Island of Thieves

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “Doesn’t matter. He hired me to keep the gallery safe without mortifying the honored guests, so that’s what I’m doing.”

  “And Olen?”

  “I don’t think Anders buys it either. He says the art’s safe enough without my help.”

  “And he ordered you to stay away.”

  Shaw shrugged. “Your father outranks Anders. Unless he tells me to go, I’m staying.”

  “At least you have tenacity. Why didn’t you tell me this from the start?”

  “One of Mr. Rohner’s requirements was secrecy. Just him and Anders.”

  She frowned. “You should have known he didn’t mean me.”

  “He was very specific about not telling you.”

  Sofia sat with that for a moment, her face clouded. “Yet here you are,” she said.

  “Because I’m not getting the whole story. That, if you’ll pardon my language, pisses me off. Yesterday Anders had three crates loaded off the Vóllmond into your gallery. He and Avery Morton and Nelson Bao met there after midnight. They were inside for a few hours. And later Kilbane tried to escort me off the island, with prejudice.”

  “Crates?”

  “I’m guessing stevedore work is usually beneath Anders’s attention. Any idea what he would have in those crates? And why he would prevent any intrusion?” Shaw pointed to her tablet on the chessboard table. “He seems to have locked you out, too.”

  “An error, no doubt. You said Mr. Bao and Mr. Morton? The scientists?”

  “Right.”

  She drummed her fingers on the leather armrest. “I believe I know what’s going on, Mr. Shaw. And while Olen may be overreacting, I understand his desire for security. He and the scientists are preparing for one of our discussions with Jiangsu and Bridgetrust, most likely to be held tomorrow.”

  “A business meeting?” Shaw didn’t bother to hide his disbelief.

  “A specific one, yes.”

  “So what’s in the crates?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t be forthcoming about that, Mr. Shaw. This is highly proprietary information. Hence why Olen is keeping the necessary materials in the gallery.”

  “Great.”

  “This may explain my father’s . . . subterfuge with the story about the potential art thief. He wanted your expert eye watching the gallery without revealing exactly why.”

  “If he’d wanted that, he could have just hired me to stand outside holding a halberd like a palace guard. No deception required. What are the odds that someone might be after your company secrets?”

  Sofia leaned back. “You think we may be at risk of that?”

  “Ask your dad.”

  “I intend to. In the meantime, if there’s even a chance . . . We find ourselves without a security detail. I realize you have no obligation after what happened last night, but if you’d continue in the same capacity, we’d all appreciate it.”

  Shaw wondered if Anders would share that appreciation. “I’ll earn my pay.”

  “Thank you.”

  Shaw rose and walked to the door. He turned back.

  “Why were you checking on the art collection so early this morning?” he said.

  “Warren told me he believed you had been . . . skulking, was how he put it, around the main house last night. From what you said, he wasn’t entirely wrong about that.”

  “You thought I might have paid your statues a visit.”

  “They are very valuable. To me at least.”

  And I’m a known criminal, thought Shaw. At least he knew where he stood in the Rohners’ estimations.

  SEVENTEEN

  The corporate leaders and their teams assembled in the pavilion at ten o’clock in the morning. They’d had breakfast in the main dining area of the north wing, with ample time after for espresso drinks served by a professional barista. The center of the huge pavilion had been restaged since the banquet the night before, with rectangular tables, a projector and screen, a rolling whiteboard, and other sundries.

  Maybe that’s what had been in the damn crates, Shaw thought sourly. A decade’s supply of highlighter pens and Post-it notes.

  Olen Anders looked up from his seat and saw Shaw standing on the flagstone path outside the pavilion. The chief of staff’s expression went rigid. Shaw waited, but Anders made no sign of wishing to speak with him. Too busy with the day’s negotiations to address a tiny matter like Shaw’s brawl with the company bullies.

  Sebastien and Sofia Rohner seemed solely focused on their work as well. If Sofia had confronted her father about the art gallery earlier in the morning, they had apparently set the topic aside for now.

