The Tempest (8 page)

 

Chapter Eleven

T
he death of developer Nicholas Champlain's wife was news, much as Walter Kepler had feared. But it was passing news, a regional wire ser­vice short with the shelf life of a single news cycle. The words “apparently accidental” helped; they'd head off potential innuendo, as would Nick Champlain's aversion to publicity. But what really concerned him now was what Champlain thought, and whether or not it would affect their plan.

Nick was staying at one of Kepler's condos on the Delaware coast tonight, letting his business manager handle inquiries and condolences. Kepler was eleven miles to the north in a larger apartment, although Champlain didn't know that.

“Nick, I'm sorry,” he said, conjuring a sympathetic tone. “I wanted to give you a chance to get your bearings. Just know I'll do whatever I can.”

“I'm letting my business manager handle it with the media,” Champlain said, talking on one of the disposable phones Kepler had given him. “We've issued a statement.”

“I saw.”

“That should take care of it.” He added, “This doesn't affect our arrangement?”

“No. Should it?”

“No. That's why I'm asking.”

There it was, then:
He
was asking the question. Everything was fine. Kepler breathed more easily, turning to look at the Atlantic Ocean. Nick Champlain had probably loved his wife very much on the day they were married, four years ago, he imagined—­but not on the night she died. By then, Susan Champlain had become a liability to him. That's why she was down in Maryland for the summer—­to keep her out of the way. Although, according to Belasco, who had been Kepler's eyes in Tidewater, that hadn't worked out so well.

“You understand, I wasn't there,” Champlain said. “It was an accident. That's what the police are saying.”

“I hear it,” Kepler said. “And I appreciate you telling me. I really do.”

Kepler looked at the fast-­moving night clouds over the water. Thinking: They were in the storm now, weren't they? He felt the change in the air, the miracle only a week away now. “You're going to the funeral?”

“I'm paying for it,” Champlain said. “They don't want me there. The sister doesn't.”

“We'd like you to
tell
­people you're going,” Kepler said. “It would work into our new time frame.”

Champlain was silent.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. Then: “What's the new time frame?”

“My client would like to move the whole thing up by three days. Is that possible?”

“Three days,” he repeated.

“You said they just needed twenty-­four-­hour notice.”

“That's right.”

“Good.” In fact, from what Kepler knew of the Rosa family—­who controlled the painting and were now selling it to him through Nick Champlain—­he suspected they didn't
want
a lot of notice. They wanted this deal to go quickly, to collect their $5 million and move on. “So can we just pick up where we were, then? We'll meet Tuesday. I'll have the rest of what you need then.”

“All right.”

“Take care of yourself, Nick. Again, I'm sorry.”

Kepler only hoped that Belasco hadn't waited too long.

 

Chapter Twelve

T
hat was the night that Luke and Charlotte finally had the talk about their future—­the real topic of which was whether or not to enlarge the Bowers family from three to four. It didn't come off quite as Luke had imagined. First, he prepared dinner—­roasted salmon with slivered almonds, prepared in butter and lemon juice—­while Charlotte made the salad, chopping tomatoes and onions she'd picked from their garden.

As the fillets were simmering, they slipped into the bedroom and made love, which had become a fairly regular Thursday night activity at the Bowerses' domicile. In bed afterward, savoring the cross breezes, Luke had spontaneously brought it up. Not as the question he'd been formulating in his thoughts for several days. But as a statement that came to him in a flash of inspiration: “I think we ought to have a child.”

Charlotte leaned on her elbow, looking at him with the tiniest of smiles. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” Luke said.

“Really.”

“Okay. That was easier than I expected,” he said, wondering if the death of Susan Champlain had nudged them a little.

The decision was one thing, of course, the details another. Those would be a much longer discussion, he knew, which they began to have that night over dinner, and a ­couple glasses of white wine. It involved deciding where to live (not enough room in the parish house), how long they would stay in Tidewater (Methodist ministers averaged only four to six years at one location) and also how long Luke wanted to remain a pastor.

They sat on the deck afterward, talking about it over another glass of wine. But eventually their thoughts drifted to more private places and more mundane concerns.

