Deceptive (4 page)

“But that’s not true,” Zoe said.

Oscar continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Then there are the flyers, which have your fingerprints on them. The rest of them are buried with the body.”

“Why are you doing this? You killed a woman for a
painting
?”

“We considered holding one of your friends, like Helen, or a relative—your Aunt Amanda or your mother—and demanding the painting as ransom.” Zoe closed her eyes. This was a nightmare. This man knew everything about her.

“However, Mr. Gray believes individuals always work harder to rescue themselves than to rescue others, no matter how close the relationship. Saving your own skin is the highest motivator. And that is exactly what will happen if you bring us the painting.”

“You’re going to magically make Lucinda’s body disappear from my yard?”

He frowned at her. “No. We will remove it in a way that draws no attention, insure it is found, and that there is no connection to you.”

“What about her family, her friends, her business? You can’t fix that.”

“No.” His phone beeped, and he reached inside his coat for it. He checked the display as he said, “Collateral damage is often unavoidable.” He replaced his phone. “I really must go now. I’ll see myself out.”

––––––––

“I
can’t quite believe it.” Zoe and Jack stood side-by-side staring at the new hedge along the fence. “It just seems so bizarre. Should we...check?”

“I think we have to. I’ll get a shovel.” It was fully dark, and the porch light threw their giant-sized shadows across the backyard.

While Jack was in the garage, Zoe edged up to the row of bushes as if there might be a rattlesnake in the woodchips. Jack returned and poised the shovel under the leaves of the first bush. He put his foot on the edge of the blade. “Ready?”

“Not really.”

“You can wait inside.”

“Are you kidding? This is my mess. I should be the one digging.”

“Not your mess. Our mess.” He shifted his weight, and the shovel sank into the ground smoothly. He transferred a scoop of earth and woodchips to the side and kept digging. “The soil is loose, like it’s been turned recently.”

Zoe nodded. Her throat felt dry. “I should get a flashlight,” she said, but didn’t move. Jack transferred several shovels of dirt and the bush tilted as the supporting earth was removed. Zoe pulled the bush to the side. The deeper he dug, the more carefully Jack maneuvered the shovel. About two feet down, he stopped. “I’ve hit something.”

“Rock?”

“No.” He probed the dirt gently with the shovel. “It’s soft.”

Zoe’s stomach twisted. “Don’t use the shovel.” She kneeled down and reached to brush the dirt away.

“Don’t use your hands.” She looked over her shoulder at him. With the porch light behind him, he was a silhouette. “Fingerprints.”

“Oh. Right. I’m not thinking clearly right now. Good thing I’ve got that whole head injury thing as an excuse. Let me get a spade or something.” She sprinted to the garage and returned with some gardening tools and gloves.

She used a spade to carefully sweep away a layer of dirt, revealing thick plastic. It was a silver color and contrasted with the dark earth. With shaking hands she removed more of the dirt until she uncovered a zipper. She sat back. “It’s true. That’s a body bag.”

Jack kneeled beside her.

“I can’t do it.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t open it, but we have to. We have to see if...Lucinda is really in there. It could all be a joke, right? Just some crazy weirdo playing a trick on us.”

“I’ll open it.” Jack pulled on one of the gardening gloves then inched the zipper open.

Zoe flinched backward at the smell, but not before she saw a tangle of dark hair and Lucinda’s pale face.

***

Z
OE turned off the faucet in the hall bath with trembling fingers and dabbed at her sweaty forehead with the hand towel. She’d been sick. She managed to lurch away from Lucinda’s body to the other side of the yard before she threw up. She closed her eyes. Poor Lucinda. She wasn’t what you’d call a sweet person—she was mean, actually—but she didn’t deserve to be killed.

Zoe twisted the towel in her hands. Oscar hadn’t lied about burying Lucinda. Did that mean what he’d said about the financial records tracing back to her name was true, too? What were they going to do?

