“He’s gaining! Faster!” Denis shrieks.
He’s gaining. I picture Kim Lord’s stalker: a balding man with shiny skin. No. A guy who’s almost handsome except for the weak chin that he tries to hide with a scraggly beard. No. A businessman, gray suit, coppery hue, chilly and elegant. His image doesn’t stay fixed in my mind except for the stare, its calculation, its possessiveness. For years, he’s been patient. For years, he’s bought up everything she’s ever made, but he can’t wait any longer. He wants to own all of her work; he wants to own her. She will be the ultimate treasure in his collection.
“Don’t stop now!” Denis shouts, pointing to my wheels. I look down at my slowing feet and pump them until they’re blurs again. Another face slips into my mind: the woman from the flash drive, with her pretty, haggard eyes, her downturned mouth, a blue collar. Who is she? Then another face: Kim Lord as Roseann Quinn, casting her vague, doomed smile over Grand Avenue, Fairfax Avenue, Western, and Sunset, this entire enormous city. Where is she?
I ride so hard I am gasping.
On my desk when I return: a green folder, a sticky note that says Per your request in Juanita’s nunnish cursive. Inside, yellowed and new clippings, Bas’s name highlighted in each article. Most are from 2001, when the Rocque hired him, and they recap the same biography: Yates graduate, a long stint at Catesby’s auction house, then a slew of development and administrative jobs at East Coast museums.
The oldest clipping, from the Yates alumni magazine, transcribes an interview with Bas when he still worked at Catesby’s as an auction specialist. In the accompanying photo, Bas smirks with smug boyishness. He stands between two Yates friends, clearly the handsome one, the budding star, arms looped over their shoulders.
I skim the text, about to turn it over, when something Bas says catches my eye:
Auction houses are changing the playing field for contemporary artists. Some artists—like Chris Branson and Kim Lord—have proved that they don’t need intermediaries to determine their value. They’re skipping the gallerists and selling straight to collectors. Big collectors. I know this will sound sacrilegious to some, but houses like Catesby’s could become as important as museums in determining the Old Masters for future generations.
The article is dated 1996. Kim Lord had just had her first show, The Flesh. Bas must have watched the paintings sell at Catesby’s for high prices, riding the artist’s wave of talent and daring. How strange he must feel now to watch his career come full circle, to work at a museum and be offered a priceless but monetarily useless gift from the same artist. And then to have her vanish. My eyes snap on another statement:
It’s all evolving because of international money. First the Japanese got in on it, and now the Russians. And they can be different about provenance. Some view ownership as a private investment, not a public statement like most American collectors. I have a friend who makes a great living buying contemporary art for collectors in Asia who don’t want their names and ownership public. Everything is under an alias. And he’s having to buy twentieth-century work because the Rembrandts and Monets—they’re just gone. Snapped up. It’s making the contemporary art market even crazier. Just wait ten, fifteen years and see how the prices have skyrocketed.
I flip through the rest of the folder. Nothing there exactly, except an unsettling feeling that Bas hasn’t changed since that interview. Not underneath. He’s always been dazzled by money, especially by how money shapes the art world. That might have blinded him, or tied his hands, when it came to an obsessive collector who wanted to buy everything an artist had ever made.
I dial Cherie.
“The arraignment is scheduled for late this afternoon.” Her voice has lost none of its clip, but deep down I hear a note of defeat. “There’s enough evidence.”
I tell her Dee’s story about Kim’s sister leaving rehab.
“Rachel Lord, missing since March,” says Cherie. “I’ve been following that lead, but—” She stops herself. “Is that why you called me, or did you want to get a message to Shaw?”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s surprisingly stoic,” she says. “Nights there can be hard.”
And grief is hard. Greg in a jail cell is an image that refuses to materialize in my mind. Instead, I see him in the weeks after his mother died, his face hawkish, badly shaven, his clothes hanging like wilted leaves. Truth be told, I didn’t know what to feel about Greg then: he was so far gone into himself that he was a stranger to me. He sat at the kitchen table and stared into space, or went on walks alone. Sometimes he held books but didn’t read them. I roamed his periphery, making useless soups and toast, wondering if I should turn on the radio or let the silences cloak us. That was the beginning of the ending: I couldn’t be Theresa for Greg, and I couldn’t be myself either, because I reminded him too much of how he’d resisted her influence all his life. How he’d settled on an ordinary, pretty girl from the country, when he was the son of a queen.
“Do you have a message for Shaw?” Cherie repeats.
I can’t ask her to ask him about the flash drive. “Not really,” I say. “Tell him I’m thinking of him.”
“Can I ask you something?” says Cherie. “Shaw said he tried to talk with you at the Gala, but you avoided him. Why?”
For a stunned moment I wonder: Is Greg trying to implicate me?
“I was embarrassed,” I say. “Humiliated might be a better term. We hadn’t seen each other much since our breakup.”
“You were humiliated by Shaw Ferguson,” she repeats.
I know where she’s going. Where Detective Ruiz was going. Angry ex. Prime motive, right?
“Yes, humiliated. In an ordinary, dumped kind of way,” I say coldly.
“I see.” She waits. “Why did you call Shaw on the night of the Gala?”
I remember my phone in Yegina’s hands that night. “My coworker asked me to call him, to find out where Kim was.”
“But you hung up before he answered. Were you upset with him?”
And so we go on for several minutes of useless prying, until I’ve had enough, and tell her I have to go.
I click end on my phone, but I waste the next thirty minutes googling Cherie Rhys to see how many cases she’s actually won (turns out, quite a few). I scroll through page after page of her pretty, intelligent face, a thinner and sharper version of Kevin’s. It bothers me to think of them discussing me. Did he give her the idea that I might be a suspect? Then I remember Kevin’s article, the call from ArtNoise, the faxed copy of it I was supposed to review.
Downstairs, the fluorescent mailroom is neatly stuffed to the brim with boxes of museum letterhead, shipping materials, and one sluggish photocopy machine. A wall label beside the copy machine says:
Copier, 1998
5 × 3 × 4 feet
Metal, lights, toner, infuriating paper jams
I check my mailbox. Empty. I check the boxes around it. Also empty. I check the fax machine. Nothing. I can’t believe Cherie Rhys—anyone—would think I could hurt Kim Lord. But who did? I wonder if Evie has had any luck with the provenance question. Although I only asked her this morning, it feels like years ago.
When I return upstairs, Yegina is marching out from Jayme’s office with a big binder, her cheeks still pink from our exercise class.
“Art of the Race Car is almost off the schedule,” she says. “I just have to win over Development. They’re going to hit the roof, though.”
“The Art of Yegina.”
She rolls her eyes. “Art of J. Ro, more like it,” she says, but the flush deepens. “You want to go out for happy hour tonight?” She follows me into my office. “Sliders and fries half off at Luster’s.”