The Monet Murders (The Art of Murder 2)

Other than a preoccupation with Jason’s investigations, there seemed nothing remotely sinister about Shipka. His life appeared to be an open book. Or at least an open internet article.

He had graduated from San Diego State University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies and landed his first job at the San Diego Reader. From there he had worked his way to the Voice of San Diego and then the San Diego Union-Tribune. After the Union-Tribune, he had moved north and taken the job at the Valley Voice. Since the Valley Voice was a smaller and less prestigious paper, maybe there was something there. Or maybe Shipka had liked being a big fish in a little pond. There was no difficulty getting bylines at the Valley Voice.

Glancing over Shipka’s online articles, Jason was disconcerted to realize that on several occasions Shipka had contacted him directly for comments or to confirm facts. Yet on Sunday night, Jason would have sworn he had no prior contact with Shipka. Partly that was because it was routine to now and again confirm or deny facts for various news media outlets. Evidently his occasional interactions with Shipka had triggered no alarms.

As for the stories themselves, Jason had kind of a…not exactly antipathy, but a determined disinterest in any attention from the press. Maybe it had to do with growing up never quite sure if he was being singled out for his own achievements or those of his family.

And in return you’ll be the guy who gets to pose in front of the cameras…

Kennedy had unknowingly struck a nerve eight months ago.

Jason was ambitious and had been aware of receiving favorable press, but it was a point of pride not to read that stuff. It was enough to know he was getting the right kind of attention for his work. Had he bothered to read Shipka’s stories, he’d have likely recognized him at the museum wing dedication—he’d have likely been aware of Shipka long before that.

But other than being a little obsessive about his job—gee, who did that remind him of?—Shipka seemed normal enough, at least on cursory examination. Jason intended to dig deeper, of course. Whether he’d intended to or not, Shipka had made himself part of the investigation by coming forward. Inevitably his motives and possible connection to the Durrand case had to be evaluated.

Jason swallowed the last mouthful of soup and checked his messages and email. He’d received an automated response from Jonnie regarding the interview notes he’d sent on the Kerk investigation. No word from Kennedy, of course. Nor was he expecting one.

After answering the most urgent of his email, he phoned the Information Technology Branch and asked Bernadette to run a basic wants and warrants on Shipka. Then he phoned The New York State Missing Persons Clearinghouse to see if any official investigation had been initiated into Havemeyer’s disappearance.

Though originally created to provide assistance to law enforcement handling cases involving missing children under the age of eighteen, in 1999 the Clearinghouse had expanded their purview to include college students of any age. Unfortunately, Havemeyer had disappeared in ’98, and Jason drew a blank. That did not necessarily mean no report had been filed, just that Havemeyer’s case had never been kicked upstairs.

Jason went back to the beginning and phoned NYPD’s Missing Persons Squad, which had its own cold case unit. It took some time, but at last he got the information he was seeking. A missing person report had been filed four days after Havemeyer disappeared. The case was still open, but that was a technicality. Nobody had given a thought to Paris Havemeyer in a very long time.

Understandable, given that hundreds of thousands of people across the country were reported missing every year. About 87 percent of those cases resolved within 30 days. The remaining 13 percent—more than 84,000 people in 2016—became long-term missing persons cases. Unsolved—hell, unidentified—homicides in most cases. And if that wasn’t depressing enough, the DOJ estimated that there were more than 40,000 sets of unclaimed human remains in medical examiner or coroner offices—with several hundred new cases reported annually.

The facts of this case were few. Paris Havemeyer had last been seen entering his apartment house on West 26th Street at 1:30 a.m. on June 22. He was with two friends—the friends who would later report him missing—and the three men had just returned from a private party at the Fletcher-Durrand gallery. Havemeyer had informed his companions he wanted to keep partying. He had given no indication of where he intended to find this next party. His friends had continued on to their own apartment several blocks away.

Jason told himself not to make too much of this tenuous, highly circumstantial connection to the Durrands, but it offered insight into Shipka’s insistence that Barnaby and Shepherd were dangerous to know.

It had taken a couple of days for Havemeyer’s friends to determine that he really was unaccounted for. Because he was a young sexually active gay male—and an art student to boot—the police had not broken down any doors looking for him. In fact, listening between the lines, it sounded to Jason like no real investigation had taken place. The prevailing theory was that he had returned to Germany.

Times had changed, and that was a good thing. Twenty years ago, the circumstances surrounding Havemeyer’s case were such that it was unlikely any other police department in the country would have handled anything differently.

“Could you email me a copy of that MP report?” Jason asked Lt. Hanna, head of the Missing Persons Squad.

“You bet,” she said. “Knock yourself out. The sad truth is we have more of these cases than we could solve if the entire NYPD devoted itself to nothing but missing persons.”

She was a woman of her word. The missing person report on Havemeyer landed in Jason’s inbox ten minutes later. He glanced it over, not expecting to find anything ground-breaking, but one of the names of Havemeyer’s companions on the night in question jumped out at him.

Donald Kerk.

The buyer for the Nacht Galerie in Berlin who had turned up dead beneath Santa Monica pier on Sunday appeared to be the same person who, twenty years earlier, had been one of the last people to see Paris Havemeyer alive.

Now that was some coincidence.

Jason glanced at the name of Havemeyer’s second companion. The name Rodney Berguan rang no bells, but it would be interesting to have a word with this witness, if he could be located after so much time had passed. Jason made a note of Berguan’s then-address.

Despite access to NCIC and all the other resources available to him, it would take some time before he had any answers. Even when you worked for the FBI, everything took longer than it did on TV, and a twenty-year-old missing person case was not anyone’s priority. It was somebody’s tragedy, though, and he felt initiating the first steps of a genuine investigation into Havemeyer’s disappearance was the right thing to have done.

He was going to have to push Shipka on the link between Havemeyer and Durrand, as well as the name of his mysterious source. Was the party at the gallery the sole basis for Shipka’s claims, or did he have something more concrete? Jason assumed Shipka had managed to access the missing person report on Havemeyer, which would explain why he’d been so sure Paris Havemeyer’s disappearance would prove relevant to Jason’s investigation into Fletcher-Durrand.

Regardless of what Shipka knew or didn’t know, Jason needed more to go on than a couple of pieces of highly circumstantial evidence and an unsubstantiated claim from a source who was, so far, an unknown quantity.

The pressing question was should he bring this nebulous connection between Kennedy’s hunt for a serial killer targeting members of the art world and his own investigation into the potentially shady dealings of the Durrand brothers, to Kennedy’s attention? Given that what he’d uncovered seemed to spin the case in Kennedy’s direction.

Or did he wait to see how these various and disparate leads developed? Leads? More like rumors and speculation.

Rumors, speculati