Read Die in Plain Sight Online
Authors: Elizabeth Lowell
Die in Plain Sight (32 page)
I
s Mr. Milford available?” asked a woman’s faintly raspy voice.
His hand tightened on the phone. Very few people knew that name. Four of them had called him in the past twenty-four hours. He’d hoped that his own call would put an end to it.
Obviously it hadn’t.
“Speaking,” he said.
“This is Mrs. Katz from Seaside Gallery. I have a line on five paintings by Lewis Marten.”
“Signed?”
“Unfortunately, no. I’ve only seen digital representations, but the paintings look excellent. Definitely some of his best work.”
“All landscapes?”
“Two coastal mountains, three coastlines.”
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or irritated that none of the crucial paintings were being offered by any of the callers.
Why in the
name of Christ doesn’t the bitch just gouge me like her grandfather did? Why is she dragging it all out?
“Are the landscapes for sale?” he asked, wondering if the answer would be different from the other galleries that had called.
“Not at this point, but that could change at any moment,” Mrs. Katz said. “The owner has guaranteed that the instant the paintings are available, my gallery will represent them.”
“I’ll wait for your call,” he said, and hung up.
He didn’t expect to be waiting long. Estate sales happened quickly after death. The tax collector saw to it. As for the death, he would see to it, personally.
Maybe that will be the end of it. Finally.
But just in case it wasn’t, he had some paintings to burn.
Y
ou’re looking at that door like you’ve never seen one,” Lacey said. She took off her coat and shook off raindrops as she ran her fingers through her wildly curling hair. “Is something wrong with it?”
“I was thinking about leaving it untouched except for the automatic electronic lock. Make it easy on the bastard if he tries to break in again.” But even as Ian said it, he was throwing the bolt and jamming in his own handy little wedge.
“Why would you want to make it easy for anyone to break in?” she asked, startled.
Ian shrugged out of his wet denim jacket. Water stood in his short hair, making it spiky. “Because I’d like to have a little chat with him.”
“If he’s the one that made the telephone call,” she said, rubbing her arms uneasily, “I don’t have anything to say to him.”
“I do. And then he’ll have a lot to say to me.”
The thin curve of Ian’s lips had nothing in common with the smile
that put children and bankers at ease. This smile was frankly predatory, as hard as the gun waiting beneath his jacket.
“You don’t look very friendly,” she said.
“I’m not feeling very friendly.” Then he turned toward her and held out his arms. Bags of deli food dangled from one big hand. “Present company excepted.”
She stepped close to him and let herself be wrapped up and hugged. Beneath the smiles and light conversation she’d been keeping up all afternoon, she was scared and off-balance, wondering where her secure world had gone.
“I’m still trying to understand…” Her voice died.
“What?”
“Everything. So much has happened, it’s like a wave that keeps breaking, tumbling me around. Granddad, Susa, you, me.” She took a swift breath that tasted of Ian. “The threat. Why would anyone want to kill me? What have I done to deserve it?”
He tilted her chin up with his free hand and kissed her tenderly. “Some people don’t need a reason.”
“But most people do.”
“Sex. Money. Power. Secrets. Insanity.”
“Well, that really narrows the field.” She rubbed her forehead against his neck and fought the chill that kept taking her by surprise. “Nobody’s going to kill for sex with me.”
“Wanna bet?” he asked.
“I’m trying to be serious here.”
He nuzzled her ear. “I’m serious.”
Despite her uneasiness, she smiled. “You’re not the one threatening me.”
“Dang. I’m going to have to work on my technique. Puppy dogs don’t get as far as wolves.”
She went nose to nose and eye to eye with him. “You’re trying to distract me.”
“Yeah.”
“This time are you going to tell me why you insisted we move my grandfather’s paintings?”
“I was bored.”
“Damn it, Ian—”
“Okay, okay,” he said quickly. “I’m paranoid, remember?”
“So am I, remember?” she retorted. “You tell me your paranoid fantasy and I’ll tell you mine.”
“I don’t think telling you will make you feel any better or help you dodge trouble down the road, so what’s the point?”
“All right.” She stepped away. “How about I tell you
my
paranoid fantasy?”
He thought of going to her, holding her again, reassuring both of them that she was safe and everything was all right. But she wasn’t and everything wasn’t, and fuzzy thinking like that could get her killed.
“Are you telling me before or after we open this deli stuff and get greasy?” Ian asked.
“During.”
He gave up trying to distract her. “I’m listening. But only if you sit down and eat instead of picking at food the way you’ve done since the call.”
She didn’t have to ask which call. She just watched him unwrap a turkey club sandwich that had to be six inches thick and was held together with a toothpick as long as a dagger. She’d thought when she ordered it that something bland like turkey would be easier to eat, but it was the greasy, garlicky sausage sandwich that smelled good to her now.
