Always a Thief

by Kay Hooper

  “Sure,” she said.

  A couple of minutes later Morgan found herself in his little sports car, and by then she'd remembered Wolfe's troubling news. She didn't want to admit to the twinge of doubt she'd felt, but she couldn't help turning in the seat to study Quinn's face as she spoke in a deliberately casual tone.

  “Ever heard of the Carstairs necklace?”

  Somewhat dryly, he replied, “The same way I've heard of the Hope diamond; who hasn't? Why?”

  “It was stolen last night.”

  He let out a low whistle, and the only emotion his face showed was mild interest. “I'd like to know who managed that.”

  “It . . . wasn't you,” she said, trying not to make it a question even though it was.

  Quinn turned his head to look at her briefly, then returned his gaze to the road. “No. It wasn't me.”

  Morgan had the upsetting idea that she had hurt him. “I had to ask.”

  “I know.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  He glanced at her again, this time with a crooked smile. “Why? We both know what I am. You'd have to be an idiot not to suspect me, Morgana—and you are far from an idiot.”

  “I just wish . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well, I just wish Nightshade would make his move and get it over with. I don't think I can stand waiting for the next two months.”

  “Somehow I doubt he'll wait so long. The Bannister collection will be impossible for him to resist, believe me. I'd be very surprised if he waits as much as two weeks before making an attempt.”

  “Intuition? Or experience?”

  “A bit of both, I suppose.” Quinn sent her another quick smile. “That is why I'm here, remember? To provide an expert's point of view. Set a thief to catch a thief?”

  She sighed. “I wish you didn't sound so damned pleased about that.”

  “Never mind,” he said with a chuckle. “You'll feel better after lunch.”

  Morgan nodded and then looked around to see where they were going. “Tony's?”

  “I thought so, unless you have another preference.”

  “No, that's fine. Alex?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The night we met—you stole a dagger from that museum.”

  “Yes, I did,” he agreed calmly.

  “I don't suppose you returned it later?”

  “No.”

  He sounded a little amused, Morgan thought, and wondered if she seemed to him incredibly naive. But she had to ask.

  “And since then? If you had stolen anything else . . . would you tell me about it?”

  Quinn turned the car into the parking lot at Tony's restaurant as he spoke, and his voice was very matter-of-fact. “No, Morgana, I wouldn't tell you.” He pulled into a parking space but paused before turning off the engine to look at her with a slight smile. “Still willing to have lunch with me?”

  Looking into those vibrant green eyes, Morgan heard herself sigh and then heard herself say, “Sure.”

  She wasn't surprised. Neither was Quinn.

  Damn him.

  Since Storm had to deal with a worried call from Ken Dugan—who was understandably anxious about museum security since the discovery in the basement—Wolfe took the opportunity to go down and check on the progress of the police forensics team. They had slipped into the museum as quietly and anonymously as possible, working under an official order not to disturb the museum or the Mysteries Past exhibit, and Wolfe doubted that any of today's visitors had even noticed.

  He found Inspector Gillian Newman supervising the removal of the knife from the statue's marble fist.

  “Keane isn't back yet?”

  “Our boss wanted him to check out the Carstairs house,” she replied readily. “Everybody's getting paranoid, looking for connections to this museum or the exhibit, and since Keane is the expert on thieves in this town . . .”

  “They want his take.”

  “Exactly.”

  Wolfe frowned as he watched technicians easing the knife from the statue's grip. “Do we know anything else about that?”

  “Not much more. It's blood on the blade, we know that, but it'll take a while to compare it to Jane Doe's. No fingerprints on the handle, which figures. Forensics found some marble dust, but whoever did this cleaned up after himself.”

  “So Morgan was right about the statue being undamaged when it was brought down here for storage.”

  “According to the museum records, yeah. Sean, drill marks?”

  The technician, who was on a stepladder peering down into the warrior's fist with a flashlight and a magnifying glass, nodded. “Definitely. And saw marks where the original marble knife was.”

  “Morgan was right about that too,” Wolfe said.

  “Looks like. He brought a nice little bag of tools with him. Which, to my mind, says he didn't kill anybody down here. He just planted that knife.”

  “How do you figure? Because he came prepared?”

  “It makes sense. He had what looks like a murder weapon he wanted to plant, and he wanted to be . . . really creative about it.”

  Still frowning, Wolfe said, “The only thing I don't get is, why here? You cops had no reason to do a more thorough search down here, it just wasn't practical. If Max hadn't asked some of the guards and me to look around, this might not have been found for months. If ever.”

  “There has to be a reason,” Gillian said. “A piece of the puzzle we don't yet have.”

  “You mean another one?”

  Reasonably, she said, “It's a picture we're meant to see—sooner or later. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many blatant clues left for us to find. We're following a trail.”

  “Or maybe Morgan was right about something else. Maybe we're all being led around by the nose.”

  In the past, Morgan had found that the fund-raisers she'd attended were either pleasant or incredibly boring; since the entire purpose was to raise money for some worthy cause (in this case to help out one of the private museums that had been burgled during the past weeks), a logical aim was to keep costs down. Ergo, the food tended to be banquet-bland and the entertainment adequate rather than inspiring. So to have a pleasant evening was to consider the event a success.

