher?

  “You’re supposed to attack the intruder, not me,” I hissed at Harold as I snatched my gun from my night table drawer. Only . . . an intruder wouldn’t knock.

  I grabbed my bathrobe and hurried to the kitchen to find Tanner rapping on the outside door. “What are you doing here?”

  “You didn’t answer your phone.”

  “Oh. I guess those pain pills must’ve really knocked me out. I probably wouldn’t have heard you knocking if the cat hadn’t pounced on my head.” I picked Harold up and gave him a nuzzle. “I’m sorry, boy. You were just trying to get my attention, weren’t you? And I go and throw you across the room.”

  Tanner’s eyebrow arched. “You threw your cat across the room?”

  “Don’t worry. He landed on his feet. Now, what was so important that it couldn’t wait”—I peered at the clock on the stove—“another two hours?” He’d already called me last night to let me know the house search hadn’t produced anything helpful to the art theft investigation. Then my brain suddenly came online. “Oh! Did they find Petra and Asher?”

  “Not exactly. They found her car. In the river. No bodies inside.”

  “What? What river?”

  “The Mississippi.”

  “Does it look as if they were in the car when it went in?”

  “We won’t know until they haul it out. They’re working on it now and searching the shoreline for any sign the pair came ashore. How’s the head?”

  “Feels like a marching band’s stomping around inside it, but I’ll survive. Give me fifteen minutes.”

  By the time I returned to the kitchen, Tanner had poured us two steaming mugs of coffee. He held one out to me. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  “Oh, I love you,” I said, snatching it up.

  His dimples winked at me.

  “Uh, I mean . . .”

  “I know. I know. You just said that because I look so much like Cary Grant.”

  Coffee spurted from my mouth.

  “Oh, Serena, Serena, Serena,” he said, doing a pretty fair imitation of Grant’s famous “Judy, Judy, Judy” line, and handed me a paper towel.

  I shook my head. “You do realize Grant died before I was born.”

  “But I notice you’re not denying the resemblance.” Tanner grinned. “Anyway, back to business, I thought you might want to question Asher’s colleagues before we go to the river.”

  “Mmm, yes, good idea.” I swigged down what was left of my coffee. “Thank you for picking up the slack for me last night.”

  “No problem. The assault and collision investigations were the PD’s domain anyway.”

  “You’ve got to understand that Asher has some kind of mental challenge,” one of his female co-workers at the big box store where Asher worked informed us a half hour later. “He’s the sweetest guy you’d want to know. He’d give you the shirt off his back and protect you with no thought to his own welfare. But he’s gullible.”

  “Have you seen people take advantage of that?”

  “A few of his co-workers have. From what he’s said about his new girlfriend, I kind of think she’s the type who might.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “He calls her Pet.”

  Tanner chuckled.

  “It’s kind of weird, hey?” the girl went on. “When he isn’t around, the guys sometimes joke that he must be dating a real dog. They’d never say it to him though, because they know he’d probably punch their lights out.”

  “He’s hit colleagues before?”

  “No, none of us, but there was an incident last summer at the company picnic. A guy threatened one of us girls and Asher went after him like a madman.”

  I stiffened, mentally replaying my personal experience with the madman routine. But Asher didn’t have a record. “The police weren’t called?”

  “No, we broke the fight up pretty quick. We found out afterward that his sister used to get bullied and got really hurt one time. I guess it made him kind of obsessive about needing to protect any woman he sees in trouble.”

  A trait that would’ve played nicely into Petra’s hands.

  “Did he work Wednesday?” Tanner asked, throwing me a sidelong glance that reminded me of my excitement with the black pickup late Wednesday morning, not afternoon.

  “No, that’s his day off.”

  Perfect. No alibi. “Thank you for your time,” I said, ending the interview.

  Next, Tanner and I drove to the river to check on the extraction of Petra’s car. “What do you make of Asher now?” he asked.

  “He thought I was stalking Petra, so chances are high that Petra told him as much, hoping he’d try to scare me away. But his moral fiber would’ve had to have been pretty elastic to be persuaded to take out Burke and Cody for her.”

  “Unless Asher testifies against her, all you’ve got is circumstantial evidence to connect her to the attacks on Cody and Burke. Burke assumes she ordered them, but he doesn’t know if it’s true any more than we do.”

  “Yeah, and I wouldn’t blame the jury for not believing it. She seems like a nice person. Even I let my guard down when she was being so cooperative. I suspect the defense would have no trouble bringing in a parade of character witnesses to raise the jury’s doubts about the allegations.”

  At the sight of a familiar car by the river, I grabbed the dash. “Is that my aunt?” I jumped out the second Tanner pulled to a stop. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, there you are,” Aunt Martha said. “I heard on the news that a museum employee’s car was found in the river and dashed straight over.” She reached up and brushed the hair from my face. “Is that what she did to you?”

