by Jack Soren
They walked the few blocks to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the site of the second murder. Awed by the beauty and majesty of the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling and intricate stained glass windows, they found nothing out of the ordinary. The murder tour was starting to feel like a complete waste of time. Even so, they grabbed a cab and headed for The Cloisters Museum.
They did a bit of the tour, trying to fit in as tourists, but spent most of their time around the fountain where the last body was found. A lot of people were there for the same reason, but when the coast was clear, Jonathan lay back on the fountain in the position they had found Bob Cummings’s body. Again, nothing but a wet stain on the back of his shirt. Their investigations were a total bust.
“I don’t get it,” Jonathan finally said when he tired of stirring his coffee. “I was sure there’d be a theme or a pattern. Something to show what this was all about.”
“Well,” Lew said around a mouthful of sandwich, “maybe the who and the where aren’t the point. Maybe it’s the how?”
The song Natalie had picked as Jonathan’s ringtone for her started playing out of his pocket. It was her favorite song from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie they’d gone to see and was the only song she’d picked that he could stand.
Ooga chaka . . . ooga chaka . . . ooga chaka. . .
Lew looked at him as he took it out of his pocket. “Cute,” he said before biting off another hunk of sandwich.
“Shut up.” Jonathan chuckled before he answered the phone.
“Hi, babe.”
Natalie told him about her day. They’d gone go-karting and tonight they were going to a movie. Ken Swenson was sparing no expense in keeping her busy. Jonathan was glad, but at this rate he’d burn through the five hundred dollars Jonathan had given him in a couple of days. They talked and joked for almost twenty minutes, Jonathan reluctant to say good-bye with what he’d possibly be facing tomorrow.
“I have to go, Dad,” Natalie said after she mumbled something to someone at the Swensons’ house. “We’re making popcorn and watching Frozen.”
“Again? You’re going to turn into Elsa if you watch that one more time,” Jonathan said, wishing he was there to hear her sing along with the movie.
“I wish! Night, Dad. Good luck. I love you.”
“Night, babe. I love you too.” Jonathan hung up and stayed lost in thought for another minute before he shook his head and forced himself to focus on the here and now.
“Sorry, what were you saying?” Jonathan asked.
“I said, maybe it’s the how we should look at. Those news reports didn’t have a whole lot of detail. The symbol scraped into the victims’ skins was shocking, but hardly life threatening,” Lew said, sliding the empty pie plate aside and digging into the cake.
Jonathan just stared at Lew. This was not the same man he’d known a few years ago. In the interim, Lew had become much more reflective.
“Okay, but how do we find out how they were killed before tomorrow?”
“I knew some guys in the NYPD about twenty years ago.”
Jonathan was going to say something, but he felt the wind sucked out of him as he looked up from his coffee. He couldn’t read the words, but the image on the screen was all too clear and all too familiar.
“Son of a bitch,” Jonathan said.
“Wha?” Lew said. He saw where Jonathan was looking and turned around. “Is that—”
Jonathan stood up and grabbed Lew’s lapel as he walked past, pulling him to his feet. “Come on.”
They walked over to where they could see the screen better.
And there it was, The Just Judges—the most stolen painting in the world. And Jonathan and Lew had been the last ones to steal it. Jonathan hadn’t seen it in almost eight years. The last time was when he’d pulled it out of his backpack and handed it to the Belgian authorities. They’d thanked Jonathan and Lew and offered to pay them for recovering it, but the authorities had an additional, bizarre request. It was the first time someone asked Jonathan and Lew to unsteal something. Well, not really unsteal it, though apparently that would have been all right with the museum as well. They’d just wanted it gone.
Most collectors and experts considered the painting lost or destroyed years ago. It had last been seen in 1935. Apparently there was just too much involved if it suddenly showed up again. Jonathan had refused payment, which had pissed Lew off, and walked away from the job, leaving the painting with the Belgian authorities.
“I told you that painting was bad luck,” Lew said, keeping his voice down so the three or four other people who had gathered around them to watch the newscast wouldn’t hear. One of the main reasons Lew had balked at not taking the payment was that he’d broken his arm during the theft. It was also the only time either of them had ever been hurt on a job. When they’d walked away, Lew had said it wasn’t the last they’d seen of that painting. Jonathan had thought he was just being superstitious. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Jonathan was having other thoughts. This painting being used as a murder weapon changed things. This wasn’t someone with Miss Burrows’s book performing murders they wanted blamed on The Monarch or even someone pretending to be The Monarch. The book didn’t even mention the painting. Whoever had done this was sending a very deliberate and very direct message to The Monarch: I know more about you than anyone in the world and I’m coming for you.
And it was received loud and clear.
21
Tartaruga Island
3:00 A.M. Local Time
THE HARDEST PART of kuru was the frustration. Before the symptoms arrived in full force, Nathan couldn’t appreciate the simple things in life for their complexity—picking up a snifter of brandy or rolling a fine cigar between his thumb and index finger. But what was going on beneath those seemingly simple acts were neurons firing, neuromuscular transmissions rifling down nerve strands to muscles, balance and coordination working in tandem. All of it happening in the blink of an eye. But Nathan sometimes even had a hard time blinking, now.
