Blue Smoke and Murder sk-4

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Now what?” Jill asked.

  Instead of answering, Zach went back to the computer, opened files, compared JPEGs from the arrest with the best photos he’d taken of the bottom edge of Frost’s Dunstan paintings. Frowning, Zach zoomed in and compared some more. He was no expert, but it looked to him like a match.

  He started laughing softly.

  “What?” Jill asked.

  “Just thinking of Worthington and his oration about the essence of masculinity and Duncan’s iconic status in Western art. Guess Justine must have clanged when she walked.”

  “Are you saying…?”

  “I sure am. Justine wasn’t Dunstan’s Scarlet Muse,” Zach said. “The thumbprints on the paintings are hers, not his. She was the artist. All he did was put a man’s name on the finished canvas.”

  “That’s why the family paintings weren’t signed by Dunstan,” Jill said “But they’re as much a Dunstan as anything he did sign. What is the going rate for ‘Dunstans’ in the auction catalogue?”

  “Enough to make murder real profitable.”

  63

  HOLLYWOOD

  SEPTEMBER 16

  3:35 P.M.

  Score read the transcript, reread it, and then read it a third time. Though his face was flushed, his hand was fairly steady as he set the transcript aside and looked at his eager employee.

  “Well, that wraps it up,” he said, forcing a smile. “You earned yourself a few days off. See you next Monday.”

  “Yes!” Amy said with a force that made her hair bounce.

  She rushed out of his office, shutting the door hard behind her in case her boss changed his mind.

  Score fisted his hands and glared at the door like a man hoping for…something.

  Anything.

  Just not what he already had.

  There weren’t many options left. St. Kilda had the paintings, which meant that it would take a truck bomb to destroy them. He didn’t fancy his chances of walking away from that kind of op free, much less alive.

  At least Frost is out of the picture, Score thought angrily. Hurray for our side.

  The Breck bitch is a lot easier to get to. Take her out of the game, and the game’s over.

  And there’s just one op with her.

  He sat in the chair for a long time, vibrating with anger, thinking about ways and means of “accidental” death.

  Fire was his personal favorite, but he wasn’t inclined to use it again. Kidnapping and disposal was an option. Unfortunately, it would take more than one person to do it right. Another person was a potential witness for the prosecution.

  Or a potential blackmailer.

  Drowning was good, but the targets were a long way from deep water. Car crashes worked only if the local coroner had the brains of a flea. Otherwise an autopsy would prove that the victims were dead before the crash. A robbery gone wrong was an old favorite, but not his first or even his second choice.

  He really didn’t want St. Kilda crawling up his ass. Word on the street was that if a St. Kilda op died on the job, Ambassador Steele got even. Always.

  No matter how long it took.

  But only if there’s a trail of blame to follow.

  Score thought about calling the client and saying, Sorry, no can do. Here’s my bill.

  It might be the smart thing to do.

  And it would be really dumb for business. When word got out that he’d turned a straightforward black-bag job into a gigantic goat roping, he’d lose his high-end clients real quick.

  When the reputation that kept him in business was part of the ante, busting out of the game wasn’t an option.

  Motionless but for the pulse beating hard in his neck, Score went through everything again, thinking through the probable fallout from each course of action, all the ways of clouding the blame trail, leaving someone else to take the fall with St. Kilda or the law.

  Then he went through the options all over again, searching for anything that he might have overlooked the first time through. When his temper was riding him, he had to be extra careful.

  He read the transcript a fourth time. After a few more minutes of thinking, he put the sheets through the cross-shredder, along with every other piece of paper from this case. When the confetti machine finally fell silent, he was a little calmer. He keyed his way into the mainframe computer, accessed Amy and Steve’s machines, and erased everything to do with the case.

  Then he wiped the master files.

  And the hard disks that had held them.

  Score had used enough computer files in court to know that they were a double-edged sword. He didn’t want anything coming back on this case to bite his ass.