“
If
my grandfather’s forgeries are a common thread,” she said after a moment, “and
if
my shop was deliberately burned to destroy them, and
if
it was my grandfather’s paintings rather than Susa’s that were the target of the hotel theft, then whoever did it might try to burn or steal the other paintings.”
I would have to pick a smart woman,
Ian thought as he put out another thick sandwich.
She waited until he reached for one of the three big boxes of salad. “Well?” she asked.
“It’s your paranoid fantasy, not mine,” he said.
“Then why did you move the paintings?”
He opened the salad box. “Same fantasy. Sit down and eat.”
“Well, that was like pulling teeth.” She sat cross-legged next to him on the floor by the coffee table and reached for a section of sandwich. “The only problem with that fantasy is—”
“If selling fake Martens is profitable, who benefits from burning them?” he interrupted.
Her lower lip pushed out. “I was going to ask you first.”
“Beat you to it. Pass one of those forks, would you?”
She gave him a plastic fork. “So my shop was just one of those things—cold hands, hot fire, ocean wind?”
“That’s what the preliminary investigation concluded.”
“Even after you talked about paraffin and gasoline?”
“How’d you find out about that?” he asked.
“I heard some of the cops talking to the firemen after they talked to you.”
“Worst gossips in the world.” Ian bit into a spicy Italian sausage sub.
“But it’s just a preliminary investigation,” she said. “Surely after more work—”
“Don’t count on it,” he cut in. “While you and your mother were bonding over virtual hair styles on the computer, I called the Newport PD on my cell phone for an update.”
“Mmph?” she asked, chewing and swallowing frantically so she could ask questions.
“The short version is that they’re understaffed and overwhelmed by the Birthday Candle Arsonist. Unless they hear on the streets that Cosmic Energy was a professional burn, they’re going to chalk it up to homeless people starting a trash can fire that got away from them. That’s where the evidence points.”
She reached for the bottle of soda that had been part of the deli package meal and washed down the turkey.
“Sure you don’t want some of the champagne that’s in the fridge?” he asked.
“Are you drinking any?”
He thought of the phone call.
Stop asking questions or she’ll die
. “Champagne doesn’t sound good to me.”
“Neither did beer,” she said, sucking a slice of tomato off her thumb.
“Don’t feel like bubbles.” He took a swallow from her bottle.
“You’re drinking Coke.”
“Different bubbles.”
She tossed her head in an attempt to keep her hair out of her sandwich. “You’re on vacation.”
“Sure am.”
“But you’re still wearing a gun.”
“Yeah.” He took another garlic-laden bite from his sub and then held it out to her. “Better eat some in self-defense.”
As she took the sub, he tucked her damp curly hair out of the way and ran the pad of his thumb over her cheekbone with a gentleness that made her heart turn over.
“Let me help you, Lacey.”
Her eyes searched his intently. “I don’t want you getting hurt because of me,” she said. “Can’t you understand that?”
“I understand.” He kissed her fast and hard, then smiled slowly. “I just don’t agree. Unhand my sandwich, woman, or prepare to defend yourself.”
Smiling, shaking her head, not knowing how he got around her so easily, she took a big bite and returned the garlicky mess to him. Then she waited until he sank his teeth into the soggy bread before she reached out and tugged lightly at the shoulder harness he wore over his T-shirt.
“Teach me how to shoot your gun,” she said.
He grinned slowly. “You shoot my gun just fine.”
“Ian, I mean it.”
“I know you do.” He sighed, set down the sandwich, licked his thumb, and said, “Have you ever shot a gun? Any kind of gun?”
“No.”
“Held one?”
“No.”
Bloody hell, as Niall always says. Annie Oakley would have been easier
Ian wiped his hands on several napkins before he drew his gun from its holster with a speed that startled Lacey.
“This is the safety,” he said.
She looked where he pointed. “Safety.”
“In this position it’s on. The gun can’t fire. In this”—his finger flicked—“it’s off. See the red dot?”
“Yes.”
“That’s how you know you’re in trouble.”
He put the safety back on and tapped the muzzle with a fingertip. “This end shoots bullets.”
“Ya think?” she said sarcastically.
“So don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill.”
She took a quick breath. “Got it.”
He put the butt of the gun in her hands, automatically making sure that the muzzle didn’t point anywhere important. The weight made her hands sag for a second before she recovered.
“Heavy,” she said.
“Yeah. I keep thinking about a Glock, but I’m used to this one.”
“A Glock?”
“A kind of gun. Real light compared to this. Plastic instead of metal.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Point my gun at that window.”
She lifted the weapon so that the muzzle was centered on a window about eight feet away. Rain lashed across the glass in the kind of sudden winter downpour that always took southern Californians by surprise.
“Put your finger over the trigger and pull back,” he said.
It took a moment, but she managed.
“Bang bang, he’s dead,” Ian said, plucking the gun from her hands and returning it to the holster. “Lesson over.”
Lacey’s cheeks flushed. She opened her mouth to give him hell, but he was already talking.
