by Nora Roberts
the strong possibility that my mother used me, betrayed me, had me terrorized. That she’s involved in a major art theft that’s already resulted in three deaths. You asked me to do that, then you criticize the way I choose to deal with it.”
“I’d rather have seen you shove her on her ass and demand an explanation.”
“That might work in your family. We’re not quite so volatile in mine.”
“Yeah, yours prefers the carefully iced blade that slices bloodlessly. I can tell you, Miranda, heat’s cleaner in the end and a hell of a lot more human.”
“What did you expect me to do? Goddamn it, what? Scream at her, shout and rage and accuse?” She swept an arm over the desk, sending neatly arranged papers and carefully sharpened pencils flying. “Was I supposed to demand she tell me the truth? Confess or deny? If she hates me enough to have done this, she hates me enough to lie to my face.”
She shoved her desk chair, sent it crashing into the wall. “She never loved me. Never gave me one free gesture of affection. Neither of them, not to me, to Andrew, or to each other. In my whole life neither of them ever said they loved me, never even bothered to lie so I could have the illusion. You don’t know what it’s like never to be held, never to be told, and to ache for it.”
She pressed her hands to her stomach as if the pain centered there was unbearable. “To ache so hard and long that you have to stop wanting it or just die.”
“No, I don’t know what it’s like,” he said quietly. “Tell me.”
“It was like growing up in a fucking laboratory, everything sterile and perfectly in place, documented, calculated, but without any of the joy of discovery. Rules, that’s all. Rules of language, conduct, education. Do this and do it this way and no other, because no other is acceptable. No other is correct. How many of those rules has she broken if she’s done this?”
Her breath was heaving, her eyes blazing, her fists clenched. He’d watched, he’d listened, and hadn’t moved or raised his voice. The only sound in the room now was her own ragged breathing as she looked around her office at the destruction she’d caused.
Stunned, she shoved at her hair, rubbed her hand over her hard-pumping heart. For the first time she became aware there were tears streaming down her cheeks, so hot they should have burned her skin.
“Is that what you wanted me to do?”
“I wanted you to get it out.”
“I guess I did.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “Tantrums give me a headache.”
“That wasn’t a tantrum.”
She let out a weak laugh. “What would you call it?”
“Honesty.” He smiled a little. “Even in my line of work I’m vaguely acquainted with the concept. You’re not cold, Miranda,” he said gently. “You’re just scared. You’re not unlovable, just unappreciated.”
She felt the tears, stood helplessly as they overflowed. “I don’t want it to be my mother who did this, Ryan.”
He went to her, nudged her fingers away and replaced them with his own. “We have a good chance of having the answers within the next couple of days. This will be over.”
“But I’ll have to live with those answers.”
He took her home and persuaded her to take a sleeping pill and go to bed early. The fact that he barely had to bully her into it only proved to him that she was running on fumes now.
When he was certain she was asleep, when Andrew was closed off in his own wing, Ryan changed into the dark sweater and jeans he preferred for nighttime breaking and entering.
He slipped his tools into his pocket, chose a soft-sided black briefcase with shoulder strap, in the event he found something he needed to transport back with him.
He found Miranda’s keys efficiently zipped in the side pocket of her purse. He walked quietly outside, got behind the wheel of her car, and adjusted the seat to suit him before putting it in neutral and releasing the brake. The car coasted downhill with its headlights shut off.
He could have claimed to have been restless, to have borrowed the car to take a drive, had either she or Andrew heard the engine. But why lie when it wasn’t necessary? He waited until he was a quarter of a mile down the drive, then turned on the ignition, switched on the lights.
Puccini was on the radio, and though he shared Miranda’s fondness for opera, it didn’t quite suit his mood. He noted the frequency, then hit scan. When he heard George Thorogood belting out “Bad to the Bone,” he grinned to himself and let it rip.
Traffic thickened a little on the edge of town. People heading to parties, he thought, to weekend dates, or home from either because they weren’t quite interesting enough. It was barely midnight.
A long way, he thought, from the city that never sleeps.
Early to bed, early to rise, these Yankees, he decided. Such an admirable people. He pulled into the hotel parking lot well away from the entrance. He was fairly certain the same admirable trait would hold true for the visitors from Florence. The seven-hour time difference could be a killer the first couple of days.
He’d stayed in the same hotel on his first trip, and knew the layout perfectly. He’d also taken the precaution of getting the room numbers for all the parties he intended to visit that night.
No one took notice of him as he crossed the lobby and walked directly to the elevators like a man in a hurry to get to his bed.
Elizabeth and Elise were sharing a two-bedroom suite on the top club level. The level required a key to release the elevator. And being a farsighted man—and because it was an old habit—he’d kept the access key when he checked out of the hotel himself.
