Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Susa’s luggage—one small suitcase and a trunk of painting supplies—was being trundled across the apron toward the private plane, but neither woman was in a hurry to leave the other.

  “I want to know the instant you find out anything about those paintings,” Susa said, her eyes intent on Lacey.

  “Since you’re paying Rarities, I’m sure you’ll be the first to hear,” Lacey said, smiling crookedly.

  “That’s not the way they work,” Susa said. “The art is their first responsibility, not the person paying the bills or the one who owns whatever is being investigated. It’s all in the papers you signed this morning giving them permission to examine the paintings.”

  Lacey’s smile faded. She hadn’t liked the part in the contract that made it clear that the truth, rather than what she might want the truth to be, was the sole objective of the Rarities personnel. “Yeah, that part was painfully clear. I didn’t know it applied to the guy paying the bills, too.”

  “It does,” Susa said ruefully.

  “Always, as more than one client has found to their sorrow,” Ian said to Lacey. “On the other hand, it means that a vetting by Rarities adds a lot of value to whatever passes the tests.”

  Lacey shrugged. “Value isn’t the point.”

  “It should be,” Ian said. “The insurance company is going to use the arson investigator’s preliminary report to hold up payment until it’s clear whether the fire was accidental or not, and if not, who set it.” Ian felt bad about adding to the problem by mentioning the paraffin-log chunks he’d seen, but there hadn’t been any help for it. The woo-woo lady might have been a scammer and a scuffler and a drunk, but she hadn’t deserved to be roasted in her bed. “You’ll need every dime to put your shop back together. Selling one of those paintings could mean a lot to you.”

  “I know. It’s just…” Lacey’s mouth flattened. “It’s so damned ugly. If the woman in the painting was really murdered, I don’t want to make money from it.”

  “So sell a landscape to me,” Susa said. “No bad juju attached to them, right?”

  “I’d be happy to give you one,” Lacey said instantly, “but I won’t sell you one.”

  Susa’s grin said Gotcha. “Okay, but only if you’ll accept a painting of mine in return.”

  Lacey’s mouth fell open. “I couldn’t. Yours are much more valuable.”

  “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it. And if you leave it, I’ll cry, because I’ve always wanted a Lewis Marten painting—or one that draws me as strongly as his paintings,” she said before Lacey could object that the canvases she owned weren’t really by Marten. “Art is where you find it, not who signs it.”

  Lacey hugged Susa again. “I shouldn’t,” she said, “but I’m going to take advantage of your incredibly generous offer.”

  “Good.” Reluctantly she let go of Lacey. “I’ve got to run. The pilot has a takeoff slot. If we miss it, we have to wait around hours for another one.” She stood on tiptoe to hug Ian and said too softly for Lacey to hear, “I don’t have a good feeling about this. Be very, very careful.”

  “You been talking to my great-uncle?” he said against her ear.

  “More like my ancestors talking to me. I mean it, Ian. Something is…wrong.”

  “I hear you.”

  She looked into his dark, steady eyes and knew that he believed her. “Bring Lacey up to Seattle to select her painting,” Susa said in a normal tone of voice. “The Donovan should meet her.”

  Ian lifted his eyebrows. “Any particular reason?”

  “If you’re foolish enough to let her slip through your fingers, I have two unmarried sons.” She winked at Lacey. “You’re too old to adopt, but I’m determined not to lose you. Daughters are so very hard to find.”

  With a speed that made people used to commercial-airline schedules blink, Susa was aboard the idling plane and it was taxiing to the run-up area for its final check. Minutes later it gave a throaty howl, gathered speed rapidly, and leaped into the air.

  Ian was on the phone to Rarities before the wheels tucked into the plane’s sleek underbelly. “Tell Niall to stop the clock on the Donovan client,” he said to the desk. “Susa is on her way home and I’m on vacation.”

  He disconnected and looked at Lacey. He didn’t have a happy feeling about anything in the past few days except meeting her. He sure as hell didn’t want to see her hurt anymore. Which meant he had to distract her, get her up to her eyebrows in the mundane details of living, and then slide off to investigate her dear departed Grandpa Rainbow, who looked to be good for three murders.

  “Now what?” Lacey asked.

  “Let’s take another go at those paintings before we send them to Rarities.”

  “And then what?”

  “Tomorrow we’ll kick butt at the insurance company to get an adjuster out to your shop,” Ian said, “and line up a contractor to put the place back together for you. Always assuming that the arson team is finished poking around, of course.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a vacation for you.”

  He gave her a slow smile and threw an arm around her shoulders. “Oh, I’ll think of something.”

  And the first thing he would work on was a way to keep her safe. He didn’t need Susa’s and his great-uncle’s warnings to know that it could get ugly when he started digging up old graves.