The back door thudded closed, and Zoe hurried down the hall to the kitchen. Jack stood at the sink soaping his hands. “It’s all back in place, the soil, the hedge, everything.”

“What? Why did you do that? We’ve got to call the police.”

He rinsed his hands. “We can’t call the police, Zoe. Think about it. Lucinda is missing.” He turned the faucet off and swiveled to face her. “You reported to the police that you’d seen her dead body today. If we call them and tell them her body is buried in our backyard, but we didn’t put her there, do you think they’ll believe us?”

She realized she still held the towel from the bathroom and gave it to him to dry his dripping hands. “Okay. Okay. You’re right.” Zoe paced around the island. “I get it, but we have to do something. We can’t just leave her out there.” She stopped. “Wait. Mort. We can call Mort.”

“Agent Vazarri? Not a good idea.”

Zoe raced into the formal living room where she’d left her messenger bag, located her phone, and dashed back to the kitchen. “He’ll help us. He knows all about what happened before. He’ll believe us. He’s with the FBI. He can investigate this Darius Gray and figure out what’s going on.”

Zoe had been scrolling through her contact lists as she spoke. She found his name and dialed his cell phone. What did it say about the craziness of her life that she had an FBI agent in her contact list? He’d given her his card when he first began investigating the fraud case, and when she realized he might actually believe that she wasn’t involved in scamming people out of money—that he was on her side—she’d saved his phone number.

“Zoe.” Jack’s voice had a warning tone. “Think about what you’re doing. You could go to jail. Take it from someone who’s been the focus of a criminal investigation, you don’t want to do this. You’re putting yourself at their mercy. I know you think he’s nice, but he’s going to err on the side of the law.”

Zoe waved him off. A female voice answered. Probably his wife. “May I speak to Mort, please?”

“He’s not available. Can I have him call you back?”

“Ah, can you get in touch with him? It’s kind of an emergency.”

“No, I’m afraid not. What’s your name again?”

“Zoe. Zoe Hunter.” Jack threw his gaze up to the ceiling and turned away from her. “It’s related to an investigation. An old case.”

“Oh, well, you’d better call the Bureau. Didn’t you know? Mort’s retired.”

“No. I didn’t know.” Zoe took a deep breath. “Look, are you his wife? Because it’s really important that I talk to Mort. It will only take a few minutes...”

“Wife? No, honey, I’m the house sitter. Mort and Kathy are on a Mediterranean cruise. I’ll tell him you called next time he checks in. But it may not be for a while. They wanted a real vacation with no interruptions, so he had his calls from his cell phone forwarded to the house phone. I’m sure he’ll get back to you.”

Zoe ended the call. “Mort’s on a cruise.”

“Thank God. Zoe, there were real estate flyers in the bag with Lucinda’s body. I saw them when I zipped the bag up.”

Zoe put her hand over her mouth then whispered through her fingers, “My prints will be on them.”

“You don’t want to call that other agent, do you?”

“Sato? No. He never liked me. He’d have me locked up before Lucinda’s body was even out of the ground. There’s no one else we can go to. What are we going to do?”

They stared at each other for a moment.

She knew what he was thinking. “We have to find that painting, don’t we?”

––––––––

Z
OE spun away from him, her hands pressed to her forehead. “But how? It’s impossible. All we know is that some person with red hair used my name and offered to sell a painting to a gallery in Paris. We can’t find the painting from that.”

“He said it was a Monet.”

“Even with that, there’s got to be hundreds of Monet paintings.”

“And he said the name of the gallery. Gallery Twenty-Seven.” Jack grabbed a pencil and the magnetized notepad hanging on the refrigerator door. “Let’s get everything, every little detail he said down on paper. He also mentioned the name of the painting.”

Zoe leaned on the island beside him, latching onto the activity. Anything was better than helpless worrying. “I can’t remember exactly. The whole conversation was surreal. I was so focused on making him understand we didn’t have it, that I don’t remember all the specifics. Wasn’t it something...military?”

