“They were, which is how we have the timeline we have. The thieves also made a point to check on the guards to make sure they were comfortable before they left with thirteen stolen artworks.”
“No leads on who the thieves were or where the artwork ended up?” I asked. I didn’t look at Darius, but my foot accidentally brushed against his under the table, and I nearly jumped from the electric current that passed between us. I was acutely aware of his profession, his attractiveness, and his interest in the story D was telling us – all of which made him completely, dangerously compelling.
The veteran reporter shrugged, clearly blind to the tension that had been building between Darius and me. “There’s always Whitey Bulger to blame, especially now that he’s dead.”
I barked a laugh that seemed to startle both men. “Did you know that Whitey hated his nickname? He preferred to be called Jim – which is a terrible name for a mob boss-turned-FBI-informant, by the way. Also, he did three years in Alcatraz, but liked it so much there he went back as a tourist with his girlfriend. And when he was in prison in Alabama, he volunteered for the CIA’s MKUltra program to take time off his sentence. They injected him with LSD as part of a mind control experiment. He didn’t know that’s what they were doing – nobody did – and when he found out, he made plans to assassinate the guy in charge of the program.”
D leaned back in his chair and chuckled in appreciation. “I knew about Alcatraz and the nickname, but not about MKUltra. You a journalist?”
“No,” I said happily, giving myself a point for stumping the reporter, “I just don’t sleep much.”
D looked at Darius as if checking for confirmation, and I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or complimented by it. Darius had a strange look on his face, and his knee brushed against mine, zinging me with another electric shock.
“Well,” D said, still chuckling, “there were a lot of dead ends, a couple of mob connections, and a chop shop or two that were investigated. Consensus now seems to be that the heist was probably planned as a way to get insurance against prison time.”
“Insurance against prison time?” I asked.
D shrugged. “Mid-level mob doesn’t have the connections to move big money art. But they could use it to negotiate a deal when they got caught for stupid low-level stuff that carried stiff sentences.”
I looked at Darius, and his eyebrows had risen as high as mine had. “Just what Junior tried to do.”
D’s eyes narrowed. “You have something new on the heist?”
I shook my head. “I had a bounty offer me some info if I’d let him go.”
“You didn’t take it?” D practically gasped.
“I’m a bounty hunter, not the D.A. I don’t make deals with bail jumpers,” I said sharply. That earned me a speculative look from Darius and a frown from D.
“Well, if you ever do stumble on something solid about the Gardner heist, I’d appreciate a call. It’s one of the Holy Grail stories for Boston reporters.”
Darius stood, and when I started to get up, he pulled my chair back in a total Disney prince move. “We appreciate your time, Mr. DeAngelis, and if anything does come up, we’ll certainly call you,” he said.
I took out my card and wrote a name on the back of it. I handed it to D and said, “This is the name of my bail jumper. He’s worried about his mom because his sister has had some trouble. If you want a crack at Junior’s information, I’d suggest playing a compassion card with him. You might have some luck.”
D took the card with a grateful nod. “Thanks. I appreciate the tip.” Then he shook Darius’s hand and pulled a black-and-white photograph out of his coat pocket, which he handed to me. “Here’s one of the original crime scene photos of the Dutch Room. The New York Times reprinted it as part of a book review in 2015. It’s hard to find online without a direct link.”
I glanced at the photo, and my gaze slid right past the two frames and smashed glass on the floor to the open wall panel. “There’s a door on that wall?”
D settled back in his seat and lifted his beer to us in a toast. “There used to be.”
* * *
The docent in the Dutch Room was a friendly middle-aged woman named Amber, whose short, spiky hair was tipped in a deep red that matched a beautiful knit scarf she gathered closed with an Irish cloak pin.
I stopped to admire Amber’s pin in a tactical move to open a dialogue, while Darius strode across the room to examine the fabric-covered panel behind the empty frame that had held The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
“I’ve heard there was a door behind that panel,” I said to Amber, nodding to the place where Darius studied the wall.
“They turned it back into a window when they tore down the annex building,” she said with a helpful smile.
“The annex?” I asked.
“Where they used to do restoration and repair on the artwork. Now that’s all done in the new wing.” Amber said.
Darius turned to join the conversation. “The hinges of the wall panel are cleverly concealed behind the fabric,” he said to me.
“This door was only used when art pieces were moved in and out of the laboratory. The staff who worked in the annex used an outside entrance.”
I opened my mouth to follow up with a pointed question about the night of the heist, but Darius beat me to the next sentence, which he uttered with perfectly casual interest that actually impressed me with its sincerity.
“Have you worked here a long time then?” He flashed his perfect Disney prince smile, and I had to shush the instinct to smile back, or throw myself on him, because both were real.
Apparently Amber was similarly affected, at least in the returned smile department. “I started as an intern—” she looked around with all the subtlety of a bad spy and whispered, “the year before the heist.”
I saw the sharp glint of steel flash in his eyes as he upped the wattage on the princely smile. “You must know all the stories …”
I could practically see the ellipsis hanging in the air after his words, inviting her to finish the sentence with all the stories.
