Abstract Aliases (A Bodies of Art Mystery Book 3)

by Ritter Ames

  “He knew the office had a silent alarm too.”

  Something else to ponder. During the time of the shakeup, when Simon disappeared and before I’d learned he’d gone over to Moran’s side, I went to his office—now my office—and found an auburn-haired Amazon inside pretending to be Simon’s secretary while she actually ransacked the place. I found out later she hadn’t breached security, but apparently entered with the code or a way to bypass it. At the time I’d thought she worked for the opposition. Learning Simon was the opposition made me wonder if she worked for him as well. Aloud, I said, “For some reason, he believed he needed to be on the scene today. A significant risk when everyone is looking for him. Simon was kind of a control freak, but…”

  “Maybe he didn’t trust his men to bring back what he wanted?” Cassie set down her fork and wiped her mouth with a Harrods napkin.

  “Could be.” This ran along my idea of his potentially sending in the Amazon before. I added, “He most definitely became a control freak when someone wasn’t around to remind him to loosen up. I can’t imagine the past few months of running and hiding has done anything to relax him.”

  “What could he need enough to go to such desperate lengths?”

  “The Amazon left the place in a state of utter destruction. If it was in the office when he worked there, you would have found it in the cleanup stage,” I said. After Simon’s escape, my agenda and flight plan didn’t allow room to schedule time to clear up the mess left behind by the redhead’s search, or put the office back into business. There was also the matter of a huge saltwater aquarium that had flooded everything in its immediate area and was kind of my fault. Well, yes, all my fault.

  Upon my return to London from France, Cassie and I met for dinner and I learned her internship at the Victoria and Albert Museum would not be renewed. She was at loose ends and didn’t want to go home to the States, and I desperately needed someone I could trust. We struck a quick agreement, and she accepted the position of my assistant to keep the office operating and get everything back up and running. Her background in restoration served her well in the role. Except her tendency toward keeping historic places in as much of a status quo state as possible made her resistant to changes in interior design, no matter how much I preferred to step away from Simon’s décor. Besides, she was a frugal wiz at all things restoration-oriented—office or otherwise—leaving Max to agree with whatever she suggested.

  Even more important, her art history and practical application degrees aided her in the analysis and tracking of art forgeries. Teaming her with Nico generated me more leads on the possible heist threat which continued to grow exponentially with each new revelation. It might even be worth sending Nico to New York to take a field trip to the publisher’s office to ask about the book and photos Cassie uncovered.

  Cassie broke my train of thought. “Maybe Simon was trying to kidnap you. That’s why he posted the rear guard.”

  I dragged myself back to the present and shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense. He could have posted a kidnapper outside to grab me before I came in one morning. I watched on my phone as he broke the camera with a cricket bat. He was already identifiable when I checked my phone app. Breaking the camera couldn’t have been to avoid evidence of his being there. Whapping the camera had to be a measure to keep anyone from seeing what he was taking. Or where it was hidden.”

  “Makes sense. Except someone almost immediately came after you as we ran.”

  “No. Someone tried to come through the secret door. We don’t know they even saw who slipped out the back way, nor do we know if they saw one person or two. The guard with the broken knife hand can tell them now, but he wouldn’t have known until we opened the door to the hall.” The more I considered the facts, the clearer it all became to me. “They couldn’t have known I was even in the office unless they were watching when I entered, but already prepared to go in by force. Leaving this line of thought to bring us back to the question of why they didn’t kidnap me on the street and shove me into a vehicle. No, it had to be something in the office. Whatever it was, it had to be something they could realize wasn’t there seconds after Simon broke the camera, and that’s why they came after whomever ran out the back door. To see if we carried it with us.”

  “Yeah, okay, it makes sense. But what could have equaled the risk of coming himself? There are a lot of people who want to talk to Simon.”

  Or do worse to him. Well, maybe I’m the only one who wanted to physically hurt him at the moment, but several branches of law enforcement from multiple countries were looking for Mr. Babbage, and it wasn’t to invite him to dinner.

  Did they immediately discover what they came for was gone, and followed us to get whatever it was from us? Or did Simon grab what he wanted right after he broke the camera, then sent his goons to grab us “just in case?” Which was why his posting a rear guard bothered me. Too many ways planned to catch us if he simply wanted a hidden item.

  “Did you notice anything during the reconstruction efforts to make you wonder why it was in the office? Even something left in pieces? Granted, Simon has to believe whatever he wants remains accessible. It’s the only explanation for him to take a chance coming in. I just can’t figure why he would have waited this long to try to grab anything important.”

  Cassie chewed her lip and raised her right hand to rub her neck. In anyone else, I would have assumed both actions tipped the scales toward nervousness or lying, but I’d known Cassie too long and this didn’t fit. I waited to see what she would say.

  She turned to look me straight in the eye when she spoke. “Nothing. I simply cannot think of anything.”

  I’d been holding my breath. This job was getting to me, and not in a good way. Relief returned when she continued and I recognized I had been reading the body language correctly—I simply hadn’t fathomed the nuances.