  When he was sure he’d cleaned up all traces of the case in the business computers, he reached for the phone. Blowing smoke was a long chance, but it was the best chance he had of winning the game.

  And he would win.

  They didn’t call him Score for nothing.

  64

  SNOWBIRD

  SEPTEMBER 16

  4:10 P.M.

  Ramsey, you better take this,” Cahill said. “Lee Dunstan calling from Las Vegas.”

  Irritably Worthington looked up from overseeing the last of the auction’s paintings being loaded into a van for the trip to the airport. “What’s his problem?”

  “Something you don’t want me yelling across a crowded room.”

  With a hissed word, Worthington turned to the people loading the van. “All right, you have your instructions. I expect to see every one of these paintings and sculptures fully and completely intact when I get to the Golden Fleece tonight.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boss said. She turned and called over her shoulder at a young man who’d stumbled on the loading ramp, “Slow down, Murphy. You’re not at UPS anymore. Nobody’s holding a stopwatch on you.”

  Worthington turned and stalked through the back entrance of the gallery, where Cahill was waiting.

  “I don’t have time to hold Lee’s hand,” Worthington said savagely.

  “You have time for him on this. Trust me.”

  Worthington disengaged the hold button and said with false cheer, “Hello, Lee. Getting excited about the auction?”

  “You could say that.” At the other end of the line, Lee gave his wife a defiant salute with a half-empty whiskey glass and took an eye-watering swallow. “Ramsey, old buddy, we have a problem. The bitch is back.”

  “Are you drunk?” Worthington asked in a clipped voice.

  “Getting there. So will you when the auction blows up in your face on Sunday. The ten million a painting that everyone is counting on will be lucky to be half that.”

  “Sweet Jesus.” Worthington tried for patience. The closest he got was “I don’t have time to listen to your drunken blather.”

  “Too bad.” Lee smiled grimly. He hadn’t allowed himself a tear-down-the-town drunk in a long time. He was looking forward to it. Maybe he’d never wake up. “You’ve got less than two days to prove that Justine Breck didn’t paint what Thomas Dunstan signed.”

  Worthington looked at the ceiling, but there weren’t any answers. “Is Betty there?”

  Lee looked at the pale, strained face of his wife. She was dressed in the worn jeans and faded work shirt of the rancher’s daughter she once had been.

  “She ain’t the bitch I’m talking about,” Lee said.

  With a silent curse, Worthington covered the phone pickup and snarled at Cahill. “What the hell is happening?”

  “All I know is that Lee Dunstan is saying that his daddy didn’t paint the Thomas Dunstans we’ll be auctioning off Sunday,” Cahill said. “Justine Breck did.”

  “Ridiculous,” Worthington snapped. He took his hand off the phone. “I don’t have time for this nonsense. Put Betty on the line.”

  “Sure. I need another whiskey anyway.” Lee motioned to his wife. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Betty watched her husband walk toward the hotel’s liquor cabinet. He wasn’t staggering yet, bu
t he would be soon.

  I knew it was too good to be true, she thought bitterly. Five million a painting was outrageous. Ten million was just plain greedy.

  She picked up the phone. “I’m sorry, Ramsey. Tal just called and was screaming at Lee so hard I heard him clear across the room. So Lee called you.”

  Worthington dug his thumb into the skin between his eyebrows, trying to shut down the headache that had come out of nowhere. “What the hell is going on?”

  “His wife picked up a blind call warning that someone was going to try to sink the auction by claiming our paintings were done by Justine Breck, not Thomas Dunstan.”

  “Betty, Betty.” Worthington’s thumb dug in deep enough to leave a crescent mark from his nail. “It would take far more than an unsubstantiated rumor to convince someone of any artistic sophistication at all that the Dunstans aren’t exactly what we know they are-paintings by one of our greatest Western artists. A competitor is simply trying to cause trouble before the auction. A tempest in a teapot, that’s all.” Or a bit of extortion. Hardly the first time-or the last.