  Shaw’s phone rang. Cyndra.

  “Hey,” he said. “How’s the first week of summer?”

  “Good. I’m playing Elder Scrolls.”

  “Who’s the farthest today?” Shaw and Cyn kept track of new and far-flung international players in her online games, marking them on a map. Cyn hadn’t quite convinced Addy that this was the same as studying geography, but at least they didn’t argue about it.

  “There’s a girl from Belgium. We have that one already.”

  “Yeah. Where’s Addy?”

  “At Holliday.”

  Holliday House, the care home where Addy’s friend Penelope was receiving treatment. Cyndra had been on her own for at least a couple of nights each week as Addy took a shift.

  “What’s the island like?” asked Cyndra. Shaw could tell she was continuing to play the game as she talked.

  “It’s a supervillain lair without the sharks.”

  Cyn chuckled. “Are you going to blow it up? You really should.”

  “Not in my job description. But I’ll try to bring you back a death ray.”

  “Cool.”

  “You all right?” he said. It wasn’t like the teenager to call out of the blue. Not to call Shaw anyway. She spent hours each day online, receiving a constant flow of information from what seemed like six dozen friends.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You lonely? Stanley’s a good dog, but he never gets my jokes.”

  “I guess.”

  “Give me another day here and I’ll be back. I can hang around the house more while Addy’s away. We’ll marathon the horror movies she doesn’t know you rent.”

  “’Kay. Love you,” Cyndra said, the final bits of her attention slipping back to the multiplayer world.

  “Back at you.”

  With everyone except for the household staff ensconced in the pavilion, it was easy for Shaw to keep an eye on the art gallery. The day was cool. The salt air smelled good. He raised the collar of his jacket and watched the boats on the strait, some of them a mile off. The wind was high, and the sailboats, heeling with their spinnakers as full as balloons, gave the illusion of matching the speed of the power cruisers. Shaw wondered if Hollis would be out on the water today. Weather like this was catnip to the cheerful smuggler.

  He hadn’t seen Hollis as frequently the past few months. Shaw had been busy with Crossroads, and Hollis had been spending a lot of time with Paula Claybeck. They were an odd pair, the effusive Ulsterman and the stoic patrician doctor. Hollis seemed happier than Shaw had ever seen him. That was something. He knew that Hollis had been married once, very young. It hadn’t taken, and the breakup had been part of Hollis’s reason for relocating an ocean and a continent away.

  After the teams had eaten lunch, there seemed to be a time designated for all the participants to stretch their legs. The glass passageways made it easy for Shaw to track their movements on the north side of the estate from a distance. Like watching mice scuttling through the plastic tubes of a habitat. Once the meeting restarted, Shaw returned to his surreptitious patrol, circling by the gallery every half hour. The afternoon passed without apparent resolution to the business deal. At least no one popped champagne corks. The meeting broke just after five o’clock, and the teams scattered, some back to their guest suites and some to the shore. Sebastien and Sofia Rohner and Olen Anders returned to the house.
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br />   Staff began to prepare the dining area for the evening meal. Shaw’s stomach growled. He’d cadged quick meals from the kitchen during the day when time had allowed, mostly cold cuts and cheeses he could eat while walking the grounds. He avoided looking at the dinner roast steaming on its silver tray as he crossed the patio outside.

  An hour later, Shaw spotted Karla Lokosh cutting across a passage to the courtyard. She wore a shiny green long-sleeved workout shirt and running shoes and shorts that gave him a chance to admire her dancer’s legs. Her hair was tied into a ponytail and her face flushed pink all the way to her ears from the run. Shaw waved in greeting, and she changed direction to jog up to him.

  “Hey,” she said, “where have you been all day?”

  “Stocking the forest with pheasant and stag,” said Shaw.

  “I look forward to the grouse hunt later. Are you joining us for dinner?”

  He shook his head. “Duty calls.”

  “Then maybe we’ll have a drink after. The Rohners are showing a movie in the dining hall at eight.”

  “I’ll swing through if I can.”