He saw no lights under any of the three doors of the suite, heard no murmur of voices or television from inside.
He was inside the parlor himself in just under two minutes. He stood still, in the dark, listening, judging, letting his eyes adjust. As a precaution, he unlocked the terrace doors, giving himself an alternate route of escape should it become necessary.
Then he got to work. He searched the parlor first, though he doubted either woman would have left anything vital or incriminating in that area.
In the first bedroom he was forced to use the penlight, keeping it away from the bed, where he could hear the soft, steady sound of a woman breathing. He took a briefcase and a purse back into the parlor with him to search.
It was Elizabeth in the bed, he noted as he flipped through the wallet. He took everything out, going through every receipt, every scrap of paper, reading the notations in her datebook. He found a key just where her daughter kept hers—inside zipper pocket. A safe-deposit box key, he noted, and pocketed it.
He checked her passport, noting the stamps coincided with the dates his cousin had given him. It was Elizabeth’s first trip back to the States in more than a year, but she’d taken two quick trips into France in the last six months.
He put everything but the key back where he’d found it, repeated the same process on her luggage; then while she slept he searched her closet, the dresser, the cosmetic case in the bathroom.
It took him an hour before he was satisfied and moved on to the second bedroom.
He knew Andrew’s ex-wife very well by the time he was done. She liked silk underwear and Opium perfume. Though her clothes were on the conservative side, she favored the top designers. Expensive taste required money to indulge it. He made a note to check her income.
She’d brought work with her if the laptop on her desk was any indication. Which made her, in his mind, either dedicated or obsessive. The contents of her purse and briefcase were orderly, with no stray wrappers or scraps of papers. The small leather jewelry case he found contained a few good pieces of Italian gold, some well-chosen colored stones, and an antique silver locket containing a picture of a man facing a picture of a woman. They were faded black-and-white, and from the style he judged them to have been taken around World War II.
Her grandparents, he imagined, and decided Elise had a quietly sentimental streak.
He left the t
wo women sleeping and moved down the hallway to Richard Hawthorne’s room. He too was fast asleep.
It took Ryan ten minutes to find the receipt for a storage facility in Florence—which he pocketed.
It took him thirteen to find the .38. That, he left alone.
In twenty, he’d located the small notebook hidden inside a black dress sock. Scanning the cramped handwriting with his light, Ryan read quickly and at random. His lips tightened on a grim smile.
He tucked the notebook in his pocket and let Richard sleep. He was, Ryan thought as he slipped out, in for a rude awakening.
“Excuse me, did you just say you broke into my mother’s bedroom last night?”
“Nothing was broken,” Ryan assured her. He felt as though he’d been chasing after Miranda for hours, trying to steal a half hour alone with her.
“Her bedroom?”
“I went in through the parlor, if it makes you feel any better. There was hardly any point in getting them all here, in one spot, if I wasn’t going to do something once they were. I got a safe-deposit key out of her purse. I found it odd she’d have one with her on a trip like this. But it’s an American bank. A Maine bank—with a branch in Jones Point.”
Miranda sat behind her desk, the first time she’d been off her feet since six that morning. It was now noon, and Ryan had finally buttonholed her during her meeting with the florist and given her the choice of walking to her office or being carried there.
“I don’t understand, Ryan. Why would a key to a bank box be important?”
“People generally keep things there that are important or valuable to them—and that they don’t want other people to get their hands on. In any case, I’ll check it out.”
He waited until Miranda opened her mouth, shut it again without saying a word. “I didn’t find anything in Elise’s room except for her laptop. Seemed strange to cart it all this way for a four-day trip when she’d be spending most of her time here. If I have time I’ll go back in and see if I can open it up while she’s out of the room.”
“Oh, that would be best,” she said with a breezy wave of her hand.
“Exactly. I found enough jewelry to break the back of an elephant in the Morelli suite. That woman has a serious glitter addiction—and if I can access Vincente’s bank account, we’ll see just how deep in debt he’s gone to pay for it. Now your father—”
“My father? He didn’t even get in until after midnight.”
“You’re telling me. I nearly bumped into him in the hall on my way out of your mother’s suite. Handy of the hotel to put everyone on the same floor.”
“We had the rooms blocked that way,” she murmured.
“In any case, doing the other rooms first gave him time to settle in. He was out like a light. Did you know your father’s been to the Cayman Islands three times in the last year?”
“The Caymans?” She wondered her head didn’t simply tumble off onto the floor, by the way it was reeling.
“Popular spot the Caymans. Good for scuba, sunshine, and money laundering. Now all that is idle speculation. But I hit gold in Hawthorne’s room.”
“You had a very full night while I was asleep.”
“You needed your rest. I found this.” He took the storage receipt out of his pocket, unfolded it. “He rented this space the day after the bronze was brought to Standjo. The day before your mother called and sent for you. What did Andrew say about coincidences? There aren’t any.”