  “I feel so guilty,” she said. “Obviously I missed something. What you say dovetails perfectly with the facts. His actions run counter to logic unless there was something hidden in the office he needed to retrieve. What? And why? I’m sorry. I should have found it—whatever it is. I’ll keep thinking.”

  I patted her arm. “Don’t beat yourself up. It could have been a file completely destroyed and tossed out with all the rubbish the Amazon made of the office when she blew through it. She made such an ungodly mess. Even now, I can’t decide if she was looking for data or attempting to destroy it.”

  “We went through papers for weeks trying to salvage whatever we could from the files. I saved everything for you to look through. Every effort was made. Simon had already hit the cloud server and erased those files, leaving us without the option there either. I really think it has to be something besides a file.”

  “All good points,” I said. What could he have been looking for? This was going to bug me until I knew, but I didn’t want Cassie obsessing over it. “Give it a rest. We already have enough to work on with this case.”

  “I’ll keep thinking. You never know what might suddenly appear differently when I let my mind wander a little.”

  I hid a smile behind my napkin. There was no point in arguing with her. She could be as immoveable as a brick wall when she felt it necessary. We’d been college roommates and she was the one person in my life who never changed.

  College had been a proving ground for me. My father lost the family fortune by my first semester at Cornell. By the end of my second semester he had skied off the side of his favorite Alp, leaving behind gold diggers’ broken hearts and black-hearted mob bosses trying to find ways to lessen their losses. And how was I? Well, when I wasn’t dealing with shadowy men who held markers they were ready to strong-arm to get paid on, and who didn’t particularly like it when I said I was desperately looking for any leftover signs of the family fortune myself, my emotions vacillated the short distance between grief and anger.

 
Naturally, the tracking needle stayed much, much longer on the anger end of the scale than it did for grief. Add in a few self-destructive tendencies, and by the time I started my sophomore year I was on the verge of getting kicked out.

  Until Cassie wandered lost into my coed dorm hall, carting a duffle bag half her weight and a laptop with a browser bookmarked to every art history and restoration site known to man. I batted away the two male letches who homed in on her and hurried her into my dorm room. She’d been my conscience ever since.

  Now she obsessed about something she probably couldn’t have accomplished anyway, while I needed her to stay on the same task she’d come back to London to solve.

  “Let me be the one who mulls over how Simon thinks. You only met him once, when I was in London and we all went to dinner to celebrate your internship at the V and A. A night when he was on his best behavior. You have no real clue to his personality quirks. I’ve worked with him more than most, and spent almost a year thinking we were in a committed transatlantic relationship. Simon had fooled all of us, but I have to believe I have a little more insight—and less charity—when considering his possible actions. If there’s something in the office, I’ll figure it out, like I found the thumb drive he hid in his aquarium.” I finished off the last of my tea. I’d learned the best way with Simon was to act on instinct—not to overthink. Given time, something would trigger the answer for me. If there was one. I put a hand on her arm. “You need to stay on the forgeries. See if some of the trails you’ve already found lead anywhere.”

  One thing I learned in the eight months we were together was the private Simon could be much different from the public one. He’d always been keen on shaking things up in unconventional ways, making the break-in less surprising.

  My watch said a quarter past three. Our impromptu lunch and brainstorming session had gone quickly. Time to move on. I slung my purse on my shoulder and said, “I don’t know about you, but I have enough room for a red velvet cupcake if we share it. Are you game?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Less than five minutes later we’d finished off one of the luscious mini-cakes, made from a recipe unlike any I’d tasted back home. Our final impulse buy meant purchasing Charbonnel et Walker truffles on our way out. We were almost giggly by the time we bade the doorman good day.

  “I feel like a kid playing hooky,” Cassie said. “We haven’t had this much fun in ages.”

  “Hard to call it hooky when we’ve been working on our day off, but I get your point.” I finished my truffle and had chocolate on two fingers. Grandmamma would have glared at me if she’d been alive, but I licked them. Harrods chocolate was worth the social faux pas. “We need to do stuff like this more often. Not just when we’re on the run and mad at Max. We used to have fun. Remember?”

  The days had been crazy since Cassie joined Beacham Ltd., and we’d jumped from one frustrating conundrum to another. Though we’d made some headway, especially when she was able to tag-team the research with Nico, we hadn’t actually closed any part of the case starting from the ill-fated trip to Italy to handle the “easy pickup” of the antique snuffbox. Where I met Jack. Which was why we continued piecing together clues.

  My phone rang. “It’s the superintendent.” I pointed to the window wall on that side of the building. “Let’s move over there.” We walked toward a place along Harrods, out of the way of the pedestrians, and I answered the call. “Hello, Superintendent Whatley. Do you have any news?”

  “No one was there when the first car arrived,” he said. “We did, however, find something puzzling. The crime tech discovered several sets of fingerprints, including a good set on an abandoned cricket bat.”

  “Simon left the cricket bat?”

  “There was one positioned squarely in the middle of the glass desk.”

