Curse of the Painted Lady (The Anlon Cully Chronicles Book 3)

by K Patrick Donoghue

  “Indio Maiz, right? The place you shot an unarmed man?” Li asked.

  The unexpected mention of Christian Hunte’s shooting stunned Jennifer, as did the tone of Agent Li’s question. She looked to Nickerson, who shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “She didn’t hear about it from me.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” Jennifer said to Li.

  “Did Muran show you how to use them?”

  “Look, I told you. I’ve never met her.”

  “Then who showed you how to use them?”

  “One of the people at the dig,” Jennifer said.

  “Name?”

  “Jacques Foucault,” Jennifer said.

  “Address?”

  “He lives in France, don’t know his address,” Jennifer said.

  “I have it, I’ll get it to you,” Nickerson said. Jennifer stared at him with a puzzled look, but then remembered she had asked Nickerson to run database queries on Foucault and Hunte after the Indio Maiz shooting.

  “Did this Foucault know Muran? Is that who you first heard the name from?”

  Jennifer recalled the first time she heard Muran’s name. Pebbles had screamed it during a turbulent session with Malinyah’s Sinethal. But the next time she heard the name, it indeed came from the lips of Jacques Foucault at Indio Maiz. She was not about to drag Pebbles into the situation, but she saw no reason to protect Foucault. “Yes, the first time I heard the name Muran was from Foucault. I don’t think he knows her personally, but I can’t say for sure.”

  The assembled officers exchanged a fresh round of silent looks. Li asked Nickerson, “Did you get a photo of Foucault in your search?”

  “Yes, I have an image of his passport,” Nickerson said. “But you can pull him up on your phone right now. He’s a somewhat public figure. I found lots of pictures of him on the Internet during my search.”

  Li slid her phone from her jacket pocket. Opening the device’s web browser, she typed in Foucault’s name. Jennifer could see her flicking her thumb to scroll through multiple screens. She handed the phone to Dunsmore. “I don’t think that’s him. Too old.”

  Dunsmore agreed and passed the phone to Bennett. With Detective Hall looking over his shoulder, the two officers examined the pictures and handed the phone back to Li. Bennett said, “Definitely not our guy.”

  The confused look on Jennifer’s face was met by a clarifying comment by Li. “Our perp didn’t act alone. She had help.”

  “What?” Jennifer asked.

  Li’s phone began to buzz. After glancing down at the screen, she looked to Dunsmore and said, “Superintendent, can you fill her in? I need to take this call.”

  “Of course,” Dunsmore said. He waited until the door closed behind Li and then said to Jennifer, “We found Carla Bailey’s body at the fort. She was laid out on the parapet facing the lake. According to Detective Hall, she was posed in a similar manner as the Simpson woman. The body was obviously brought to the fort after it closed for the day, but its placement looked purposely staged, so we considered the possibility the suspect had previously visited the fort to pick the staging spot. So, we had detectives review footage from the park’s security cams for a period covering the past several days. And we came up big.”

  Two days before the robbery, Dunsmore explained, video of a woman fitting Debbie Bailey’s description of Muran was captured by a security camera in the museum café. Further analysis of footage around the fort taken the same day showed the woman bundled under disguising clothes in the fort’s courtyard, and on two separate occasions she lingered at the very spot where Carla’s body was found.

  Before Dunsmore could say it, Jennifer guessed his next comment. “There was someone with her. A man.”

  “Correct. A man met her in the courtyard and they went to the café together,” Dunsmore said, just as Agent Li returned to the room. Having overheard Dunsmore’s comment, Li reached into her briefcase and withdrew an eight-by-ten blowup of the café security cam image. She walked around the bed until she stood by Jennifer. She held the photograph in front of Jennifer’s face and asked, “Recognize him?”

  A butterfly wing would have knocked Jennifer over. As she stared at the pompous man’s smile, her face turned scarlet. “I’ll be damned! Chuck f—ing Goodwin.”

  As soon as Jennifer identified Charles Goodwin as the man in the photo, all the officers scurried out of the room, phones in hand. The Chuck-hunt was on. As she examined the photo some more, Jennifer wondered aloud, “What have you got yourself mixed up in, Chuck? Accessory to murder, grand theft, kidnapping. Damn, your ass is grass.”

