Eyebrows on both men went up, but they waited for Darius to continue. He looked at me, so I picked up where he left off, proud that my voice was steady.
“I swear on all the corgi butts in the world that I did not know I was taking that painting. The painting I meant to take, The Sisters, belongs to my mother. She and my aunt were both the artists and the models for it, and my aunt wanted me to take it back from Gray, which I can prove. I had no idea the other painting was there until after I’d left the Gray mansion, and then, well, I couldn’t exactly put it back.”
“I’m just gonna go with corgi butts as a solemn oath,” said Dan, with a smirk.
I shot him a quick smile of gratitude and continued. “We’ve figured out that there are a couple of factors that tie The Sisters painting to the Gardner Museum. One,” I ticked off on my fingers, “my mom and aunt worked as interns at the museum thirty years ago. They painted The Sisters in the annex of the museum, where repairs and restorations of the museum’s holdings were done. Two, their painting went missing from the annex around the time of a big theft from the museum in 1990.”
“Holy shit, I know that heist,” said Dan, the surprise evident in his voice. “Word on the street was a couple of guys working for Merlino did the job.”
“Merlino went down for an armored car robbery and died in prison,” Quinn said.
“Right,” Dan nodded, “which is why I had my doubts about Merlino as the kingpin.”
“Apparently it’s been speculated,” Darius said, “that the stolen art was being kept as insurance against prison time.”
“So if he had three hundred mil in stolen art to trade, it makes no fucking sense that Merlino died in prison,” continued Dan.
I held up three fingers, which got the men’s attention. “The third thing that ties the paintings I took from Gray to the Gardner is that my mom had painted a copy of the Manet but never finished the edges of it. She didn’t see it as having any value, so she and her sister just put their painting over that one to save having to use another stretcher. ”
Dan shrugged. “So what’s the problem? The painting underneath is your mom’s copy.”
“Except I saw the edges of both paintings left behind in the frame in Gray’s panic room, and they were finished. Both of them.” Darius took a sip of his own coffee – black, I noted – and watched his bosses’ expressions.
Quinn got it immediately, and his eyes narrowed at Darius. “You’re suggesting that the painting on the wall of the Gardner is a forgery, and the one behind The Sisters is a real Manet.”
Darius nodded, and then glanced at me to drop his next bombshell. “Apparently, the original Madame Auguste Manet was in the annex for repairs on the night of the Gardner heist.”
“No sh—?” I managed to stop the word from forming, but not the thought.
“No sh—.” Darius mimicked back to me.
“And that is surprising because?” Quinn asked.
“Because there’s a crime scene photo that shows the secret door to the annex was left open on the night of the heist,” I said, still staring at Darius. He pulled a manila folder out of his bag and opened it on the table for Quinn and Dan. Inside was a copy of the black and white photo, a picture of the Madame Auguste painting, and copies of the photos we’d taken comparing the one from behind the sisters to the one hanging on the wall of the Blue Room. He also surprised me with a close-up photo of what was left behind in the frame in Gray’s panic room after I cut the paintings out of it. The edges of both paintings were clearly visible, and both were painted black.
“How does Gray fit into all of this,” Quinn asked grimly.
“He knew my mom and aunt when they worked at the museum. He was in a band with one of the guards, and they apparently practiced their music and had parties after hours at the museum in the months before the theft. There are a lot of factors that point to an inside job, and it seems like Markham Gray was tight with the guards who opened the door for the thieves.”
“Most damning is the fact that the two paintings were wired and alarmed to the wall in his panic room,” Darius added.
I tried to meet his eyes, but he didn’t look at me. Quinn studied the photos before his gaze found mine. “I’d like to see whatever proof you have of ownership,” he said.
I nodded.
“Where are the paintings now?” Dan asked.
“My mom has the one she and her sister painted. It’s hers,” I said with a decent amount of fierceness in my tone. “And I have Madame Auguste.”
Quinn still studied me through narrowed eyes, and I met them squarely. It was either that or run away yipping with my tail between my legs. I forgot to close my mouth, though, and accidentally whispered in my best Dr. Evil voice, “Frickin’ laser beams.”
The corner of his mouth trembled, and I wondered if he was having a seizure. I spent thirty seconds picturing the paramedics, the gurney, and all the heroic measures people would go through to save his life, until he finally spoke. “Is the painting safe where it is, Ms. Collins?”
“Safe as long as no one knows I have it,” I said.
“Make it safer than that, please.” He had already turned to speak to Darius when I interrupted.
“Can I just ask what you plan to do about me?”
Quinn’s gaze returned to me. “Is there something to be done about you, Ms. Collins?”
I exhaled, and I felt about as able to lie to Quinn as I did to Darius. “You know I stole the painting, and the police could probably find something that’ll get me convicted for breaking and entering at a minimum.”
“Are you a criminal?” Quinn asked in the same, almost-bored tone of voice.
“Not generally.”
“Do you feel the need for punishment?” he asked.
“Are you offering?” I said before I could smack a hand over my face.
Dan laughed, Darius scowled, and Quinn just looked at me in silence. I would have been way more uncomfortable in that moment if I hadn’t been counting prime numbers to myself, just to keep from saying the next idiotic thing that popped into my head.