“Yes.” Jack tapped the pencil against the paper several times. “Marine. That was it.” Jack shot her a smile as he jotted it down. “What else?”

“Okay.” Zoe studied the new drywall on her ceiling as she thought. “He talked about cities: Freeport, Geneva, and Singapore, but the way he said it...was weird. Something about us having the painting in Freeport,
in
Geneva or Singapore, which doesn’t make any sense.” She pushed away from the island and retrieved her new computer, which only took moments to bring up a browser.

While she typed, Jack added words to his list, reading them out. “He talked about the financial transactions, Verity Trustees, and the twelve million dollars.”

Zoe’s fingers paused. “That worries me. What if the FBI isn’t finished investigating? What if Costa set me up? It would be just like him—use the money from the scam to buy world-class art and finger me as the culprit.”

“I meant what I said. I don’t think the FBI is going to buy a false trail like that, not after the way this whole case has gone. For all we know, the case is closed, and he just said that to scare you.”

“He wasn’t lying about anything else.”

Jack reached for her hand. “Let’s go one step at a time.”

Zoe squeezed his hand. “Right. Find the painting. Simple. Easy,” she said with a bogus, breezy tone that she didn’t feel. “Mark that off our list, and
then
we’ll worry about FBI investigations.”

Jack leaned over and kissed her hard on the mouth. “You’re lying through your teeth,” he said, keeping his face close to hers. “But very brave.”

She couldn’t help smiling back at him. “Foolhardy, probably.” He leaned forward and they kissed again, this time slowly, lingeringly.

Jack pulled away. “Much as I’d like to continue this, I don’t think this an ideal time to get distracted.”

Zoe felt as dizzy and as disoriented as she had when she had woken up in her car earlier that afternoon. How could that happen when only their lips had touched? She hadn’t moved her arms to reach for him. Her fingers were still poised on the computer keypad. She cleared her throat, torn between not wanting to let on how much that kiss had rocked her and wanting to throw her arms around Jack. But she wasn’t sure she could handle what would happen if she pulled him back to her, so she went with option A. “Right. Business before pleasure and all that.” She scanned the search results and clicked through a few articles.

Jack sent her a look. “Don’t tempt me.”

“I thought you were wooing me. Is this wooing?”

“No. This is flirting, an essential part of wooing. Now, did you find anything?”

“Yes, I think so. Freeport is a city in the Bahamas, but when I combine it with Geneva, I get some interesting results. Freeport, either in a compound form or separate in two words, has another meaning, an economic free-trade zone.”

“No taxes?”

“Exactly. There’s a huge warehouse-type place in Geneva and one in Singapore, too, where collectors keep art and apparently lots of other things like gold bars, wine, even luxury cars.” Zoe shook her head as she read through one of the articles. “Can you imagine? A warehouse full of tax-free luxury goods? It sounds like if you sell something on the premises, neither the seller nor the buyer pays taxes or custom duties. Listen to this line.” She read aloud, “Free ports like the one in Geneva are ideal for art collectors who are not interested in displaying their art and need a secure storage location.”

“Sounds like the go-to place for stolen art.”

“Doesn’t it?” Zoe sat back. “Of course, there’s no way of knowing if the painting is there. I’m sure Mr. Gray—whoever he is—would use a place like this, but for all we know, Anna might have it under her bed.” Zoe forced her thoughts away from all the thousands of possibilities of where the painting could be. She blew out a sigh. “This is why he gave us three days, for the travel time. So we could go and get it from Geneva or...wherever.”

“Three days is a good thing.”

“I hope it’s enough. What’s next?” Zoe asked, nodding at the list. She suddenly was very aware of the seconds ticking by.

“The painting and the gallery.”

“Okay,
Marine
,” Zoe said as she typed.

Jack pulled out his phone. “I’ll search for the gallery. That shouldn’t be too hard to run down.”

Zoe frowned at the computer screen as she studied images of galleons and stormy seas. “Fifty-six million results for ‘
Marine
painting.’ ” She tried again, using the search term “
Marine
by Monet.”