  She recalled sitting in the stuck-up curator’s office. Well, it was less of an office and more of a shrine to Goodwin’s brilliance and celebrity, as Jennifer remembered it. She had arranged the meeting in the hopes of discovering where Devlin Wilson had acquired Malinyah’s Sinethal and the two unusual statuettes in his collection. At first, Goodwin had treated her like a peon, a messenger unworthy of his time. She had quickly dispelled his perception, causing only a small shift in his dismissive demeanor. It wasn’t until she had threatened to leave without handing over Anlon’s donation that Goodwin’s level of cooperation improved. But even then, he had still seemed aloof and, in spots, combative. This latter attitude had ultimately fizzled when Jennifer threatened to involve the police.

  As she replayed the conversation in her mind, she began to reconsider the shifts in his behavior over the course of the meeting. He never really shed his holier-than-thou disdain for her as they parried back and forth, but Jennifer now wondered if her interpretations of his combativeness and indifference had been faulty.

  She remembered Goodwin initially wouldn’t look at the photograph of Malinyah’s Sinethal when Jennifer had tried to show him. When she badgered him into taking a quick glance, he’d just as quickly denied any knowledge of it. His instantaneous reaction had seemed odd and she had pressed him about it. With great irritation, Goodwin had emphatically stated that his museum had not sold the Sinethal to Devlin. When she probed him again about whether he’d ever seen it before, his answer had been patently evasive. The conclusion she had reached at the time: Goodwin was lying. He had seen the Stone or was at least aware of its existence.

  It would have been a simple matter for him to examine the photograph with some depth and then say, “I’ve seen similar pieces, but I don’t think I’ve ever run across this one.” But he had treated the photograph like radioactive waste. He didn’t want to touch it, look at it or talk about it. There definitely had been a panicked quality in his denials, a “move along, nothing to see here” kind of vibe, Jennifer thought. She had interpreted his reactions as a tacit admission that he had seen the Stone before but had been unwilling to tell her where or when he had.

  Now, however, she considered his reactions in a different light. If Goodwin was connected with Muran, as the Ticonderoga video capture implied, maybe he reacted to Jennifer’s questions for the opposite reason — not because he had seen it before but because he had been looking for it on Muran’s behalf.

  Yet, Jennifer had told Goodwin that Anlon had the Sinethal and that it was a piece from Devlin’s collection. Presuming Goodwin passed those tidbits to Muran, why had Muran gone after Anabel instead of Anlon? And how had that ultimately led her to the Middlebury bank and the safe-deposit boxes registered to someone else? Also unexplained was the surveillance video of Muran removing another Sinethal from the safe-deposit box and her angry reaction to a missing piece, or pieces.

  There was another aspect of Goodwin’s behavior that Jennifer now believed she had misinterpreted. He had fought her hard when she requested the catalog records pertaining to three Munuorian Aromaeghs in the museum’s archives. He had only relented when she threatened to tip the police of her suspicions that there might be something connected to Devlin’s death hidden in the records. She had made the threat betting on Goodwin’s desire to protect the museum from potential scandal. Anyone who looked at the framed pictures on t
he “wall of fame” in Goodwin’s office would have concluded the man was image conscious beyond the norm. Her bet had paid off and Goodwin had provided the records.

  Later, when Jennifer had been in Villahermosa to visit the curator of the La Venta museum, she had learned Devlin’s “fish-man” statuette was a replica of larger statues originally discovered on the Nicaraguan island of Zapatera. The name of the island had triggered Jennifer’s memory; Goodwin’s catalog records had shown two of the museum’s Aromaeghs had been discovered on Zapatera. Jennifer had put two and two together and concluded that Goodwin’s reluctance to share the records was likely an attempt to hide the connection between the Aromaeghs and the picture of the statuette she had shown him, for he had denied knowledge of the statuette, too.