  Corona del Mar

  Sunday morning

  50

  Lacey leaned out to punch in her code, waited for the arm to lift, and drove Ian’s truck through the wide gates of the storage area. There were more people around today, everyone from middle-aged men stripping old cars and rebuilding them for the vintage-car circuit to families storing junk until they finally decided that Aunt Effie’s old furniture wasn’t worth the monthly fee to keep it.

  “You have any special place in mind to park?” Lacey asked, remembering when he’d wanted the truck hidden from the road.

  “Close.” He looked in the rearview mirror. “There’s wrapping gear in the back.”

  “Anyone following?”

  He frowned and told half of the truth. “Hard to be sure.”

  But he was. He’d seen the unmarked car following them to the airport. Now the car was hanging way back because there wasn’t any need to work in close. Tailing an old truck on a sunny Sunday morning highway was a piece of cake. Getting away from the deputies again would be about as likely as hiding an elephant in an ashtray.

  “Susa’s gone,” Lacey said, turning toward Ian. “Why would the sheriff care what we do?”

  “Because he’d like to stick me with the theft of Susa’s paintings.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous!”

  “You know it and I know it, but look at things his way. It was an inside job. His security cops were on the inside. So was I. Guess who he’d rather tag for jail time?”

  “That’s crap.”

  “A lot of cop work is crap.”

  “He’s more likely to have stolen them than you,” Lacey muttered.

  “I’ll be sure to tell him the next time I see him.”

  Lacey backed the truck into a parking space right next to her unit. Carrying armloads of tape and packing material, they lifted up the front door of the storage area and looked around.

  The interior of the storage room hadn’t changed. Paintings were still stacked in racks and leaning against various surfaces in a way that looked haphazard yet still managed to keep the surface of each canvas from rubbing against anything.

  Ian pulled out the digital camera he’d purchased and the portable computer he’d bought to use along with it. “Let’s photograph, then wrap them.”

  Lacey was reaching for the closest painting—another version of the drowning pool—when Ian stopped her.

  “We’ll do the dark ones last,” Ian said. “I want to look at them all together in good light before we wrap them up.”

  “Then stack them to one side so we have room to pack the rest.”

  He sta
rted collecting the various scenes of violence and set them out of the way. As he did, he couldn’t help studying them. They were alike, yet different. Sometimes the numbers on the front were painted in red, sometimes not; sometimes the numbers were circled, sometimes not; but the numbers themselves were the same on each of the drowning pool canvases.

  “Did you ever see your grandfather paint one of these?” Ian asked.

  “No. Hand me that roll of bubble wrap, okay?”

  “Let me photograph the painting first.”

  She waited while he photographed, then she began wrapping. He photographed another painting while she worked, then set aside the camera long enough to tape up what she’d already wrapped while she went to work on the canvas he’d just photographed.

  “I’m only going to tape once around each way,” he said, “unless you really want the mummy thing.”

  “Mummy thing?” Lacey looked up from the canvas she was rolling into a sheet of bubble wrap. “Oh, the way I brought the paintings for Susa to look at. No need for that now. I was just worried about the crowds of people pushing and shoving.”

  For a time the only sounds inside the unit were the rustle of plastic wrap and the soft ripping hiss when Ian stripped tape off a roll. Shouts, laughter, and the occasional curse drifted in from the alley out front, where people shoved things from car trunks into overstuffed units. With part of his attention, Ian listened to the outside sounds in the same way a jungle animal listens to its surroundings—just another way to keep track of what was happening behind his back.

  Most of Ian’s attention was on the numbers on the paintings. He kept thinking they should mean something, have some logic to explain their presence, like the numbers written on the back of the canvases indicating that each was part of a series.

  No inspiration came as he wrapped paintings for shipment to Rarities. He and Lacey would rent a big truck and drive the paintings to L.A. as soon as they could take the time away from putting her shop back together.

  But first they were going to move the paintings to a different storage unit, one at the far end of the complex. Shayla Carlyle’s brother-in-law had been curious about why the switch was necessary, and happy to settle for cash instead of answers as to why the unit would be rented to Mark Jones instead of Shayla or Lacey. Lacey was curious, too, but Ian just had shrugged and said, “Humor me.”

  Ian and Lacey quickly found a rhythm: after he photographed a canvas, she would wrap, tape and stack it to one side while he photographed another. When his truck was full, he drove down the row and around the corner to the new unit and stacked the canvases inside. A lot faster than he would have believed, the storage unit was down to the Death Suite. With the sun pouring through the open door, the paintings looked darker than ever. And oddly more intense, more detailed.

  “It’s a shame Susa didn’t see these in the daytime,” Lacey said. “I’d forgotten how vivid the contrasts are in strong light.”

