Chameleon's Death Dance

by BR Kingsolver

  Martel visibly struggled to calm himself. “No, you’re probably right,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ll call in more resources.”

  On our way outside, Myron leaned over and asked me in a low voice, “Do you think you could inquire about the forger? I can provide information that might be identifying.”

  “I can ask, of course.”

  Myron, Wil and I stood alone on the sidewalk outside the museum. “What I’m interested in,” I said, “is who knew I was taking those paintings to you this afternoon? You told me where to take them, and I asked Wil to help me. I didn’t talk to anyone else. Who’s the leak?”

  “I’ve been rather curious about that myself,” Wil said.

  Myron looked as unhappy as I felt. “I told Fenton,” he said.

  “Only Fenton?”

  “He had one of his detectives with him.”

  “What about your people?” Wil asked.

  “Well, of course my people knew.”

  “And the people at the gallery where I took them,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I glanced at Wil. “So, we have a dozen people, plus whoever they told. Too damned many to figure out who tried to get us killed.”

  Myron rented me another van and took us to pick it up. On our way to Wil’s hotel, I said, “My bets are on a paid informant at Feitler’s, and at least one paid informant with the police. And I’ll bet that the two informants aren’t being paid by the same people.”

  “You have a fairly low opinion of the police,” Wil said. His face and tone were sour.

  “Experience. If you want honest cops, you need to pay them, and no one ever wants to do that. Society wants the police to be adequate but not truly competent. Too many of us have our little secrets. If you had enough cops, and they were good, smart cops, they’d probably bust a bunch of the wrong people. You know, for things like art forgery and trading in stolen goods.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, you’re probably right. So, who do you think is paying all of these informants?”

  “I’m guessing one or more wealthy collectors have one or more informants at Feitler’s Gallery. If I knew about certain rare items ahead of everyone else, I might be able to enhance my collection at the expense of my neighbor. Right?”

  Wil chuckled again, but winced when he did it.

  “As for the police, I’ll bet money that the majority of the top families in the city own a cop. At least one. Hell, if I was a cop, I’d certainly want to get on as many payrolls as I could.”

  He gave me another sour look.

  It became clear at the hotel just how much Wil was hurting. He could barely get out of the car without help, and by the time we reached his room and I stripped him and poured him into a bathtub, the entire right side of his body was black and blue. I started to nag him about not going to the hospital, then thought about how much I hated hospitals. Instead, I gave him a large splash of brandy and a couple of painkillers.

  Room service must have thought I was weird when I ordered thirty pounds of crushed ice and asked for a fresh pot of hot coffee to be delivered every hour. The ice went into the bath water, and the coffee, liberally laced with brandy, went into Wil to keep his core temperature up.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked me.

  “Am I a bruise expert? Do as I say, or I send you to the hospital and let them put up with you while I get a good night’s sleep.”

  I didn’t live a genteel life. When we first started sleeping together, he made a few comments about my bruises. After a while, he stopped. Might as well comment on the sun coming up.

  He shut up and let me torture him. I checked on him regularly to make sure he didn’t pass out and drown. When I finally hauled him out of the ice bath and put him to bed, he was shivering and slightly blue, so I held him tight against me to warm him up. I told myself that it was part of being in love, but in the back of my mind, something kept whispering that I’d gone insane. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if there was a difference.

  I had always been ambidextrous. Some things I normally did with either my left or my right hand, but I could change without much trouble if I needed to. So, I thought it was pretty funny watching Wil try to feed himself breakfast with his left hand. He didn’t see the humor.

  After making sure he had everything he needed, especially communications, I drove out to my safe house. Firing up my computer and connecting through a pirate server in Belarus, I entered the Chamber of Commerce’s network through a backdoor, and hacked into the Vancouver Gallery. I had a legitimate login to the Art Loss Database.

  It took about three hours to write a program that would download the data I needed from all three sources into a database on my server in Toronto, and then integrate and analyze it. I set it running, then sat back and realized I was starving. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  I took a shower and called my dad.

  “Hi, hotshot. What’s going on?” his voice was cheery when he answered.

  “This isn’t public knowledge yet, but the Director and Assistant Director at the Vancouver Art Gallery were dirty.”

  “You mean the museum?”

  “Yeah. The main museum here. They were dealing stolen art, and we’ve found some forgeries.”

  “Oh, boy. I knew that town had a hot market for hot art, but I hadn’t heard anything about forgeries.”

  “Martel says the forger is very good.”

  “Adrian Martel?”

  “Yes, do you know him? Anyway, Myron Chung asked if I could try to find a lead to the forger.”

  “Adrian Martel is the best there is at detecting a forgery. What artists?”

  “Mostly impressionists. Cezanne, Renoir, Pissarro, and Degas were the ones I recognized. There was also something more modern, but I didn’t know the artist. They’ve found seven so far.”

  “I’ll check around,” he said in a voice that seemed to tail away.

  “You have a suspicion.”

  “Maybe.” He hung up.

  A call to Kieran reached her voicemail, but I didn’t leave a message. I took a shower and stopped by a take-out Japanese café on my way to Wil’s hotel.