  But, now, Jennifer wondered if there had been something else in the records. Something pointing toward Muran. Something Goodwin hadn’t wanted the police to sniff out. She made a mental note to call Pebbles to ask her to pull the records from Anlon’s office and email them to her. She laid down the photo of Goodwin and Muran and said, “My phone!”

  Jennifer pressed the call button to summon the nurse. She waited a few minutes for LeShana to appear, but the nurse did not. Reluctantly, Jennifer pulled back the sheets and maneuvered out of bed. With her IV cart in tow, she shuffled to the room door and pulled it open. The hallway outside the room was vacant, but Jennifer could see the sprawling nurse’s station down the corridor. It seemed too far a distance to shout, and she was not thrilled with the idea of trying to walk to the station, as she didn’t feel particularly stable on her feet. Plus, she was self-conscious of her battered face, not to mention the loosely tied opening in the back of her flimsy hospital gown. She hovered in the doorway, hoping to catch the attention of a nurse or doctor exiting one of the rooms, when she saw Nickerson turn into the hallway. He didn’t see her at first, so Jennifer stepped out into the corridor and called to him.

  Nickerson looked up and immediately quickened his pace in Jennifer’s direction. As he approached, he said, “Are you all right? Do you need something?”

  “My bag. I left my bag somewhere at the command post last night. My phone’s in it. I wanted to call Anlon and Pebbles. Let them know what happened.”

  Nickerson hesitated and looked back toward the nurse’s station. He wavered in place for a few seconds, then turned to Jennifer and motioned her to turn around. “Um, okay. I’ll go ask Tim Hall about it in a sec. Let’s get you back in bed first.”

  Jennifer agreed to return to the room but asked Nickerson to precede her, explaining, “Not much covering my caboose.”

  As he assisted her into bed, Nickerson seemed awkward, averting his eyes away from her. At first, Jennifer thought he was making a demonstrative effort to avoid catching a glimpse of her bare backside, but his manner didn’t change once she was safely under the bed’s coverings. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at his shoes, deep in thought.

  “You’re acting weird,” Jennifer said. “Why won’t you look at me?”

  “Huh?” he said, finally raising his eyes to meet hers.

  “Something’s the matter, isn’t it?” Jennifer asked. “Did they lose my bag?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m pretty sure Hall has it.”

  “Then, what?”

  “Um, I’m not sure it’s my place to tell you, Jen. I think Captain Bennett said he would talk to you about it.”

  “I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so, not now. When I first got here, Agent Li was ready to throw the book at you, but when you identified Goodwin, she simmered down.”

  “Then, what’s going on, Dan? The look on your face is starting to scare me.”

  Nickerson sighed and approached the bed. He sat down on the edge and reached for Jennifer’s hand. Peering into her eyes, he softly said, “It’s about Pebbles.”

  Chapter 10 – The Longest Flight

  Reno, Nevada

  September 28

  The six-hour flight had been excruciating. Trapped in the Gulfstream as it zoomed across the country, Anlon had spent the entirety of the red-eye journey in a whirlwind of phone calls and texts.

  Early in the flight, he’d used the chartered plane’s satellite phone to speak with Carl Emerson, the Nevada State Police detective leading the investigation into Pebbles’ disappearance. Emerson had pummeled him with question after question about Pebbles, the state of their relationship, their neighbors, Anlon’s business dealings and potential enemies. Antonio had evidently told them about the Lifintyls, because Emerson also posed questions about their value, where they were kept, who knew about them and the like.

  This latter part of the conversation had led Anlon to tell Emerson about his murdered uncle and the cast of villains who’d been involved in multiple attempts to steal the Stones, including Margaret Corchran, her brother Kyle, Klaus Navarro, Thatcher Reynolds and even Jacques Foucault. He told Emerson he thought one of them, directly or indirectly, was behind the home invasion. The detective had thanked him for the information, then ended their call with a request to meet Anlon as soon as he landed.

  For all his candor answering the detective’s questions, Anlon had received precious little information from Emerson, other than receiving confirmation that Pebbles had been shot during the home invasion. This frustrating imbalance in cooperation had been somewhat mitigated after Anlon learned the chartered plane had a Wi-Fi connection. Once online, he had immediately texted Antonio, who was at the house with the police. In one of their exchanges, Antonio shared a piece of hopeful news. He had overheard the medical examiner speaking with Emerson, and the M.E. didn’t think Pebbles’ injury was life threatening.

