Deadly Little Secrets (4 page)

He looked up, and froze. This time the smile was all business, and she felt the withdrawal like a slap. “Excuse me, a moment,” he murmured, easing around the open driver's side door to speak to a man who'd come up behind her vehicle. The conversation was brief, but in another language, maybe Greek. The younger man looked uncomfortable, then nodded and turned on his heel and disappeared.

“My apologies, Agent. Please call me if I can answer any questions in the meantime. This is the office number here that reaches me directly.” He indicated one of the numbers printed on the card. It was all business now. The hint of warmth in his eyes was all that remained of the earlier flirtation.

“Thanks.” She took the card, pocketed it, and slipped into the car. She drove away, but when she looked in the rearview mirror he was still standing there, watching her until she was out of sight.

The package was waiting for her at the front desk as she came in: a copy of the list he'd given her; two eight-by-ten photos of the new paintings on the list, one a landscape, one a woman draped in a sheet looking sated and satisfied; and a copy of the appraisals and documentation on both paintings.

Circled in red at the bottom of the list were the decorator's name, address, and telephone numbers, including personal and professional e-mails and cell numbers. Ana grinned.

“So, Mr. Bromley, tell me how you really feel about this woman, eh?” She had to hand it to him; it was a good twist of the screws to have Ana call her from the Agency without any prior warning. People tended to get really wigged out when they got a call from the CIA.

Ana had no sooner dumped her loaded briefcase on her desk when her phone rang.

“Now what?” She fished it out and nearly groaned. Jen again.

“Oh. My. God. You are
not
going to believe this,” Jen said by way of greeting. “Jack just called me, and he's taking me to the coolest place this Friday. We're going to an opening at the Prometheus Gallery.”

“Prometheus?” That rang a faint bell in the back of her mind. Where had she heard it? Something recent, connected to this new case.

Jen made a rude noise. “Keep up, Ana. It's only the most exclusive gallery in the Bay Area. These openings? Invitation only. Big charity deal this time too, so there'll be celebrities and power brokers and stuff.”

“So who's the artist?” she asked Jen, just to keep the conversation going as she dumped the McDonald's bag on her desk. Pretzky couldn't slap at her for taking a personal call at lunch. Meanwhile, she was booting up her computers, getting into the system, opening the art fraud file.

Jen rattled out a name and then continued to gush about the high profile of the event. “And maybe meet Carrie McCray, you know, she's been nearly a recluse since her husband died. She's only like forty and she looks, like maybe, I don't know, twenty-eight or nine? I swear she's got one of those paintings in the basement, you know, the one that ages for you.”

“
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
” Ana absently supplied the name of the famous book and film. “So what happened to the husband?”

“Oh, really sad, you know? Just dropped dead of a heart attack in a Peet's Coffee shop right down from the gallery. By the time the ambulance got there, he was gone.”

Ana frowned, switching monitors. One of the dead guys in this cold case had died of an apparent heart attack. The only way the original team had figured the connection was that the dead man, Bob Wentz, had notes on the forgery in his safety deposit box, no history of heart disease, and a foreign substance in his tox screen.

“What did you say the husband's name was?” Ana opened the files, sifted, and waited for Jen as she muttered through names, searching for the right combo. This was probably nothing, and no connection, but she never ignored that tickle at the back of her brain that said,
Check this.

“Oh, uh, Luke Gideon. They had different last names and all, like some people do.”

Ana typed the name in and hit S
EARCH
.

“So, you wanna go?”

“Go? Go where?” Ana scrambled to tune in. What had she missed?

“To the gallery opening. Jack said he had several tickets and was there anyone I wanted to ask along. So I'm asking you, goofball. There will be, like,
serious
man action there. Rich man action.”

Ana rolled her eyes. “Let me think about it. Hey, I gotta get back to work. I'll call you later, okay?” She was about to hang up when another thought occurred. “Wait a sec, what did you say the charity was?”

“Oh!” Jen piled pounds of enthusiasm in that one word. “It's this totally cool thing, Jack's really involved. It's called the Bootstrap Foundation. They do, like, microloans and stuff. They do some here, in South Central LA, and in Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama and stuff. Some in Detroit, he said.” Jen paused, and Ana could almost hear how hard she was thinking. “It's all about people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or something. Do you know what that means? You know that kind of stuff. What the hell's a bootstrap anyway?”

