“Yes. Well, I mean, I don’t know,” Quilletta said. “I know the letters prove Uncle Roy was not a thief. It was never his idea to move those items. Never. He would have as easily thought of moving the moon. But I don’t know for a fact that Edgar has them. I don’t know why he would. If it matters, all Uncle Roy’s letters home were published in the Bozwin Daily Chronicle.”
Jason’s heart stopped. He could think of absolutely nothing to say.
Published.
A weird silence seemed to fall over the office.
Jason felt J.J.’s glance, but could honestly not find the words he needed. This was a disaster he had not counted on.
J.J. said, “Regarding the items not already listed for sale—”
Quilletta said quickly, “But that’s just it. That’s why Bert and I wanted this meeting. We don’t want trouble. We don’t have money for a big lawsuit. We don’t want the IRS to come after us. We’re willing to work with the government and the museum and the-the heirs of the other two paintings, if there are any still living, but we don’t have those other things.” She nodded at de Haan. “The things listed in the email he sent. We don’t have them. We never did.”
Chapter Seven
“She’s lying,” de Haan said.
De Haan, J.J., and Jason were sitting in a downtown restaurant and bakery called the Coffee Pot, holding an impromptu council of war after leaving the meeting at Corliss, Flook & Doggett.
“I don’t know,” J.J. said through a mouthful of freshly baked cinnamon roll. “If she’s lying, she’s pretty convincing.”
De Haan scoffed at the idea.
“If they don’t have the other items, where are they?” J.J. asked thoughtfully. “Who has them?”
Jason listened absently. His thoughts were running in circles. He needed to go through the newspaper morgue at the Bozwin Daily Chronicle and find out what, if anything, Captain Thompson had written about Emerson Harley. It was possible the archive was already digitized and online—thanks to Google’s aborted News Archive Project, thousands of newspapers and millions of pages had been scanned and made available to anyone with time and patience to sort through them all. But physical newspaper archives sometimes contained supplemental materials. Things like photos, internal correspondence, reporters’ notes, or perhaps the original letters from a homesick GI Joe. It was worth checking.
It was unlikely Thompson’s family wo
uld have handed over any letters for publication that mentioned sending art treasures home. Almost certainly Thompson would have warned them to keep quiet about the parcels he was shipping under separate cover. It was equally unlikely that a newspaper of the day would have published anything derogative about the military or military officers. But Thompson could have easily mentioned his commanding officers in an innocuous context.
That was the kind of information a good reporter would hunt down. After that, it wouldn’t be difficult to connect the dots.
And not everyone cared if the dots created a completely false picture. Sometimes members of the press just wanted a good story—and damn the personal cost to the subjects of that false narrative.
There wouldn’t be just one commander in Captain Thompson’s life. Emerson Harley’s mission had been tangential to that of the 3rd Infantry Division. Thompson would have had to answer to a whole chain of command. But this was a story about stolen art, so even if Thompson did not specifically point the finger at Harley, the Deputy Chief of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program was naturally going to be the prime suspect.
And if Quilletta was right, if her uncle did name Harley in his letters, it was going to be case closed in the eyes of a lot of people.
Which was one more reason why Jason had been reluctant to hand this case over to anyone else. Generally speaking, the ACT liked—and typically received—good press. Another agent was not going to do his best to make sure the story of Thompson’s treasures was DOA. Just the opposite.
“All fifteen items disappeared at the same time,” de Haan said. “It’s too great a coincidence that two thieves should be at work.”
“Maybe they were working together,” J.J. said.
De Haan scoffed at this idea, and J.J. glanced at Jason.
“West?”
Jason snapped out of his preoccupation. “Hm?”
“Something bugging you?”
“No. Just thinking.” He hit rewind on the last few seconds of conversation. “It’s possible Thompson had a partner. It’s also possible—”
“Yes, this Emerson Harley, the officer who gave him permission to take the works from the castle. We know he was complicit in the theft,” de Haan said.
So much for hoping de Haan might have forgotten the name of that mysterious officer. It was like discovering you had stepped on a landmine—again. Everything in Jason froze…and then defrosted in a wave of anger. But that was irrational. De Haan wasn’t the bad guy. He was simply drawing logical conclusions from the information available to them. He was thinking like a good investigator.