The Tempest (9 page)

“No, not at all.” He breathed out deliberately. “But, think of it this way. What if our cases are intimately entwined, okay? In other words, what if solving one case solves the other?”

“Okay,” she said, feeling skeptical all of a sudden. “And you're going to explain that. You're going to tell me about this man Walter Kepler.”

“Of course,” he said. “That's why we're here. That's why I called you.”

 

Chapter Fourteen

L
uke was thinking about the vapor, from James 4:14, and the similar, earlier passages from the Psalms about the brevity of life, his topic now for Sunday's sermon. The discussion with Charlotte the night before—­the decision to start a family—­had filled him with new energies and optimism, and he'd sat down this morning with the idea of writing Sunday's sermon in a single sitting. But his thoughts kept straying from the sermon to the unknown details of their future—­they would need a larger house, surely, but how long would they stay in Tidewater? Would they take up in a new part of the world, as they'd occasionally discussed? And what would Sneakers think?

He looked out the window, surprised to see J. Michael Bunting's Jeep parked in the church lot beside his car.

Almost simultaneously, Aggie appeared in the doorway.

“Do you want me to tell him you're in a meeting?” she asked in her breathy voice.

“No, that's all right,” Luke said. It would be sort of a tough sell with no other cars in the lot.

By then, Luke had all but forgotten about the pet blessing proposal. The plan to give dog and cat owners the opportunity to bring their pets to church two or three times during the off-­season was in line with what other churches were doing around the country. A quick online search would've confirmed that. But J. Michael, as he liked to be called, was still trying to make it seem like a local controversy. Luke had declined to be interviewed by him, instead preparing a statement, which he'd run by the staff parish committee for their approval (after making their usual three or four word changes). He had sent the statement over to Bunting the day before.

That should have been the end of it.

But here he was, sitting in Luke's office, opening a badly wrinkled copy of what he'd e-­mailed to him. “So you got our statement, I see?” Luke said.

“I did. Thank you.”

He rattled it in the air for a moment and then tucked it back under his notebook. “But I just wanted to clarify a few things.”

“Okay.” Luke watched him cautiously and laced his fingers on the desk. J. Michael was a short, wiry man with curly hair, who wore thick-­lensed, black-­frame glasses. “Although as I said to you before, I don't want to make any public comment,” he said. “The statement will have to stand on its own. That's the position of the church, and it's now been approved by staff parish.”

Bunting stared at him, his brows frowning, as if Luke had said something inappropriate.

“Off the record, though,” he said. “I wonder if I could just get your response to a comment I've been told.”

“It would have to be off the record.”

“I've been told that your wife has been lobbying for this. That the idea may have in fact come from her? And that's caused some ­people to suggest there may be a conflict of interest.”

Luke cleared his throat. This was a new one. J. Michael kept looking, his expression far too serious for the discussion at hand. Luke was fairly certain that he'd made this up, an excuse to get him on the defensive.

“I'm just repeating what I've heard,” Bunting said.

“Well, the answer is no,” Luke said. “Not true.” He was tempted to say something like “Why don't you ask her?” but he knew that J. Michael would use it as a reason to drive over to their house and bother Charlotte.

“So, you're denying that there's any conflict, then,” he said, his pen now poised.

“I don't think there's anything to deny, really,” Luke said, trying to smile. “But since we're off the record, I'll tell you, Charlotte—­my wife—­had nothing to do with suggesting this, that's correct.”

“Even though she does work at the Humane Society.”

“She volunteers there, yes. Once or twice a week. But this was suggested by two other women, who are members of the congregation. And, as I said before, there really hasn't been any opposition to it that I've heard.”

“Other than Mrs. Elliott.”

“Well, but she isn't a member of the congregation. And in her letter to the editor, she was just posing the question about whether pets should be allowed in church. It's actually a growing national trend, as I told you the first time.”

He nodded, scribbling a jagged line on his pad and then several parallel lines over it; not real notes.

“But you do understand the opposition.”

“Actually, no,” Luke said. “What I understand is that there isn't much. Or any. As the statement says, these blessings will be held separate from the regular church ser­vices, just once a month. And, obviously, only for those who choose to attend.”

“Okay.” J. Michael was giving him his too-­serious look again. “And, I mean—­and this may sound kind of naive, but ­people are asking it—­the pets wouldn't actually be expected to
worship
, obviously, would they? Or how would it work?”

Luke coughed once and shifted in his chair, trying not to laugh. It usually didn't take long for J. Michael to ask a thoroughly inane question, mostly because he hadn't bothered to research the issue or think it through.

Luke decided to try a different tack. “Do you have a dog? A cat?”

“Not at the moment.”

“But you have had?”

“You mean—­in my
lifetime
?”

“Yes.”
When else?
Luke wondered.