To be fair, the disease wasn’t the only problem. The loss of muscle control and coordination was bad, though not as bad as the involuntary laughing fits. Nathan’s ego had suffered the hardest hit of all. At his request, Sophia had come up with a solution for him that had nothing to do with treating his illness.
When he was off the serum, he loaded up with non-depolarizing blocking agents, similar to what anesthesiologists used during surgeries to prevent patients from twitching or moving when scalpels were inside them. The tricky part was keeping Nathan’s respiratory system unaffected and allowing him to stay conscious. Eventually, after some seriously close calls, she’d found the right cocktail. His ego could avoid the embarrassment of appearing undignified. But if not for the advanced systems built into his chair, he would’ve been completely immobile and silent between serum shots.
Now, Nathan worked to rotate his motorized wheelchair so the arm affixed to the side lined up his pass card properly with the access slot keeping the lab door shut. He’d been trying for almost five solid minutes, now. Most doors in the complex automatically detected his approach and opened for him when he was in his chair. Most doors he was apt to use, that is. Not this one. Sophia’s lab was her domain.
Finally he oriented the card, gave the subvocal command, and the card slid down through the slot. The door to Sophia’s lab clicked open, and he quickly whirred inside. A moment later the door clicked closed behind him.
He rolled down an aisle with science stations on either side, looking like something out of Frankenstein. Glass beakers, tubes, and Bunsen burners bubbled and burned away in their stations, oblivious to the stranger among them.
At the end of the aisle he spotted his quarry; a large refrigeration unit. He rolled closer but stopped short when he saw a padlock on it. Even if he’d had the key it wouldn’t have helped in his current state. Th
e frustration in him built to a crescendo and he wished he could make a fist just for a moment so he could pound a table with it.
Nathan opened his unwilling, unaligned lips and uttered a moist, drooling howl that might have been cursing in another reality; his chair, confused by the utterance, shimmied back and forth. Just past this tiny loop of metal, inside the refrigerated exterior of the box, sat his prize. The only thing that could make him whole again, if only for a short time.
It might as well have been at the bottom of an active volcano.
“What are you doing?” a sleep-raspy voice behind him said. He turned the wheelchair around and saw Sophia standing there, lines on her face and wrinkles in her lab coat telling him she’d fallen asleep at her desk again. She may not be my biological daughter, but she sure acts like me.
“I just want to see it,” Nathan’s electronic voice said.
“No, you’re in no shape to take another dose so soon,” she said. “Your body is adapting to the new formula as fast as it did to the others. You’ll only quicken the process.”
“I feel fine.” He was lying. His body screamed in pain. The chair that enabled him to get around and speak was designed for paraplegics but despite his artificial paralysis, he felt everything. “Why is it locked?”
“Because of nights like this,” Sophia said.
“I told you, I just want to see it.”
“Then why did Lara tell me you wanted a treatment for tonight?” she asked. He knew she was trying to play him. She was the last person Lara would take into confidence.
“Tonight is everything. I have to be at capacity.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, seeing as you haven’t told me what the hell you’re doing down there. Despite the fact you’ve turned my lab into a ghost town. Regardless, you’re not thinking straight. Maybe . . .”
“Maybe my mind is being affected?” Nathan’s electronic voice finished for her. “It’s not.”
Then something strange happened. Nathan watched Sophia look at him as if she were searching for something or trying to make a decision. Nathan felt like a bug under one of her microscopes. No one had ever made him feel that way before. The moment stretched out and then it was over. She turned away and he was released from her gaze.
“It stays locked. Go to bed, Nathan,” Sophia said as she left the lab, presumably to take her own advice, leaving him sitting alone, still shook up from that gaze.
Nathan?
OUT IN THE hallway, Sophia fell back against the corridor wall gasping for breath. She was trying to both stave off tears and calm down. But it wasn’t sadness she was feeling. Well, not totally. It was anger.
Earlier that day she had been performing routine tests on a sample of Nathan’s blood to try and determine what kind of adjustments she could make to the serum so his body would stop adapting to it so quickly. But she didn’t have another blood sample to use as a control, so she used her own. What she’d seen in the comparison had made her feel like she’d been punched in the stomach with an iron fist.
It had nothing to do with the serum. It was the blood samples. Nathan’s blood type was O-positive. Sophia’s was AB-negative, which she knew was the same as her late mother’s. It was a fluke that she even noticed it, but once she did, she checked again and again. There was no mistake.
Nathan could not be her father.
For a brief second in the lab a moment ago, Sophia thought she was going to grab something off a workstation and smash it into his face. Her whole adult life had been devoted to trying to save that bastard’s life. Her education, her training and all these years heading up her lab. All of it was for him. For family.
Then the tears won out. She put her hand over her mouth to stifle the sobs and ran toward her room, her lab coat billowing out behind her like a ghost.
