Applause roared in Monty’s head as he returned the needle to the record, finally letting Sinatra get on with his song.
“I’ve got the world on a string . . .”
Monty slid across the floor on the flat soles of his dress shoes. Bouncing his shoulders to the swinging beat, he spun an invisible top hat at the end of an imaginary cane.
After making several turns around the room, he stopped in front of the covered easel. Dramatically lifting the bottom of the sheet, he waited for an uptick in the music to throw the cover clear of the painting that had been hidden beneath.
The picture depicted a man in a dark navy suit and a matching narrow-width tie. The subject’s curly brown hair had been straightened and combed back from his forehead. His thin lips were pursed into a regal, smirking smile.
The figure stood in front of a wide wooden desk, whose polished surface reflected a small pool of light from a decorative lamp sitting on its corner. It was a stately pose, similar to one struck by a man in a much smaller framed poster hanging by the art studio’s front door.
The primary difference between the two images was that the man in the framed poster had twice been elected to the mayor’s office of San Francisco. The man depicted in the larger painting was still waiting for his chance.
Monty held a brush over the canvas, studying the details with his experienced artist’s eye. His hand hovered in the air for several seconds; then he dropped the brush into a jar of cleaning solution. He could find nothing to improve upon. There wasn’t anything he would change—about the man in the picture, that is.
“What a world, what a life, what a . . .”
The needle skipped again as Monty ripped it from the record.
“What a fortuitous circumstance,” he said as he spied a woman with long brown hair and bifocal glasses emerging from the Green Vase showroom across the street. He watched, a gleam in his eye as she turned and locked the door.
“Hold tight, Frank,” Monty said to the record player as he stripped off the smock and hurried to the studio’s front entrance. He reached inside a glass canister filled with keys that rested on a small table by the coatrack.
“I’ll be back in a few.”
Chapter 34
AN ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE
SPIDER PAUSED, MID-SCRIBBLE, as the object of his surveillance suddenly stopped his bizarre dance-step maneuver and peered out the art studio’s front door.
Following the direction of Mr. Carmichael’s gaze, Spider spied a woman with long brown hair and glasses leaving the Green Vase antiques shop across the street.
With panic, he realized that he had ventured several feet from his bike. He’d been so focused on Mr. Carmichael’s curious behavior that he’d dropped his gear-repair routine and strayed several feet from the curb. There was no time to inconspicuously resume his cover.
Fearing he was about to be exposed, Spider dove behind the nearest parked vehicle, skidded across the asphalt, and slid beneath the undercarriage near the front wheel.
• • •
HEART POUNDING, SPIDER looked up from his hiding position, certain that he’d been spotted by either the Mayor’s Life Coach or the woman from the antiques shop—or worse, he thought with a gulp, both.
He watched with disbelief as the woman jogged down the sidewalk to the next corner, never once looking back.
A moment later, Mr. Carmichael strode purposefully out of the art studio and traipsed across the street to the entrance of the Green Vase showroom. He, too, was oblivious to the young man hiding beneath the vehicle.
“Huh,” Spider said, once more amazed at the general populace’s poor skills of perception.
He began scrupulously detailing the encounter in his notepad.
“I’m starting to feel invisible.”
• • •
MONTY STOOD IN front of the door to the Green Vase antiques shop, keeping a close eye on the corner where Oscar’s niece had disappeared just a few moments earlier. With a last glance up the block, he wrapped his hand around the wrought iron handle. His narrow fingers ran over the image of the tulip engraved in the knob as he tried to rotate it.
“Locked,” he surmised with a wry grin after the handle refused to turn.
“Not a problem,” he said smoothly, holding up the key he’d grabbed from the glass canister in the art studio. It was one of several duplicates he’d had tooled for just this sort of occasion. “At least not for me.”
The key had a long metal stem. One end had been tooled with jagged teeth, the type of fittings used to engage with a typical lock’s interior.
The opposite end was more unique. Here, the iron had been cast into the shape of a three-petaled tulip.
Monty fed the regular end of the key into the slot in the door’s facing and twisted the stem. The lock released with a satisfying click.
Grinning triumphantly, he swung open the door. With a last glance at the apparently empty street, he pulled his key from the lock and goose-stepped inside the showroom.
• • •
ABOUT A MONTH earlier, the woman who now owned the Green Vase had hired a locksmith to retool the lock to the shop’s front door.
It had taken Monty a little over a week to cast a new set of keys—his only impediment had been picking an appropriate time when he could use his special laser tool kit to measure the spacing between the lock’s interior tumblers. After a few tinkering improvements, he had created a suitable mold. From there, it had been a simple process to start cranking out keys.
He had made about fifty copies—all of which he would need when Oscar’s niece figured out he was once more gaining unauthorized access to the Green Vase. She had a nasty habit of trying to confiscate his lock-defeating devices.
As Monty lingered in the front entrance, congratulating himself on the success of his key-pirating operation, he paused, considering. Then he reached back to the door and reset the lock. The longer he could keep his neighbor in the dark about his clandestine visits, the better.
