by Jeff Miller
“So Señor Manuel concluded that the painting was authentic?”
“As did the other experts,” Mr. Williamson said. “Technique, materials, subject matter—there was no question in their minds.”
“We were careful,” Mrs. Williamson interjected, “since it was a private auction and the previous owner was undisclosed.”
That seemed strange. “Why was he undisclosed?”
“Sometimes that’s how it works,” Mr. Williamson explained. “We bought it from Cecil Rowanhouse. You’ve heard of him, I assume?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“Well, he’s well known in our circles,” Mrs. Williamson said. “He handles transactions for those who desire anonymity. An interesting man,” she added, with disapproval evident in her voice.
“Why would people desire anonymity?” Dagny asked.
“Lots of reasons,” Mr. Williamson said. “And most of them perfectly legal,” he added, seeming to remember that he was talking to an FBI agent.
“Such as?”
“Suppose your father gave you a Picasso, but never told your brother about it. If times were hard, you might want to sell the painting without your brother knowing. No need for him to resent both you and your father. So you sell through Cecil.”
“A lot of what goes through Cecil is just being laundered,” Mrs. Williamson added. Her husband seemed to recoil as if she had said something profane.
“Barbara, dear, Cecil is a gentleman. I wouldn’t dare suggest that he was engaged in improprieties.”
“Well, I would,” Mrs. Williamson said. “Because there aren’t that many people trying to keep their brothers from knowing about paintings.” She turned to Dagny. “Sometimes, in anticipation of divorce, husbands liquidate assets that their wives don’t know about and set up accounts to hide the proceeds of the sale. Often they liquidate art.”
“Why art?”
“Because most of these rich old men marry young, pretty, stupid little girls; and while these girls are keenly aware of the value of cars, yachts, and homes, they don’t know a thing about art. So when it’s time for the divorce, the husbands sell off a few paintings, artifacts, historical pieces, and that money goes into an account. After the divorce, the men withdraw the cash.”
“Preposterous.” Mr. Williamson shook his head and pursed his lips.
“No, dear, I know it happens. I’m not a stupid young thing.”
“Well, maybe it does, but I think you overstate it.”
“Mr. Rowanhouse sounds like an interesting man,” Dagny said. “Could I get his address and number?”
Mr. Williamson darted out of the room again and returned a moment later with Rowanhouse’s business card.
“Bermuda?” Dagny asked, looking at the address on the card.
“I told you he’s not legitimate,” Mrs. Williamson replied.
Dagny spent two more hours with the Williamsons before heading to the airport. She called Victor on the way. “Let’s meet at the Professor’s tomorrow morning. Then the next day, we’ll head to Bermuda.”
“Bermuda?” Victor said. “How do you know about Cecil Rowanhouse?”
CHAPTER 27
March 25—Arlington, Virginia
Victor pulled a picture of an Indian man from a stack of papers and passed it around. “Dr. Santosh Vyas, originally from Calcutta. Has a wife, two kids, and a healthy fear of law enforcement. He gave me this.” Victor pulled a manila folder from his briefcase and tossed it onto the Professor’s desk.
“So much for physician-patient confidentiality,” Dagny noted.
“The file indicates that Berry’s operation was paid for by RLD Inc., a business that didn’t exist until two weeks before the surgery, and as far as I can tell, hasn’t done anything other than pay for his surgery. According to filings with the Florida Department of State, RLD was incorporated and is owned by a guy named Franco Chavez. In fact, Mr. Chavez is the sole owner of a lot of corporations in Florida that don’t seem to do very much. So I looked up Mr. Chavez. Turns out that he’s an eighty-year-old Cuban immigrant with Alzheimer’s. Lives in a Miami retirement home. Can’t remember his own name. Thought I was his son. Barely functions. I convinced the nursing home to let me see who is paying his bill, figure maybe there’s a connection there.”
“And they gave you his file without a warrant?” Dagny asked.
