Ulterior Motives

by Terri Blackstock

  “He just wants the painting,” Sharon said, trying to reassure herself more than Anne. “He has to keep them alive so he’ll have something to bargain with. He can’t hurt them. He just can’t.”

  “He already has,” Anne whispered. “Just by taking them, he hurt them. The trauma that they’re going through . . .” She covered her face, and her voice came out in a squeak. “I know God’s punishing me.”

  Sharon stared at her for a long moment, at a loss for what to say. There had been many times since her divorce when she had wished God would punish Anne, but in the last couple of years, those wishes had come less frequently. Why would such punishment come now, and include her own child?

  Sharon grew quiet and followed Anne’s gaze to the raindrops running down the window. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you remember during yours and Ben’s divorce, when you told him that the pain for you was bad enough, but that he had traumatized his children and robbed them of their family? That they’d never be the same because of it?”

  “I said a lot of things,” Sharon whispered.

  “That haunted Ben,” Anne went on. “And I never let it haunt me. I thought kids were resilient. That they’d recover. That it wouldn’t be a big deal.”

  Sharon had known that was Anne’s attitude. She stiffened a little, wondering where the woman was going with this.

  “But sometimes, I think God punishes people by giving them more of the pain they gave somebody else.” She swallowed and hiccuped a sob, then kept going. “We traumatized your children, so now he’s letting us see how it feels. Only this is even worse.”

  Sharon stared down at the doll for a moment, running her fingertip across the porcelain face and over the pink lips. “There’s one problem with your logic on this, Anne. If it’s the way you say it is, why would God make me go through it?”

  Anne considered that for a moment, then looked at Sharon. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s punishing you for something, too.”

  She dropped the doll and got up. “Maybe you’re just wrong about all of it,” she said. “Maybe God had nothing to do with any of this. Maybe he’s just watching over them. Bringing them back to us.”

  “They’re both so little,” Anne said in a tormented whisper.

  For a moment Sharon felt a bond with Anne that she had never felt before. The bond of one mother to another.

  But she didn’t want to feel that bond, and as the contagious agony caught up with her and brought her close to breaking, Sharon left the room, to suffer alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The gallery was almost as it had been the last time Ben left it. The same paintings still graced the walls, the same sculptures stood on their pedestals.

  But everything was different.

  Ben let his eyes stray to the chalk mark on the floor, and realized for the first time that a man he had respected and depended on, a man he had seen every day for the last five years, was dead. Some murderer had come in here and killed him, and if Dubose had not fired and evicted him, Ben and his family might have been killed, as well. He wondered if that was why Dubose had been in such a hurry to get them out. Did he know he was in danger? Was he trying to spare Ben and his family?

  Somehow, that thought made the reality seem more difficult to bear. His eyes teared up, and he turned away.

  Tony looked uncomfortable with the show of emotion. “So where was this painting you told us about? How about taking us there and showing us where it was hidden?”

  Ben tried to pull himself together and started up the stairs, with Larry and Tony following behind him. He cut through the studio where he’d been the most creative, and looked longingly at the work that leaned against the walls or sat on easels. Without uttering a word, he crossed the room to the office where Dubose had worked.

  The little door to the attic was at the back of Dubose’s office. Ben turned on the light, and the wooden stairwell lit up.

  Slowly, he led them up into the attic. A few bare bulbs hung from the ceiling, casting a weak glare over wrapped and stacked canvases, over empty frames hung haphazardly on the walls.

  “It was right over here,” he said, and the two cops followed him. “I was up here looking for a frame.” He gestured toward all of the old frames, some broken, some just dusty. “I wanted a frame that was obviously old. I was going for the antique look for one of my paintings. I’ll show it to you when we go back down. Anyway, I bent down like this to look at that frame over there, and when I stood back up, my head bumped on this compartment, and the painting fell out. It had been rolled up for some time, because when I started to unroll it, the paint cracked a little.”

  Tony stepped forward and examined the narrow box built into the rafter at the ceiling. The door was hanging open, and he could see how the slanted compartment could have dropped its contents if it hadn’t been closed properly. “Any idea where the painting is now?”

  “I gave it to Dubose,” Ben said. “I never saw it again.”

  “What might he have done with it?”

  “Got me,” Ben said. “He may have hidden it someplace else, though I don’t really know why he’d go to all that trouble. I mean, it obviously wasn’t the original.”

  Larry took a deep breath. “Well, maybe we’d better look around up here. It could be in a new hiding place.”

  “But didn’t you say that the place had been rifled through? If it was here, the killer would have found it.”

  “We have to anyway,” Tony said. So they set about examining every inch of the dusty, dark attic, moving frames and old cracked canvases, oil paintings that looked as if they’d be better suited to the dumpster outside than the attic, and broken sculptures that Dubose hadn’t had the heart to throw away. There were no more hidden compartments, and very little of value there.

  As they walked back through the studio, Ben showed them some of the things he’d been working on. “Pretty cushy job you had,” Tony said, looking around. “Free rent, nice place to work, steady income whether you sell anything or not.”

  Ben’s face reddened. “I sold plenty. People came from all over the country to buy my work.”