“Okay.”

“Good. Then I'm sure you can understand how ­people become very attached to their pets. How they become like family members. How they share their lives with them.”

“Mmm-­hmm.”

“And so this would just be a way of showing gratitude for this blessing that our pets have been to our lives.” J. Michael raked his pen slowly over the pad. He seemed to be stifling a yawn. “Maybe if you waited to see the first ser­vice yourself, see what it's about. Because I don't think there's any issue here. I mean, other than that one letter to the editor—­”

“Well,
five
letters to the editor, actually. That we've published.” His mouth flattened.

“Yes, but only one was critical of the idea,” Luke said. “And she obviously misunderstood the concept, thinking that, as you just suggested, the pets would be expected to pray.”

J. Michael stared blankly back at Luke. There would be no resolution to this today, Luke saw.

Walking to the door, J. Michael capped his pen and slipped it into his pants pocket. “Anything more on Susan Champlain?” he asked as they stood on the gravel out front.

“Not that I've heard, no.”

He looked at Luke intently, as if he were a police investigator. “There's some talk now that it might not have been an accident?”

Luke sighed. There was a scent of cut grass and gasoline in the breeze. The sound of motorboats carried up the bluff. ­“People say all sorts of things, don't they?”

His brow clenched. “Supposedly she left behind a note? Had you heard that?”

“Nope. Nothing like that,” Luke said. “Where'd you hear it?”

He shrugged. Sometimes, J. Michael made up details in order to get ­people to talk to him. It was more a nervous trait than anything malicious. “Anyway, Hunter hasn't been a lot of help,” he added.

Luke smiled to himself at this. Amy Hunter categorically avoided the media, referring all inquiries to the public information officer. That was smart of her.
He
should hire a PIO, just to deal with J. Michael Bunting.

“Well, thanks for stopping by,” he said. “I hope you're able to attend the pet blessing and see for yourself what it's about.”

J. Michael opened his mouth and showed his tongue like he was about to be sick. Then he smiled and reached to shake Luke's hand.

“Poor man,” Aggie said, holding down a Venetian blind slat with her finger as the Jeep started up. “Supposedly he's having problems at home. And their youngest son is ill. Although I probably shouldn't be saying anything.”

“No.”

“You know what he said about the note?” Luke's eyes went to the window; he saw the air on the screen. Aggie must've heard their whole parking lot conversation. “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn't trying to eavesdrop. But I've heard the same thing.”

“Which—?”

“That she left behind a note of some kind, I mean.”

“Saying what, I wonder?”

“Oh, I don't know. I just heard there might've been a note.”

“Hmm.” Luke grimaced and went back to his office and the Sunday sermon. It was something else he had to share with Hunter.

 

Chapter Fifteen

T
here are bad men and there are bad men,” Scott Randall said, driving slowly past corn and soybean fields back to Tidewater.

“Okay,” Hunter said. “And so which would he be? Kepler?”

“Bad,” he said. “Very bad.”

Hunter nodded, trying to grasp the distinction.

“Kepler was a legitimate art dealer at one time,” Randall went on. “Which is how he got into this: he inherited his father's business in New York. His father studied art in Israel, wrote about art, wanted to be an artist himself. But—­this is the way Kepler described it—­he loved great art too much to produce merely good art himself. He opened a modest art gallery in New York many years ago, and did okay. Kepler ramped it up after he died. I actually
knew
Kepler briefly, years ago. So I know a little about him personally. And he
was
good at what he did. The man had an ability to make ­people believe a painting was worth far more than it really was. You have to understand, that's what the art world is, in a lot of ways—­a high-­level game of illusion. And he became a very accomplished BS'r, the kind of person who takes on the color of his surroundings.” He glanced over at Hunter, to see if she was with him. “And, so, what happened was, he eventually stumbled into a deal that set him up for life. Mostly, it was dumb luck. But I give him a lot of credit for being able to pull it off.”

“What was it?”

“He'd brokered the sale of a small private collection, which included two Picasso paintings from the nineteen fifties. Befriended the buyer, who had no immediate family, and became the man's friend, as well as his dealer. When the man died several years later, Kepler somehow wound up in possession of one of the Picassos. It was challenged by the deceased's estranged granddaughter—­who was as unsavory, but not as sophisticated, as he was. They tried to claim he'd forged the man's signature on his will, etcetera, etcetera, it went on for a while. But the courts ruled ultimately in Kepler's favor. He sold the painting a year after the dust cleared, for sixteen point five million. You can look it up. A ­couple of years after that, he flipped a lesser Picasso to a well-­known casino owner and picked up another seven or eight mill. That sort of thing happens in the art world. But for a very small number of ­people. Do you know the most ever paid for a painting?”

“I don't know,” Hunter said. “Two hundred million?”