“It was just like with the Indian doctor. If you come back with a broad warrant, you’re going to find something wrong, so they’d rather just give you the file you ask for than risk something worse. Plus, they figure this guy isn’t going to complain, since he doesn’t even know where he is.” Victor sat down in the Professor’s chair and put his feet up on the Professor’s desk. “And he kept telling people I was his son, so they figured I had a right to see the file.”
The Professor glared at Victor, who removed his feet from the desk.
“So what did you get from the file?” Dagny asked.
“Not much,” Victor began. “Chavez’s bills are paid by money order, so I couldn’t trace them back to a bank account. I figured that we could trace the timing of the money orders, go to the issuing bank, try to look at their records or video, and figure it out that way, but that would take forever. So instead I went back and looked at the name of the statutory agent for the corporations, and it was the same for all of them—Peter Flust, a Miami lawyer—solo practitioner. Specializes in international law according to his bio on Martindale-Hubbell. I searched court cases for Flust and the names of all the dummy corporations for which he was named a statutory agent. Figured maybe one of them had been sued. It was a long shot, since none of them seem to do any real business. But one had been sued—purely by accident.
“Someone meant to sue LNR Products over some mislabeled medicine, but they screwed up and sued LNR Productions, one of Flust’s front companies, instead. Flust filed a motion to dismiss, claiming mistaken identity. Judge denied it—said the plaintiff was entitled to discovery to see if it really was the wrong company. In the process of discovery, the plaintiff subpoenaed documents from third parties, including local banks, just trying to figure out if LNR Productions had any relation to LNR Products. No surprise, there was no relationship, but one of the documents showed that LNR Productions was sending a guy named Cecil Rowanhouse a steady stream of checks. I figured this Rowanhouse guy might have a connection to the other companies as well, including the one that fronted the money for Berry’s surgery.
“I waited by the elevator bank at Flust’s office, hoping he’d step out for a meeting or something in the afternoon, and after an hour or so, he did. Then I went up to his office and told the receptionist that I was supposed to meet Mr. Flust and Mr. Rowanhouse, but that I might have gotten the date wrong. She told me that Rowanhouse doesn’t usually fly in to meet with Flust until later in the month, and she checked her schedule and said he wasn’t due for a week. I took a chance and asked her if she’d ever seen Rowanhouse’s place, and that it was beautiful, and she said she hadn’t, but who cares what it looks like, it’s in ‘freaking Bermuda,’ and that she’d live in a tent if it meant waking up by the ocean.”
“Impressive,” Dagny said.
“I called up the prison and asked if they had a record of Rowanhouse ever visiting Reginald Berry. Nope, nothing. But then I asked about Flust, and it turns out that Flust was the lawyer who got him moved to the women’s prison. Since Rowanhouse seems to do regular business with Mr. Flust, maybe Rowanhouse paid for Reginald Berry’s surgery.”
“The kid’s got game,” Dagny said to the Professor. “Perhaps Rowanhouse is our man.”
“Rowanhouse launders transactions for a living,” the Professor said. “If he were our man, he’d have the sense to hide behind someone else. And living in Bermuda—it would be easy enough to see when he’s been in and out of the country. No, I think our man is probably a client of Rowanhouse. And that would mean that he has money, and that Rowanhouse is handling it for him.”
“He
re’s what I don’t get,” Victor remarked. “The unsub gave us both the stolen Matisse and Regina Berry. Both lead to Cecil Rowanhouse. Why give us two roads to him? “He must really want us to meet with Rowanhouse,” Dagny said.
“And he didn’t think we’d be smart enough to pick up on just one of the leads,” the Professor added. He pressed a button, and the white dry-erase board descended from the ceiling.
Dagny and the Professor had drawn a mostly empty chart a week earlier, listing each of the crimes across the top. They spent the rest of the day filling out the chart with everything they now knew. And at the Professor’s insistence, Dagny ate every bite of the oversize 700-calorie turkey club his wife had made for her.
At the end of the day, she headed home with some trepidation. Hotel life had been simpler. At home, she saw herself in everything around her. The walls she’d painted; the pictures she’d hung. In a hotel room, she could look around without thinking about herself at all.