  “But what about the thumbprint?” she asked.

  Worthington wondered how Betty knew that he was trying to dig a hole in his forehead with his thumb. “What thumbprint?”

  “The ones on the Dunstan paintings that belong to Justine, not to Thomas Dunstan.”

  “Betty.” Worthington took a better grip on the phone and his exasperation. It’s always something before a big auction, and it’s always at the worst possible time. “Even if his lover’s fingerprints were all over the canvases, all it would prove is that Justine was with Dunstan when the paintings were created. Since Dunstan didn’t paint unless his Scarlet Muse was with him, finding her fingerprints on the canvas would hardly be earth-shattering. Even if the identity of the owner of the purported fingerprints could be proved, which is highly doubtful.”

  “But Tal was so upset.”

  “I’ll call Tal and straighten things out. Are you in Las Vegas now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep a lid on Lee. The less said, the better.”

  Betty looked at the man pouring whiskey into a tumbler and sighed. “I’ll do what I can.” She hesitated. “This will make the paintings less valuable, won’t it?”

  “Don’t worry,” Worthington said. “And keep Lee away from the public until he’s sober. If you get a call from anyone offering to sell new Dunstans to you, pass the call on to me.”

  “Why would anyone want to sell us Dunstan paintings? We don’t have that kind of money.”

  Extortion, you silly twit. What else? Worthington’s thumb ached almost as much as his head. Lee verifies fake paintings and everything is sweet-except Crawford will have my balls if I don’t generate enough auction excitement to support a minimum of eight million dollars per Dunstan. Ten is what Crawford really wants. That will make the kind of waves that nobody can question, not even the IRS.

  Worthington was, in his own way, as eager as Crawford to make a huge splash. It would bring his new auction house to the attention of the big players in the art world in a dazzling way. But that would be hard to pull off with a dozen dubious Dunstans coming out of the woodwork at the last moment.

  Crawford didn’t have the money to soak up twelve new paintings at four million each, much less at ten. And if the new paintings went for less, they would devalue the ones Crawford already owned.

  “Don’t worry about anything except keeping a lid on Lee and calling me if someone contacts you about the paintings,” Worthington said. “Do you understand?”

  Betty sighed. “I don’t understand anything, but I’ll do what you say.”

  Worthington hung up and dialed Crawford’s cell phone number from memory.

  Answer, you bastard. Time is running out.

  65

  SAN DIEGO

  SEPTEMBER 16

  4:15 P.M.

  Dad?” Lane asked, sticking his head out of the bedroom doorway. “Where are you?”

  “In our office,” Faroe called out, “burping the eating machine.”

  “I didn’t know if you wanted all this on the St. Kilda network, so I thought I’d give you what I have so far.”

  Computer under his arm, Lane walked into his parents’ office. He took the locked gun cabinet and the wall of electronics for granted, but he always loved seeing the array of computers. Working for St. Kilda Consulting meant not only that his parents had great equipment but that he got to use it sometimes.

  His idea of heaven.

  The baby tucked against Faroe’s shoulder gave a belch that Lane would have been proud of.

  “Is that a round-two burp?” Lane asked.

  Faroe blinked. “A what?”

  “You know. You’re full and then you give a big belch and you’re ready for-”

  “Round two,” Faroe said, shaking his head. “Gotcha.”

  Grace looked up from her computer and held out her arms for little Annalise. “I have a new search running on the Moorcroft case.”

  “Anything?” Faroe asked.

  “I’ll know in a few hours. Or days. Depends on how many levels I have to go through to strike gold.”

  “We’ve got to hire some more researchers,” Faroe said.

  “Steele said he’s vetting them as fast as he can.”

  “He’s worse than the government when it comes to background checks.”

  “Good thing, too,” Grace said dryly. “St. Kilda is a lot more demanding than good old Uncle Sam.”