Jack said, “I’ve got the gallery. It’s on the left bank, open Tuesday to Saturday. Owner is Henri Masard.”

“I found it.” At her slightly strangled tone, Jack looked up. “
Marine
is in the FBI stolen art database. The Monet—along with several other valuable paintings—was stolen from a museum in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival in 2006. Hasn’t been seen since.” Zoe shifted the laptop so Jack could see the landscape, a sweep of a deep blue bay rimmed with land in neutral tans, yellows, and greens that transitioned to a pale wedge of a low, white escarpment that stretched out into the water forming one arm of the bay.

Jack came closer to look at the image of the painting on the computer. “It makes sense.”

“Of course. I should have seen that one coming.” Zoe slid off the barstool and paced as she spoke. “He was a criminal. Of course he wouldn’t do something as out of character as buy something legitimately for sale. No, it had to be black market art.”

“Zoe,” Jack leaned forward. “This is actually good.”

“How? How can this be good?”

“If we find it, there are two parties interested in it—the FBI and Mr. Gray. Now, I may be way off base here, but I’m assuming that since Mr. Gray wants a stolen painting, he’s probably involved in other illegal activities that would interest the FBI.”

“You mean besides murder?”

“We know about Lucinda’s murder and a stolen painting, but I’m willing to bet that those aren’t his first forays into illegal activity.”

Zoe walked slowly toward him. “You’re saying that if we find the painting, we can use it.”

“It’s leverage.”

“With the FBI and with Mr. Gray.” They smiled at each other for a second across the island. Then Zoe said, “We need to know more about Mr. Gray.” She’d climbed halfway onto the barstool before it hit her. She stopped, leg dangling. “Jack. The people. We’re looking at this the wrong way. It’s not the painting, it’s the people we need to focus on.”

“You’re right,” Jack agreed. “We need everything we can get on this Darius Gray.”

Zoe shifted her weight fully into the barstool and began typing. “Let’s see what Google has to say about him.” She summarized as she scanned. “Okay, he’s in the import/export business, but he was arrested over a year ago.” She swiveled the laptop so Jack could see a news article with a photo that showed a nearly bald man with circular glasses and neatly trimmed gray beard, who wore a three-piece suit while being escorted out of an office building between two police officers.

“Not what I expected him to look like,” Zoe said. The image she’d had in mind of him ran more along the lines of Marlon Brando in
The Godfather
. “This guy looks more like a college professor than a criminal. But, no matter what he looks like, he’s apparently got some really good lawyers,” Zoe continued. “He was charged with money laundering, tax evasion, and handling stolen goods. He was convicted on the tax evasion and money laundering charges and went to prison in January.”

“So maybe not such great lawyers,” Jack said.

Zoe held up a finger. “He got off on a technicality during the appeal.” She clicked on another article, this one with a picture of Gray waving to the camera, a smile splitting his beard, as he stepped into a limousine. “He’s been out of prison for two weeks, which explains why he’s just now coming after the painting, I guess,” Zoe said.

Jack nodded. “I suppose a federal trial and prison time would take priority over recovering a painting that you’d been swindled out of.”

“But if he’s fresh out of prison, why would he come after the painting?” Zoe asked. “Wouldn’t it be smarter for him to wait? Wouldn’t the FBI—or whoever investigated him before—have an eye on him?”

“You’d think they would, wouldn’t you?”

“As close as they’ve watched me, trying to get to you, I can’t believe they’d wouldn’t do the same thing to him. This is the third time he’s been arrested, the second time he’s gone to jail, and the second time he’s walked away.”

“Maybe he feels invincible,” Jack said. “Like he can get away with whatever he wants.” He ran his hand through his hair. “It’s not enough. We don’t even know if the authorities are still interested in him.”

“Wait—I know someone...” Zoe’s voice trailed off as she typed.

“Who?”

