“Sorry to disappoint you,” Shawn said.
“Not me,” the man said. “I don’t mind waiting in line. But my wife-she hates it when she thinks other people have it better than her. Like when we were in that gallery with all the paintings and all we had to explain it was that prerecorded thing. Sorry I bothered you two.”
“No bother at all,” Gus said, feeling the cake dissolve again in his gut.
“Guess I’ll go wait in line,” the man said. “Unless…”
“Unless what?” Gus said.
The man stared down at his sandals in embarrassment. “Well, I was thinking maybe I could slip you some money and you could get some food and bring it over to us. I know it’s a big thing to ask, but it would make my wife awfully happy.”
“I wish we could help,” Gus said. “But we’re here-”
“To be of service to our fellow man,” Shawn said. “That’s why we’re dressed like this.”
“It is?” Gus said.
“Give us your order, and my friend here will bring it over to your table,” Shawn said.
Gus stared at Shawn, trying to figure out what he was doing. “I will?” he said.
“You will,” Shawn said. “Because this nice family has suffered enough today. Like when they were back in that gallery and all they had to explain the paintings was that prerecorded thing.”
“That’s right,” the man said.
“When there were other people in the gallery who didn’t pay anything more than you did who not only had the prerecorded tour, but also got a personal introduction to every painting in the room.”
“That’s right,” the man said. “It wasn’t like he was leading a tour or anything. There were these people looking at a painting right next to us and this giant tweedy guy came up to them and started talking about the guy who did it and where he was born and what kind of paint he used.”
Now Gus understood what Shawn was after. “And did he stop talking?” he asked.
“Not as long as we were in that room,” the man said. “Honestly, I don’t know why the missus cared so much. At least the recorded thing runs out of batteries at some point. This guy was never going to.”
“We’ll get your food,” Shawn said. “But then we need you to tell us exactly where you saw this man.”
Chapter Twelve
Gus had never actually believed they’d find Professor Kitteredge at the museum. He’d let Shawn talk him into looking there because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to start the search. But it simply didn’t make any sense that the professor would be hiding out in one of the only two places in Santa Barbara where he would be quickly recognized and caught.
Not that there was any good place for him to hide. He couldn’t go back to his hotel, which was undoubtedly under constant surveillance by the police. He might try to make a break for home, but he had to know the Riverside police would be hunting for him. Gus was sure the local airport, bus station, and train depot were all being watched, and there was an Amber alert out on his car, the license plate flashing on giant signs over every stretch of freeway in the state.
But he’d been here at the museum just last night; as a guest of honor he must have been introduced to many of the staffers. And while Gus had no idea how popular Clay Filkins had been, he had to imagine that most of those staffers would be overjoyed to finger the man who had killed their colleague.
Gus had considered pressing Shawn for an explanation of his thinking, but every time he’d done this in the past he’d ended up with a blasting headache. Shawn’s mental processes were like string theory-knowledgeable people insisted they were actually valid, and when experiments were performed the results ended up confirming the predictions, but it was impossible to describe precisely how or why they worked.
Even though he remained dubious, Gus felt his heart beating faster as he followed Shawn through galleries of European paintings segregated by century. And as they reached the end of the 1800s and moved on to the 1700s, he was thrilled to hear a familiar voice.
“There are those who believe that Fragonard tired of these scenes of lust and licentiousness, and that’s why he turned to neoclassicism in his later years,” the voice was saying. “But that denies a key element of biographical research which became evident in-”
Gus quickened his pace, nearly running into the next gallery. There he saw Professor Kitteredge standing next to a young Japanese couple and gesturing toward an ornate painting of three young girls in period dress playing in a fountain. The professor kept talking to the young couple despite the fact that they both had earphones clamped over their heads and in fact were looking at a different painting.
Gus rushed over to Kitteredge. “Professor, what are you doing here?”
Kitteredge jumped, then realized who it was who had come up to him. “Mr. Guster?”
“Yes,” Gus said. “Gus. The police are searching for you.”
“They’re not the only ones,” Kitteredge said. “I don’t have much time.”
“I can’t believe you’ve made it this long,” Gus said. “Somebody is going to report you.”
“I’m safe for the moment,” Kitteredge said. “No one ever notices a museum docent.”
“But the staff all know you,” Gus said, checking the gallery doors to make sure none of them were closing in.
“Museum staff particularly never notices a docent,” Kitteredge said. “Because the docent’s favorite trick is to introduce the staff member to his tour group, and then ask him to take over the lecture. Whenever a staffer sees a docent in a gallery he’ll cover his head and run out as quickly as possible.”
“What happens when the museum closes?” Gus said. “We’ve got to find a place for you to hide.”
“Professor Kitteredge can’t leave the museum yet,” Shawn said, stepping up to them. “Not until he’s seen what he’s come to see. And it’s not in this room. Which means that hiding out here isn’t doing you any good at all.”
