The Tempest

by James Lilliefors

  “Thanks for last night,” she said. He nodded, simultaneously backhanding away the sentiment. He wanted to talk about Kepler.

  “The museum must’ve been complicit in this. Right?”

  “I’m assuming,” Hunter said. “Although it’ll make a better story, of course, if they don’t comment.”

  Moore shifted forward in his chair; he smiled with just the right side of his mouth. “My job, meanwhile, is solving homicides.”

  “I know.”

  “And so . . . I’m sitting here, asking myself: are there two or three homicides we’re going to need to address here, or just one?”

  “Two or three?”

  “Susan Champlain. Joseph Sanders. And now I’m told Susan’s husband has gone missing.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are they all connected?” he said. “Is this all Elena Fiorille?”

  Hunter sighed. “Probably,” she said. In effect, Hunter had inadvertently closed all three cases in one night, she recognized, even if two of them hadn’t officially been opened yet. But Moore was talking about something else: perception and public opinion; and about how these killings were going to be prosecuted.

  “The other two cases—­if there are two—­aren’t ours,” Hunter told him. “Sanders is Virginia, not in our jurisdiction. Nick Champlain, I don’t know, it’s too early to say.”

  Moore kept looking at her. “And you don’t think we’re going to get pulled in? You don’t think they’re going to be linked up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What bothers me,” he said, “is motive. Did she kill Susan Champlain to help Kepler? Isn’t that what you think?”

  “Probably.”

  “So . . . aren’t we going to have to explain Kepler?”

  Hunter saw what was bothering him: what would happen if the Susan Champlain case became about Kepler. “Not really,” she said. “Maybe the motive was that Elena Rodgers just didn’t like Susan Champlain. We do have some evidence of that.”

  “Do we?”

  “Claire French at the Humane Society told Pastor Luke that.” Hunter added, “But that case isn’t going to need a lot of motive, because we’ll have evidence. Beginning with Elena’s necklace. And I’m sure they’re going to find Elena Fiorille’s skin under her fingernails.”

  Moore nodded, not quite convinced. “And the other two?”

  “Maybe they were personal, too. Maybe Sanders and Champlain were harassing her. I think the physical evidence will prove the cases. And the more evidence there is, the more motive will take care of itself,” Hunter said. “Right?”

  Moore slowly gave her his half smile.

  “I mean, we don’t have to prove a grand conspiracy,” she added. “That’s the FBI’s domain.”

  “I was talking with the captain up there,” Moore said. “He’s not anxious to make this more involved than it needs to be. But we still have to tell them why this woman kidnapped you.”

  “Because I’d found her out,” Hunter said. “I knew what she’d done to Susan Champlain.”

  “Is that our story?”

  “That’s our story.”

  He sighed, but there was a glint in his right eye.

  “What was the thing they found on her?” Hunter asked. “Do they know yet?” She felt a rush of adrenaline, recalling the hard tone of Elena Fiorille’s voice, ordering her to get to her knees.

  “Yeah.” He tugged a sheet of paper closer. “Preliminary says it was a compound called succinylcholine.” Hunter said nothing. “You know what that is?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It’s an anesthetic. Similar to one of the ingredients used in lethal injections.”

  “That’s right. It causes paralysis. Very hard to detect on autopsies.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. But the fact that we know about it means we can look for traces in Sanders, too. And Susan Champlain.”

  He exhaled thoughtfully, pulling his papers together.

  Hunter said, “I just wish I could keep working the case.”

  “Well. We’ll have to see about that,” he said. “Maybe we can work out something quietly.” He winked.

  But then he saw she had something specific in mind and said, “Why? What do you want to do?”

  “I’m thinking I’d like Tanner to work on a little side project,” she said. “For you. Involving Scott Randall. It wouldn’t take long. Maybe a ­couple of days.”

  The corners of his mouth turned down this time. “Go on,” he said. “Tell me about it. I’ll listen, anyway.”

  TANNER AND FISCHER had together created a preliminary background report on Elena Fiorille, with Fischer writing the summary. A copy was on Hunter’s desk when she returned to her office. That must have been what they were discussing so cordially when she first came in.

  Hunter closed her door and read through it for the next twenty minutes, absorbing the details of her life story: Linda Elena Fiorille had been raised in South Philadelphia by working-­class parents, the fourth of four children and the only girl. Her father had been a hardware store owner who’d also worked for the Bruno crime family. When Elena was fourteen, he went away to prison for a year on racketeering and bookmaking charges. Elena was in trouble frequently as a girl, for drug and alcohol possession, and for theft and assault. The assault charge came after she beat up another girl in high school so bad that the girl spent a night in the hospital. Elena had shown a talent for painting and sculpture in high school, but it was evidently an “undisciplined and ultimately unrealized” talent, Sonny Fischer wrote in his summary.

  Fiorille had been arrested four times as an adult: for aggravated assault, drug possession, attempted murder, and petty larceny. All of the charges but one were dropped. In 2002, she was convicted of misdemeanor marijuana possession. Someone who knew Elena in the 1990s and early 2000s told Tanner that she never lost her love of art; that she’d spend days sometimes in the galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, alone with the paintings. She’d also taken college art classes, he recalled; she talked about becoming an artist herself, but never pursued it.