“Two hundred
fifty
.” Both hands kneaded the steering wheel. He was disappointed, she could tell, that her guess was so close, although it wasn't a guess. “Cézanne's
The Card Players
. One of five, actually. It sold in twenty twelve to the royal family of Qatar for two fifty.”

“That's hard to imagine, anyone paying that much for a painting.”

“Yeah, well, that's the point, isn't it?” he said. “It was $100 million more than anyone had ever paid for a painting before. Is
The Card Players
really worth two hundred fifty million? No, of course not. But that's the nature of the business. It's worth what ­people are willing to pay.

“I think those deals gave Kepler an inflated sense of himself,” he went on. “After that, he changed his M.O. and became a dealer in
stolen
art. Or
lost
art, as he called it, as if that gave some legitimacy to what he was doing. He began to style himself for a while—­still does, probably—­as this great
retriever
of stolen masterpieces.”

“Rather than as just a dealer or broker.”

“Right, that's how it evolved. He's made the claim that he can find and purchase any stolen masterpiece still in existence,” Randall said, and Hunter heard an echo of bitterness in his voice once again. “Some years ago, he supposedly handed out business cards with just his name and the initials RSM. That's the story, anyway.”

Hunter thought about it for a moment. “As in ‘retriever of stolen masterpieces'?”

“That's right. He likes to think he's serving some higher calling, I guess, saving these art treasures, finding them a home where they'll be properly cared for. Sometimes in museums, sometimes not. If the museums had cared for them properly in the first place, they never would have been stolen, that's the idea he wants to project. To me? He's a high-­level fence, who's just been lucky so far. End of paragraph, end of story.”

Hunter noticed his lashes fluttering behind the sunglasses.

“But he
has
retrieved stolen art?” Hunter said.

“He has. Yes. Three or four times that we know of.”

“What were they?”

“The paintings?” He seemed to become more tentative all of a sudden. “There were a ­couple of well-­known cases. One in Zurich, where in 2008 a Degas, a Cézanne, van Gogh, and Monet were all taken off the walls of a small museum. No security. They were recovered four years later in Serbia. Kepler and his attorney played a role in negotiating their return, by setting up a dummy buyer.

“And also one of
The Scream
thefts in Oslo. The more recent one. He was involved in the recovery. But understand, he was very well paid, in both cases.

“I'll tell you what I
do
respect about Kepler,” he added. “The problem with stolen art at this level is getting the thieves together with the potential buyers. That's always been the issue. We're talking two completely different social classes, two kinds of ­people. Neither of whom trusts or understands the other. There's a huge gulf there. That's why ­people who've dealt in stolen masterpieces have nearly always failed miserably. If I give Kepler any credit, it's that he's been able to bridge those two worlds.”

“So Kepler has nothing to do with the thefts themselves.”

“Oh, no,” Randall said. “Most—­all—­thefts of masterpieces are carried out by ­people who don't know their little toe from their elbow. They don't respect the art, they only respect what it's supposedly ‘worth,' and mistakenly think they can get some of that. We're talking low-­level organized crime, in many cases. This one, for instance—­the Rembrandt—­the thieves cut the canvas out and left the frame on the floor of the Gardner. The painting was damaged goods before it even left the museum.

“Some very famous paintings—­by Picasso, by Caravaggio, many others—­have been destroyed because the thieves couldn't find a buyer. A few years ago, some men in Rotterdam stole seven works—­Gauguin, Monet, Matisse, among them. They tried to sell them a ­couple times, couldn't get any serious offers and one of the thieves' mothers ended up burning them in her kitchen, to protect her son from prosecution. You can look it up.”

“Yes, I have,” Hunter said. “So Kepler wants to save these masterpieces before the same thing happens.”

“Well. That's what he says.”

“And so if a Cézanne could be sold privately for two hundred and fifty million dollars, presumably other paintings could also be sold privately for a sizable amount?”

“Yes, in theory.” He smiled, turning to give her an enigmatic, possibly admiring look. “Of course, the art does carry a certain stigma, being stolen. The Cézanne wasn't stolen. But I think he may be able to use that in a perverse way to add to their value.”

“So who's the buyer in this case, if it isn't him?”

When he didn't respond, Hunter said, “Do you have any idea?”

“Do I have any idea? Of course. There are a handful of ­people who operate at that level, a few predictable players: there is a collector in Dubai we know about who would like to own it. There is the Qatar royal family, as I mentioned. There's a Corsican dealer. There's someone now doing this very quietly in Silicon Valley.

“But what concerns us, you see, is that this buyer
isn't
one of the usual suspects. We have good intelligence that there may even be terrorist money in this deal.
That's
what concerns us.” His voice rose with a new, more urgent inflection as he said this.

“Why would terrorists have any interest in a Rembrandt painting?”

