by Gene Riehl
Sung Kim stepped up to them. “Interesting,” she said, gesturing toward the first of the paintings, a William Aiken Walker oil on canvas entitled Noon Day Pause in the Cotton Field. A little over a foot high, two feet across, the picture showed a horse-drawn wagon filled with cotton and surrounded by the slaves who’d picked it. Sung Kim glanced at the wall to their left, toward the paintings hanging there. “I don’t see a lot of figures in the rest of your collection. What made you decide to buy the Walker?”
“Walker’s going to be big again. I paid seventy-five thousand, but I’ll hold it five years and get ten times that much.”
She nodded. He was right. One day she’d be stealing Walker herself.
“Nice Meeker, too,” she said, looking at the second of his purchases, a painting she knew to be entitled Sunlight on the Bayou. “Sunlight’s one of his best, don’t you think?”
“Another good investment, that’s for sure.”
“They’re all nice,” she said, gesturing toward the three paintings on the floor. “But not quite what I was expecting, Lyman. A man with the good sense to jump on a Walker has to have something else in the house. Something to knock my socks off.” She sipped brandy from her glass and smiled. “Or all the rest of my …” She shook her head. “Jesus, listen to me. A couple of drinks and I forget all about growing up in Boston.”
He leaned toward her. “The stuff down here is what I speculate with. My real keepers are upstairs, locked away for safekeeping. A few close friends get to see them. Nobody else.”
“How close a friend do you have to be?”
“I think you just might qualify.”
She allowed him to lead her out of the library and back toward the front of the house, to the wide staircase leading to the top two floors. The steps themselves were built of the same polished maple that filled the rest of the house, and a crimson carpet formed a runner up the center, held in place by bronze rods.
On the second floor they moved to the end of a long corridor, the walls lined with exquisite paintings of every period and style. The door at the end looked ordinary enough, but the alarm panel set into the right-side jamb bothered Sung Kim. It was part of the same Ademco Vista-40 system she’d seen when they came through the front door of the house. A good system, too good. She couldn’t beat the Ademco, not without spending the whole night working on it, and that was clearly out of the question. She would just have to do the best she could with the equipment she’d been born with.
Davidson moved up close to the door, his body between her and the keypad. Sung Kim glanced back down the corridor. The housekeeper was supposed to be visiting her kids in Baltimore tonight but she might pop out of any one of these doors. Sung Kim checked her watch. It was after eleven. Maybe the housekeeper was asleep. Maybe. As a professional, Sung Kim detested the word.
She turned back to Davidson, stepped up to his right side, close enough that her right breast pushed into his arm. He made no attempt to get away so she pushed harder. This time he edged closer to her, encouraging the contact.
“Sorry,” she said. “I know I’m crowding you, but I can’t wait to see what you’ve got.” She laughed, low and in the back of her throat. “In your secret room, I mean.”
He reached for the keypad and she looked around his arm, saw him touch the numbers 1-6-3-9. A green light on the control panel began to blink. Davidson pulled the door open and stepped into the room. Sung Kim started to follow, but he put out his hand to stop her.
“Give me a second,” he said, “to punch in the security code. If I don’t shut off the motion detectors, we’ll trip every alarm in the house. The cops’ll be here before I can call them off.”
She nodded, but her eyes stayed on him as he turned back into the room and reached to his right, to what had to be a second keypad, although Sung Kim couldn’t see it from where she was standing. Which wouldn’t work. Knowing the code to get through the door didn’t help if she couldn’t disable the alarm once she was inside. She heard three distinct beeps as he touched the keypad before reaching for her hand and pulling her into the room.
He flipped a switch and the interior lights came on: museum-quality baby spots from track lighting that crisscrossed the ceiling. The walls were painted flat black in the three-hundred or so square foot space, and the effect was elegant. Almost as though the paintings were suspended without any support at all. Sung Kim couldn’t remember seeing an exhibit lit better.
She saw the Madonna immediately. There was no use pretending she didn’t. It was much more important to pretend she was surprised to see it here.