Amber’s smile faltered just a little bit as she leaned in closer to us to whisper. “We’re … discouraged from speaking about it. They actually give us a script to follow when people ask.”
I totally called it. I leaned forward too. “What if we don’t ask about that night at all? What if we just ask what it was like to work here that first year? I mean, you must have some great stories from that time. I know my mom does,” I lied, totally not knowing anything at all about my mom’s time working here. I was sure if I did the math, I could figure out when exactly that had been, but Darius’s expression of approval as he looked at me completely prevented any mathing.
“Oh! What’s her name? I might know her,” Amber said, all traces of nervousness gone from her voice. I shot Darius a quick glance and he gave a tiny nod.
“Sophia Kiriakis. She was a student at MassArt.”
Amber’s expression scrunched up like she was struggling to remember. “I feel like I know that name, but I’m not sure.”
“What about her sister, Alexandra? Alex Kiriakis.”
Amber’s eyes opened wide. “Alex? Yeah, I remember Alex. She went to all the parties.”
I stared at Darius, then quickly shifted my attention back to Amber. “There were parties here, in the museum?”
“Oh yeah, almost every weekend. When the new museum director – she’s gone now – when she didn’t move into the fourth floor like all the others had, a couple of the guards started having impromptu jam sessions with their band out in the courtyard. It was pretty great, actually.”
“It sounds like it. Kind of like the movie Night at the Museum, except without all the animals that come to life,” I said, picturing Rembrandt stepping out of his portrait to go chat with the Madonna next door.
Amber laughed. “Oh the animals definitely came to life back then. There was one boy, one of Ricky’s friends in the band, I think, who taugh
t a couple of the others how to play sensor tag.”
Another docent entered the Dutch Room and waved Amber over. Her expression shuttered. “Damn,” she whispered under her breath. “It was nice talking to you both,” she said in a professional voice as she walked toward the man who’d entered the room.
I watched her greet him carefully, and then I tugged Darius’ hand. “Come on, we won’t get anything else from Amber today. She’s getting spanked for talking to us.”
Darius glanced at the man, and I knew he understood. I took us on a circuitous route around the room, playing the happy tourist for the security people. It wasn’t until we finally wandered out of the Dutch Room that I realized I still held his hand – or he held mine, I wasn’t sure.
It was nice. Way more than nice. It was also electric, zingy, zappy, and confusing as hell.
He must have realized it too, because he dropped my hand like it was a live wire.
“Sensor tag?” I said, to crowd out the other words that my instinct for self-preservation prevented me from saying. “Like trip a motion sensor, and tag, you’re it?” I took a step back from him so the current between us could diffuse.
“Exactly like that, I think.” He considered the room for a moment, his eyes taking in every camera, every motion sensor, every fire alarm and sprinkler. “Come,” he said finally, and walked down the corridor to the Short Gallery. Damn, he was sexy when he got all bossy and professional. I had to keep reminding myself that his profession was actually still diametrically opposed to my one and only foray into thieving, no matter how much fun this investigation of a thirty-year-old mystery might be. I also reluctantly reminded myself that the Gardner heist had nothing to do with Madame Auguste, and she was the whole reason I was at the museum in the first place.
But who was I kidding? Solving the old mystery was a game I could play that let me spend time with Darius without the risk that he’d have me arrested, and Darius seemed to prefer playing it too. So I followed him as we went in search of the next clue.
Once we were inside the small gallery, he studied the cabinets on either side of the room. “The pieces stolen from here were drawings from the cabinet and the finial from the top of the Napoleonic flag.”
I watched him move around the gallery, his natural grace making the khakis and casual sweater he wore look expensive. I could be wearing an evening gown next to him and he’d still look more elegant. He wasn’t especially tall – probably six feet or so – and his athleticism looked like it came from rowing or swimming rather than gym equipment. I thought I’d heard him say that his spirit animal was a jaguar. That felt right. He prowled the room with stealthy grace, and I found it ironic that he’d make a great thief.
Except I was the thief.
And even if thief wasn’t my usual job, I had the brain, eyeballs, and a few of the skills of one, so maybe it was time to put all that criminal potential to use.
“What was the timeline of the heist?” I murmured to him as I came to stand next to him in front of the cabinet where the missing Degas drawings had been kept.
“If DeAngelis’ information is correct, the sensors apparently logged quite a bit of back and forth activity between the Dutch Room and this one, but the Dutch Room had all the high-dollar-value paintings, and these were just sketches,” he said quietly. The docent that stood just inside the Little Salon could see into the Short Gallery, but he was paying attention to a young couple with a toddler who wanted to touch all the tapestries.
My shoulder just barely touched Darius’s arm as I studied the contents of the cabinet. “There’s a Michelangelo in there,” I said, pointing.
“And so many lovely little pocketable things, and yet they only took five drawings,” he said.
“They must have had a list,” I finally said. “Given to them by whoever planned the job. And if anything else went missing, it would come out of their cut.”