“Well. That's the part I can't get into,” he said. “But in general terms? The information we have is that he's working this deal for a Middle Eastern businessman who collects art. He, also, happens to be a supplier of arms to Sunni rebels in Iraq and to terrorist interests throughout the region. That's why this concerns us more than any other deal.”

He went silent again. Hunter flashed on Dave Crowe's warning:
You may regret it if you become involved with this guy.
She watched his long fingers, tightening and loosening on the wheel again as if doing hand exercises.

“And there's one other problem, which goes even beyond that,” Randall said. “Many of the deals Kepler's been involved in? Have been dirty, in a different way. The man has a problem, and his wealth and success have only exacerbated it: He doesn't care about human life. He always values the art over ­people. ­People's lives aren't going to last; these masterpieces will. That's one of his sayings.” Randall's voice had a bitter edge again. “In each deal that we know about, there has been some collateral, human damage. ‘Collateral' is his term.”

“As in ­people who've been killed,” she said, sensing that this was what the conversation had been turning toward.

“At least four,” he said. “Although there's some disagreement over this within the Bureau. But—­we know of three cases, unsolved, that have his fingerprints: one missing person, two homicides. And another accidental death that I'd put in the same category. That's four. This Susan Champlain may be number five.” There was a sudden catch in his voice. “As I say, he's a man without a moral compass.”

“Hmm.”
Had
he said this? Hunter wondered.

“We've tried twice before to make cases against the man. Put good time and manpower into it. But we couldn't bring charges. And right now, some in the Bureau are a little reluctant to go up against him a third time, even though we're building a case.”

Hunter waited, then realized he wasn't going to say any more. “So he hasn't been charged with anything, you're saying, not even in relation to stolen art?”

“Not yet. Right now, Kepler has a perfectly legal presence in the world. He pays his taxes, owns property, keeps a primary residence near Dover, Delaware, and owns some beach property. Although he's not there right now. Whenever Kepler's working a deal, he goes mobile, he rents rooms in various places, for himself and the ­people working for him. When Kepler's not home, it usually means something's happening.”

“So something's happening now, you're saying,” Hunter said.

“That's what we think. But we're limited in what we can do. It's a little bit of Catch-22: we don't have the resources to go after him properly because we haven't been able to make the case; and we can't make the case without the resources. You say the words ‘stolen art' and some ­people in the Bureau roll their eyes; it's not a high priority, never has been. Stolen art is the Bureau's orphan child. And that situation's only made him bolder. This deal, in particular, worries me.”

“Why?”

“Because of the terrorist connection, first. And because of the painting itself. Walter Kepler loves this painting, he's made remarks about it over the years. He told one of our ­people last year this is not only the greatest stolen work of art in the world, it's also the greatest
painting
in the world.”

Randall went silent, then. They were coming back to the highway.

“And so you want me involved why? Because I can talk with Nicholas Champlain?” she said.

“In part,” he said. “You're in an unusual position. You have a legitimate pretense to approach him and ask questions.”

“Homicide isn't a pretense, though.”

“No. Sorry, you have a
reason
to approach him. And he's not going to think that you have any interest in the larger case.”

“I don't know that I do.”

“Or knowledge of it, let's say.”

This confirmed what Randall was up to, anyway: he was recruiting her. Hunter needed to know more about him, even if it meant getting in touch with Dave Crowe again. “So? What do you have in mind?” Hunter said.

Scott Randall told her his idea, then, his real reason for contacting her. He wanted Hunter to meet with Nicholas Champlain—­which she already planned to do on Monday afternoon—­and to talk with him while wearing an electronic transmitter. He wanted them to discuss the death of his wife, Susan Champlain—­which she planned to do anyway—­and, also, to ask him about the stolen painting and about Walter Kepler.

Hunter watched the scenery. She wondered how much there was here that he wasn't saying. She'd worked with the FBI several times before and found that mistrust and misdirection were institutional. The feds had a little attitude toward state and local cops; their investigations tended to become unnecessarily convoluted and bureaucratic, she'd found. Still, Hunter had learned from them, and her instinct was to say yes, even though this Randall worried her a little. She couldn't quite figure him out.

“I've already talked with Henry Moore,” he added, as if hearing her doubts. “He's on board with me.”

“Is he?” Hunter was surprised. “When did you talk with him?”

“Right before I came to see you.”

Oh. He shifted, then, to a more companionable tone: “It's a wonder they've got you out here in the bean fields of Tidewater County, anyway,” he said.

“Is it?” Hunter said, a little defensively. “Homicides happen everywhere, though,” she said. “It doesn't matter a lot where you are, does it?”

“Well, you proved that last year,” he said, alluding to the Psalmist case. “I'd've thought you could've written your own ticket after that.”