  My desk. Simon had to know it was my desk too. What kind of message was he leaving me? “Definitely puzzling. Hearing you say it makes me realize the guard who tried to stop us in our escape wasn’t wearing gloves either. He had a knife, but no gloves.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember seeing the thugs who entered my office behind Simon. “The security video file would confirm this for sure, but I think the other guys who came in with Simon were wearing dark gloves.”

  “Unfortunately, it appears they left with the hard drive to your security cameras. Your impressions are important, as the gloves may mean their fingerprints are documented in the Scotland Yard or Interpol systems. We didn’t have a record of Babbage’s prints, and those of the man in the public hallway would be difficult to isolate.”

  I had the speaker positioned to allow Cassie to hear, and she asked, “Why would Simon leave the cricket bat with his fingerprints if he knew you didn’t have them before?”

  “He probably didn’t think about Laurel watching the video feed when you both ran away. He didn’t realize she could give evidence to prove he was the one holding the bat.”

  Good for me. I did an irresponsible thing by letting my curiosity make me stop to watch, but doing so gave us a good bit of definitive evidence Scotland Yard needed. Oh, wait a minute— “Is his apartment still sealed? You could verify the fingerprints there.”

  “When we arrived at his address in late September the place was empty,” Whatley said. “The entire flat had been wiped down completely, and we couldn’t find any fingerprints or DNA trace evidence. My team couldn’t even find partial prints on normally forgotten places.”

  “What kind of places do people forget about?” I asked.

  “Sorry, confidential information.” We heard papers shuffled, then he said, “I’d like to meet with the two of you. I have some snaps I’d like to bring out to see if anyone looks familiar.”

  “The package,” Cassie reminded.

  I nodded. “Superintendent, we might have something else you need to follow up on first.” I briefed him on the mysterious delivery. “I was hoping you could get the package picked up at the hotel, to make sure it wasn’t something with a tracker or worse.”

  “Absolutely. I’ll go by and pick it up myself and take one of the portable X-ray machines. Are you on the way to your new hotel?”

  “We have one stop to make before heading to the hotel on Manchester. I’ll forward the text of the address and my room number. Or we’ll be happy to come into Scotland Yard.”

  “No, I don’t really want to bring you in here and run the risk of someone keeping eyes on you both as you leave.”

  Cassie gasped. I jumped in, saying, “Okay, we’re a ten-minute walk from the place where we need to pick up a tapestry. We’ll catch a cab to the hotel.”

  “I believe it might be better if you take a cab to both places,” Whatley said. “A little less opportunity for someone to spot you along the way. On second thought, why don’t I meet you at your appointment and take you to the new hotel myself?”

  “Good point.” I gave him Nelly’s address. “We have to pick up a tapestry she’s been working on. We’ll stand in her building’s lobby and watch for you to drive up.”

  “Very good. I’ll leave here momentarily, fetch your package, and meet you at the place of your appointment.”

  “I’ll call the concierge at the hotel and make sure you have no difficulty there,” I promised.

  “Capital,” he said. “Be sure to tell them to check for ID. I’ll have mine ready, but I don’t want anyone to arrive ahead of me and get the package first.”

  Neither did I.

  Seven

  Cassie glanced at her watch. “We need to get moving if we’re going to catch a cab,” she said.

  She was right. I hadn’t planned to walk to Nelly’s for purely the exercise. With traffic thickening by the minute, two feet could easily beat four wheels.

  The superintendent’s words of warning resonated as I noticed all the people passing back and
forth on the busy sidewalk in front of Harrods. Before the phone call it seemed like a good idea to hide in a crowd, but second thoughts ran through my head. I felt even more exposed when someone called my name. A good-looking guy resembling a young George Clooney headed our way. His smile widened. “It is you. You are Laurel, right?”

  Dylan had some kind of financial position in the City, and the last time I saw him—which was also when I met him—he left me in Jack’s care and protection, despite my reservations and attempts at protest. To Dylan’s credit, I didn’t protest too adamantly at the time because I was trying to figure out who or what Jack was, and we were in public. A Beacham is taught at an early age not to make a public spectacle of oneself if it can in any way be avoided. This was following my escape from two of Moran’s henchmen by stomping on the foot of Dylan’s friend, Jeremy, to create a diversion while we exited the Tube, making for one “mini-scene” already on my record for that day. Plus, by then I was kind of getting used to Jack popping up unexpectedly.

  “Yes, Dylan, Laurel Beacham.” I walked forward, extending a hand. We needed to get moving, but it seemed prudent to at least be friendly. His lovely brown eyes crinkled at the corners with his grin. Something about them reminded me of someone else, but I couldn’t remember who. “Good to see you. Does Jeremy still have a contract out on me?” We both laughed, but Cassie didn’t. I took a moment to smile at her and make a quick introduction. I asked him, “What are you doing here?”

  “Using the bank holiday to do a little shopping.” He leaned close and whispered, “The only way they let me loose on the city.” We moved out of sidewalk traffic and he continued, “Need to get away from family, and I hoped to hide within the tourist crowds in Harrods. Less chance of running into someone who knows me.”