“I'm going to check something online,” Charlotte said vaguely a few minutes past nine. Luke gravitated to his own space in the sitting room, glad to work on his sermon for a while—­reading several times through the passage in James about the brevity of life.

Charlotte came in with Sneakers and a glass of wine later to check on him, and to say that she was going to review her notes for a few minutes. Charlotte was writing about Delmarva-­region Indian treaties from the 1600s and 1700s—­including the famous treaty of 1722, which professed to be binding until “world's end.”

He could hear her later talking to herself, which she sometimes did, as if alone in the house with Sneakers, her voice occasionally rising on a phrase or a word. “Now,
that's
interesting,” he heard her say at one point and he wondered if she might be on the phone. Charlotte had a phone voice that was slightly different from the tone she used with him; she tended to gesture with her arms while talking on the phone, too, as if the person on the other end could see her.

Then she went quiet. Luke looked at the clock when he heard her again: 9:47. “Are you
kidding
?”

“No way,” she said, at 10:19.

Feeling left out, Luke decided to see what was up.

“Everything under control in here? You two behaving?”

Charlotte turned, surprised. Sneakers, too, raised his head and looked up. She was deep into something, he could see; she'd tacked all kinds of printouts to her bulletin board.

“Sorry,” he said, “I just wanted to make sure you weren't indulging a secret porn habit.”

What Luke saw on her computer was only slightly less surprising, though. Blown up on the screen was one of the images Susan had sent him the day before. Was
this
what she'd been working on so diligently for the past hour or so, while Luke assumed she was researching Indian treaties?

“You're looking at Susan Champlain's pictures.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She sighed and clicked a new image onto the screen. “See this?”

“Okay.”

“And this.” She pointed to a printout on the bulletin board, what looked like a dark abstract painting, or maybe a drapery pattern.

“Looks like an out-­of-­focus early Rothko.”

“No,” Charlotte said. She collapsed the image on her screen, to show most of the room again, from Susan Champlain's photo. “Now this is the reflection of the next room,” she said, closing in on just the mirror. “See this? What looks like a giant piece of wood here, leaning on the wall?”

“Okay.”

“Now, this is a stretch, admittedly,” she said, “because it's so blurry, but this image”—­she enlarged the screen image further—­“looks quite a bit like this one,” indicating the abstract printout. Charlotte pointed to similarities in the color and paint patterns with the assurance of a forensics expert in a murder trial. “Doesn't it?”

“They
are
similar blurs.”

“Yes, more than similar, actually. They're matching blurs.”

“Matching blurs.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds like a rock band.”

“Ha-ha.”

“You're saying that piece of wood leaning on the wall in the mirror might be a
paint
ing?”

“Might be.” She called up a different, sharper image that he vaguely recognized—­a dark oil painting of a ship tilted in rough seas. “The color's off a bit, but the shapes are almost an exact match. See?” She brought in a close-­up of the painting, and compared it with another printout, detail from Susan's cell-­phone photo. Despite the distortion, there were clearly similarities in the patterns and colors.

“Why does that painting look so familiar?”

“It's an early Rembrandt,” Charlotte said. “Called
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
.”

“Oh.”

“It's one of the most famous stolen paintings in the world. Missing now for some twenty-­five years.”

“And how did you manage to figure
this
out?”

Charlotte shrugged. “A ­couple of glasses of wine helped. Sneakers gave me moral support, of course.” Luke frowned at her, but admiringly. “Actually, I've written about this painting,” she said. “We've talked about it. Several times.”

“The Gardner Museum.”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, I'm a little slow tonight.”

In fact, they'd visited the Gardner in Boston twice together; he'd looked at the empty frame where Rembrandt's masterpiece had lived for decades.

“Of course, even if that's what this is, it could be a reproduction,” he said.

“Could be.” But Luke wasn't thinking that. He was thinking of Susan Champlain, the urgency and evasiveness in her eyes as she'd told him her story.

He pulled up a chair and listened as Charlotte recounted what had happened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on St. Patrick's Day night 1990, a tale he'd heard many times over the years, although he'd forgotten some of the details: how two men dressed as Boston police officers had been allowed in the museum that night on the pretense that they were responding to a reported disturbance. How they'd tied up the night guards with duct tape in the basement, disabled security cameras and spent eighty-­one minutes in the galleries, removing thirteen works of art worth an estimated $500 million, including a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and a Manet.