  “Vivid.” He shook his head. “There’s a nice, neutral word.”

  “Would you prefer chiaroscuro?”

  He smiled, but it quickly faded. “Do you agree with Susa that a man could have painted these all at once?”

  “Each subject at a different time but all the same subject at once—wreck, house, pool?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve gone on a few painting sprees in my time, but nothing this epic. Maybe I just wasn’t feeling the emotions as intensely.”

  Working swiftly, Ian separated the paintings into the three distinct subjects: wreck, drowning, fire. “I don’t have a trained eye, but it seems odd that all these were done at once.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, even assuming that he was stoked on drugs or some kind of manic high”—because he’d just murdered someone, Ian added to himself—“why would he treat the numbers differently on the same subject? Circled in red here”—he pointed to the canvas—“painted in red and circled in black there, black and black there, all red there, and so on.”

  Lacey walked closer. She’d noticed the small differences before, but hadn’t thought much of them. The similarity of the subject matter overwhelmed everything else. Then there was the fact that she really hadn’t spent much time looking at the darker paintings. They’d simply made her too uncomfortable.

  They still did.

  Tough, she told herself. Pretend a stranger painted them.

  Shoving aside the mental picture of her beloved Grandpa Rainbow whistling tunelessly as he painted death after death, she squatted on her heels in front of the paintings of the car wreck. There were subtle differences among the canvases, shades of gold and orange and hues of darkness that weren’t the same from painting to painting.

  “If he painted these wrecks all at once,” she said slowly, “there are two ways he could have gone at it. Decorator-art style or—”

  “What’s that?” Ian interrupted.

  “You start with a batch of prepared canvases, paint one aspect of each subject—rocks or trees or beach or whatever—in the same place on each canvas with the same color of paint, then go on to the next element of the landscape, and then the next, moving from canvas to canvas so that all of them are always at the same stage of painting. Saves all kinds of time on mixing paints, and each canvas is, technically, original art, though they’re actually one short step up from prints.”

  “Said original oil painting is then sold to decorators at inflated prices for their clients’ homes or businesses,” Ian said.

  “Right. It’s the sort of thing that gave figurative painting a bad name. Then”—Lacey grinned slyly—“modern art became so popular that motels started using it. Mortified a lot of academics.”

  “So you think these paintings are the result of that kind of assembly-line art?”

  “No. Look at the oranges and yellows and shadows in these paintings. Granddad made his own paints from scratch. He bought the lead white for priming the canvas, but after that he ground his own pigment and combined it with turpentine and oil himself. The more pigment and the less turpentine, the more intense the color.”

  Ian made an encouraging sound.

  “The point is,” she said, looking narrowly at the paintings of the burning wreck, “if he was doing the decorator thing, all the shades of the same colors would be nearly equal because they would have come from the same batch of paint.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “But these aren’t the same shades from canvas to canvas. Look at the orange in this one and in this one and in this,” she said, pointing quickly. “Different shades of the same color to depict the same part of each painting. If they’d been painted at the same time, they’d be the same shade of orange all the way across.”

  Ian looked thoughtfully at the paintings. “What you’re telling me is that your grandfather’s homemade paints were like commercial dye lots.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay. These probably weren’t painted all at the same time,” Ian agreed. “Then why do they have the same numbers on the front?”

  Lacey didn’t answer. Head tilted slightly to one side, she studied the paintings. After a moment she said almost absently, “Could you move all the drowning ones aside?”

  He wondered why but didn’t ask. He just moved paintings and watched her. She was frowning. In the clean winter sunlight, her eyes glowed like fine, tawny topaz. Slowly she began sorting the remaining paintings without regard to subject.

  “Would it help to think out loud?” he asked softly.

  “The technique is different in the drowning paintings,” she said after a moment. “Thicker paint. More use of the palette knife. More paint, period. None of the ground shows through anywhere. There’s texture in the wreck and the fire, but it’s not as…heavy.”

  “And they all show some form of death at night, so the different technique isn’t a matter of trying to make a statement about the subject, is that it?”

  Without looking away, she smiled. “Underneath the shoulders and gun, you�
�re one bright man.”

  “You’re just figuring that out?”

  “Just saying it out loud. I figured it out about ten seconds after we met. Scary combination—brains and muscle. Then you smiled. It was all over then, no chance to run, and running was the last thing on my stunned little mind.”

  Grinning, he tugged lightly at one of her rebellious curls. “So why would your grandfather change technique?”

  “Lots of reasons. Some artists do it deliberately, as a kind of academic exercise. But Grandfather wasn’t academically trained. Self-taught all the way. The changes that came in his painting were a natural outgrowth of time and experience.”