Treasure of Saint-Lazare (13 page)

Jen had brought the BMW smoothly up to 70 miles an hour as they passed through a section of pine forest, broken every quarter-mile by small houses, many with old appliances and cars in the yards. They were now fully in the country.

“Good idea,” she replied. “But hold on, because there’s a white car a half-mile back that may be following us. I saw them move out of a parking place downtown when we left Jimmy Dean’s office, and now they’ve followed us onto this road. It could be a coincidence, but ....”

“After what we’ve learned, we need to be super cautious. Do you think we should go back downtown?”

“We’ll have to deal with it eventually. They probably don’t know these roads as well as I do. In high school I used to come out dancing at the old roadhouses around here. Some of the gravel roads were prime stops for horny teenagers on the way back.”

Thom answered his phone this time and Eddie delivered a quick summary of the day, including the indication that Al Sommers had intervened to keep the Hans Frank interview out of official Army files, and that he knew about the Arcadia bank vault but avoided telling Eddie about it. Eddie did not think that was an innocent omission.

Thom broke in. “The guy you talked to yesterday, Deus Lewis. A dog walker found his body in a park this morning, not too far from the grocery store where you told me you left him. It wasn’t pretty, and you’d better figure that he spilled everything about your meeting with him.”

“Arturo is in danger.”

“I sent a car out there as soon as I heard. Arturo was at work, but somebody already tried to burn his house down with his wife and daughter inside. The only reason they escaped is she pushed a sofa in front of the door and slowed him down. When he forced his way in they hid in the bathroom, which has a really strong lock. She made so much noise the guy gave up but set fire to the sofa on the way out. A neighbor saw smoke and called the fire department.”

“And they’re OK?”

“Scared but otherwise fine. We picked up Arturo at his job and took him home.”

“Any idea who the pyromaniac is?”

“No, except that the wife said he had an accent. Not one like hers, but more guttural. I think maybe it was German, or Russian, but that’s a guess.”

Jen called out, “Eddie, they’re coming closer!”

“Oh, Thom,” Eddie said, almost as an aside. “We may have somebody chasing us. We’re on the way back from Arcadia, and Jen saw a white car pull out and follow us. We’re going eighty-five and they’re creeping up on us, so they aren’t out for a leisurely drive in the country.”

“Careful. There are some bad turns on that road.”

“We’ll be OK. Jen got to know it well during her misspent youth. She says tell you she’s going to cut through the two-lane roads around Myakka City if we have to. If the driver is a foreigner, or even an out-of-towner, he won’t know them.”

He described Jen’s BMW to Thom and asked him to alert any sheriff’s deputies or highway patrolmen in the vicinity. “And tell them to be careful. If these are the guys who killed Deus and tried to murder Arturo’s wife and baby, they are very dangerous and probably armed.”

“Will do.” Thom’s tone said he didn’t appreciate being told his job and Eddie made a mental note to back off.

Eddie turned up the ringer volume so he’d be sure to hear it over the wind noise. “He’ll alert the highway patrol, but no guarantee they’ll find us or we’ll find them. Can you deal with this guy?”

“I think so. We have about a two-mile straightaway before we get to a little road called Sugar Bowl. I’ll use that to see if we can clearly outrun them — I think we can. If not, we’ll head back into the farmland. I know I can duck them in there, but it’d be more dangerous because the roads are narrow.”

“Ok with me. I’ll watch them.” Eddie tightened his seatbelt as he felt the 300-horsepower engine respond to Jen’s steady push on the accelerator. As Eddie looked back, he saw the pursuers increase their speed but it was clear after only a few seconds that Jen was pulling away.

“I think we’re outrunning them pretty easily, Jen,” he shouted over the rushing wind.

“Good. I could maybe dig out a few more RPMs but I hate to do it on this road. You never know when you’ll come up behind a truck. We’re running at almost a hundred twenty now, and I’d be surprised if they can maintain a hundred for any distance without blowing up their engine. And we still have revs to spare.”

The 25-mile drive to the Interstate crossroads took them less than 15 minutes, even allowing for the truck Jen had to slow down to pass. For the last five a black-and-tan cruiser of the Florida Highway Patrol pulled in front of them and Jen was able to slow to 80. She let out a sigh and looked at Eddie. “That was fun when I was 18 years old, but at 40 it’s just stupid. I hope that’s the last excitement I have for a while.”