  “Do you think this is about one of your own paintings?” Larry asked.

  Ben shook his head. “Why wouldn’t he just call it by name? Describe it? Why the secrecy? Why does he think I know what he’s talking about?”

  They went through each of his paintings, then headed downstairs, studying each painting for something that gave it more value than the others. Nothing stood out as a work worthy of murder and kidnapping.

  “All right, who can we call to find out for sure if that Multitude painting was recovered?” Tony asked.

  Ben thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, Louis kept a set of books in his office that have information like that.” He started back up the stairs, feeling excited. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before!”

  They followed him back up, and he hurried into Dubose’s office. “See?” he asked, pointing to the eight volumes on the credenza behind the desk. “The Dictionary of Painters and Sculptors. I had almost forgotten. It has information about lost and stolen art, what it’s worth now, and all that kind of stuff. Louis used it extensively.”

  He pulled out one volume and flipped through the pages until he came to Marazzio. “There it is,” he said, setting the book down and pointing to the passage so that Tony and Larry could see. “Says The Multitude was stolen from a museum in Palermo over ten years ago.” He frowned. “I don’t get it. It doesn’t say it was recovered. These other two that were stolen at other times, they were recovered three years ago, but nothing about The Multitude.”

  “How current are these books?”

  “Very current. Louis kept them up-to-date. He just got this set about a month ago.”

  “Maybe he got The Multitude mixed up with one of the ones that really was recovered.”

  “Or he lied,” Larry said.

  “If the painting I found was really the o
riginal, stolen painting, then it probably is what the kidnapper wants.”

  “So where is it?”

  “I have no idea,” Ben said. “Maybe you should search his house . . . his car . . .”

  “We searched it after the murder,” Larry said, “but we weren’t looking for a painting then.”

  As they drove back to Sharon’s house, Tony said, “That painting is the key to whatever is going on here. This painter. Mar—”

  “Marazzio,” Ben said.

  “Yeah, Marazzio. He was pretty famous, huh?”

  Ben chuckled, almost condescendingly. “I’d say so. He’s considered one of the greats. Who knows? If it was a fake, maybe Dubose was going to doctor the reproduction and try to pass it off as the original, especially if he really did know the painting was still missing. See how many millions he could get for it.”

  “I’m in the wrong business,” Tony muttered, and Larry laughed. “No, really. I’m artistic. I used to draw a mean Bugs Bunny.”

  “Used to? What happened?”

  “I had to trade my crayon in for a gun.”

  “Tough life, buddy.”

  “Yeah. But if I’d known the money was in those crayons . . .”

  They looked in the backseat. Ben wasn’t laughing. But their bantering made him realize one good thing: they no longer considered him the killer.

  “So where did Dubose buy most of the original art pieces he found?” Larry asked.

  Ben shrugged. “He traveled a lot, went to a lot of auctions. And there were a few dealers he did business with. Some of them spent a lot of time at the gallery.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Well, there were several. He had dealings with people all over the world. But some of the most frequent ones, I guess, were Leon Spatika, Nelson Chamberlain, T. Z. Quarternet. All three of them have bought paintings of mine.”

  Tony shot Larry a look. “Would their names be in Dubose’s Rolodex?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “We took it as evidence. Maybe we’ll give them a call.”

  Larry looked over his shoulder. “If Dubose was such a big-time art dealer with all these connections, what was he doing in a little town like St. Clair?”

  “He had about ten galleries across the U.S.,” Ben said. “They’re all as small as this one. It’s a good outlet for some of the lower priced paintings he sells. Plus he liked to cultivate up-and-comers. That’s what he considered me.”

  “Then there are other galleries with artists-in-residence?”

  “Sure. But I doubt there are any others where the owner has been murdered and the artist’s kids have been abducted.”

  They pulled into Sharon’s driveway, but Larry made no move to get out. “Go on in, Ben, and tell John and Nick in there that they’ll have to stay a little longer. Tony and I are going to search Dubose’s apartment and his car again. Maybe we can find the painting.”

  “All right,” Ben said. “But what if the kidnapper calls back?”

  “John and Nick know what to do, and they’ll get in touch with us.”

  “All right.” He got out of the car, and headed inside to face the quiet left behind by his two little girls.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The hole the girls had dug was deep, and though their fingers had developed blisters, they both dug with a zeal that they hadn’t felt since they’d come there. At the end of the tunnel they were digging with their hands was freedom. And food. And warmth.

  They heard a car pulling up to the shack, its wheels popping on the gravel road.

  “Daddy’s come!” Emily exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “Daddy! Daddy!”

  But Christy clapped a dirty hand over Emily’s mouth. “It might be him!” she hissed. “The mean man. Be quiet and help me hide the hole!”

  Emily’s joy crashed instantly, and she looked around for something to move over the hole. There was nothing.

  “I’ll sit here over it,” Christy said, sitting on the edge of the hole. “You lie down with your head in my lap, and he won’t see it.”

  “What about the pile of dirt we dug out?”

  “Lie down in front of it,” Christy said. “Maybe he won’t see it.”

  Emily got into place, and Christy could feel her trembling as she laid her head in her lap. “Do I pretend I’m sleeping?” she whispered.