  I fingered my bangs back over my stitches. “No.”

  “Oh, come on. Nate asked me how you were recovering when I showed up at the apartment this morning. That tells me you were the federal officer who got assaulted, and I assume that the driver of this car was the perp?”

  Perp? Tanner mouthed at me, amusement dancing in his eyes. Admittedly, the TV-version cop talk did sound funny coming from Aunt Martha, but I wasn’t in a laughing mood.

  “No, Aunt Martha, she wasn’t the person who gave me the
cut. You need to go home and let me do my job.” I’d take care of strangling Nate later.

  “They said she wasn’t in the car. Have you put a watch on her bank account and credit cards? She’s going to need money to get out of town.”

  I sent Tanner a pleading look.

  “Yes, we’re on it,” he reassured her. “Tracking down addresses of all the friends and relatives who might take her in too.”

  Oh, whoa, yeah, I should’ve been doing that last night. That whack on the head really messed me up.

  “Of course,” Aunt Martha said in a conspiratorial whisper, drawing closer, “if she sold that other painting for a lot of cash, she could be on a plane to anywhere by now. It’s not that hard to get fake ID if you know the right people. Carmen says—”

  “Yes, Aunt Martha,” I interjected, not up to handling the deep dark secrets she’d gleaned from her mobster boyfriend.

  “He would’ve come with me, but he was afraid people would get the wrong impression if they saw him here. You know? Think it was a mob hit.”

  “He said that?”

  She laughed. “No. The mob would’ve had her swimming with the fishes a long time ago, if you know what I mean. Go on with you. I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “I like her,” Tanner said as Aunt Martha trundled off. “I can see where you get your spunky sense of humor.”

  Great. Let’s hope spinsterhood wasn’t also hereditary.

  “Scratches on the inside of the car doors and the broken rear window suggest that the vehicle may have been occupied when it hit the water,” the officer in charge of the excavation reported to us. “But divers haven’t found anyone.”

  “They couldn’t have gotten far if they went in the icy water.”

  “My officers haven’t found any sign along shore that they dragged themselves out.”

  “I think she’s playing us,” I said to Tanner. “She wants us to think she died so she can start a new life somewhere else without looking over her shoulder.”

  Tanner’s mouth twisted sideways. “They found a blonde wig and voice-altering equipment in the car. The wig could incriminate her as the one who tried to sell the Monet to the pawnshop and the sound equipment as the one blackmailing the senator. If she set this up, don’t you think she would’ve destroyed any incriminating evidence?”

  “Unless that’s what she expected us to think and figured we’d be more likely to assume she’s dead if we found the evidence.”

  “You think she’s that conniving?”

  “Yeah. No. I don’t know, but I know one man who’ll likely give us the unvarnished truth.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Her ex-husband.”

  “Tell her I’m not in,” Petra’s ex’s oh-so-very-in voice floated from his receptionist’s intercom.

  She yanked up the handset and scrambled to silence the speaker mode.

  I reached across the desk and did the give-it-to-me finger flutter until she shakily handed over the handset. “Mr. Horvak, this is Special Agent Serena Jones. We seem to be starting off on the wrong foot here.”

  I’m pretty sure I heard a gulp.

  “I’d like to believe you’re merely a busy man—being tax season and all—and didn’t realize you just asked your receptionist to commit a felony.”

  The poor woman’s face blanched.

  Liam Horvak owned his own accounting firm, and by the looks of the limited edition prints gracing the walls of the reception area and the plush leather armchairs for waiting clients, he was successful. But from his stonewalling, I had to wonder if some of the success might be thanks to creative bookkeeping.

  “I won’t keep you long, but I do need you to answer a few questions. Now.”

  A door down the hallway to my right opened and a dark-haired, thirty-something man in an expensive suit stepped out. “This way, Special Agent.”

  I handed the phone back to his receptionist, then accepted his offered hand. His handshake was firm, although a tad moist. Not surprising since I’d already used the word felony and we hadn’t even been properly introduced yet.

  He motioned me toward a chair and took a seat behind his expansive mahogany desk. “I apologize for the misunderstanding. How may I help you?” he said, closing files and stacking them on the side of his desk.

  “I’m trying to locate your ex-wife. When was the last time you heard from her?”

  The abrupt intake of breath, sudden twitch in his left eye, and clenched jaw buoyed my hopes. I glanced around the office, half-expecting to find a closet door she might tumble out of.

  “I haven’t seen her since our divorce was finalized eighteen months ago.”