Two blocks past the Interstate the cruiser stopped behind a sheriff’s car waiting at the side of the road. The highway patrolman, a lanky sergeant who appeared about their age, walked back to Jen’s side of the car.

“We’re glad you were in the neighborhood,” she told him with relief.

“Me too. We’re still working through what’s going on, but for now the deputy in that car ahead will escort you downtown to the city Police Department. Detective Anderson is waiting for you there, and by the time you see him he should know something about what’s happening.”

The deputy led them through town and up the ramp of a parking garage, stopping on the third floor. As he opened the door of the unmarked white cruiser, Eddie thought he caught a murmured “Oh, shit!” from Jen as a tall blond deputy, his white shirt bearing captain’s bars on the collar, reached the car.

“Been out racing the Arcadia road again, Jen?”

“One last time, Kevin. I think that was it for me.”

She introduced him to Eddie as Kevin LaFarge, a high school classmate.

“Jen and I go ‘way back,” Kevin told Eddie. “I should have known it was her when the call came in. I was in the area and Thom Anderson said it was important so I took it myself. He’s waiting for you across the street.”

He waved at the entrance to a bridge that spanned a narrow street, connecting the garage to the police station.

“Old friend?” Eddie asked after Kevin had driven away.

“Part of my past. Important part. He’s one of the reasons I know the country roads. It was a close call back then, but he married the homecoming queen. Now they have four kids and she runs around on him when she can.”

At the end of the bridge Thom stood in a small reception area, its walls painted an institutional seafoam green. Two plastic chairs stood against a side wall, and one look at their seats told Eddie why Thom had chosen to stand. One appeared to have a dried-up puddle of ice cream residue; whatever had been dropped on the other was unidentifiable.

Thom said, “Well, we didn’t find the white car. Or, I should say, we found a lot of white cars but we couldn’t match any of them with your pursuers.”

“When Jen put the pedal down they dropped back,” Eddie told him. “At that point they were just a couple of guys out for a drive in the country.”

“And that’s what the Highway Patrol found — a lot of Sunday drivers. We have so many retirees here that every day is Sunday to somebody.”

The door buzzed as Thom passed his card through a reader mounted on the wall. “Follow me and we can bring each other up to date on everything that’s been going on today.”

The desk and two small chairs left room for only one file cabinet in Thom’s small office. Eddie pulled out one of the chairs so Jen could take the second one, then waited for Thom to speak. He was already concerned that the detective would be offended that he’d found the second witness, and knew policemen could be territorial about their work — in Kuwait the civilian police called up to be MPs were among the thinnest-skinned soldiers and most likely to over-react to a slight, real or imagined. Although Thom didn’t strike him as that picky, he knew ruffled feelings could jeopardize Jen’s chances of learning the truth about Roy’s death, so he sat quietly waiting for Thom to begin.

He did. “Your message yesterday was significant in a lot of ways. Can we go over the day again? First, how did you get Arturo to tell you about Deus?”

“Respect and patience. He had to know more than he’d told, so I just told him how important his information was to solving the case and waited for him to make the right decision. In the end, his wife encouraged him to tell me about Deus. She’s the one who really got it done.

“By the way, do they have a place to stay?”

“The wife has a cousin here. That’s where they went today. But there’s not much room so they’ll have to find somewhere else in a day or two.”

Eddie turned to Jen. “They shouldn’t have to suffer because they did the right thing, and they should be somewhere with some security. I’ll pay the bill.”

“I have a friend in the rental business. I’ll see if he has something in a locked building, or at least with cameras.”

Eddie turned back to Thom. “Arturo gave me a good description of Deus Lewis. I found him on the corner just where he was supposed to be, along with three of his buddies. All of them were wannabe tough guys.

“Deus saw the whole thing. It wasn’t supposed to be a murder, but a kidnapping. Two men tried to hold Roy until they could push him into the car — that’s theory. Fact is that Roy recognized one of them and broke free. The car hit him as he was trying to run across the street. It can’t have been moving very fast, but it weighs probably 1,500 kilograms.”