Kitteredge, who had been holding himself up proudly, deflated like a beach ball under a truck tire. “I’ve got to get another look at The Defence of Guenevere,” he said.
“Professor, I understand how long you’ve wanted to see this painting, but this is not the time,” Gus said. “After we clear your name, you’ll be able to study it as much as you want. But now we’ve got to go.”
“That’s the problem,” Shawn said. “That painting is the only way to clear his name.”
Kitteredge looked at Shawn as if revising an earlier opinion of him. “The painting is the reason Filkins was killed,” Kitteredge said. “I’m convinced it contains essential clues to the identity and purpose of this global conspiracy. That’s why it’s been held in secrecy for so many years. Now that it was finally going to be made public, they knew I would be able to decipher its secret message. They had to shut me up, so they killed poor Clay Filkins and framed me for it.”
“The picture’s a hundred and fifty years old,” Gus said. “Even if it does have all those clues in it, how is it going to help you identify the actual murderers?”
“I’ll know when I have a chance to study it,” Kitteredge said. “Last night, I was only able to get a quick glimpse. And now the gallery where it’s hanging is closed and there’s a police officer guarding the door.”
“Just one?” Shawn said. “We’re in.”
Chapter Thirteen
Carlton Lassiter had never noticed just how lovely the veneer on the chief’s desk was. Although he knew it was really just a microscopically thin layer of walnut glued over particleboard, it still managed to convey the sense of prestige, power, and authority that came with the office.
It surprised him that he’d never noticed this before. All the times he’d sat across from Chief Karen Vick as she gave him assignments or accepted his debriefing or just talked about the state of the department and the world with him, he’d never let his gaze drift away from her face long enough to appreciate the special quality of the wood surfacing.
Somewhere, in some part of his brain that wasn’t completely occupied with the office’s furniture, he was aware that the desk’s occupant was talking to him. Apparently Chief Vick has been speaking the entire time he’d been staring at her desk. Her voice sounded sympathetic and yet with an undertone of steel, which was, he realized, not unlike the composition of that desk.
“No one blames you for this, Carlton,” Chief Vick said. “As this process moves forward it’s important that you understand that.”
Lassiter felt his head nodding. Apparently some part of him was aware of what the chief was saying, or at least could figure out the correct response from her tone of voice.
“But it’s also crucial that the Santa Barbara Police Department understand exactly what went wrong here,” Vick continued. “We’re not looking to point fingers or find a scapegoat. We just need to know if there are problems in our procedures that need to be fixed to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
Whatever part of him that was controlling his muscles made Lassiter’s head nod again.
“And the first tool we need to use in our study of this incident is going to be the report of the officer who was at the center of it,” Vick said. She opened a file that was lying on her desk and pulled out a single sheet of paper. “That’s why I need you to rewrite this.”
She pushed the paper across the desk at him. His eyes, attracted by the movement, shifted up to see that it was a report form with a couple lines of type on it. He vaguely remembered having turned in a similar form a short while before.
“That’s my report,” Lassiter said, shifting his gaze back to the comfortingly familiar sight of walnut grain.
Chief Vick picked up the paper and sighed heavily. “This is the report you want to turn in?”
“It’s the truth,” Lassiter said.
“Detective Carlton Lassiter failed in his duty and allowed the suspect to take him hostage, shaming not only the Santa Barbara Police Department but every law enforcement agency everywhere in the world,” she read. “The entire fault rests with him. The only mistake made by any other member of the force was in opening the car trunk in which Detective Lassiter had been locked instead of leaving him there to suffocate.”
“Is there something in there you disagree with?” Lassiter said. “I think it sums up the situation pretty well.”
Chief Vick let out a deep sigh and shoved the paper across the desk at him. “I can’t give this to the police commission,” she said. “And I won’t turn it over to Internal Affairs. I will not let you destroy your career over this.”
One of Lassiter’s hands reached out and took the paper. “What do you want me to say?”
“You’ve written a million reports,” she said. “You know what has to be in it. I need a complete accounting of everything that happened, starting with your arrival at the museum and ending with your rescue.”
Lassiter stared down at the paper in his hand. He read the words over again. It said everything there was to say about the incident. “So you want me to pad it out?” he said.
“I’ve told you what I expect, Detective,” Chief Vick said, the edge of steel now rising above the sympathetic tone. “And I expect it no later than tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” He knew what that word meant-a day that would begin when this one was finally over. But he couldn’t quite imagine it ever coming, because he was pretty sure that this day would never actually end.
“Tomorrow, Carlton,” Vick said, her tone softening again. “Right now, what I want you to do is go home and get some sleep. The next couple of days are going to be rough. Internal Affairs will need to do a thorough review, and the press is going to be all over this. Our departmental therapists are excellent at dealing with post-traumatic stress, and I strongly urge you to take advantage of their expertise. But first you need to go home and get some rest.”
“I need to work,” Lassiter said. “I need to catch Kitteredge.”