She couldn't help it, she laughed. “It's the way you get tight boots on, with the loops at the top. Mostly it's a metaphor for helping yourself, or getting a little help and turning that into something big. I think that's probably the concept here.”

“Oh, okay. So anyway, this Bootstrap thing is the charity. Jack donates to it and so does Carrie McCray, so he has like, tickets, you know?”

“Yes, I get it. Okay. I'll let you know, all right?” She was itching to dig into the file. Maybe, finally, a lead she could hook into and fly with.

Ana hung up, snatched up her burger, and began tracking down Carrie McCray, the Prometheus Gallery, and the Bootstrap Foundation. Something was there, she could feel it, and even before the burger was gone, she was beginning to see the shape of it.

“Holy shit!” Ana dropped the last French fry into the trash and let her fingers fly over the keys. The gallery's patron list read like a close duplicate of her list from the cold case. Turning to the second screen, she pulled up the information on Bootstrap. “Look at that,” she crowed, noting four patrons of Prometheus listed on the platinum patrons list of Bootstrap as well, and every one of them had been scammed out of high-dollar art.

“Something new?” Pretzky demanded, rounding the corner.

Once again, Ana jumped. “Jeez, will you quit sneaking up on me?” she snapped, forgetting whom she was talking to. “You're gonna take a year off my life at this rate.”

Pretzky smirked her smirk and said, “Keeps you on your toes. Told you to break the habit.”

“I'll be on the damn floor needing CPR at this rate,” Ana muttered, embarrassed that she'd been so immersed as to not hear Pretzky's approach.

“So? What do you have?”

“Not that much,” she stalled, not wanting to reveal something she hadn't fully researched, fully documented. “Just another thread to tug, which is pretty much cause for celebration since yesterday I had diddly-squat.”

“Diddly-squat? How quaint. So? What is it?”

“Just a gallery in the city. It's very prominent, and it's also connected by patronage to ninety-seven percent of the list of those with fraudulent works.”

“And that? What's that?” Pretzky pointed to the second screen showing the logo of the Bootstrap Foundation and its donors.

“There's a fundraiser at the gallery tomorrow night, I decided to cross-check the art patrons list with the list of donors at the charity. Seventy-five percent duplication, and of the duplicates, all are on our fraud list.”

“Coincidence?” Pretzky said facetiously. “I think not. So, get yourself to that gallery opening, talk to some people, poke around.”

“It's invitation only.” Ana didn't want to involve Jen if she could help it.

“I can call Washington if you want.” Pretzky's grin was feral. It was as if she could feel how much Ana now hated going out in the field for that kind of assignment. Since Rome, everything was hard. It was hard enough doing interviews, calling people cold. Once upon a time she'd enjoyed it, seen it as dress up and catch the bad guys, even though she wasn't a trained covert-ops agent.

Data was her deal. She needed to stick with it.

And Pretzky knew she didn't want to call DC for help. DC tended to jump in and take over, which every regional bureau despised. More than that, Ana didn't want anyone in DC hearing her name before her hearing with the Panel of Inquiry.

“Not yet, thanks. I think I may have an inside track. I'll let you know.”

“Do that,” Pretzky said as she stalked away.

Great. Now she was going to have to agree to go with Jen. Jen would take it as a sign that she was weakening on the dating thing. Ugh.

On the other hand, it wouldn't hurt to drop by a gallery opening. Check out the legendary Carrie McCray, maybe get a chance to assess Jen's millionaire, Jack D'Onofrio, in person. She might even see some nice art. However, even though she had a degree in art, what some people defined as art frequently baffled Ana.

Ana braced herself, picked up the phone, and called Jen. Before she even got more than a hello out, there was a whole new spate of Jack-this, and Jack-that. Evidently she'd just hung up with the man himself. He was out of town, on the East Coast in some kind of hush-hush meeting, so Jen hadn't expected to hear from him.

“Jen,” Ana finally got a word in edgewise. “Hey, would you mind if I joined you on Friday, just for a bit?”

There was a moment of silence, then a squeal of glee. “Really? You'd go? Like dress up and everything?”

“Sure. It's business though. I need to be there. Check stuff out with the gallery owner.”

“With Carrie McCray?” Jen was incredulous. “Seriously?”