“What do you do for a living, Ms. Collins?” Quinn asked, interrupting me at 239.
“You can knock off the Ms. Collins stuff, you know. Normal people don’t say each other’s names in conversations, they just, you know, look at each other. Your ‘Ms. Collins’ this and ‘Ms. Collins’ that is designed to intimidate me with how very polite you can be while you twist my arm up behind my back. My name is Anna. I talk too much, have no filter, and clearly should not be out in public without a gag order. Also, I’m a bounty hunter.”
The corner of Quinn’s mouth twitched again, and I gave the seizure up as wishful thinking. He was laughing at me. One twitch at the corner of the man of steel’s mouth was the equivalent of a full belly laugh from a normal person.
“We would appreciate any help you are willing to render us, Anna,” he said, emphasizing his use of my first name.
“Help doing what?” I asked, trying not to sound belligerent.
“Discovering the truth,” he answered.
“Why? Gray was your client – doesn’t that pose ethical problems for you?”
“In my experience,” Quinn said, “it’s better to be slapped with the truth than kissed by a lie. I prefer to see the hand coming so I can control how hard it lands.”
I realized that I respected Quinn Sullivan, and actually liked Dan O’Malley. Dan laughed at the things I didn’t say out loud, and Quinn said things I hadn’t considered. Not a bad potential working environment. “What’s it take to get a job here?” I asked.
“A clean record,” Quinn answered without hesitation.
Damn.
“Cool.” I said quickly. “I’ll bring you what I have to back up my mom’s ownership of The Sisters.” I stood up and turned toward Darius, who looked at me with an odd expression on his face. “Let me know how I can help, and I’ll do what I can while I’m in town.”
“You have plans to trave
l, Ms. … Anna?” Quinn said carefully.
I shrugged. “I always have plans to travel. It was interesting to meet you both.”
Darius exchanged some indefinable look with his bosses that I didn’t try to analyze because I was too intent on leaving the room. He caught up to me at the staircase.
“Can I come with you?”
“You don’t trust me to bring the docs back?” I shot back, more defensively than I intended to.
“I’d like to see where you live,” he said simply.
I had turned to face him, ready to do battle, but all the fight blew out. “Um. Okay.”
He smiled and held the door to the hidden staircase open for me. “Who else uses this way?” I asked him.
“Just me,” he said, “and now you.”
34
Anna
“My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.”
Anna Collins
We didn’t say much to each other on the ride to my studio. I was weirdly nostalgic to be back in Darius’s Land Cruiser. I tried not to pet the dashboard but failed. Darius was too distracted to comment or even smirk, and I wondered what was fueling the little hamster on the wheel in his head.
“You’ll have to find a spot on the street,” I told him when we pulled onto Burton Street. “It’s why I don’t keep a car.”
“Where do you park your bike?” he asked.
“How do you know I have a bike?”
He gave me a side-eye, but said nothing.
“There’s a spot by the dumpster behind the building. It’s protected and mostly hidden, and I make sure the garbage guys get cookies a couple of times a month.”
“Cookies?” He sounded incredulous and … annoyed.
“It’s not a bribe,” I said quickly. “It’s a courtesy. They’re considerate of my bike, I’m considerate of their stomachs.”
He lapsed back into silence, and I wondered which one of us was being unreasonable. He found a spot a block away, and I told him the history of the building as we walked.
“My aunt left me her space at the Carl Street Studios, which was what Carl Miller and Sol Kagan called their design project in the 1920s and 30s. Carl Miller was an artist who mostly worked in architectural design, and a lot of the things he became famous for were first tried in this building.”
I led the way into the old Victorian mansion and compound that had been converted to twenty-two individual spaces. Mine was a small studio on the third floor, and I watched Darius’s face for his expression as I opened the door.
He didn’t disappoint. The hamster wheel stopped spinning in his brain when he stepped inside my studio, and I saw his imagination engage. I looked around, trying to see everything through his eyes. The space was a single room with a soaring ceiling and tall windows with stained glass accents that made the walls glow with jewel tones. The wood floor was laid with contrasting strips of ebony, walnut, and ash, and the fireplace which dominated one wall was surrounded by art deco tiles in all the shades of green. I had set my bed up on a platform under the window, and the heavy tapestry I threw over it during the day, plus big pillows against the wall and a thick rug on the floor, gave it a distinctly divan vibe. A small galley kitchen and same-sized bathroom occupied the other side of the studio, and an old wardrobe that I’d inherited with the space, which held my small collection of jeans, T-shirts, boots, and two dresses, dominated one wall. The only other thing of Alex’s which had remained in the studio was her easel, which stood in the corner holding the painting she had been working on when she died.
Darius strode directly to the easel. It was a portrait of two women, nearly identical to The Sisters painting in style and use of color. The only real difference was that the subjects weren’t my mom and Alex, they were Colette and me. She’d used a photograph my dad had taken of us when we were home for Christmas a couple of years ago.