“My God,” she said, as she stepped toward the famous da Vinci, a fourteen-by-twenty-inch depiction of Mary with the baby Jesus, the infant reaching for a yarn winder, a Renaissance-era machine shaped like the cross he would eventually die on. “You’ve got one of the copies Leonardo himself may have painted.”
Davidson joined her in front of the painting, entitled Madonna with the Yarn Winder, a copy of the da Vinci masterpiece believed lost in antiquity. One of three copies art historians continued to argue about.
“I haven’t had it long,” he said. “Bought it in New York last April.”
“I didn’t see anything in the papers.”
“Got it from a private collection. People like that don’t want publicity. Art theft is so brazen nowadays, the collectors don’t want anyone to know what they own. Half the time they don’t even report what’s stolen.”
Sung Kim nodded. Rich people went to great pains to keep from alerting the wrong people to the presence of their collections. Thomas Franklin was a good example of one, and Franklin—her own billionaire—would have no problem at all with keeping this Madonna to himself.
Davidson smiled. “I have a bar in the master suite. Let’s freshen our drinks in there and come back here later.” He turned toward the door. “If you’ll step out into the hall I’ll reset the alarm. That way we can take our time with our drinks.”
Sung Kim moved toward him and he turned back to her. She couldn’t allow him to lock the door again. She stumbled as she got to him and he reached out to steady her, his hands on her shoulders a lot longer than they needed to be.
“You know,” she told him, her words slurred perfectly. “I’d really like to see the resht … the rest of your collection first.” She reached out and stroked his arm. “Then we won’t have to worry about coming back in here at all.”
He grinned. “Sounds great to me. Let’s get started.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’ve got a Matisse over here you might enjoy.” He started toward the back wall. Behind him, Sung Kim reached into her purse and withdrew the weapon she’d chosen for tonight. She lifted it and pulled the trigger.
Davidson stopped dead. “Jesus!” he said. “What the hell was that?” He started to turn toward her, then stiffened suddenly, his arms and legs jerking wildly, before he slumped to his knees and toppled to the floor.
Sung Kim turned and hurried back to the door. She checked the corridor for any sign of the housekeeper, saw nothing, then started to close the door before realizing she couldn’t do that. Without punching in the correct code on the Ademco panel to her left, the silent alarm would go off. The police would be here in minutes, maybe—in a ritzy neighborhood like Kalorama Heights—even faster.
She swung the door almost closed, then turned and went to work.
Eight minutes later, she’d finished cleaning up the traces of her presence.
She left her brandy glass—wiped clean of prints—on the dark carpet and searched the rest of the carpet until she’d gathered up anything else that might tie her to this room.
Satisfied she’d done everything she could, Sung Kim removed the Madonna from the wall and held it by the edge of the frame in one hand as she returned to the door and opened it again to check the corridor. She stuck her head into the hallway and listened intently. Now she could hear it. A television set. Damn it. She hadn’t heard it before. The housekeeper was here. And she’d just opened
her door.
Sung Kim stepped out into the hallway, turned back and once again closed the vault door almost all the way, then hustled toward the stairs. As she approached the landing, the housekeeper came around the corner and stopped dead. Seventy, at least, Sung Kim guessed, dressed in a dark blue bathrobe and brown slippers. Her gray hair was going in every direction at once, as were her brown eyes.
“Who …?” she said. “I heard a noise …” She saw the painting in Sung Kim’s hand. “What’s going on here? Who are you? Where’s Mr. Davidson?”
Sung Kim started toward her. The housekeeper turned back toward the stairs, surprisingly quick for her age, and Sung Kim stopped when she heard the sirens.
Shit.
Somehow she’d tripped the silent alarm. Or the housekeeper had called the police. Now there was no time to get to the SUV.
Sung Kim turned and sprinted toward Davidson’s bedroom. When she got there, she veered toward the big bed against the far wall, grabbed an oversized pillow, and managed to stuff the Madonna inside the case. She darted toward the French doors leading out to a small balcony above the back yard, through the doors, and out to the black iron railing. It was ten feet to the thick lawn below, maybe a little more. She held the Madonna in the pillow over the railing and let it go, careful to keep the soft side down. She reached for her high heels and snatched them off, tossed them over as well.