  The remains of multiple room-service meals on multiple trays sat in the hall next to his door. So much for being nice and getting him eel sushi. I never would have bought the stuff for myself. I found him stretched out on a couch, lying on his left side, watching cartoons on the screen. To be fair, he was only half-awake.

  I unloaded the carry-out onto the table. “How are you feeling?”

  “Sore.” It seemed to take an effort for him to talk. A little bit worried, I walked over and studied him. He seemed rather out of it.

  “Did you take a painkiller?”

  “Doctor came by. Gave me a couple of shots.”

  “What kind of doctor? Doctor from where?” I looked frantically around, half expecting an assassin to step out of the bathroom or something.

  “Chamber. Did you send out an email from my account?”

  “Yeah. I told people not to bother you for a couple of days. Said you had an important project to work on.”

  His eyes opened a little more. “That’s a confidential account. How did you get into it?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Would you like each of the steps in sequence?”

  “You hacked into my private account.” It almost sounded as if he was offended.

  “The only thing that ever keeps me out of your accounts is respect for your privacy. I didn’t read anything while I was there, if that’s what you’re worried about. Wil, I’ve had an administrative account on the Chamber’s system for years. Hell, their lousy security bothered me so much that I wrote them a new security manual and cleaned a lot of it up. And I did it for free!”

  I wandered back to the table and my tempura, grumbling to myself about some people’s lack of gratitude. “Do you want any eel sushi? I bought it just for you. Cause if you don’t, I’m gonna toss it.”
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br />   He sat up enough to eat, and I sat beside him, helping him watch cartoons. It was actually kind of romantic, as long as I sat by his left side. The ice bags on his other side didn’t invite much closeness.

  “Next time,” he said, “turn to the right.”

  “Huh? Look, I’m really sorry that you got banged up, but that doesn’t make any sense. If I was disabled, or the collision involved the steering wheel, they’d have had us.”

  He sighed.

  Chapter 13

  It took about a week before Wil was fully back in the game, although still moving a little gingerly. I spent my time following Martel around at the Gallery, working through the plans for Reagan’s estate, and bugging Inspector Fenton.

  Martel’s knowledge of artists was encyclopedic. Even if the painting itself was flawless, he pointed out that the angle of the brushstrokes on the forgeries were all the same. Side-by-side with other paintings by the same artist, even I could see they were different.

  “That’s amazing,” I said after comparing the forgery to four other paintings attributed to Monet.

  “Yes,” Martel said. “In fact, I would go so far as to guess that the forger is a woman. The strokes are lighter, as though the forger’s hands didn’t weigh as much, and she wasn’t as strong as the painter she was copying.” He moved to the Degas. “You see the same thing here.”

  It might have been apparent to him, but in this case, I couldn’t see the difference.

  I tried calling Kieran several times without any luck, so I asked Fenton about her.

  “I left a message for her,” he told me, “and she came into the museum the following day. We questioned her for about two hours.”

  “Was Jon present?”

  “Oh, yeah. Detective Cruikshank sat in on the interview. I’m convinced that she didn’t have anything to do with Boyle or Wang and their schemes.”

  I sought out Detective Cruikshank, who said, “I agree with Fenton. I still think she’s hiding something, but I don’t think it has anything to do with our investigation. Hell, Miss Nelson, almost everyone has something they want to hide.”

  “Not me,” I said with a grin. “I never do anything I’m ashamed of, so I’m an open book.”

  He shook his head and grinned back. “I’ll buy the first part of that sentence, but I have a feeling it would take me forever to untangle all the things you are hiding.”

  I laughed, but admitted to myself that he always made me uneasy.

  When Wil expressed a little bit of cabin fever—“I’m going to go crazy if I have to spend another minute in this damned room!”—I took him out to dinner. I could understand being sick of take-out and room service.

  While waiting for our meals, I noticed Kieran sitting at a table across the room. Her long strawberry blonde hair was rather distinctive.

  “Wil, that’s Kieran Murphy over there, and she’s with Michael Reagan again.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Maybe they’re dating,” he said after taking a sip of his wine.

  “You know men like that don’t date.”

  “Okay, so he’s screwing her, if you prefer more graphic terminology.”

  “That begs the question of why he’s taking her to dinner.”

  “You’re screwing me, but you’re still taking me out to dinner,” Wil said. “I will admit, once you had your way with me, I figured you’d dump me and…” My dinner roll hit him right in the nose. He stared at it sitting on his plate. “That was terribly sophisticated.”

  “You knew what you were getting into when you seduced me. Don’t give me any crap.”

  His chuckle was accompanied by a wink.

  “Eat fast. Assuming they ever bring our meals,” I said.

  “Why? What do you have in mind?”

  “We’re going to follow them.” As I spoke, I saw the waiter deliver Kieran and Reagan’s dinners.

  I signaled to our waitress, and when she came over, I said, “I just got a call, and our babysitter’s sick. Can you ask the kitchen if they can hurry our dinner a little bit?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  As she walked away, Wil raised an eyebrow and asked, “Our babysitter?”

  “Of course, darling. Don’t I look like the kind of corporate wife who lives to pop out babies?”