Dagny parked in front of her house, walked up the steps, and turned the key. Once inside, she turned on the television to make some noise, and then walked to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. A three-inch stack of mail sat in the middle of the counter. Had she left it there? She thought it had been on the kitchen table. She scanned the rest of the kitchen and then the living room. Everything seemed fine. But the remote...had she left it on the arm of the sofa? Yes, of course she had. She was just being paranoid.
Maybe it was time to look at the box again.
She went upstairs and opened her closet, pushed back her clothes, and found the safe. She turned the combination, withdrew the box, and carried it to her bed.
The box was an octagon, twelve inches deep, made of mahogany. Each of the eight sides and the top framed a red-and-gold padded fabric panel. Each panel depicted a scene in a story about a bird breaking free from an egg and learning to fly. Dagny inserted a small key into the box and unlocked it.
Some of the letters he’d sent from his business trips. Some he’d slipped under her pillow. He’d written them from the day she was born to the day he died, but none of them were written to a child. They recounted stories from his youth, and described his fears and aspirations. They gave advice about the future—as if he had known that this would be all she would have of him. And they all told her that he loved her.
After she finished with her father’s letters, Dagny washed her clothes, packed her bags, and crawled into bed. At two in the morning, she woke up feeling sick, ran to the bathroom, and vomited every bit of Mrs. McDougal’s turkey sandwich into the toilet.
CHAPTER 28
March 26—Saint George’s, Bermuda
According to the brochure, Saint George’s was the oldest continuously inhabited English settlement in the Western Hemisphere. Most of the buildings in the town looked to be two or three hundred years old and were painted in bright pastel colors—pink and yellow and baby blue. The streets were narrow and made of cobblestone. Kids on mopeds raced in and out of traffic, weaving dangerously close to the cars they passed. Along the side of the road, a soaking-wet tourist stuck his face and hands through public stocks while his equally drenched wife took his picture. The man waved to them as they drove past. Farther ahead, a sign on a wall read TOWN CENTRE, with arrows pointing both left and right. Around the corner, an antique high-wheel bicycle leaned against an orange three-story building with white stone trim. The lettering on the building read ST. GEORGE’S CYCLE LIVERY.
“Quaint,” Victor said.
It was hard to hear him over the clatter of rain pounding against the roof of the cab.
“Huh?”
“Quaint!” Victor yelled.
The taxi driver looked back over his shoulder and nodded his head. He was Portuguese, but spoke with an Indian accent. “Is this your honeymoon?”
Dagny laughed. “No, it’s not.” Thinking about it some more, she laughed again.
“It’s not that funny,” Victor mumbled.
The driver turned onto a narrow road that curved up the side of a hill. “His house is on the other side.” He eased the car to a crawl, building suspense. “Wait for it...”
The home was made of smooth, rounded white concrete, glass, and steel. Its curved, parabolic walls arched back from the front door, spreading toward the ocean, appearing to rest upon the bright, gorgeous blue water and white bubbling foam. The back of the roof was much higher than the front, making the house seem a bit like a half-open, postmodern oyster that had washed onto the shore. The rain washed off the roof, shunted into waterfalls on each side of the front door, and drained into small streams that ran around the sides of the house, back to the ocean. The driveway circled around a large abstract bronze sculpture—undulating wavelets that zigzagged higher and higher, reaching at least fifty feet from the ground. “Some say they are waves,” the driver explained. “Others say that it’s a graph of Mr. Rowanhouse’s bank account.”
Dagny paid the cabbie, and they ran through the rain to the shelter of a small overhang above the front door. She rang the bell and tried to peek through the thick, opaque windows that lined the doorway. A figure walked slowly through the entry hall toward the door. Dagny took a deep breath, prepared to confront the man with the answers, but the door opened to reveal a young, thin blonde woman instead.