  Along with the sketch of Fiorille’s life were five photos taken of her over about fifteen years, four of them mug shots. She was smiling in all but one of them. But it wasn’t a happy smile. It was a flattened, surly smile. In the earliest mug shot, it seemed to be trying to become a smirk. A dare: Don’t come too close.

  At 2 P.M., Tanner rapped on Hunter’s door again. “It’s official,” he said. The museum had just sent out a statement confirming that the painting that had appeared in the Dutch Room overnight was in fact Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.

  Hunter switched her computer to cable news to watch. There was, by then, a uniformity to how the story was being covered: A Miracle in Boston. “The so-­called miracle in Boston,” some broadcasters were saying, already reporting on the reporting.

  Surely, it had been planned that way, Hunter figured. Kepler must have made the use of the word “miracle” one of his conditions.

  She was interrupted again by a call: Thelma Williams, a name Hunter didn’t recognize until the woman identified herself: she was Eddie Charles’s daughter. Her voice sounded unfamiliar, deeper and more assured than before. Had their meeting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art happened just two days ago?

  Thelma had seen the news about the Rembrandt, and decided she needed to talk with Hunter again. Walters had given her the number.

  “This was why my father died, wasn’t it? This was the deal.”

  “Maybe,” Hunter said. “There may have been some connection, anyway.”

  “I’m almost tempted to go to the media and tell them about it.”

  “No, I don’t think that would be the best course of action at this point,” Hunter said.

  “Is there something I can do? Something that would help clear my
father’s name?” she asked.

  “I think there is,” Hunter said. “But not right away. Give me a little time to work on it first. I promise I’ll get back with you.”

  “He died because of this, didn’t he?”

  “Give me some time,” Hunter said. “I promise I’ll work on it and get back with you.”

  Hunter stared out at the pinewoods after hanging up. Thelma represented the part of the case that Helen Bradbury had called the “moral tale.” It was thornier than solving a murder, and not in Amy Hunter’s job description; but it wasn’t something that she wanted to ignore, either. She’d work on it with Calvin Walters, she decided, during her “administrative leave.” Maybe go up and visit with him and have lunch with Thelma Williams. See if they could find a way to redefine Eddie Charles’s death, to remove the stigma of “drug related”—­although in real life, of course, it wasn’t so easy to tie bows around crime stories.

  Hunter still wondered if Eddie Charles had played a role in this case, which would make his death even more complicated. He’d been in the photo, after all, on Susan’s phone, in the same frame with the stolen Rembrandt. But maybe he’d just been in the house that day to wire it for electricity.

  Just as she was thinking this, and as if to provide dramatic relief, Marc Devlin called her desk phone. With his slow Southern inflection, he said, “Miss Hunter? Marc Devlin here. I saw the news from Boston and just wondered—­I mean, if this had anything to do with what we were talking about?”

  “What we were talking about?”

  “Yes, about Miss Champlain.”

  “Oh, I can’t say a lot about that,” she said. “But, between us, yeah, it may have.”

  “Did you know this was going to happen? With the painting?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He cleared his throat; she thought about his unearthly blue eyes, the way he’d been walking behind Susan Champlain weeks earlier on an afternoon when the air seemed to be drugged with heat. “I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe we could go out for a drink sometime. Just to talk.”

  “Okay,” Hunter said.

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  Hunter smiled. He hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t, either.

  “Okay, well. Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” Hunter said, feeling a tingle of gratitude again. She needed to loosen up. “I can meet you over at Kent’s, if you’d like. Six o’clock?”

  “Really? Okay. Great.”

  Hunter smiled and went back to the file that Moore had given her, although her mind kept taking her on tangents. Wondering how Kepler had managed to pull this off, and where he was now. At three o’clock, she turned on CNN just to see if there was any new Rembrandt coverage and was stunned to see Scott Randall’s face on the screen. He was playing FBI spokesman, talking in a measured, annunciated voice: “. . . the culmination of a years-­long investigation. I couldn’t comment on any particulars at this point other than to say that it was a team effort, involving the assistance of several agencies.”

  Hunter tried calling him right away, her heart racing; but naturally she couldn’t get him. She was a little too angry to leave a message. She tried Dave Crowe again, reaching him on his cell phone.

  “It’s been running since noon,” Crowe told her, amused at Hunter’s urgent tone. “You’re just seeing it now?”

  “It’s like he’s doing a victory lap.”

  “Oh, he is. Like I told you before, he’s justifying the Kepler investigation, that’s all.” Then his voice fell to a more sober register: “Did you have any idea this was going to happen?”

  “None. You?”

  “No.”

  “Got to give Kepler some credit, I guess,” Hunter said.

  “Some. I just wonder where the money came from. I don’t think it came from the government.”

  “No, I’m sure it didn’t,” Hunter said.

  “Maybe a philanthropist or wealthy art patron. Or maybe the museum.”

  “Or maybe him,” Hunter said.