Two men police believed played a role in the theft were murdered shortly afterward and countless leads in the case had fizzled over the years. One investigator said there seemed to be a “curse” surrounding the Gardner art.

As Charlotte talked, Luke continued to think of Susan Champlain, seated in his office wearing a white sleeveless blouse, her hands gesturing anxiously, her voice momentarily thickening at one point. He wondered if she'd had any idea what she'd photographed. If she suspected what her husband had meant when he'd said ­“people could get killed waving this thing around.” Or if she had died without knowing any of that.

Sensing that he was no longer paying attention to her, Charlotte stopped talking. They just looked at each other for a while, and then at the matching blurs. By that point, Luke could tell they were thinking the same thing: this may have been the reason that Susan Champlain was killed.

“The question is,” he said, “what are we going to do about it?”

 

Chapter Thirteen

H
unter's cell phone woke her several minutes before sunrise on Friday. It was Scott Randall, from the FBI's Stolen Art Division in Washington.

“Are you able to meet this morning?”

“I am,” she said, blinking herself awake. “Where are you?”

“Headed your way,” he said. His voice had the pitch of a female and Hunter wondered at first if  “Scott” might be a woman. “Could you meet me in front of the Captain's Table at nine thirty?”

She gazed at the boats in the marina, just turning visible again, a slight breeze moving in the trees. She'd been up much of the night running Internet searches, ever since Luke had called and e-­mailed over the Rembrandt image. Hunter had forwarded it on to John Marcino, of the Criminal Investigations Division, her longtime contact at the FBI. By the time she'd fallen asleep ninety minutes earlier, Hunter had become an expert on the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist. “I'll see you there,” she said.

The Captain's Table was a breakfast/lunch diner in a strip of storefronts along the highway, known for creative breakfast selections such as oyster omelets and blue crab muffins. At 9:30, Hunter was standing out front.

A Honda Civic pulled to the curb a few minutes later. The passenger window slid down.

“Hunter?” Randall leaned across the seat, showed his ID, and reached to shake her hand. “Hop in.”

He was a tall, rangy man with a good-­natured face and receding hairline, his eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses.

“Sorry to do it this way,” he said. “I'm not a fan of offices.”

“No, me neither.”

“Thanks for sending over the photo.” He smiled as he pulled onto the highway, and Hunter noticed that his middle front teeth protruded, one longer than the other, giving him the affable smile of an overgrown high-­school kid. He was wearing a black golf shirt and light-­colored sports slacks and loafers, an inch of white flesh showing above his beige ankle socks.

“I hope you understand we need to keep this whole thing contained,” he said.

“Sure,” Hunter said. “Which whole thing, exactly?”

“The photo.”

“Okay,” she said. “Which would make me think that this painting is the real deal.”

“Well.” He made a throat-­clearing sound. “Maybe. Hard to tell from the cell photo, obviously.”

He turned off Highway 50 onto a two-­lane state road and pushed down on the accelerator, heading toward rural Delaware. “Who else knows about it?” he asked her.

“The painting? Or the photo?”

“Both.”

Randall's nose wrinkled as soon as she mentioned Dave Crowe. Not a lot of ­people liked Crowe, even though he was a skilled investigator.

“And, of course, Nick Champlain, too,” she added.

Randall briefly let his foot off the gas. “How do you mean?”

“I mentioned the photo to him. Two nights ago. The night his wife died. During police interviews. Of course, I hadn't seen the images yet at the time. I didn't know about the painting at that point.”

Hunter told him the rest of it, about Susan Champlain's conversation with Pastor Luke and about Nick Champlain's cool denial. Randall listened, leaning back, both hands flexing on the wheel, Hunter noticing his long clean fingernails. Several times he started to reach for something in his left shirt pocket, although there was nothing there to reach for; and no pocket, for that matter. He also lowered and raised the window twice. Hunter suspected he'd recently quit smoking.

“And no one else?”

“No one else.”

The painting, though, was different. A smaller club. Only Hunter, Charlotte, and Luke knew about it. And John Marcino, at the FBI.

“And my cat,” Hunter added. “He knows the whole deal.”