  “Good. And I’m late—again. See you then.”

  Shaw went to his room to rinse off and change clothes. Warmer gear for the windy night. Black carpenter pants and a turtleneck with a fleece vest and light jacket. He put on his black hiking boots and stuffed a watch cap into his pocket on the way out the door.

  Dinner service was on to the entrées by the time he returned to the north wing to scarf some food. He went to the kitchen and made small sandwiches of rolls and roast and wrapped them in a linen napkin to take with him. The staff eyed him oddly, as they had since he’d first come to the island, but no one asked questions.

  Though the sun was still above the horizon, a crescent moon was out, mimicking the shape of Briar Bay. Give him a monstrous pen and he could have drawn a map of the island on the lunar surface.

  He chose a different spot from which to watch the gallery, in the first stand of trees past the main house. The placement didn’t have a direct line of sight on the gallery’s outside entrance, but he could see the beach leading to that door, and he would be hidden from view himself. If a cautious thief had spotted him on the shore last night, maybe Shaw’s absence tonight would coax the burglar into action.

  Dusk came quickly, with full dark dragging its feet. Whatever movie the Rohners were showing would be nearly over. Some prestige drama, Shaw guessed. A new release still on its first run, playing in theaters, with an expert projectionist to run each reel. The family wouldn’t miss a chance to show off their influence by acquiring a personal copy.

  Between the looming forest and the back of the great house, the rest of the estate was hidden from his view. The strait looked empty and black. Any boats still on the water were too far out for Shaw to see their running lights.

  Rohner’s island really was an astounding place. Shaw wished the trip were under different circumstances. He’d have liked to bring Wren here, if only to show her the stars and the moon.

  Just before one o’clock in the morning, he saw a man with a flashlight walking up the estate path toward the gallery and the main house. Short, cautious steps on the flagstones. As the man neared, moonlight shone off the leather of his jacket.

  Avery Morton, the chemist from Bridgetrust Group. Walking directly to the gallery. Shaw couldn’t see him open the exterior door, but in another moment the familiar glow of the gallery’s track lights switching on appeared from the skylights atop the roof. How had Morton gotten inside? Had he borrowed Anders’s access wand? Or had Anders programmed Morton’s to allow the man free rein?

  After fifteen minutes the skylights dimmed again. Morton reappeared, walking back the way he’d come. He was carrying something now, a small container that he held cradled with two hands like a football as he navigated the path.

  The container was much too small to hold one of the statues. Shaw slipped out of the forest to follow Morton. Maybe he could get a look at what the chemist was carrying.

  He kept close to the slope above the shore, moving between clumps of rock. Morton seemed oblivious, intent on keeping his footing on the flagstones. Shaw followed the chemist past the north wing to the darkened pavilion.

  Not completely dark, Shaw saw as he knelt in the shadows beyond the flagstone path. Bill Flynn, the Bridgetrust head, sat with Sebastien Rohner and Linda Edgemont at a table close to the main entrance. Morton entered through one of the pavilion’s outer doors to join them. Standing lamps had been set by the table. The small bright pool within the huge glass house was like a single flaw catching the light within a diamond.

  Morton removed bottles from the container. Flasks and small jars, tapered and sealed at the tops and filled with liquids. He sat and began speaking with the two CEOs and the attorney. Unlike his almost glum demeanor at dinner the previous day, now Morton seemed jazzed. Big gestures and urgent scribbling on papers in front of him.

  The group talked for half an hour. Rohner seemed to call an end by standing up. Morton replaced the flasks into the container while Flynn gathered the papers that Morton had been making notes on.

  They left through the main entrance to the pavilion and headed for the north wing. Flynn and Morton and Linda Edgemont presumably to their guest quarters and Rohner on to the main house.

  Shaw recalled Linda Edgemont’s comment about the business leads pushing to finish their conference early. Meeting at one-thirty in the morning seemed to stretch the concept. And if they had been talking chemistry, where was Bao, the other scientist? Or Chen, for that matter.