  He stared at me for a minute, then said, “You’d make a disastrous mother.”

  I felt something warm in my chest, and a smile spread across my face. Picking up my glass, I held it up to him. “That is the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. I’m so glad that we’ve gotten close enough for you to see the real me.”

  Wil barked out a laugh, then picked up his glass and clinked it against mine.

  Our meals arrived shortly thereafter, and we settled down to eat, keeping an eye on Kieran and Reagan. We finished about the same time, and paid our check as the other two had their desserts and coffee.

  While we waited outside in the car, Wil said, “You know they’re probably going to take a helicopter out to the island.”

  “You can order us a helicopter, can’t you? Or an aircar?”

  “Not a safe passage across the Georgia Straits in an aircar. They aren’t very stable, you know. And it isn’t easy to be discreet following someone in a helicopter.

  “You’re such a killjoy. If they do that, we know that she’s staying out at his place.”

  “And?”

  With a shrug, I said, “She’s sleeping with a crook. Fenton’s empath thinks she’s hiding something. Whatever’s going on, she’s dirty.”

  “I’m sleeping with a crook, and I’m not dirty.”

  I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Yeah, but you’re special.”

  We watched Kieran and Reagan come out of the restaurant and get into a limousine. It drove away in the direction of Stanley Island, and we followed. As we crossed the bridge, I said, “I have no idea where they’re going. Maybe they have an invitation to someone’s house.

  “There’s a small private airport out here,” Wil said. “Floatplanes and helicopters.”

  The limo drove into the airport. We stopped outside the fence.

  “Now what?” Wil asked.

  “We wait. As long as we’re out here, I want a look at how he’s traveling back and forth.”

  “Probably jetcopter, since he’s flying at night,” Wil said. “The copters are also more stable in bad weather.”

  I pulled a monocular from my bag.

  “Is there a bottom to that thing?” Wil asked.

  “What thing?”

  “Your purse. I can’t believe the amount of junk you carry in that thing.”

  “It’s not a purse, it’s just disguised as one. I use it to carry my equipment. Most women carry a ton of makeup and other stuff, but I fill that space with things that are useful.”

  Sure enough, in about fifteen minutes a helicopter rose into the air and headed out toward the ocean. I snapped pictures with the camera built into the monocular until I was satisfied that I had all the identifying marks and numbers. Then I talked Wil into following the limo back into town, but it went to a garage, and the driver parked it for the night.

  “So, what now?” Wil asked.

  “We go home. I just wanted to make sure Kieran went out to Reagan’s place.”

  I spent the following morning studying Reagan’s plans and blueprints. I also checked on travel out to Vancouver Island. When I talked to Wil about leaks from various organizations, I never mentioned the Chamber because I knew it would upset him. But Chamber personnel had tried to kill me more than once. I didn’t think I could trust the Chamber enough to hitch a helicopter ride.

  My dad called around noon.

  “What’s the scoop?” I asked. “Have you got a forger for me?”

  “I’m afraid not, but I do have some information.”

  “Shoot.”

  “About five or six years ago, a number of impressionist forgeries surfaced in Europe. A couple of them were identif
ied at reputable museums, and there was a scandal at one of the major auction firms.”

  “That’s why you asked me about the artists. The impressionists are selling for very high prices.”

  “That they are. Anyway, Adrian Martel was called in to authenticate the paintings, and then everything got very hush-hush. A contact of mine tells me that some of the big boys in the art world got stung, and to save their reputations, the whole thing got swept under the rug.”

  Disappointment settled in. “So, no one found out who the forger was?”

  “If they caught him, no one is talking. I can’t even find any rumor or speculation. But the forgeries stopped.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” I hung up and thought very hard. Then I drove down to the Gallery.

  I found Martel with his face buried in a computer terminal in the museum’s financial offices.

  “Mr. Martel?”

  He raised his head. It took a few moments for his eyes to focus.

  “Ah, Miss Nelson. How can I help you?”

  “I’d like to know a little more about some impressionist forgeries in Europe, oh, say about five years ago.”

  His demeanor immediately became guarded. “I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to. Does Myron know you’re here?”

  I filed away that Myron Chung had been involved with the cover up.

  “No, but I don’t clear what I do with Myron. I’m an independent contractor. I was told that you were involved in identifying a number of forgeries. I’m wondering if you suspect the same forger in our current situation.”

  Martel eyed me warily. “An independent contractor?” He pushed away from the desk and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t mean to be offensive, but you strike me as being very young to be providing expertise to someone like Myron Chung.”

  “Ah, I see. No one told you who I am.”

  “Not really. I thought you were one of Myron’s staff.”

  I allowed myself a small smile as I anticipated his reaction. “I’m Jason Bouchard’s daughter.”

  He froze for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Of course. I should have known. You look so much like him.”

  I grinned. I was eight inches taller than my father, although he outweighed me by at least forty or fifty pounds, and he was dark-haired and swarthy with almost hound-dog features where I was blonde and appeared rather Nordic. I actually didn’t resemble either of my parents. Mom was a short, redheaded Irish-English beauty with curves that I didn’t inherit.