Scott Randall either didn't find her comment humorous, or didn't understand what she was saying. Sometimes Hunter suffered timing issues when she tried to be funny. Randall drove on through the tall cornfields, passing an old barn and a roadside produce stand.

“You're going to explain what this is all about, I presume,” she said.

“What I can, yeah.”

“Because, I ought to point out, my concern is the death of Susan Champlain,” Hunter said, “not the whereabouts of a stolen painting. Not even one that's worth a hundred million dollars.”

This, surprisingly, got a rise from him. He grinned over at her, a little maniacally, it seemed. “Who told you it was worth a hundred million dollars?”

“No one. I saw it online,” Hunter said. “The whole theft, supposedly, is worth five hundred million.”

“Yeah, right,” he said. “That's an estimated auction price. If it ever went to auction. But stolen art doesn't go to auction. So saying it's ‘worth' something is nonsensical.”

“Okay.”

“The media invents these numbers. Sometimes assisted by so-­called art experts, sometimes not,” he said. “Matter of fact, there was a famous theft at the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam in 2012. The media reports all said the art was, quote, worth five hundred million. The number was repeated over and over like it was the Holy Grail. Indisputable. But then later they had to adjust it down to fifteen million. They'd talked to the wrong ‘experts.' ” He smiled at her again, in his element now, Hunter could tell. Randall had all sorts of facts and figures about stolen art at his disposal, she sensed. His voice had taken on a new assuredness, and speeded up; he had a way of crowding his words, dropping syllables—­
matter of fact
sounded like
ma'fak
.
Holy Grail
was
Ho'grell
. Once he got going, he reminded her a little of Chris Matthews on
Hardball
.

“They want to find someone who'll say it's worth some big, astronomical number, right, because that's what sells, makes for a good story. But does it help the cause? No. It doesn't. I'm sort of an amateur collector myself. It amuses me, but it angers me a little at the same time.”

The road turned into the sun through the cornfields and Hunter pushed down the passenger visor to block it. “You know what that Rembrandt's been worth for these past twenty-­five years
? Storm on the Sea of Galilee
?”

“No,” she said. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Zilch.”

“Because it couldn't be sold, you mean.”

“That's right, because it couldn't be sold. High-­end stolen art is priceless—­which from the standpoint of a thief means the same thing as worthless. The idea that stolen masterpieces are worth anything is a myth. They aren't. You can't take a masterpiece from a museum wall and sell it. It can't be done.”

“But you're saying this case is different.”

He gave her a cagey sideways look, thrown off momentarily; Hunter caught a glimpse of his eyes for the first time. “I'm asking,” she said.

“Well, yes, in a way,” he said. “In a way.” But rather than explain, Scott Randall dropped back into silence.

“W
HICH MAKES ME
wonder,” Hunter said, a minute or so later. “I was told yesterday that the FBI had an interest in the photos I sent over—­but this was
before
we figured out they might have anything to do with this famous Rembrandt.”

“That's right.” He took his foot off the gas again.

“And I was told you'd be contacting me in the next day or so,” Hunter said.

“Right.”

“But then I sent over the image last night and you called me right away, before the sun was up, even,” she said. “So something must've changed.”

His face colored. “Did I wake you?”

“No, that's all right. My point is, you were interested in the photo be
fore
you knew about the painting.”

“That's correct, yes.” Randall slowed. They were coming to a rural four-­way stop, with a convenience store and gas pumps. Randall braked and then pulled over in front of the store, the only vehicle there. “You mind?”

“No,” she said. “I don't mind.”

Hunter got out and stretched her legs, walking to the edge of the road while Randall went in. A slow breeze rustled the cornstalks, stirring the tassels.

Randall came out looking around for a moment as if he'd lost his car. There was a picnic table around the side, between a Dumpster and the cornfields. He pointed his coffee at it. His right hand went to the invisible shirt pocket.

“This okay?” he asked.

“Sure.”

His leg made a wide arc over the bench as he sat. The coffee seemed to energize Scott Randall a little. He told her some more about the business of stolen art, his eyes seeming fixed on a spot down the road, although it was hard to tell with the sunglasses. He might've been talking with anyone, Hunter thought, expounding on the business of art theft, how stolen paintings on the black market sell for only 5 to 10 percent of what they'd draw at auction; how the Bureau calls stolen art a $6 billion-­ to $8 billion-­a-­year business. “But those numbers aren't based on actual transactions,” he said, “they're based on ‘market value,' so who knows? It's very misleading.