  Shaw retreated to the shore and headed for the gallery again. He stepped nimbly over the splits in the rock and the small permanent pools waiting for the advancing tide to refresh them. Moonlight tinted the phosphorescent curl of each wave.

  Then he saw the hand.

  It extended up from the rock, as if the shore had somehow formed around it. Pale fingers stretching skyward. Reminiscent of every zombie-movie poster Shaw had ever seen, a clutching claw dragging its way out of the grave.

  EIGHTEEN

  Shaw stared for an instant. A wave splashed over and around the hand and then retreated, leaving the pale fingers dripping.

  He moved toward the ghastly scene. A deep crevice in the rock revealed itself, like a sliver of night in the island. Each step allowed Shaw to see another inch of the arm attached to the white hand. The sleeve of a dark jacket had fallen nearly to the arm’s elbow.

  In another few strides, he was next to the fissure, looking down at the rest of the body within.

  Nelson Bao. Unquestionably dead. He lay on his right side, with his head toward the water and a few inches lower than his legs and feet. An awkward position defined by the shape of the rock beneath him. Bao’s left knee rested on a cluster of barnacles. The serrated edges of the tiny shells had torn the fabric of his trousers. His left arm had become wedged in one of the crevice’s stony wrinkles, holding it aloft. Without the beckoning hand, Shaw might have stepped over him and not even noticed.

  Bao’s head didn’t look normal, even under the circumstances. Shaw knelt for a closer examination. The crown of the chemist’s skull was misshapen. Staved in. His left profile as pale as his hand. Lips parted and teeth showing. The eye halfway open.

  As Shaw watched, a surge flooded the crevice, washing over the body. Bao’s clothes flapped, and his hair swirled momentarily. Even the body moved, buoyed by the water. Then the wave retreated, and everything settled back into place. Only the trapped arm remained perfectly still.

  Shaw took a deep breath. Bao had lost a lot of blood. His crushed head almost certainly the cause. A powerful enough blow to create a large divot in the man’s skull. The waves had washed the body clean and would continue to do so.

  Perhaps Bao had been walking and distractedly missed seeing the crevice and fallen headlong into the gap, his skull striking the side of the fissure. But then the wound should be on the forehead, or the temple if Bao had reflexively turned
away from the coming impact.

  And the tide was going out, not in. Bao would have been farther up the shore if he’d been walking, assuming the chemist hadn’t been wading hip-deep at the time. Shaw looked inland. Hard to imagine Bao tripping and falling so violently on the flatter part of the beach. Had he been running for some reason and taken a spill?

  High tide had been around midnight. Both Morton and Shaw had passed close to this spot on the shore an hour later, as Shaw followed the Bridgetrust man to the pavilion. Assuming Bao had died here, it must have been afterward. Maybe only by a few minutes. An ebbing tide couldn’t have come high up the beach and carried his body outward.

  Assume that Bao had suffered the injury to his head farther up the beach, out of the water. For what happened after that, Shaw could think of only two possibilities. Bao had crawled or staggered into the water and died. Or someone had dragged him in, maybe with the hope that the tide would carry the body out into the strait. Either way Bao had become lodged in the crevice by the surging waves, and here he was.

  Shaw stood but did not move away. He didn’t want to chance stepping on or kicking anything loose from where it might lie.

  People didn’t generally carry around blunt objects. They took advantage of what was there.

  He walked slowly in a wide circle, scanning the ground. He left his flashlight in his pocket. No reason to attract attention until he was ready. When his first circle came up empty, he walked a larger one, without much expectation. If there had been a weapon, a rock or a driftwood log, it could have been taken away or thrown a distance, on land or into the water. It wasn’t close in any event.

  Shaw reached for his phone to call Anders. Then changed his mind.

  He returned to where Bao lay. Another surge of tide forced the body into a false dance. When it subsided, Shaw knelt and leaned down to run his hands over Bao’s clothing. The corpse felt no different from the cold, wet fabric draping it. Warmth had long since left the body. Any texture of its flesh was lost in the icy drops numbing Shaw’s fingers.