Darius turned to me, studying my face as he thought about that. “Drawings are easily transported and easily hidden. But why this room? The thieves came all the way across this floor of the building to get here, and they went back and forth to the Dutch room several times, according to the motion sensors.”
I went back to the door we’d entered and stood with my back to it. An older man with a cane excused himself and I let him pass by, then I studied the Short Gallery for a few seconds before walking across it to the window. The view looked down onto Palace Avenue and the main entrance, and suddenly I understood.
“This was the lookout station. One of them checked for police while the other grabbed the paintings from the Dutch Room.”
Darius came to join me at the window. “Of course. Whoever planned this thing sent the thieves in here to watch for cops, and also gave them their list of drawings to take.” He smelled so good that I had to take a half-step back, just so I didn’t throw myself at him.
“It makes more sense that it was planned rather than opportunistic,” I said, because talking was more socially acceptable than sniffing the man, “otherwise whoever was on lookout would have raided the cabinet for any drawing by a recognizable name. And Michelangelo is pretty fricking recognizable.”
The ghost of a smile passed over his lips, and I gave myself one point for cleverness, one point for self-restraint, and a half a point for whatever it was that made the man’s mouth twitch.
Darius’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the screen before muttering under his breath that he had to take the call. He left the room, and after a moment’s hesitation, I followed him out. He was already walking down the stairs to the East Cloister where he finally paused at the railing that overlooked the courtyard.
I waited until he’d finished his call before I approached. He looked up from his phone with a serious expression.
“I need to go meet Markham Gray.” His eyes searched mine, presumably looking for guilt. I had none where his client was concerned.
“Can I come?”
That surprised him, and I gave myself another point. “Why?” he asked.
I smiled. “I’ve heard he has great art.”
Darius stared at me in complete shock for one very long moment, and then he burst into laughter. I gave myself three whole points and a very stern talking-to about falling for the opposition.
24
Darius
“Is the collector of stolen goods more or less culpable than the thief?”
Darius Masoud
I left Anna at the museum talking to the chatty young docent Crystal, who had just come back on duty, and met Dan O’Malley in the lobby of Gray’s offices. The building had likely been a bank at one time, and just as Anna had surmised, there was art.
My art education was limited to the requisite undergraduate art history class, so I wasn’t particularly well-versed in the styles and periods, but even to my untrained eye there didn’t appear to be any particular method to Gray’s collection, other than that everything in it could be attributed to a recognizable name. There was an O’Keefe hanging near a Warhol and what looked like a Miró near something that may have been a Sargent.
“You looking at the art?” Dan came to stand next to me and spoke quietly.
“If they’re originals, they’re worth several fortunes,” I murmured back.
He shot me a quizzical look. “He’s got the dough and the swagger. You think they might not be the real deal?”
I shrugged. “I’ve had some interesting debates about authenticity recently, and what I think is that I don’t know nearly enough about the art world.”
Dan gave our names to the receptionist, who could just as easily have been a model as an economist, and after a hushed phone call we were politely directed upstairs.
Another beautiful woman, this one slightly older than the receptionist, met us at the elevator.
“Mr. Gray is just finishing a call with his son,” she said as she ushered us into an office that contained even more valuable art than the lobby had. To my eye the paintings were more
classically European and would have fit right into one of the rooms in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Gray hung up the phone and came around his desk.
“It’s good to see you again, O’Malley,” Gray said as he shook Dan’s hand. With me he was less jovial. I got a nod, not a smile, with my handshake. “Masoud, my son tells me your system failed.”
I could feel Dan bristle next to me, but I kept my voice even and unaffected. “My system did exactly what it was designed to do. The thief exploited a weakness in the type of security it was, not in the system itself.”
Markham Gray was in his late fifties and had the build of someone who still took his fitness seriously. His custom-made suit fit him perfectly, and everything from shoes to watch was designed to project class, elegance, and power. He was not a man who appreciated contradiction, no matter how mildly it was delivered.
He turned his attention back to Dan. “I expect that Cipher Security will find and return my painting to me.”
“I understand the painting wasn’t insured,” I persisted. Gray either didn’t know or didn’t care that he was poking a bear by speaking to Dan as though he were an employee.
“You can’t insure sentimental value,” he snapped at me.
“Wiring and alarming a painting inside a panic room seems a bit more than sentimental,” I said casually. The corner of Dan’s mouth lifted wryly, but I didn’t think Gray saw it. He was too angry at me to notice that Dan had started pacing around the room looking at the art in it.
“I knew the artist,” he ground out through clenched teeth. “Her family will want to know the painting is safe.”
“Is that so?” I didn’t have to feign interest. “Perhaps I could speak to the artist directly?”
“She’s dead,” he said, with what sounded like anger.
“What’s her name? Someone in her family might know something about the painting’s disappearance.”
He glared at me, and his right hand flinched as though he resisted clenching it into a fist. “Find the thief and you’ll find the painting.” His voice held menace, and Dan looked up from a Picasso sketch.
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