  “Steele has me,” Lane said, smiling and opening his computer. “Look at this. I don’t understand half the language, but there are a lot of zeros to the left of the decimal.”

  “Drag a chair over,” Faroe said, settling into his own office chair, “and show me what your swarm found.”

  “This is only preliminary,” Lane said. “We haven’t had much-”

  “Gimme,” Faroe cut in. “No researcher ever has enough time.”

  Lane sat and scooted a rolling office chair across the Spanish tile floor. Faroe stuck out a long leg and cushioned the impact of his son’s landing.

  “I’m not sure where to begin,” Lane said.

  “At the bottom line,” Faroe said.

  “Which one,” Lane said under his breath.

  “You always say that.”

  “You always give me a reason.” Lane frowned at the computer. “Okay, most recent hits first. I shunted all the general Western art stuff into a separate file if-”

  “Bottom line,” Faroe said ruthlessly.

  “Right. Recent Dunstan hits. Governor of Nevada, one of the state senators, a congressional representative, and a rich dude called Talbert ‘Tal’ Crawford congratulated themselves at a press conference called because Crawford is making a big contribution to something called the Museum of the West. He’s donating his entire collection of Western art, including whatever he buys at the Vegas auction on Sunday.”

  Faroe watched his son with steady eyes that were more green than hazel, intelligent, and fierce in their intensity. “Generous man.”

  “Yeah. It’s his first big charitable contribution, too, and he has megabucks. Has had it for years. Oil, mostly.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I thought so,” Lane said. “You always say to look for the pattern, then look where it isn’t followed.”

  Faroe’s smile made him look deceptively gentle.

  “I’ve got a bunch of stuff on Crawford from the financial angle,” Lane said.

  “Let’s stick with Dunstan for now.”

  “There’s not much to stick with. All the really recent hits have to do with the museum. Most of the other recent hits on the Dunstan name have to do with the upcoming auction. The art bloggers are all over it like a cat covering-” Lane glanced up, saw his mother nursing the baby, and cleared his throat. “All over it like a cat in a sandbox.”

  Faroe bit back a smile. Lane was really trying to keep his language clean around his baby sister.

&n
bsp; So was Dad.

  “A month or so ago there was a thread on some art blogs that some new Dunstans had been discovered,” Lane said, “but nothing came of it that got posted on the Internet. Other blogs said anything new by Dunstan would be a fraud or a scam of some sort.”

  “Copy the blogs to me,” Faroe said.

  “Already did.”

  “Despite what you sometimes think,” Grace said without looking up from her computer or the baby, “your son actually listens to you. Sometimes.”

  Lane snickered. “The blogs are saying that the four to six million dollars per Dunstan is low end, because he comes on the market so rarely that there’s a lot of demand. The figure ten million dollars keeps coming up again and again in the really recent hits. Some serious buzz going down.”

  “Good news for the art business,” Faroe said.

  “Bad news for Uncle Sam,” Lane said, “according to one source.”

  “Yeah?” Faroe asked. “In my experience, the government always gets its cut of the action.”

  “Something to do with taxes,” Lane said.

  “Are we talking Crawford?”

  “Yeah, but you said you wanted to talk about Dunstan.”

  “Do you have anything else on Dunstan?” Faroe asked.

  “Just secondary and tertiary sources quoting primary sources and then each other. For example-”

  “Quit jerking Joe’s chain,” Grace cut in. “He may be in the mood for it but I’m not. Bottom-line time.”

  Lane started to defend himself, then thought better of it. He knew he was yanking his dad’s chain, but only in a sideways, sort of buddy kind of way. Nothing serious.

  “About two years ago,” Lane said, drawing up a new document on the computer, “Crawford’s business manager was busted on some bad tax shelters. He got bail on appeal, then hopped a plane to Paraguay with two showgirls and a lot of money in offshore accounts. Turns out that some of the deals he cut for Crawford weren’t what they looked like on the surface. Certainly not when it came to claiming federal tax deductions on losses.”