“This is totally cool!” she screamed. “He said you were coming, but I didn’t believe him.” Her skin was tan and smooth, her teeth were straight and white, and her eyebrows were plucked into Roman arches. The bottom of her sheer yellow dress showed off her underwear when she jumped, while the top of the dress hung round her neck and split between her breasts, plunging low enough to reveal the silver stud piercing her belly button. She was maybe twenty-two and looked like the cover of a magazine.
And she was exceptionally thin, Dagny thought. Perfectly thin.
“Follow me, kids!” she yelled, motioning for Victor and Dagny to follow, and then skipping down the entry hall.
“His daughter?” Victor whispered to Dagny.
The girl overheard. “No, silly!” She giggled.
Rowanhouse’s home was furnished in a modern, minimalist manner. Though a few abstract pieces hung from the walls, there was little ornamentation. The furniture was sleek and utilitarian. Simple monochromatic rugs covered the shiny bamboo floors. Everything was well lit and clean. Although the furnishings were simple, Dagny could see that they were not cheap.
The young woman spun around and extended her hand. “Silly me! I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Jana.”
Dagny shook her hand. “Nice to meet you, Jana.”
“You’re Special Agent Gray, right? Dagny Gray?”
“That’s right.” Dagny wondered how she knew, but didn’t ask. Maybe the airport had tipped them off. Maybe the driver.
“And you’re Special Agent Victor Walton? Junior, right? Victor Walton Jr.?”
Victor shook her hand. “That’s right, ma’am,” he said, inexplicably trotting out the fake Southern accent he’d used at Waller’s Food Mart. “Nice to meet you, Jana.”
“You’re a cute young thing to be working for the FBI,” Jana said, flipping her hair out of her eyes with one hand while gently brushing Victor’s arm with the other. Then she turned abruptly and continued down another hallway. “He’s back here.”
She led them to a large glass room that was suspended over the ocean by cantilever and cables. Twenty or thirty lounge chairs circled a long pool, where a man was swimming laps. “I’ll leave you with him!” Jana yelled, so as to be heard over the rain that thundered against the glass roof. Lightning flashed in the sky, and huge waves crashed against the beach below; the crests of some smashed against the bottom of the glass wall near Dagny’s feet. On a nice day, it was probably the most beautiful place in the world. In a storm, it was a little scary.
The man swam to the side of the pool. The storm seemed to calm as he climbed out of the water. He pulled off his goggles and swim cap, grabbed a towel from a nearby lounge chair,
and dried his hands. “I’m Cecil Rowanhouse,” he said, firmly shaking Dagny’s hand, and then Victor’s. He spoke with deliberate and careful enunciation. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Rowanhouse had the body of a twenty-year-old swimmer, but the hair on his head was grey and thinning, and his face was wrinkled from too much time in the sun. He was sixty, at least—but the healthiest sixty-year-old Dagny had ever seen.
“Did Jana offer you two anything to drink?” he asked.
“No,” Dagny said.
Rowanhouse mumbled something, then wandered over to a poolside bar, grabbed some ice cubes from a bucket, and dropped them into a glass. “Scotch? Whiskey? Can I recommend a Gosling’s and Coke?”
“Nothing for me,” Dagny said.
“You have ginger ale?” Victor asked, abandoning his Southern accent.
“Of course.” Rowanhouse grabbed a bottle, twisted the cap, and poured Victor a glass. “Now, if you don’t mind, I must change. We’ll have dinner in a few minutes. I hope you’re hungry.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Rowanhouse, we didn’t come for dinner.”
“Then you shall delight in the surprise of getting more than you bargained for, Agent Gray. And seeing as you were not explicitly invited to my home, I’m sure you will appreciate the hospitality.” Rowanhouse scurried off before Dagny could reply.
Victor downed his drink, walked over to the bar, and poured himself another. “Do you think Jana’s his lover?” Victor asked.
“I don’t know,” Dagny said, nodding toward the entry to the room. “Why don’t you ask her?”
Jana had returned. She’d changed into a pink-and-blue sundress and carried a towel over her shoulder.
“Hey, Jana. You’re from the States, right?” Victor asked.
“That’s true!” Jana gushed. “I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, though I’m working on losing the accent.”