“There. Message sent,” Zoe said. “If there’s anything else to find out about Mr. Darius Gray, Jenny will dig it up. She’s got contacts in the FBI—she’s a friend of Mort’s. I can’t believe I didn’t think of her a minute ago.”

“Who is this again?”

“Jenny Singletarry. You remember her, the reporter who broke the story about the fraud. I answered a few of her questions once the FBI cleared you.”

“You talked to the media?” Jack’s tone implied it was equivalent to spreading the plague. “And you emailed her now?”

“Yes. She was so persistent. I figured if I talked to her, gave her a little info, she’d move on. It worked. It was a fair article, and I haven’t heard from her since. Well, except for
her
Facebook friend request, which I accepted.”

Jack rubbed his forehead. “Well, we can’t undo it now.”

“She’s good, Jack, and I trust her.”

Jack waved his hand. “It’s done. Can’t change it. Got to move on. Maybe she’ll find something useful, if she’s got the resources you say she does. It’s always good to know what kind of person we are dealing with.”

Zoe sat up straight. “Jack, we do know the person we’re dealing with,” she said, excitement quickening the pace of her words. “Not just Gray. Anna. We know Anna has the painting. Mr. Gray doesn’t know that. He thinks we’ve got it. We know who really has it.”

Jack nodded. “Find Anna, and we find the painting—at least we hope. I see what you’re saying, but I doubt she is broadcasting her presence.”

“I agree. She probably isn’t tweeting about her day, but I think I know someone who can help us find her.”

“Who?”

“A reformed hacker.”

***

S
PECIAL Agent Greg Sato leaned back from his desk and stretched. He’d tweaked a muscle in his lower back, and it was tightening up like a rubber band snapping back into shape after it had been stretched to full length. He shouldn’t have pushed so hard during his run last night, but the half marathon was two weeks away and he needed to get his miles in. As he stretched, he glanced at the wonder kid, who was hunched over a nearby desk. Supposedly a Golden Boy and a fast burner, Dirk Sorkensov was the youngest agent Sato had ever worked with. He was so shiny and fresh-faced that the corners of his eyes didn’t even wrinkle when he smiled. And he smiled a lot. Good-humored to the point of irritation, Wonder Kid could always find the bright side to any situation.

Too many cases? Job security, he’d pronounce cheerfully.

Called in to work the weekend? Bonus! Overtime.

No witnesses? A challenge.

Sato was beginning to think Wonder Kid had been promoted because of his upbeat, always positive attitude.

Sato twisted slowly to the left, felt the tension release a bit, then turned to the right and watched Wonder Kid, whose attention was equally divided between a file on his desk and his cell phone, which he checked every few minutes.

Sato finished his stretch as The Kid closed the file with a whistle. “Man, this reads like a novel.” He stood and came over to Sato’s desk, bringing the file with him. “Fascinating.”

Sato grunted. He hadn’t thought he’d miss his old partner much, but this was one of those days when he wished he could exchange The Kid’s puppyish enthusiasm for Mort’s silent world-weariness. Must be his back making him cranky. Sato didn’t need to see the name on the file. “The Andrews case? Yeah.” The Kid shot a quick look at his phone as he handed Sato the file. “Anything?” Sato asked with a pointed glance at the phone.

“No. Just Braxton Hicks.”

“Oh.” Sato had no idea what Braxton Hicks were, but The Kid’s wife—wife! He looked as if he was barely old enough to have a high school diploma—and she was pregnant. Sato figured Braxton Hicks had to be something to do with the pregnancy. Before The Kid could enlighten him, Sato said, “The one disappointment of that case was the low arrest rate. All the big fish got away.”

“Dying isn’t exactly getting away.”

Sato shrugged. “No arrests.”

“Well, here’s a chance to change that.” The Kid held out an additional stack of papers. “Got the report on the transfers of the money from the scam.”

At least The Kid liked reading reports and getting into the hard evidence as much as Mort had, Sato thought. Sato preferred to focus on more intangible things: attitudes, relationships, and connections. “It’s about time.”