  “If you want.”

  Christy’s hand was trembling as she laid it over Emily’s arm. “Our hands,” Emily said. “When he sees them, he’ll know we’ve been digging.”

  Christy considered that for a moment. “I’ll put mine under you. Put yours between your legs.”

  Both children hid their hands as the car door slammed. Footsteps came closer to the shed, and keys jingled.

  “It’s not Daddy, is it?” Emily asked on a whisper.

  “No. I think it’s him.”

  The door opened, and both girls stiffened. Emily closed her eyes and tried to pretend to be asleep.

  The big man stepped inside holding two bags. “I brought you something to eat,” he said, and thrust the bags at Christy. She took the bags, forgetting the dirt on her hands. The man didn’t seem to notice.

  “Thanks, Mister. Are we gonna get to go home today?”

  “That depends on how much your daddy wants to keep you alive. It’s up to him, kiddo.”

  Christy’s eyes widened as she tried to understand. “It’s cold in here. And dark. Real dark, and Emily’s afraid of the dark.” She started to cry, knowing that it wasn’t the right thing to do, but she couldn’t stop it. Then Emily’s act crumbled, and she began to squint her eyes and cry, too.

  “Please let us go home, Mister. We’ll tell everybody you were nice to us. We won’t tell them about this place.”

  The man laughed sullenly under his breath. “I told you, it’s up to your father. When he gives me what I want, you can go home.”

  Both girls looked up at him, quiet.

  “Eat your food. I don’t know when I’ll bring you any more.”

  With that, he closed the door and locked the bolt again.

  “McDonald’s!” Emily cried, and dug into the bag. “Drinks, too. Look, Christy!”

  But Christy wasn’t thinking about the food. Her mind was still hung on the fact that her father had the power to get them back, but hadn’t done anything about it. More tears ran down the dirt on her face, and she wiped them away with a filthy, blistered hand, smearing mud across her face.

  “Aren’t you hungry, Christy?” Emily asked.

  “Yeah,” Christy said and took her drink out of the bag. “Emily, do you think he’s ever gonna let us go home?”

  Emily bit into her burger, and chewed thoughtfully as she looked at her sister. “If he doesn’t, Daddy’ll come get us. He’ll find us. He always finds me when we play hide-and-seek.”

  “This isn’t hide-and-seek,” Christy said miserably. “He doesn’t know where to look for us. And the man said it was up to him. What if we have to stay here another night?”

  “We’ll dig out before then,” Emily said solemnly. “We’ll run away and find that grandma with the telephone.”

  Christy wiped her eyes again and moved away from the hole. The man hadn’t discovered it. Maybe Emily was right. Maybe they could escape soon.

  The baby’s cry woke Sharon from where she half-dozed with her head in her arms at the kitchen table, and she jumped up. It was morning. That was Christy calling her! She rushed toward the stairs.

  But the crying wasn’t coming from upstairs, and as the fog from her brain cleared, reality jolted her. It was Bobby, not Christy. Christy was still out there with some maniac who’d already killed at least once.

  She grabbed Christy’s Simba doll and wished she could at least get it to her somehow, so there would be some measure of comfort for her child.

  She walked into the living room, and saw that Tony and Larry had come back and had fallen asleep on the two couches set at right angles to each other in the big living room. Tony stirred s
lightly, so she backed out and walked toward the sound of the crying baby.

  As she grew closer, the crying stopped. She slowed her step and got to the doorway. Anne was there, holding the baby, humming to him and gently rocking him as he whimpered.

  Maternal anguish washed over her, overwhelming her with pain. But it wasn’t resentment this time, or jealousy. The sight just reminded her that there would be no outlet, none at all, for her emotions until Christy came back.

  Then came the miserable, cruel, startling thought. What if he’s killed them? What if they’re already dead somewhere? What if they cried and he got impatient? What if I never see Christy again?

  She covered her mouth to muffle her sobs. Rushing back up the hall, her head bent, she slammed right into someone coming toward her.

  She caught her breath and yelped once, before she realized it was Tony.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, looking down at her.

  She covered her face and shook her head viciously. “What if they’re dead?”

  He pulled her into his arms and held her as she sobbed violently against his rumpled shirt. “They’re not dead,” he whispered. “You can’t think like that. We’re going to find them. Come on. Sit down. You’re exhausted.”

  She let him lead her to the couch, and she sat down and allowed him to pull her against him. She laid her head on his shoulder and hiccuped sobs that wouldn’t stop as he whispered soothing assurances against her ear. “Go ahead . . . it’s okay to cry . . .”

  The human contact helped. Slowly, her sobs subsided, and she was left under a blanket of grief. He still didn’t let her go.

  He stroked her hair back from her face and wiped her cheek with the back of his fingers.

  “I dozed off in the kitchen,” she whispered. “And the baby cried, and for a minute, I thought it was Christy. Just a split second, where I believed it had been an awful dream, and I was waking up.”

  “You need to get some real sleep, Sharon. You’re not a superwoman.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Some part of me thinks that if I let myself relax even for a minute, that they’ll just fade away, and I’ll never see my baby again.”