• • •
THERE WAS NO fooling the shop’s resident felines, however. A few seconds later, the cats poked their heads out of the stairwell leading to the second-floor apartment.
Rupert took a few hesitant steps before rushing across the room to greet his fellow fried-chicken enthusiast. He circled Monty’s feet, hopefully sniffing the air.
“Hey, buddy,” Monty said with a grin. “Sorry, I’m fresh out of treats.”
Isabella was decidedly less welcoming in her approach. After sauntering to the front door, she hopped onto the cashier counter and leveled her frosty gaze at the man she clearly considered an intruder.
“Come on, Isabella,” Monty said reproachfully. “Where’s your sense of humor?”
Her blue eyes stared back, a stern, unblinking response.
• • •
UNFAZED, MONTY MEANDERED into the store, stopping at several display cases to fiddle with an antique or two, before eventually making his way to the dentist’s recliner at the back of the room.
“Someone’s been sitting in my chair,” he called out as he brushed off the layer of Rupert fur.
He dropped onto the recliner’s leather cushions and pulled a lever beneath the seat so that the chair swung down to its horizontal position.
“Ahhhh.” Monty sighed, propping up his feet. “Perfect.”
“You know,” he said as Rupert padded over to the recliner. “When I’m mayor, I’m going to have one of these in my office. Just think of it . . .”
Monty’s eyelids fluttered shut as his shoulders relaxed into the chair’s cushioned comfort. They soon snapped back open, however, at a thudding bump from the room below.
“Hello?” he called out as Rupert sprung into the air and sprinted for the stairs.
A second whomp brought the recliner whizzing back to its upright position.
Monty stared first at the floor, then at Isabella, who had crept up to the basement’s closed hatch. A growl rising in her throat, she began to scra
tch at the surface of the wood.
“What do we have here?” Monty asked, more curious than concerned.
Quietly lifting himself off the chair, he tiptoed across the floor to the hatch. He knelt beside Isabella, quickly removed the small panel covering the recessed handle, and wrapped his hand around the handle’s metal bar.
“Brace yourself,” he cautioned Isabella as he lifted the hatch, triggering the drop-down stairs to unfold loudly against the basement’s concrete floor.
Holding a finger to his lips, he listened for another indication of movement in the room below.
After a long moment of silence, he started stealthily down the steps.
Isabella watched his descent, cynically pondering what might happen next.
Then, figuring she could run much faster than her spindly-legged neighbor, she cautiously followed him into the basement.
Chapter 35
FEEDING THE BEAST
HAROLD WOMBLER GIMPED across the length of the chicken restaurant’s kitchen, motioning for Oscar’s niece to follow him. At the far end of the room, he pulled open the heavy stainless steel door to a walk-in freezer and hobbled inside.
“You’re not serious about the chicken,” the woman said as she shivered in the freezer entrance.
She watched, brow furrowed, as Harold stood in front of a tall metal rack, slowly scanning the rows of shelving.
“This ought to do it,” he grunted after selecting a package on the rack’s top shelf. He pulled down a large bundle wrapped in white butcher paper.
Giving the woman a sideways glance, he tossed it through the air to her.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked, juggling the heavy frozen block to keep it from freezing her fingers. “You don’t expect me to give it to the alligator?”
Harold wiped his hands on his apron and grimaced. “You came here for help, didn’t you?”
After a long, apprehensive stare, she finally nodded.
“Well, first things first, you’ve got to feed the beast,” he said in a matter-of-fact manner.
“But how do I . . . ?” Her voice trailed off as she gestured with the pack of frozen chicken.
Harold rolled his eyes. He flicked his wrist as if demonstrating a toss. “Walk down to the basement and chuck it to him, I imagine.”
“You want me to feed him?” she asked warily.
He slapped a bony hand on his hip. “Well, it’s your basement, isn’t it?”
Her face crimped into a clearly unpersuaded expression.
Finally, he threw his hands up. “How hard can it be?” he grumbled as he grabbed a set of keys from a hook behind the kitchen counter. He locked the back door and headed for the front of the diner.
The woman trailed behind him as he continued to mutter.
“It’s not like you need scientific training.”
Chapter 36
THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
AS THE LUNCH hour approached, the front lawn outside the California Academy of Sciences began to empty out. The media crews had filmed an hour or so of footage of the building’s exterior, but with no new developments in the missing-alligator case, they were shifting their focus back to the story at City Hall.
This time tomorrow, the supervisors would begin their special session to select the interim mayor, and it was still anyone’s guess as to who would be filling the slot. The city’s political pundits had talked themselves silly, debating the likely candidates, but there appeared to be no consensus, even among the board members themselves, as to who would gain a majority of the vote.
On top of all this, a rumor had begun to circulate that the Current Mayor was sequestered in his office after suffering yet another amphibian-related breakdown. After the morning’s gator-mania, the newspeople were gearing up for a late-afternoon round of ninja frog jokes.
But as most of the reporters packed up their gear and headed for the parking lot, one could be seen marching toward the Academy’s front steps.
Despite his misgivings about the less-than-serious nature of the Clive headline, Hoxton Fin had an inside source to consult on the alligator investigation.