“If you have to use this gun it will be because I’m dead and a man is coming at you,” Ian said, meeting her anger with dark eyes, watching her go pale at his words. “Point and shoot and keep shooting until you’re out of bullets or you’re dead. Nothing fancy about it. Just killing, pure and simple, because the second choice is to be killed. No training on earth can prepare you for it, and thinking a short lesson in a hotel room is going to make any difference is a good way to end up stone-cold fucking dead.”
“You’re trying to scare me.”
“The phone caller was trying to scare you. I’m trying to educate you.”
“By telling me I’m helpless?” She dropped the tasteless turkey sandwich on the table. “Gee, thanks, I feel ever so much better informed.”
Ian quit pretending to eat and dumped his own sandwich on top of the salad. “You think you’re the only one who’s scared? I’m spending a lot of the time in a cold sweat, thinking of all the ways someone can kill and get away with it. I want to haul you to Rarities and leave you there until I catch this bastard.”
“Without me, how are you going to catch anything but a cold from all that sweat?” she asked sweetly. “You can’t offer anything to make gallery
owners prick up their ears and dig in their memories. You don’t have personal memories and questions that threaten someone enough to make him—or her—commit arson and murder. You don’t have anything but a gun, and that won’t make this cockroach come crawling up out of the bathroom drain to tell you his life story.”
She was right, so Ian stuck with the part of the argument he had a chance of winning. “I never said you were defenseless. You’re better armed than ninety-nine percent of the population.”
“You just pointed out that I can’t shoot a gun so I—”
“I’m not talking about guns,” he cut in.
“Then what
are
you talking about?”
“Brains. I’ll bet brains against bullets anytime, anywhere but a turkey shoot. This isn’t a turkey shoot.”
Please, God, keep it that way. It’s always been staged in the past, wrecks and fires and drowning. No bullets
. “You’re smart.”
“I’m scared.”
“That’s smart. So let’s put our smarts together and see if we can come up with this killer before he comes down on us.”
T
he raincoat-shrouded man moved quickly toward the electrical wires. No matter how many urban or suburban codes were written to keep things pretty, buried wires had to emerge somewhere in order to connect buildings to the basic necessity of the twenty-first century: electricity. The deserted storage yard was in an area zoned for light industry, so various wires were allowed to climb in unsightly tubes right up the outside of the buildings—and the gatepost.
Bolt cutters sliced through tube and wires with gratifying ease. As required of all public areas, electronic locks opened the instant the power went out. It was a simple safety measure to ensure that people caught behind gates or doors by a fire weren’t trapped by the very security devices that had been intended to keep them safe.
The gate opened. No alarm bells went off. No backup lights came on. He hadn’t expected any. People who had real valuables kept them in safes, not storage units made of heavy tinfoil and light security.
The same bolt cutters and a lot more effort got him through the padlock on the outside of unit 120. He pulled up slowly, expecting a squeal of metal on metal. Nothing but a rumble of oiled wheels. He rolled up the door just enough to get under and pull it down behind him so no light would show. It was utterly dark inside.
He reached inside his coat. The cold and damp made his fingers clumsy. It took a few moments before he got the big flashlight on. Eagerly he swept the cone of light around the room.
Empty racks. A lot of them. Three—no, four—fire extinguishers. Some freestanding shelves that still held goods. He raked the light over lamp bases and vases and Depression glass, South American weavings based on Escher’s skewed fantasies, flutes made of exotic woods and decorated with magic symbols, costume jewelry shaped like Egyptian gods, old photo frames of silver and gilt, and dolls with smiles painted on their precious faces.
The flashlight picked up the gleam of hinges across the room. He went quickly to the closed cabinets. Fingers trembling, he yanked the first one open. Then the next. And the next and the next until every door was agape.
There wasn’t anything inside.
Not one painting.
Not
one
“Nothing but fucking junk!”
With a guttural noise he spun around and shoved the nearest rack over, sending it crashing into another rack and then another, huge metal dominoes falling and scattering everything on their shelves in a raucous cascade of breakage and ruin. What didn’t break in the fall he stamped on until it lay in pieces and he was panting hard and fast, a runner who hadn’t meant to race at all.
He forced his breath to steady and deepen until his heart was no longer a savage fist beating against his chest. Losing his temper didn’t make him any safer.
Killing her would.
He could hardly wait. This was one death he would enjoy.
Smiling, thinking about her fear, he smashed several of the empty wooden racks, scattered chunks of paraffin and sawdust over them, and reached into his coat for a glass bottle of kerosene. He emptied most of it
on the ragged pile of wood. He pulled a colorful pack of birthday candles from his pocket, arranged them, and made a trail of oily liquid between candles and the pile of kerosene-soaked wood. Folding a matchbook open, he tore off one match, propped the matchbook against the candles, and lit the single match. A tiny, bright flame bit into the cardboard matchbook.
By the time the flame reached the rest of the matches, touched off the candles, and snaked over to the pile of wood, the man had already vanished into the rain.