“You don’t need to do anything but rest, Detective,” Chief Vick said. “Juliet O’Hara is leading the search for Kitteredge.”
“But I need to-”
“Go home right now,” Chief Vick said. “You can take a personal day, if you’d like. Or I could suspend you pending review. But either way you’re off this case.”
Chapter Fourteen
“When a problem looks unsolvable,”Shawn said, “it just means that we’re not looking at it the right way.”
Despite Kitteredge’s insistence that the guise of museum docent provided a cloak of invisibility to rival the one elves hand out to ring-bearing hobbits, Gus and Shawn had felt that the European painting galleries were too well attended to make a safe hiding place. After a quick study of the museum map, they located the one spot in the institution that no one would ever walk into intentionally. And indeed, the Oceanic Arts and Crafts gallery was as deserted as any movie theater showing the second half of Funny People.
Had Gus been in more of a cultural mood he might have stopped to consider the unfairness of this. It was true that a lot of the Micronesian wood carvings all began to look alike very quickly, but some of the Melanesian works carried a sexual charge that Fragonard could only have dreamed of achieving. Granted, erotic sculptures of fertility goddesses would never replace Cinemax After Dark, but Gus was surprised not to see more teenage boys loitering around down here.
But right now, culture was the last thing on anyone’s minds. Even Kitteredge, who had started a brief discussion on the destruction of traditional art forms in the Oceanic cultures after World War II when they first entered the gallery, quickly wrapped it up as they began to focus on the difficulty of the task before them.
“The problem is that we have to get into a gallery that’s under constant guard by an armed police officer,” Gus said. “Is there another way to look at that?”
“There’s always another way,” Shawn said. “For instance, we could say that the core problem is that you haven’t come up with a solution.”
“Me?” Gus said. “What about you?”
“I don’t want to hog all the glory,” Shawn said. “Especially since you were the one Professor Kitteredge asked for help.”
“I’m willing to give up some glory,” Gus said. “In fact, you can have it all. So solve.”
“I can’t yet,” Shawn said. “Because we haven’t come up with the right way to ask the question. Once we do that, the answer will be obvious.”
“So what is the right question?” Gus said.
“That is,” Shawn said. “And now that you’ve asked it, the answer should be obvious to you. So go ahead and answer.”
The only answer that Gus could come up with seemed inappropriate to use in a museum frequented by families, even if none of them happened to be in this gallery. “What if we set some papers on fire so the alarm went off?” Gus said.
“Then steel doors would slam down on every gallery, and all the air would be sucked out to put out the fire and protect the art,” Shawn said.
“That wouldn’t happen,” Gus said.
“It did when Pierce Brosnan tried it,” Shawn said.
“First of all, you’re not Pierce Brosnan,” Gus said.
“I could be,” Shawn said. “I am wearing a tuxedo.”
“And second, that was a movie,” Gus said. “No museum is going to have steel doors that slam down on galleries if there’s a fire. What if there are people inside? They could suffocate or burn to death.”
“They’re extras,” Shawn said. “No one cares about them.”
“Until their survivors sue,” Gus said.
Gus knew there had to be a way to get past that cop. He simply had to visualize it. He cast his gaze around the gallery until his eye fell on a carved wooden figure about a foot high. It sat in a Plexiglas box standing on a
narrow pillar. A card in front of the display case described it as a Melanesian fertility symbol from the early 1600s.
“Okay,” Gus said, “let’s say this is the cop.”
Shawn looked at the little figure, and then at the enormous priapus jutting out from its midsection. “If that’s the cop, he won’t need his gun to stop us,” he said. “He won’t even need a nightstick.”
“Is this helping?” Gus said.
“It’s helping pass the time,” Shawn said.
“We don’t want to pass time,” Gus said. “Time is not our friend.”
“Maybe not to you,” Shawn said. “But I’ve always felt that Pierce Brosnan was a much more compelling actor once he got a little age on his face.”
Gus fought back an image of what he could do with that Melanesian fertility symbol and tried to refocus on the problem.
“Okay,” Gus said, “we’re saying that this is the cop-and that’s all we’re saying on the subject. Our one goal here is to figure out how we can make him move away from the gallery he’s guarding.”
Shawn stared at the wooden figure. Then his face lit up in a smile. “I’ve got it.”
“Yes?” Kitteredge said.
“I said I had the answer,” Shawn said. “Not that I feel like sharing it. Because just standing here chatting with you could be considered a felony, seeing as how you’re wanted for a bunch of terrible crimes. So before we go any further down the road to helping you, I think you owe us an explanation.”
Gus was about to jump in to defend his professor, but before he could speak he realized that Shawn was right.
Kitteredge looked from Shawn to Gus and saw the determination on their faces. “You’re right,” he said. “By helping me, you may have put yourself in terrible danger, and not just from the police. You need to know about the Cabal.”
A Fatal Frame of Mind p-4 Page 7