The sirens were closer now.
She considered jumping, but only for an instant. Even with the cushion of the grass it was too far. A twisted ankle would get her caught, and she couldn’t get caught. Prison would be the least of her worries. She’d never be allowed to make it as far as a trial.
She turned to her right. There was a drain pipe she might be able to reach if she jumped at it. She looked down and shook her head. If she missed … She wouldn’t miss. Scrambling over the low railing, she stood on the very edge of the balcony and gathered her strength. The sirens were a block away now, maybe less. She jumped. Her right hand grabbed for the iron drain pipe, caught the pipe, but her downward momentum tore her grip loose. She was falling now … her hands desperately trying to find something to save her … when she hit a patch of climbing ivy. She clutched it with both hands … and felt it tear away from the brick wall.
She hit the lawn hard, but knew how to land. She bent her knees at impact, then rolled immediately into a ball. She was up in an instant, pulling the Madonna from the pillowcase. Grabbing her shoes. Racing into the darkness.
THREE
“You can’t be serious,” Trevor Blaine said, when Monk told him Lyman Davidson’s Madonna had just been stolen.
It was very quiet in the living room of Blaine’s penthouse apartment in the Watergate complex overlooking the Potomac. Monk looked past the thin-faced art dealer, out the window at the lights across the river. On the blue leather couch across from the matching club chairs occupied by Monk and his partner, Roger Forbes, their suspect sat perfectly still.
“When, Agent Monk?” Trevor Blaine asked. “When did it happen?”
Monk allowed the question to hang in the air while he watched for a tell, for something in the man’s body language to indicate that Trevor Blaine already knew the answer. He saw nothing. Despite the late hour—half an hour past midnight—Blaine showed not the slightest sign of discomfort. Even his clothes looked relaxed. His light gray silk suit hung on his spare frame as unwrinkled as if it had just come from the cleaners. Monk wasn’t surprised. If what he and Roger Forbes had heard about the art dealer from Monk’s informant in jail was true, it would take more than just their showing up to rattle him.
“The Madonna was stolen from Lyman Davidson’s house in Kalorama Heights about two hours ago,” Monk told him. “A woman Davidson was entertaining in his home attacked him and walked out with it.”
“Attacked him?”
Monk nodded, but again he said nothing. Davidson was alive, but Monk wasn’t about to be more specific about the details of the robbery, not with a suspect, not this early in the investigation.
Trevor Blaine frowned. “What does the FBI have to do with the theft of a painting? I would have thought the Metropolitan Police Department handled something like this.”
Monk glanced at Roger Forbes, signaling his partner to answer the question, to give himself a better opportunity to observe Trevor Blaine’s reaction. He paid particular attention to the man’s eyes, looking for Blaine to glance to his left, a shift of his gaze in that direction, something to indicate his mind’s eye might be looking backward as he “watched” the robbery go down. Or a shift of gaze to his right, to “see” the painting Blaine might even now be waiting to fence.
“The money,” Roger said. “That’s what gets us involved. Davidson claims the Madonna’s been appraised at fifteen million dollars. That kind of money, there’s a presumption it’ll go interstate, or out of the country. If we recover the painting here in the District, the case goes back to the locals.”
“Then my next question is, Why are you here? At my flat, I mean. How can I possibly help you with this?”
Monk had to hand it to the Englishman. There wasn’t the tiniest variation in the pitch or timbre of his voice, not the slightest lean of his shoulders away from them. Even his hands stayed in the right position, palms open and up. He appeared to be sincerely puzzled by their visit. Monk glanced at Roger and saw his partner’s eyebrows lift. Perhaps coming here was a mistake, Roger’s expression suggested. Maybe they’d leaned too hard on Monk’s informant when they’d sweated him in the interrogation room at the Federal Detention Center downtown. Made it too easy for the criminal informant to trade Trevor Blaine’s name for a kind word to the judge before the informant’s sentencing next week. It wasn’t impossible. Sure as hell wouldn’t be the first time a snitch had lied to save his own ass.
