Re: Official Leave
Sir. I’m grateful to you for granting this leave, and to the expert consultant, civilian, for making said leave possible during the course of a challenging investigation. If circumstances require this leave to be rescinded, I am prepared to return to duty at any time during the seventy-two hours.
I am fully prepared to work my ass off until it’s as skinny as yours. (I wish.)
Thank you.
She had to smile, then rose to update her board.
She stood back, studying the new faces as Roarke came in.
“I had one faint glimmer,” he began.
“I’ll take faint glimmer.”
“A contact with—we’ll stick with sick bastard for now—indicates he received a query several weeks ago. On the dark web, which the sick bastard frequents.”
“About Richie’s paintings?”
“About a hypothetical. If the artist of a certain painting, worth an estimated amount, were to die a sudden and tragic death with much of his work destroyed in this tragedy, would the sick bastard be interested in bidding on the painting.”
“That’s pretty damn vague. Yet specific.”
“My contact claims he asked for more specifics—after all, if he didn’t know the artist in question or the painting, he couldn’t speculate. However, several others expressed some interest.”
“It’s a sick bastard world.”
“And yet, without sick bastards where would we be? The upshot, for the moment, is the hypothetical refused specifics, instead boasting he’d provide them in the spring. Advising the sick bastards to prepare for bidding.”
“Weeks ago. So they knew about Richie, knew about the plans for the opening, likely had Denby selected as the trigger.” She circled. “That, the showing and all of the hype around it, would have been set. A date, specific.”
“For marketing, and the hyping, to give Richie time to finish work, to select it. Yes. And no, the meeting for the merger wouldn’t have been set weeks ago. It would have been in the works, certainly. But the very definite date and time wouldn’t have been set until closer to that date and time.”
“They ended up having to go back-to-back. Probably wasn’t their first choice, but to cash in on both, they had to go with the one, two. Still stupid.”
When Roarke took the coffee from her hand to drink it himself, she only scowled a little. She figured she owed him.
“You know the smarter, easier, more direct way to blow up the artist and most of his work? You send Denby to his studio, not to the Salon.”
“Hmm. You know, you’re right about that,” Roarke agreed. “Except, of course, they wouldn’t have been able to steal several canvases.”
“That tells me they don’t, or didn’t, have enough scratch to buy up paintings. They had it for the stocks, but not for the paintings. And they could—what you called—do the margin thing on the stocks. They didn’t have a big hunk of money for stocks and paintings, so they had to do it the stupid way.”
“Stupid, but effective,” he pointed out.
“It still tells me they don’t just want money. They need it. Not saying it’s not down to basic greed, but to gamble on these deals, they had a relatively small stake. They had to steal the paintings. And they knew they were going to weeks before the opening. Weeks before the meeting at Quantum was set in stone.”
She frowned back at the board. “It’s not a lot, but it’s more.”
“And you have more here. Your interviews?”
“Low probability on the left. The three higher on the right. I’m not sold on the three. Except this one.” She tapped a face. “He has a brother-in-law who’s retired Army, and a sister—not the one married to Army—who’s an art broker, based in Florence. And when we interviewed him, he came off nervy and evasive. Something shady there.”
“William O’Donnell.” Roarke studied the ID shot, sipped more coffee. Said, “Hmm.”
“What?” Instantly, she swung around, eyes narrowed and focused. “What kind of hmm was that? That was a, you know, some kind of hmm.”
“Obviously, I’ll need to guard my hmms in the future.”
Eve drilled a finger into Roarke’s chest. “You know this guy?”
“I don’t know William O’Donnell, but I knew a Liam Donnelly. Back in Dublin in the bad old days, and here and there a few times since.”
“He’s got fake ID? Son of a bitch.”
Even as she swung again toward her command center, Roarke took her arm. “Hold on a minute.”
“He may be a friend of yours, but—”
“Not a friend so much as a former colleague, we’ll say. He was a decent B and E man. Had some years on me when we both ran in Dublin. We had a few . . . enterprises in common over the years. Where did you find him?”
“As William O’Donnell he’s a mechanical engineer at Econo.”
“Is he now? He always did have a hand for mechanics as I recall. I’d heard he’d retired from those other enterprises. Or for the most part.”
“Decent enough at B and E to get through security at Rogan’s, at Denby’s? A one-eyed moron could get through the security at Richie’s building.”
“He’d have improved considerably to have gotten through my system at the Rogan’s house, but it’s not impossible he did. What is? He’d never be a part of murder. In tormenting women and children. It’s not Liam, not at all.”
“People change.”
“So they do, as you and I illustrate very well. But the core rarely does. It’s not Liam, Eve. He had a mother and three sisters he adored. I’d wager he still does. The only time I ever saw him use violence was when a . . . compatriot slapped a bar girl. Liam stood, lifted his chair, and slammed it into the idiot’s face. Broke several teeth, as I recall. Then he hauled the man up, ordered him to apologize. No one strikes a woman when Liam Donnelly’s about, he said. He never carried a weapon other than a pocket knife.”
“I need him in the box.”
Roarke sighed. “Give me his contact information to speed it up, and let me speak with him.”
“So he can rabbit before—”
“Bloody hell.”
She saw the flash of hot temper before he turned, paced away. And her own rose to meet it.
“Eighteen dead. Your old pal’s a suspect. I’ll have him in the box.”
“You know, sometimes the fucking cop is a keen pain in the arse.”
“I’m always the fucking cop.”
The flash of heat had cooled, she noted, and gone brutally cold when he turned back to her.
“And that I know very bloody well. Do you think a man I haven’t seen in a fecking decade matters more to me than the eighteen blown to bits? Is that what you think? How do you live with a man such as me?”
“I think old ties can squeeze tight.”
“So tight I’d betray you?”
“Don’t put that on me.” The insult boiled under her skin. “I didn’t say anything about betraying.”
“But that’s what it would be. If you don’t trust me to stand with you for those eighteen, then what the bloody hell are we doing?”
“Back on me,” she said, bitterly.
“And if you put him in the box, a man with a past and false papers, what will happen to him? If he’s innocent of the rest, as I know he is, what will happen? Deportation at best, prison at worst, because you won’t trust me to hold up my end.”
“If he rabbits?”
“He may have already, but it won’t be because he had any part in this. I’ll talk to him, and while I do, you run Liam Donnelly. See if you find anything more than I’ve told you. See if you find a man who’d beat women, frighten children, or drive a father to kill and die.”
“If you’re wrong.”
“I’ll use every resource I have, and I’ve more than he, believe me, to hunt him down and put him in your bleeding box with my own hands.”