  Not exactly what I’d asked. I rested my forearm on my crossed leg and leaned toward him, lowering my voice. “You do know it’s a felony to lie to a federal agent, right?”

  Sweat beaded his upper lip. “I haven’t heard from her either. Unless letters count. She sometimes sends me letters. But I don’t pay any attention to them. She’s certifiable. And it’s been months since she’s sent any.”

  Okay, rule number one about exes, they tend to exaggerate. But there’s usually a grain of truth to what they’re saying, and given the innocent act Petra had put on for me versus the tortured look in Burke’s eyes when he’d made his statement, I was inclined to believe the ex wasn’t far off on the “certifiable” part. “What do you mean by certifiable?”

  “The letters are nothing but newspaper clippings with ‘See?’ written across the top.”

  “Do you have them?”

  “No, I threw them out.”

  “What were the articles about?”

  He raked his fingers through his hair, leaving it thoroughly mussed, not at all like the put-together executive he’d appeared when I first arrived. “There was one about a guy who’d torched his business for the insurance money, and another about a single pastor who ran off with his married secretary.”

  “And what did she expect you to ‘see’ in them?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I suspected she might’ve been taunting him about clients, but I wasn’t here to investigate his business practices. “Do you know where I might find her?”

  He shook his head. “No idea.”

  “Can you give me the names and addresses of friends or relatives she might visit?”

  His fingers fiddled with the edges of a couple of pages poking out of his stack of files. “Neither of us have any living relatives. I wouldn’t know who her friends are now.”

  “How about here in town?” I wasn’t buying that he didn’t know where she’d be, not given his lack of curiosity about why I was inquiring. “You moved here together several months before the separation, correct?”

  “Yes, but she didn’t socialize much.”

  “How about where you previously lived?”

  His fingers stilled and his breathing shallowed.

  Ah, I was onto something. Restraining a smile, I flipped back in my notebook to the page I’d recorded the address on. “At 35 Appleton Drive in Winchester. Who were her friends?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I was busy getting my career off the ground. I didn’t pay much attention to who she spent time with when I wasn’t around.”

  “Mutual friends then?”

  “Didn’t really have any. When I wasn’t working, we wanted the time for ourselves.”

  “Neighbors?”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t know them.” His fingers started their fiddling again.

  Thinking of Petra’s alleged threats to the senator, I asked, “Does Petra have strong political views?”

  He laughed. “She doesn’t know the difference between a Democrat and a Republican.” His phone buzzed and he pushed the intercom button. “Yes, Tracey?”

  “Your 11:00 appointment is here,” his receptionist said.

  “I’ll be a few more minutes.” He released the button and lifted his gaze to mine. “Was there anything else?”

  Tilting my head, I held his gaz
e. “Aren’t you curious why a federal agent is asking about your ex-wife?”

  He looked away. “The last thing I want to know about is my ex-wife’s troubles.”

  I flipped my notebook closed. “Okay, I won’t take up any more of your time. However, if you hear from Petra, hear where she is, or receive another one of those letters from her, please call me immediately.” I handed him my business card.

  “Will do.”

  I walked back out to the reception area, where no 11:00 appointment was waiting. The receptionist averted her gaze, clearly realizing I’d seen through the subterfuge.

  “When was the last time you saw Petra Horvak?” I asked.

  “Me?” The receptionist looked like a scared rabbit.

  “Yes, you.”

  “I’ve never met her. Mr. and Mrs. Horvak had separated before I was hired.”

  “When was the last time she called the office?”

  “Oh.” Her gaze shifted sideways. “I don’t recall that she ever has, not since I’ve been here, anyway.”

  Okay, that was slightly more believable than the politicians’ favorite “I don’t recall” line. Hopefully, the Horvaks’ former neighbors on Appleton Drive would be more forthcoming.

  I put a call in to headquarters as I drove and asked for an analyst to look into the two news articles Horvak had mentioned to see if they were connected to his business or Petra somehow.

  The small town was a pleasant twenty-five-minute drive from Horvak’s current location and from its size, seemed like a place where neighbors might know more about their neighbors’ business than Horvak would like. Appleton Drive was part of a typical suburban development of single-family homes. Large treed lots, at least one car or minivan in the driveways, suggesting a mix of young families and retired folks.

  I knocked on number 37’s door to the right of the Horvak’s former place. No answer. Next, I tried 33’s.

  A curly-haired senior opened the door. “Yes?”

  I introduced myself. “I’m trying to locate Petra Horvak who used to live next door.”

  “Oh, such a sweet girl. It hasn’t been the same around here since she moved away. Come in. Come in.” Mrs. Landers poured me a cup of tea and was soon regaling me with stories about the Horvaks. “Oh, my,” she said, “I’d never seen Petra so happy as the day she brought home that baby.”