  Crowe said nothing at first. “Kepler?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That wouldn’t be his M.O.,” he said. “Or make a lot of sense.”

  “That’s right. And maybe that’s why it worked.” Hunter gazed at the familiar picture of Susan Champlain on her corkboard. “I was thinking about the Mona Lisa earlier,” she told him. “I’ve been reading about her, how she came to be such an iconic painting.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We thought the point of this deal was to make money,” she said. “That’s the logical assumption. But it couldn’t have been. Despite what the Stolen Art Division might have thought. That’s why this worked.”

  Crowe answered with silence. Then: “You’re saying, what, that Kepler’s only objective was to return the painting?”

  “And to create this story. This so-­called miracle. The idea that a great painting can come back and tell a story.” Hunter waited a beat. “It’s a theory.”

  “Okay.” More silence. “But what do you mean, the Mona Lisa?”

  “When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre a hundred years ago, it wasn’t a widely known painting. It wasn’t even the most popular painting in the museum. Scholars said it was great, but the public didn’t know it.”

  “I didn’t even remember it was stolen,” Crowe said.

  “Well, no, you probably wouldn’t; this was in nineteen eleven. The point is, the theft helped make it an iconic painting. If it hadn’t been recovered eighteen months later, and returned to the Louvre, it would be completely unknown today.”

  “Oh. I see,” Crowe said. After a moment, Hunter sensed he really did see. “And so you’re saying he spent his own money to tell this story, for the sake of the painting?”

  “Something like that. With a little subsidy from the U.S. government, maybe,” she said. “I keep hearing that he cares more about art than he does about ­people or anything else. That would give a funny kind of logic to this whole thing.”

  “Does Scott Randall know this?”

  “No. I don’t think he’s supposed to.” Just hearing Randall’s name gave her a prickly sensation. “Listen,” she said, “I need to talk with you about Randall. You and Bradbury. The whole thing about when he disappears on weekends to see his mother. And the way he goes out West sometimes and no one hears from him for a while. Where does he go, exactly?”

  “He owns property in Wyoming. Retirement property.”

  “And you said you thought he’d retire after this case.”

  “I think he will. Why?”

  “Something Kepler said to me. I think there’s something wrong about the whole setup.”

  “What—­with Kepler?” Crowe wasn’t following.

  “No,” she said. “I’m becoming less concerned about Kepler getting away than about Randall getting away,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “You and Bradbury have all sorts of reservations about Randall, anyway, right?”

  “Some.”

  “I think you need to find a way to take them to the Justice Department.”

  “What?” Crowe’s confusion was becoming anger. “Why?”

  “To help them find out if there’s a hidey-­hole.”

  “A what?”

  “That’s what Kepler called it.”

  Even Crowe’s breathing seemed confused now. Hunter told him the rest of what Walter Kepler had said to her and then she let him know what she was thinking. “These are just suggestions,” she said, afterward. “I’m on administrative leave now and not supposed to be involved. But we have an investigator here named Gerry Tanner who . . .” Then Hunter broke it off. She recognized the number calling in on her office phone. “Speaking of Scott Randall.”

  “What, is he there?” Crowe asked.
/>   “Let me call you back.”

  Hunter cleared her throat and sat up straighter before answering.

  “Hunter,” she said.

  “Amy? Scott Randall. Are you all right? I heard you were in a shooting.”

  “I’m fine, yes, thank you,” she said. “I saw you on television earlier.”

  “Yeah, I know, I didn’t want to do that.” Hunter was surprised that her heart was racing again; a reaction to Randall’s voice.

  “You made it sound like this was some kind of victory for the Bureau,” she said. “But you didn’t have any idea that Kepler was returning the painting. Did you?”

  “I couldn’t really comment on that.”

  Hunter worked at keeping her composure. “You told me that you thought Kepler was selling it to a Middle East terrorist.”

  “Not a terrorist.”

  “A terrorist sympathizer.”

  “Yeah, slight difference.” Hunter exhaled. He was right, although that wasn’t the issue. “The bottom line, Amy? Is we got it back, okay? My job is heading up the Stolen Art Division. And we just brought in one of the art world’s great masterpieces. The art’s home, it’s a happy occasion. We won. Okay? What are you griping about?” There was an edge to how he said the word griping.

  “You didn’t get the guy you wanted.”

  “No,” he said. “But we will.”

  “I’m told you wanted to get the government to fund this operation,” she said, “to set up a straw man as the buyer. That’s how you did it the last time, right?”

  Randall chuckled uneasily. “Amy,” he said, scolding her.

  She decided not to press him on that. It wasn’t something he would talk about, anyway. Instead, she told him, “I think I understand about Belasco now. About your reluctance to pursue him. He told me all about it.”

  “Who did?”

  “Kepler. He told me about your screenplay.”

  “Oh?”

  “I didn’t realize how well you knew Walter Kepler. The two of you were college pals at one time.”

  “Not pals,” he said. “Acquaintances. That was thirty-­five years ago, Amy. I told you that. Hey, I gotta go. Take it easy, okay? Talk with you later.”