“The letter Alex left for me was taped to the back of the canvas,” I said, as Darius examined the faces. I’d spent a long time doing the same. He picked up the snapshot from the easel where I’d found it and flipped it over to read the inscription on the back. “Sophia misses you every day,” he read. “Whose handwriting is this?”
“My dad’s. I’m not sure my mom ever knew he’d been in touch with her sister, and I’ve never asked him about it.”
“The painting is beautiful, Anna.”
“It is, isn’t it. She didn’t finish the edges.” The edges of the canvas that stretched over the wooden frame were still white, and it made the painting feel more like a print than something a paintbrush had ever touched.
He studied the edges then walked around to peer at the back of the canvas. “Single canvas?”
“Yeah. I checked.”
“Can I see the letter she left you?”
I fished it out of a drawer in the wardrobe where I kept things that were precious to me, and Darius saw what else was in the drawer before I could shut it.
“You have a T. rex costume?” he asked as he looked over my shoulder.
I snorted. “You don’t?” I shut the drawer before he could see the rhinestone tiara.
He laughed and wandered away from the painting. “The tile baseboards are cool.”
“Right? Only a few of them repeat, and all of them were hand-fired in a kiln that was kept downstairs for all the artists to use.”
“I like the heart,” he said, pointing to a tile I loved near the fireplace.
I tried not to swoon as I handed him the letter. Swooning was poor form when corsets were not involved. They were par for the course when corsets were involved, but that was not a story that bore repeating.
“Do you mean to say such lovely things to unsettle me, or are you really a guy who thinks hearts are cool?”
He looked surprised. “Sorry?” He gaped slightly, then seemed to realize he was doing it and stopped. “You do remember I was denied membership in the man club of manly men, right?”
“And yet, here you are – undeniably male.” I waved my hand in an up-and-down motion that denoted my clear thoughts on the matter of his attractiveness.
“And here I am,” he echoed, as though wondering why.
I studied my aunt’s handwriting as he read her letter. She had nice handwriting, sort of architectural and blocky, and I wished I had gotten letters from her my whole life.
“May I photograph this and the painting?” he asked carefully.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
I plopped down on my bed to wait for him as he pulled out his phone and took the photos. When he was done, he refolded the letter and handed it to me, then sat on the edge of the bed next to me and looked around the room.
“I expected to see books.”
I leaned over him to pull my kindle out from under my pillow. “I travel too much to buy paperbacks, and the studio isn’t really big enough for bookshelves.”
“It’s beautiful here,” he said quietly.
“Thank you. I think so too.”
We sat side by side, but not close enough to touch, and finally, Darius sighed. “Why did you ask to work at Cipher?”
I did not expect that question and looked over in surprise. “I like your bosses.”
He didn’t meet my eyes, but nodded. “They’re good guys. Quinn’s intense, but his wife makes him human. She reminds me a little of you in some ways.”
I smirked. “She jumps out of planes and climbs Half Dome whenever she gets a chance?”
He smiled, still not looking at me. “No. Her filter is … odd.”
“Ah, but she has one,” I wagged my finger. “Not the same.”
He was silent for another long moment as his eyes wandered the room, settling on a mirror I’d hung on one wall that was almost completely obscured by my collection of postcards from my adventures.
“I have Sunday roast, Iranian-style, with my family every Monday night.” He looked over at my mouth, already open to protest the ridiculousness of that statement, and laughed. “Yes, I’m awar
e of the irony – Iranian food for a quintessential British meal, served on Monday instead of Sunday. It’s a habit left over from my father’s taxi driving days, because everyone else had Sunday roast taxi needs, and Mondays were typically quiet.”
“Makes sense.”
He inhaled. “Why did you ask to meet my parents?”
I hadn’t quite formulated words to go with the request when I’d asked, so I winged it now. “You’ve met my family,” I watched his face and was happy to see the upward quirk of his lips, “and that probably filled in some of the colors of your picture of me.”
He smiled properly at that. “One or two,” he said.
I wondered what color my mom’s topless dip in the freezing ocean added to the picture of Anna Collins, then decided I hoped it was hot pink or sunset orange.
I met Darius’s eyes. “I want to add some colors to my picture of you.”
His eyes searched mine long enough for my inside voice to start whispering self-consciously. “Would you like to come with me tonight?” he finally asked.
I sighed. “I do realize I just put you on the spot. I could meet them at your boat, or at a café. If I go to a family dinner, all kinds of awkward assumptions could be made about the non-existence of our status.”
“You said we’re friends. That’s a status, right?”
“Of course it is,” I said impatiently. “Some of my best friends are … friends.” I couldn’t help the smile at my own nonsense, and Darius finally lightened up to smile too.
“The restaurant we went to in Boston was good, but my mum’s cooking is much better. Come. They enjoy meeting my friends.”
His expression had shifted from carefully neutral to friendly-ish. It made me want to tickle him, just to see him laugh, but I resisted the urge. Barely. It was a close one though.
“Sure, I’d love to. Thank you for inviting me,” I said formally, in an attempt to quell the tickling instinct.
“Great,” he said, standing up. “I’ll pick you up at six?”
“Sure. Is this okay?” I said, looking down at myself. “It’s either this or a dress. I don’t really have other options besides jeans.”
Code of Honor Page 21