But then Trevor Blaine made his first mistake.
“I know I’m an art dealer,” he said, “but really.” He smiled. “Surely that isn’t the only reason you’ve come to me.”
Now Monk wanted to smile himself. One of the hardest things for a liar to do was keep his mouth shut. Unable to let it alone, Blaine had tried to make the same point a second time, and Monk was so surprised he almost changed expression himself. Unfortunately, he couldn’t give the man an answer. To give up his CI—get his informant killed in prison—was not an option. Made it too damned hard to recruit the next one. But maybe there was a better way.
“Why you, Mr. Blaine? Is that what you want to know?”
Trevor Blaine nodded. Monk glanced at Roger, then reached into the inside breast pocket of his summer-weight silk jacket and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers. He unfolded the pages and examined them for a moment before staring at Blaine.
“According to Interpol, we have very good reason to come to you about the Madonna. According to our friends at Scotland Yard, we should have come to you the moment we heard the Madonna was—”
Monk’s voice stopped as the cell phone in his pocket rang.
Damn it. Concentrating hard on Trevor Blaine’s reaction to his words, Monk tried to ignore the phone, but he saw that it was already too late. The Englishman had been leaning toward him, toward the papers in his hand, but now he was sitting back, grinning as he recognized his reprieve. Monk felt a sudden warmth up the back of his neck. Shit. A good interrogation was as intricately choreographed as a tango contest. He’d been on the verge of pulling Trevor Blaine onto the dance floor when the orchestra dropped dead.
He grabbed his phone. “What!”
“Listen carefully, Special Agent Monk.” The voice was dead flat. “This is the counterintelligence unit at the Hoover Building. These orders come from the director himself.”
Monk glanced at Roger Forbes as the voice continued.
“You and SA Forbes will return immediately to the Special Operations Group headquarters. To the wire room. Be alert for countersurveillance. Park no closer than a quarter mile from the SOG. Do not walk to the building until you are certa
in you are not being observed.”
“Who is this?” Monk demanded. “We’re right in the middle of something here. I can’t just—”
“Ten minutes, Agent Monk,” the voice said. “You will not want to be late.”
FOUR
Downstairs in Monk’s SOG car—a black Saab 9-3 Turbo—he realized that Roger Forbes was staring at the side of his head, clearly upset by Monk’s refusal to tell him what had just happened upstairs.
“Christ, Puller,” he said at last. “I can understand why you didn’t want to talk inside the building, but it’s just the two of us now. What the hell’s going on?”
Monk lifted his finger to his lips, then used the same finger to point at the radio mike hanging at the end of the black cable that spiraled out of the center console. It was the universal signal between agents to check to make sure the microphone switch wasn’t stuck in the on position, a calamity that had led to some of the worst horror stories in the FBI.
Roger bent down and keyed the mike. The short raspy squawk told them the radio was safe. Roger turned his attention back to Monk.
“We’re going back to the SOG,” Monk told him. “One of the surveillance teams must have come up with a new lead on the Madonna. But for some reason they want us to dry-clean first.” Bureauspeak for evasive maneuvers to detect the presence of surveillance.
Roger unfastened his seat belt, preparing to turn around and watch through the rear window. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“I’ll get on the Whitehurst. If you notice anything before then, we’ll stay on the surface streets.”
Monk got on H Street out of the Watergate parking lot and took a left on Twenty-fifth as the quickest way to K Street and the Whitehurst Freeway. But as he drove, he couldn’t keep his brain quiet. What he’d told Roger about the possibility of a new lead didn’t seem a very likely reason for the cryptic phone call. For one thing, the director of the FBI wouldn’t be personally involved in a robbery, regardless of the amount of money involved. For another, the bureau’s counterintelligence division wouldn’t be either. So what did it mean? Monk wondered. Why had they been interrupted and ordered back to—
