Leverage in Death (In Death 47)

“I’ll take faint glimmer.”

“A contact with—we’ll stick with sick bastard for now—indicates he received a query several weeks ago. On the dark web, which the sick bastard frequents.”

“About Richie’s paintings?”

“About a hypothetical. If the artist of a certain painting, worth an estimated amount, were to die a sudden and tragic death with much of his work destroyed in this tragedy, would the sick bastard be interested in bidding on the painting.”

“That’s pretty damn vague. Yet specific.”

“My contact claims he asked for more specifics—after all, if he didn’t know the artist in question or the painting, he couldn’t speculate. However, several others expressed some interest.”

“It’s a sick bastard world.”

“And yet, without sick bastards where would we be? The upshot, for the moment, is the hypothetical refused specifics, instead boasting he’d provide them in the spring. Advising the sick bastards to prepare for bidding.”

“Weeks ago. So they knew about Richie, knew about the plans for the opening, likely had Denby selected as the trigger.” She circled. “That, the showing and all of the hype around it, would have been set. A date, specific.”

“For marketing, and the hyping, to give Richie time to finish work, to select it. Yes. And no, the meeting for the merger wouldn’t have been set weeks ago. It would have been in the works, certainly. But the very definite date and time wouldn’t have been set until closer to that date and time.”

“They ended up having to go back-to-back. Probably wasn’t their first choice, but to cash in on both, they had to go with the one, two. Still stupid.”

When Roarke took the coffee from her hand to drink it himself, she only scowled a little. She figured she owed him.

“You know the smarter, easier, more direct way to blow up the artist and most of his work? You send Denby to his studio, not to the Salon.”

“Hmm. You know, you’re right about that,” Roarke agreed. “Except, of course, they wouldn’t have been able to steal several canvases.”

“That tells me they don’t, or didn’t, have enough scratch to buy up paintings. They had it for the stocks, but not for the paintings. And they could—what you called—do the margin thing on the stocks. They didn’t have a big hunk of money for stocks and paintings, so they had to do it the stupid way.”

“Stupid, but effective,” he pointed out.

“It still tells me they don’t just want money. They need it. Not saying it’s not down to basic greed, but to gamble on these deals, they had a relatively small stake. They had to steal the paintings. And they knew they were going to weeks before the opening. Weeks before the meeting at Quantum was set in stone.”

She frowned back at the board. “It’s not a lot, but it’s more.”

“And you have more here. Your interviews?”

“Low probability on the left. The three higher on the right. I’m not sold on the three. Except this one.” She tapped a face. “He has a brother-in-law who’s retired Army, and a sister—not the one married to Army—who’s an art broker, based in Florence. And when we interviewed him, he came off nervy and evasive. Something shady there.”

“William O’Donnell.” Roarke studied the ID shot, sipped more coffee. Said, “Hmm.”

“What?” Instantly, she swung around, eyes narrowed and focused. “What kind of hmm was that? That was a, you know, some kind of hmm.”

“Obviously, I’ll need to guard my hmms in the future.”

Eve drilled a finger into Roarke’s chest. “You know this guy?”

“I don’t know William O’Donnell, but I knew a Liam Donnelly. Back in Dublin in the bad old days, and here and there a few times since.”

“He’s got fake ID? Son of a bitch.”

Even as she swung again toward her command center, Roarke took her arm. “Hold on a minute.”

“He may be a friend of yours, but—”

“Not a friend so much as a former colleague, we’ll say. He was a decent B and E man. Had some years on me when we both ran in Dublin. We had a few . . . enterprises in common over the years. Where did you find him?”

“As William O’Donnell he’s a mechanical engineer at Econo.”