“At the highest level? It's a business that has its own rules. Which it sometimes makes up as it goes along.” He backhanded the air as if flicking away a fly. “But back to your question? Yeah, you're right, we
were
interested in that picture before we knew about the painting.”

“Why?”

“Because of one of the men in the picture. Okay? We think we know who one of the men is.” He turned his aviator lenses to her. “And that's strictly on the q.t.” He lifted his coffee cup and looked at the cornfield. “What's that stand for, anyway—­‘on the q.t.'? I've always wondered.”

“I think it's just a slang for quiet,” Hunter said. “The first and last letters.”

“Is that right?” He took a long drink of coffee. “So, anyhow, yeah. There's reason to think one of the men in the picture has a connection to this painting. What you sent over last night seems to confirm it.”

“And this is someone with ties to the Philadelphia mob?”

He grinned. “You saw that online, too?” He backhanded the air again. “We didn't necessarily want all that out there, but, yeah, okay. Of course, organized crime is a different animal now than it used to be. In Philly, we're not even talking about the families anymore, we're talking Nigerian stolen-­car gangs—­they steal luxury vehicles, load them onto big-­box freighters, ship them across the Atlantic to sell in West Africa.”
Ship them across the Atlantic
came out as
Shipacroslanick.

“Okay,” Hunter said, “but getting back to the painting. You think Nick Champlain has some connection with these ­people. And with the stolen painting.”

“It's possible. Champlain is not the man we're interested in, though, okay? But what we think—­what we hope—­is that he may
lead
us to that man.”

“Who is—­?”

He smiled again, the easy, big kid's smile, and made her wait.

“The man's name is Walter Kepler,” he finally said. “He's basically just a high-­end art fence, although full of grand ideas about himself. He's a narcissist, a real piece of work.” Randall's tone stiffened as he said this. She saw the crow's-­feet form beside his eye as he turned his head toward the road. “Stolen masterpieces are essentially worthless. It's a myth that there's any market for them.”

“You said that.”

“But there's one exception. And that's what we're dealing with.
Who
we're dealing with.”

“Kepler.”

“Mmm-­hmm.” He finished his coffee, tilting his head way back. “His business isn't stolen art, he likes to say, it's stolen masterpieces. That's
his
characterization, now, not ours.”

“The difference being—­?”

“Numbers.” His hand reached for the phantom cigarettes. “There are four hundred thousand stolen works of art out there, okay? Stolen masterpieces? Less than three dozen. Some would say less than two dozen, maybe closer to ten or twelve works that actually still exist. Depends on how you define
masterpiece
. So—­a much more specialized market. Kepler's the only one who's ever been able to work that market in any kind of sustained way. And we haven't been able to catch him, to make a case that sticks. For that, I give him credit. I don't give him credit for how he goes about it.”

“And you have information that Walter Kepler is in the process now of obtaining
this
particular masterpiece. That's what your case is about?”

“No, I didn't say that,” he said, an irritability leaking into his voice. His feelings about Walter Kepler were personal, Hunter could tell, probably more than they should be. “And understand, Kepler's almost never the buyer. He's the buyer's agent, a broker basically. He's the dealmaker. ­People come to him, wanting to acquire a painting. Kepler puts the deal together.”

“Okay.”

“Typically, there is a seller and a buyer, and each is represented by an agent who does the negotiations directly. Typically, buyer and seller never meet.”

“So you think Nick Champlain may be the seller's agent in this case? The connection to the stolen painting?”

“Well, I didn't say that, either. But, yeah, it's a reasonable assumption. That's been one of the missing pieces. I'm grateful that you brought this to our attention.”

He nodded to her and smiled momentarily. Hunter still hadn't seen his eyes. “Ready?” He stood. He stuffed his coffee cup through the hatch of the trash can and pulled out his keys.

“So why are you interested in me?” Hunter asked as they headed south again through the cornfields, a rural route into Maryland. “I mean, I hope you don't think of me as a path to finding this stolen art.”