22
Hemingway Hotel
New York City
9:00 P.M. Local Time
LEW, A BUCKET of ice under one arm and several cans of soda crooked in the other, bullied his way through the hotel room door. Two of the cans broke free and bounced off the orange and brown carpet. He put the ice and sodas on the credenza by the door with a mumbled curse.
Jonathan sat at the desk against the wall in a bathrobe, his hair damp and mussed, talking on the phone. Lew didn’t recognize the language, but could guess that it was Dutch since Jonathan had been trying all night to call the Belgian museum curator they’d left The Just Judges with years ago. Lew spun the top off the bottle of Canadian Club he’d bought earlier. He filled a glass halfway and then snapped a Coke open and topped it off. He offered the glass to Jonathan, who waved it away like an annoying gnat. Lew shrugged, took a sip, and then plopped down on a hard orange sofa, putting his feet up on the aluminum coffee table. He eyed the full-length duster coat he’d bought earlier hanging in the closet and raised his glass to it before he swallowed half of his drink.
Jonathan slammed down the phone. “Idiot.”
“What’s the scoop?” Lew asked.
“The moron sold it to a private collector two days after we left. Two days,” Jonathan said. “Hey, go easy on that. We’ve got work tomorrow.”
“So I won’t drink tomorrow,” Lew said. “Did you get a name?”
“Nope. He was too pissed for that. It’s three in the morning over there.”
“Didn’t he call you back?”
“Yeah, but only because I’ve been calling the museum, his house, and everyone he’s ever known every five minutes all night. I can’t wait to see this bill,” Jonathan said, crossing to the credenza and getting a glass of Coke with ice. He reached for the CC, but then stopped.
“Go on. Live a little,” Lew said, seeing his indecision. Jonathan gave a sly grin, rolled his eyes, and grabbed the bottle. “There ya go.”
“Anyways, he wasn’t going to give me the guy’s name until I threatened to keep the harassment up,” Jonathan said, sitting down beside Lew on the sofa. He took a long drink.
“And?”
“Some guy named Canton George,” Jonathan said. Lew felt the blood rush out of his limbs. He tried to keep his face from showing what he was feeling.
“Dead end,” Lew said after clearing his throat, staring intently into his drink.
“What?”
“What what?” Lew said innocently.
“Lew?” Jonathan said like a father who’d caught his kid with his hand in the cookie jar. Lew tried to keep up the front, but it was short-lasting. Jonathan knew him too well. Besides, Jonathan needed to at least know something about it.
“Fine, yeah I know him. Boy, do I know him.”
“Wait a minute,” Jonathan said, looking pensive. “George. Son of a bitch!”
And Lew knew the jig was up.
It had been years ago, back when Jonathan had first met Samantha. During that time, Lew pulled one job on his own as The Monarch: the Canton George estate. Things had not gone well. All Lew had told Jonathan was that George was an Australian industrialist and the lead on his collection hadn’t panned out.
“What are you holding back, Lew?”
“Nothing,” Lew said, not seeing any point in going into the details. Jonathan eyed him while he sipped his drink. Mercifully he eventually broke eye contact, either because Lew had covered his anxiety sufficiently or because he knew pushing now wouldn’t be the best tactic.
“That’s one hell of a coincidence.”
“Yup,” Lew said, keeping his eyes down.
“How many is that?” Jonathan asked with a smile, gesturing toward the duster hanging in the closet. “Four?”
“Five,” Lew said, thankful the subject was changing. He loved dusters, but they seemed to have a bad habit of attracting knives and bullets.
“I know it’s April, but you’re going to roast at the press conference tomorrow. Not to mention stand out like
a gray pubic hair.” At the mention of the press conference, Lew put his feet down and sat up. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking about this whole press conference thing,” Lew said.
“Yeah? What about it?”
“Look, I know it was my idea to come to New York and all, and I’m glad we’re here.”
“But . . .”
“But, after seeing The Just Judges, are you sure going to this press conference is such a great idea?”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s like when Hitler started using the swastika—”
“Excuse me?”
“Let me finish. Before Hitler started using the symbol, it was actually a Hindu symbol of peace. Of course, nobody connects it with anything except the Nazis now. But the difference between what we thought we were getting into before seeing the painting and what we’re really getting into is like if Hitler hadn’t had a problem with the Jews, but took the symbol anyway and tried to wipe them out just to make the Hindus look bad. You know?”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“I think you just made a good point. Must be the booze.”
Lew elbowed him and got up to refill his glass. “I’m serious, Jonny.”
“I know you are,” Jonathan said, putting his drink down on the table. “But the fact is, seeing that painting and knowing this is targeted—personal—makes me want to stop this guy even more. Can you imagine what would happen if he ever discovered our true identities? Or worse, if Talie found out?”
“What we did was good,” Lew said. “We’ve got nothing to be ashamed about.”
“I know, but it won’t matter. And even if I could explain it to her, what do you think a judge would say?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’d never see her again, Lew. I know you care about her, but she’s not just in my heart, she is my heart. I’d die without her.”
Lew knew from the look in Jonathan’s eyes that he wasn’t exaggerating. He felt something welling up in him that he didn’t like, so he tried to change the subject as much as he could.