“People rent space for all sorts of reasons.”
“They don’t generally rent a small garage just outside of the city when they don’t own a car. I checked, and he doesn’t. Then there was the gun.”
“Gun?”
“The handgun—don’t ask me the make and model. I try to avoid guns, but it looked very efficient to me.”
Idly, he took her coffeepot off the burner, sniffed, and was pleased to find what was left was still fresh. “I think there’s a law about transporting weapons on airplanes,” he added as he poured a cup. “I doubt he went through the proper channels to get it here. And why would a nice, quiet researcher need a gun to attend an exhibit?”
“I don’t know. Richard and a gun. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I think it might, once you read this.” He took the notebook out of his pocket. “You’ll want to read it, but I’ll give you the highlights. It describes a bronze, ninety point four centimeters, twenty-four point sixty-eight kilograms. A female nude. It gives test results on said bronze, dating it late fifteenth century in the style of Michelangelo.”
He watched her cheeks drain of color and her eyes go glassy, then held out the coffee until she’d wrapped both hands around the cup. “The date of the first test is at nineteen hundred hours, on the date The Dark Lady was accepted and signed for at Standjo. I imagine the lab’s closed at eight most nights.”
“He ran tests on it, on his own.”
“It lists them, step by step, giving times and results. Two solid nights’ work, and it adds several points of research. The documentation. He found something you didn’t, and he didn’t tell you about. An old baptismal record from the Convent of Mercy, written out by the abbess on a male child, infant. The mother’s name was recorded as Giulietta Buonadoni.”
“She had a child. I’d read there was a child, possibly the illegitimate son of one of the Medicis. She sent him away, most likely for his own protection as there was political tension during that period.”
“The child was baptized Michelangelo.” He saw when the idea struck home. “One might speculate, after his papa.”
“Michelangelo never fathered a child. He was, by all accounts, homosexual.”
“That doesn’t make him incapable of conceiving a child.” But he shrugged. “Doesn’t mean the kid was his either, but it does make the theory that they had a close personal relationship highly possible, and if they did . . .”
“It helps support the likelihood that he would have used her as a model.”
“Exactly. Hawthorne thought it was important enough to record it in his little book—and to keep the information from you. If they were lovers, even once, or if they had a close enough platonic relationship that she would name her only child after him, it goes a long way toward concluding that he created the bronze of her.”
“It wouldn’t be proof, but yes, it would add weight. It makes it less and less likely that he’d never used her, and we have no documentation of any other sculpture or painting of Michelangelo’s that uses Giulietta as a model. Oh, it’s good,” she murmured, shutting her eyes. “If nothing else, as a springboard to keep looking.”
“He didn’t want you to look.”
“No, and I stepped in line in that area. I left nearly all of the research in his hands. What I did came primarily from sources he gave me. He recognized it, exactly as I did. Probably the minute he saw it.”
“I’d say that’s an accurate assumption, Dr. Jones.”
She could see the sense of it now, the logic and the steps. “Richard stole the bronze and copied it. And the David, he had to have taken that as well.” Her fisted hand pressed against her midriff. “He killed Giovanni.”
“It wouldn’t be proof,” Ryan said, laying the book on her desk. “But it would add weight.”
“We need to take this to the police.”
“Not yet.” He laid his hand on the book before she could grab it. “I’d feel a lot more . . . confident of the outcome if we had the bronzes in hand before we talk to cops. I’ll go to Florence tomorrow, check out his garage. If they’re not there, they’ll be in his apartment, or the record of where they are will be. Once we’ve got them, we’ll work out what to tell the cops.”
“He has to pay for Giovanni.”
“He will. He’ll pay for it all. Give me forty-eight hours, Miranda. We’ve come this far.”
She pressed her lips together. “I haven’t lost sight of what this can do for my career, or what it can mean to the art world. And I know we made a deal. But I’m
asking you now to agree, to promise, that justice for Giovanni will come first.”
“If Hawthorne’s responsible for Giovanni, he’ll pay. I’ll promise you that.”
“All right. We’ll wait until you’re back from Florence to go to the police. But tonight. How can we possibly go through with tonight? He’ll be there. He’s here now.”
“Tonight goes as scheduled. You have hundreds of people coming,” he went on before she could object. “It’s all in place. You just ride the current. The Institute, and my galleries, are too far into it to pull out. You’re too far in. And we don’t know if he acted alone.”
She ran her hands up and down her arms. “It could still be my mother. It could be any of them.”
There was nothing he could do about the haunted look in her eyes. “You have to handle it, Miranda.”
“I intend to.” She dropped her hands. “I will.”
“Hawthorne’s made a mistake. Now we’ll see if he—or someone else—makes another one. When I have the bronzes, we’ll give him to