He stopped to do a quick mental conversion. “More than 3,300 pounds, so it was enough. And then his head hit the curb, and that was that.”

“I agree,” Thom said. “That makes it murder, or something close — now two murders. But who did it?”

Jen interrupted, “In all the time I’ve been with Roy, I don’t recall him having a fight with anyone. He told me more than once that life is too short to carry grudges.”

Thom continued. “I should have been more precise. We are pretty sure who did it. That is, we found one of the men on security video at the airport. We know he arrived in Sarasota two days before Roy was killed and two other men were with him. We know they were foreign, probably Germans. What we don’t know is who they are or what they intended to do with Roy. And Eddie, I’m in agreement that it was supposed to be a snatch, not a murder. But where were they going to take him for questioning? And where did they stay while they were here? If we learn that, we’ll probably know who’s behind it.”

“How did they get here?” Eddie asked.

“Train from up north somewhere, we’re still trying to find out where. We circulated the surveillance picture to cab drivers and yesterday one remembered picking them up at the Amtrak station in Tampa. It was a lucky fare for him, since he’d just dropped off a couple who were taking the train to New York. Afraid to fly.

“There were three men together, two tall and one short, and they spoke German with each other. The cabbie studied German in high school so he’s sure that’s what is was. He dropped them at a motel near the Interstate, but they didn’t check in. The desk clerk thinks someone picked them up in a private car, but he didn’t get a make or model.”

“Did you send the picture to Philippe?”

“It’s not one of the two he has locked up. A witness thinks it resembles the one that got away, but on the other hand maybe it doesn’t. And we didn’t get any usable prints, so there’s nothing Philippe can use to compare with the car they used in Paris. And it was rented using false ID.”

Jen leaned forward, glanced at Eddie, then looked at Thom to say, “We picked up a lead this morning that may be worth something. Roy had been getting threatening letters from a German, demanding that he reveal the location of a valuable painting the Nazis stole during the war.

“They came from a man named Erich Kraft. I knew him as a very unpleasant boy my age in Frankfurt. My mother was married to his father for a couple of years.

“The letters ended just before Eddie’s father was killed. He says in them that the painting and some gold belonged to his father, and he meant to have them. It’s probably the gold that has him interested now, since it’s gone up in value a lot recently.

“Roy wrote back once to say he’d looked for the painting for more than twenty years but never found it, and had given up the search. Kraft wouldn’t take that for an answer. He said he knew for a fact Roy could find the picture, because the Nazi who stole it first had told him.”

Thom stood up, a quizzical expression on his face.

“Whoa.” He waved his hands. “What’s all this really about? Did this start with the letter you found?”

“It did,” Jen answered. “Roy asked me to deliver the letter to Eddie’s father in Paris. Either he didn’t know Mr. Grant had died, or he knew and just forgot to change the instruction on the envelope. It could be either, because we don’t know when the letter was written.”

“And it said what?”

Jen signaled for Eddie to explain.

“It was very vague. It was written in a rough code, more like jargon, but the import of it was that he was giving up the search. He gave a couple of suggestions to my father but we don’t know yet what they all mean.”

“But what were they looking for?”

“The most famous and valuable painting still missing. It was painted in the early 1500s by one of the Italian Old Masters, Raphael, and is usually called ‘Portrait of a Young Man,’ or sometimes ‘Portrait of a Gentleman.’ It was the pride of a family-owned museum in Poland but it spent the war hanging in the home of Hans Frank, who was the Nazi party lawyer before the war but the governor-general of Poland after the Germans invaded. That’s when he wasn’t fighting over it with other Nazi bigwigs.

“The painting was destined for the grand museum Hitler planned to build in Austria after he’d won the war, but of course things didn’t go their way. As the Russians got closer to Cracow in 1945 Frank had the most valuable pieces of his stolen art packed up and shipped to his home near Munich. A Leonardo and a Rembrandt arrived, but the Raphael didn’t, and hasn’t been seen since. My father and Roy interviewed Frank just a week or two before he was hanged and they came away with a certain respect for his intelligence. They got the impression that he’d already sent the Raphael out of Poland.”

Thom stopped him and asked, “Does this really trace back to something that happened seventy years ago? And a painting?”