“Well, I want to take a look at this guy of yours too.” She was tweaking Jen now and waiting to see how she'd take it.

She could hear the pout in her friend's voice. “You're not going to weird him out with the third degree are you?”

“No, really, I won't. Besides a gun and weighted blackjack don't go with the dress I'm planning to wear,” she joked, getting a reluctant laugh from Jen. “It's just that I do need to go to that gallery, for a cold case I'm checking out, and it would be great if I could do it unofficially first. You know, incognito.”

“Wow, cool, like undercover?”

Ana grinned. “Sort of. I'd use another name, look a little different, but meet you there so I have an entrée. That is, if your date doesn't object.”

“I'll text him and double-check, then let you know. You gonna be in your office?”

“Yeah, but text me on my phone for now rather than e-mail. I've got a go-ahead, but I'd like to keep this off the radar.” Jen wouldn't question that, but Pretzky would have. Ana wasn't sure why she wanted to keep Jen's connection to her visit to Prometheus and Carrie off the official notes for now, but she did.

“Got it,” Jen said, her mind obviously now on other things because she didn't have anything else to say about Mr. Millionaire. “I gotta go, I'm getting another call. Later?”

“You bet,” Ana said, heading for vending to get something sweet.

Before the end of the day, Ana had a text saying there would be a pass for her at the door if she'd give Jen a name for the pass. Digging through her desk, Ana got out her folder with alternate identities and picked one of her favorites.

“Shirley Bascom. That looks good.” Shirley, as her alter ego, was about the right temperament to be going out for an evening at the gallery. A red wig and a pair of glasses would do the rest. Not that a gallery would check that closely if a millionaire gave her name as a guest. She texted the name to Jen.

She spent the rest of the week and all of Friday sorting through the data, arranging it to suit her, making sure she knew whose pieces had come from which gallery and which showing. She pulled out and sorted everything that had come from Prometheus, both before Luke Gideon's death and after it.

Only two fraudulent items were on the list after Luke's death. Interesting. She wondered what Carrie McCray had changed, if anything.

“You going tonight?” Pretzky sneaked up on her again.

Ana refused to jump, refused to give Pretzky any more satisfaction.

“Yeah. Got a pass through a connection. Using an alias, not that I really need it, but it'll keep things clear and separate.”

“Good.” Pretzky surprised her by approving. Ana had figured she'd bitch about it. “Keep me posted. Send an e-mail after you leave the event, fill me in.”

“Will do,” she said, glancing up. Pretzky was frowning at her, a strange look on her face. “Problem?”

“Of course not. See that you report in, Burton,” she said curtly, stalking away.

“Have a good weekend,” Ana called. She nearly winced again as the words left her mouth. She didn't want to fraternize with Pretzky. Didn't want to imply friendship. Didn't even want to hate the woman. She didn't want to feel anything for her current post other than the tedium of wading through the files.

Connecting with her peers, feeling for anyone, meant emotions. Emotions meant pain, and she wanted to avoid any more of that for a while. It had taken her a month after Rome to pick up the pieces of her heart. She'd known everyone on the team there, from their dogs' names to their birthdays, childhood hangouts, and even their favorite gelato. Knowing them that well made their loss a constant black hole, especially since she felt responsible. She'd lost her parents so young, and those memories had leapt in to compound the loss of her friends in Rome. One day they were there, the next, gone.

Talking to the agents who'd worked this case originally, she'd come perilously close to getting involved again. Emotionally invested. Dealing with an irrational attraction to Gates Bromley made it worse.

Uh-uh. No way.

Before she could dig herself a hole of despair—far too easy in her current mental state—the alarm on her PDA chimed the time.

“Shit,” she cursed, cutting the thing off mid ping. “An hour to get home, damn it.”

She'd waited too long to leave. She'd meant for the alarm to remind her, at home, that she had to get dressed. Shutting down her computers and flinging things into her briefcase, she hurried out.

Luckily, it took her only forty minutes to get home, a near-miracle for a Friday night. Even with that bare excess of time, Ana was still over thirty minutes late to the Prometheus Gallery to meet Jen. She hadn't finished her deep data runs on the gallery, Carrie McCray, and her late husband. She preferred to have the data at hand, but there hadn't been quite enough time to get it all done. She'd made the choice to have the info on the art be her primary focus, but she had the basics on McCray and everything else. If she had to, she could wing it.