That was something his ingrained reporter’s instincts couldn’t walk away from—even if it required him to revisit an unpleasant chapter in his personal history.
• • •
OUTSIDE THE ACADEMY’S front doors, Hox pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through the names catalogued in his contact list.
With a slight grimace, he selected the number for his former sister-in-law.
He hadn’t spoken to his ex-wife or anyone from her family since the divorce, but he kept close track of their whereabouts—if for no other reason than to ensure he didn’t inadvertently run into the movie star or, worse, her new fiancé.
It was because of this diligent research that Hox knew his ex-wife’s younger sister was likely sequestered inside the otherwise off-limits aquarium.
Little Kimmee Kline was now all grown up, but he still thought of her as the tiny girl in pigtails who had served as the flower girl at his wedding—she was a good twenty years junior to her famous older sibling.
Last spring, Kimmee had received a doctoral degree in the life sciences. Soon after graduation, she had taken a position at the Academy of Sciences in her field of expertise, herpetology.
“Dr. Kline,” Hox muttered as the telephone line began to ring. He was going to have a hard time remembering to call her that.
• • •
DR. KIMBERLY KLINE set the phone down onto its receiver and threaded her fingers through her thick blond bob. She’d just received a call from her former brother-in-law, Hoxton Fin, who was outside the building waiting for her to let him in. Groaning, she bent her head over her cluttered desk in the Academy’s basement.
As if this day could get any worse.
Sighing tensely, Kimberly glanced at a small photo in a metal frame propped on the desk’s corner. The picture was of her and her big sister, who, given their sizable age gap, had always been more like an aunt. They’d been close when she was younger and her sister less famous. Nowadays, they only spoke once or twice a year, during the holidays or at rare family get-togethers.
Kimberly wasn’t sure what had caused the breakdown in her sister’s marriage to Hox, but everything had gone downhill quickly after the infamous komodo dragon incident at the Los Angeles Zoo.
Like the previous divorce, Kimberly had first received news of her sister’s recent engagement from the gossip magazines. Her sister’s e-mail announcing the event had come several days later.
She frowned, remembering. The magazine article had provided far more details than the e-mail.
• • •
KIMBERLY BRUSHED HER hair back from her forehead and tried to assume a confident expression.
So far, she’d managed to hide the fact that she’d lost her set of keys to the Academy’s main exterior doors in the hours prior to Clive’s disappearance. She’d been searching high and low throughout the exhibits for the last several hours, to no avail. It seemed less and less likely that they had simply fallen off her key chain.
A crushing wave of guilt had risen in her chest as she’d realized that she might be responsible for the alligator’s disappearance.
Biting her lower lip, she shoved the key chain into her pocket.
With his probing stare and dogged questioning, an encounter with Hoxton Fin was the last thing she needed right now.
• • •
THE BROODING MAN standing impatiently outside the Academy’s glass walls looked a little grayer than Kimberly remembered—and a great deal more grumpy.
She nodded to the security guard, who reluctantly opened the door. Hox brushed past the man and stalked into the atrium.
“Hello there, Kimmee . . . er, ah . . . Dr. Kline.” He meted out the fractured greeting as he joined her beneath the dinosaur skeleton. He fiddled with a strap on his backpack before adding, “Well, it’s been a while.”
“Mmm,” she
replied, feeling much smaller and shorter than usual.
Hox waited through an awkward silence and then cleared his throat. He might as well get the inevitable pleasantries over with.
“How’s Gloria?” he asked gruffly.
“She’s fine,” Kimberly said, lifting her face toward the ceiling as she tried to avoid eye contact with the surly reporter. She tugged at the hem of her blue Academy T-shirt.
“You heard about . . . ?” Her voice trailed off, as if she were afraid to speak the name of her sister’s new beau.
Hox cut in gruffly. “I wish them the best.” He shifted his weight, alleviating pressure from his sore foot. “Or him anyway. That guy’s going to need all the help he can get.”
There was another long silence. Even the dinosaur began to feel uncomfortable.
“How about you?” Kimberly asked, struggling to be conversational. “Are you seeing anyone?”
Hox responded with a withering glare. “I’m here about the stolen gator,” he said curtly. He thwacked his notebook against the side of his leg with a loud snapping pop that caused the scientist to jump.
“That’s not really my department,” she demurred, trying to maintain her composure. Her gaze now shifted to Hox’s lame left foot. “I’m in herpetology.”
“You mean frogs,” he translated, flipping the notebook open to a clean page. He pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket and eyed her suspiciously. “Surely, there’s not much separation between the two.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut in again.
“Can you take me to the Swamp Exhibit?”
Chapter 37
SPIDER MAN
SPIDER SLOWLY EASED himself from under the parked car outside the art studio. Straightening his lanky frame, he dusted off the janitor’s coveralls and reset his baseball cap.
A few minutes earlier, he had watched the Mayor’s Life Coach plug a strange-shaped key into the store’s front door and surreptitiously step inside. He had been able to follow Mr. Carmichael’s movements as the man wandered around the front of the showroom, but Spider had lost track of his target when he moved to the back of the store.
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