  This particular fund-raiser had been organized by several museum curators—gentlemen not known for their adventurous spirits or love of the absurd—and their choice of entertainment was, to say the least, singular.

  “It has a certain something,” Quinn commented, leaning close to Morgan so she could hear him over the noise filling the large room. His expression was grave.

  She winced at a discordant clash of notes from a band that seemed to have come from some twilight zone of amateur nights. “Oh, yeah, it has something. It has a beat and you can dance to it. But please don't ask me to.”

  He chuckled. “Well, we've done our duty. We listened to the speeches, ate the meal, and conversed intelligently with our table companions.” He glanced around their table, which, like all the others in the room, seated twelve people—and was now deserted except for them and a very young couple on the other side who were totally wrapped up in each other.

  “Most of whom bailed half an hour ago,” Morgan pointed out, half closing her eyes as the enthusiastic drummer showed off his talents.

  Quinn leaned even closer to her and, his breath warm against her neck, said, “I think they all showed good sense. Why don't we follow suit? It's a beautiful night, and I happen to know of a coffee shop about two blocks from here; what do you say? We can walk off that mystery chicken dish and get some fresh air—and a decent cup of coffee.”

  Morgan was in complete agreement, though she did feel a bit guilty in joining the exodus from the building. “I should find Ken and tell him he did a good job,” she said to Quinn.

  “Tell him tomorrow at the museum,” he suggested. “It'll give you time to construct a really sincere face.”

  She couldn't help laughing as they got up. “Is nothing sacred to you?”

/>   Guiding her through the jungle of pushed-back chairs and the occasional—and inexplicable—dancers, Quinn said, “In the area of manners and mores, you mean? Sure. I just happen to believe we should all be completely honest with ourselves—especially when we have to lie to be polite to others.”

  Morgan thought about that while they made their way from the hotel that was hosting the fund-raiser. She thought about lies. And she wondered which man had told her the most lies, Alex or Quinn.

  As long as she followed her instincts and emotions, she had little hesitation in trusting Quinn. She wasn't so sure about Alex Brandon, partly, she suspected, because she hadn't quite convinced herself he was a real person. A psychologist would no doubt have found that as interesting as Storm had, but the truth was that after hearing about him for years and having several rather dramatic nighttime encounters with him, Quinn was the most real man she had ever known.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  “You're very quiet, Morgana. Something wrong?”

  She looked at her hand resting lightly on his arm, then drew in a breath of the clear night air and turned her gaze ahead of them again as they strolled along the sidewalk toward the coffee shop. “No. I was just thinking. Are you always honest with yourself, Alex?”

  “Anyone who plays . . . identity games has to be.”

  “Identity games,” she repeated slowly. “Is that what you do?”

  He was silent for a moment, then spoke in an unusually serious tone. “I could say that when I was a boy I could never decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, but that wouldn't be true. What is true is that I had certain . . . talents that were not exactly suitable for your average career.”

  “Such as?” She thought he would say something about opening locks or blending into the night, but his answer was far more complex.

  “The ability to reinvent myself whenever I had to. The ability to function well under . . . unusual kinds of pressure. The ability to work completely alone—and a liking for it.” He shrugged. “I don't know what I might have done, but in college a friend dared me to . . . liberate something from the dean's house one night. I did it. And I liked it.”

  Morgan looked up at him curiously. “A college prank is a long way from professional burglary.”

  He smiled. “True.”

  “Was there any one thing that . . . bridged that distance? Something that happened to you, I mean.”

  “A tragedy that propelled me into a life of crime?”

  She couldn't help but smile. “I said something like that once, didn't I?”

  “Yes. And you were right to be doubtful of it.” They had reached the coffee shop by then, and Quinn stopped on the sidewalk and turned to look down at her with a faint, rueful smile. “It was nothing so . . . romantic or quixotic, sweet, not a decision made in the heat of some painful emotion. I made a conscious, carefully thought-out, cold-blooded choice. No apologies. No regrets.”

  Morgan sighed and let go of his arm. “I need a cup of coffee.”

  His smile went even more crooked. “I'm not making it easy for you, am I?”

  “No. But then—you never said you would.” She tried to sound humorous about it.

  Quinn gazed at her upturned face for a moment, then bent his head and kissed her. It was a brief kiss but by no means light, and Morgan would have melted against him except that his hands were on her shoulders holding her still. When he lifted his head rather abruptly, she had the dazed impression that he said something a bit profane under his breath, but she didn't quite catch it.

  He turned her briskly toward the door of the coffee shop and said, “You may not have realized, but it's nearly eleven.”

  Morgan allowed herself to be steered, but she heard the telltale frustration in her voice when she said, “Can't you take a night off?”

  “Not this night—but I'll see what I can do about the future.”

  Once they were inside and seated at a small table in the crowded shop, Morgan wasn't quite sure which way the conversation would go, but Quinn was definite. To her surprise, he wanted to talk about her.

  “My family?” She looked at him bemusedly. “Why do you ask?”

  “It's all a part of the boy-meets-girl stuff,” he told her in a grave tone. “I just realized I know practically nothing about your background.”