  Then had come a text from Dan Nickerson, informing Anlon of Jennifer’s accident. Until that moment, Anlon had been very angry with Jennifer. He had tried to reach her on the restaurant’s landline immediately after taking Antonio’s emergency call, but she hadn’t answered. Once he had left the restaurant and his cell phone reception returned, he had tried to call her again. But while he waited for the call to connect, his phone had buzzed with a flurry of message notifications. He ditched the call and quickly scanned the notifications for any calls or messages from Pebbles. Seeing none, he had ignored the others and hailed a taxi.

  It wasn’t until Anlon was in the taxi, speeding toward the Westchester County Airport to catch the hastily arranged charter, that he finally had read Jennifer’s text messages imploring him to find a television, telling him Muran had surfaced. Upon reading the last of her texts, Anlon had messaged her back to call him immediately. While he awaited her reply, he asked the driver to tune the taxi’s radio to a news station. That’s where Anlon first learned the details of the Middlebury bank robbery and the stand-off near Ticonderoga. After boarding the plane, he had called Jennifer once more. Frustrated at his inability to reach her, Anlon had ripped off a terse text telling her to get her ass on a plane to Reno as soon as she got the message.

  The moment he read Nickerson’s text about Jennifer’s accident, Anlon had used the satellite phone to call him. That’s when Anlon learned Nickerson was at the hospital awaiting an update on her condition. “Jennifer is going to be okay,” Nickerson had said, “but she’s sustained a concussion and is in intensive care for observation. They’re keeping her overnight.” The conversation had continued for several more minutes, but Anlon remembered little of it. He knew he had told Nickerson about Pebbles, but his mind had been filled with such turmoil that the rest of the conversation was beyond recall.

  In between the calls and texts, Anlon had used his phone’s Internet browser to cycle through a slew of articles and video clips of Muran’s exploits in New England. The charter’s flight attendant noticed Anlon’s overall air of distress and stopped by twice to ask if he wanted a stiff drink. Anlon declined, the second time a bit gruffly, and the attendant had retreated for the remainder of the flight.

  Toward the end of the flight, Anlon h
ad called Jacques Foucault. When Anlon asked him if he was aware of the happenings in Middlebury and Ticonderoga, Foucault had said he had been following the news reports for several hours. Anlon then told him about Pebbles and Jennifer. Foucault expressed his dismay. Though spoken with sincerity, the show of sympathy hadn’t been convincing to Anlon, especially given the two questions Foucault had asked right after offering his condolences. The bugger had wanted to know if Malinyah was safe! And then he had asked about the damn necklace! Anlon had managed to control his temper because he needed Foucault’s assistance. After answering Foucault’s questions, Anlon had asked Foucault to shift the location of their previously planned meeting from New York to Reno and implored the Frenchman to get underway as soon as possible. Foucault had swiftly agreed, indicating he was of the same mind.

  Shortly after the call ended, Anlon dozed off until the Gulfstream’s wheels hit the runway and jolted him awake. Immediately, the pilot came on the intercom to offer his apology for the rough landing. Once the G500 had taxied to the terminal, the pilot opened the cockpit door and apologized to Anlon again.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Anlon said, shaking the pilot’s hand. “I owe you big time.”

  “Just doing my job,” the pilot said.

  “Seriously, thank you for treating my emergency like it was your own. Both of you,” Anlon said, turning to also thank the bleary-eyed flight attendant.

  “You’re welcome,” said the young woman. “I hope everything works out.”

  “God, I hope so, too,” Anlon said, crossing his fingers as he deplaned.

  Antonio was the first to greet Anlon when he reached the tarmac. After exchanging a brief hug, Antonio said, “I’m so sorry, buddy. If I’d only gotten there sooner, none of this would have happened.”

  Anlon brushed off the suggestion. “Don’t be ridiculous, you couldn’t have known.”

  “Well, I still feel badly. I just hope she’s all right,” Antonio said, lowering his head.