  So, still a little mystified, Morgan briefly described a life that, to her, had always seemed quite ordinary. A middle-class upbringing as an only child; her parents' deaths in a car accident when she was eighteen and the modest inheritance that had put her through college; summer archaeological digs in various parts of the world; the jobs and positions she'd taken over the years.

  “You've been alone a long time,” he noted.

  She nodded. “I guess—six years since college.” Gazing at him steadily, she added in a deliberate tone, “I was briefly engaged once, the summer before graduation.”

  “What happened?”

  Morgan had never told anyone about this, but she found the words coming easily now, so easily that it startled her. “He was another archaeology student, we seemed to have everything in common. I thought so, anyway. But there were warning signs—and I should have paid attention.”

  “Warning signs?”

  “Mmm. He liked to see me dress a certain way—in clingy sweaters, for instance, and short skirts. His thoughts and opinions seemed to be more important than mine. In fact, he never wanted to talk to me about anything that mattered to me—even archaeology. He was always telling me I should wear my hair up or use more eye makeup or a different perfume.”

  Morgan shook her head and managed a smile. “Eventually I realized that who I was didn't matter to him—just what I looked like. And how I looked on his arm. He thought all his friends envied him because I looked . . .”

  “Sexy?” Quinn supplied quietly.

  “I guess. It was something I didn't want to believe about him, that he could be so . . . superficial. But, when we went back to school in the fall for our senior year, they gave us an I.Q. test.”

  “And you scored higher than he did?” Quinn guessed.

  Morgan looked down at her coffee cup, frowning a little as she remembered. “Twenty points higher. At first, he didn't believe it. He kept saying somebody must have screwed up the test. I finally lost my temper and told him I'd scored high before and that the results were accurate. Then he—he just looked at me in shock. His eyes moved up and down over me in total incredulity, and he couldn't seem to say a word. So I did. I gave him back his ring and said good-bye.”

  “Morgana?”

  She looked across the table at Quinn.

  “Any man who could look at you and not see the intelligence and vitality in your eyes would have to be either blind or incredibly stupid.” His own eyes laughed suddenly. “Of course, he'd also have to be blind or made of stone not to notice that you do look splendid in clingy sweaters.”

  Morgan couldn't help laughing, but she responded seriously to what she sensed was a serious point of his. “That experience made me wary—but not especially bitter. Noticing someone's looks is an automatic thing, after all, so I can hardly blame people for noticing mine. Obviously it's a problem only when they can't get past appearances.” She paused, then added, “But you must admit that in me the . . . inner and outer woman are more contradictory than usual.”

  Quinn looked thoughtful. “As far as first impressions go, that may be true. But—trust me—it's a fleeting moment. Once you begin speaking, your wit and intelligence are obvious.”

  “If you say so.”

  Smiling, he said, “I'm sure at least a few of the men you've known in the years since college have proven me right.”

  “A few, I guess. Max is one. And Wolfe. Neither one of them has ever made me feel like an ornament.”

  “And me? Have I ever made you feel that way?”

  “No.” Wryly, she added, “Neither one of you. Although Alex has come closer than Quinn. The Don Juan bit.”

 
“Sorry about that. If it helps, it was only . . .”

  “You playing a part?”

  “More or less.”

  “Yeah, I got that. Do us both a favor and quit it, okay?”

  “I'll see what I can do.”

  She doubted him, but Morgan was a bit surprised, over the next few days, to find that Alex really did seem to have shed his Don Juan persona. He turned up at the museum every day, usually in late afternoon, and somehow always ended up taking her for drinks and dinner, once to a movie. He continued to be a pleasant, amusing companion—and a perfect gentleman.

  The question was, what was he up to?

  It wasn't until late Friday evening that Morgan began to get an inkling. Her evening with Alex had ended a bit earlier than usual because he'd had “a few chores to take care of.” So she was home, brooding.

  She sat there on her comfortable couch, still wearing her work outfit of skirt and sweater but shoeless, her feet drawn up on the cushions, and scowled at the muted television. Slowly but inexorably, a fine, pure fury grew to fill her. It felt wonderful. Her mind was clear, her senses sharp, and for the first time in several days she knew she was looking directly at something he'd done his level best to distract her from seeing.

  Damn him! That lousy, rotten, no-good thief had done it to her again. With all the skilled legerdemain of a master magician, he had convinced her that an illusion was real; she had been so intrigued—and seduced—by Alex that she had paid little attention to the nighttime activities of Quinn.

  Oh, she'd asked the occasional mild question, but she hadn't really thought about the matter. And she should have. She really should have.

  Characteristically, once anger took hold of her, Morgan didn't stop to think about what she was doing. She found a pair of black Reeboks and laced them swiftly onto her stockinged feet, caught up her purse, and left the apartment without even remembering to turn off the television.

  Instead of rushing openly to the museum, she crossed the street and kept to the shadows, moving with all the stealth she could summon. She hung the strap of her shoulder bag to cross her chest so she was able to keep her hands free, but she was so intent on finding Quinn that she didn't follow her usual custom of keeping one cautious hand on her can of pepper spray.