Read the book: «The Night Café»

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF
TAYLOR SMITH

“Smith, who has been both a diplomat and an intelligence agent, convincingly conveys what life is like on the streets and sands of Iraq in her compelling new thriller.”

—Publishers Weekly on Slim to None

“Smith’s experience as an international diplomat and intelligence analyst lends credibility to this first-rate political thriller…exciting and intelligent.”

—Booklist on Deadly Grace

“The publisher compares Smith to John Grisham…Smith’s a better prose stylist.”

—Publishers Weekly on Random Acts

“Smith’s latest is a graceful, compellingly written thriller…[The] gloriously intricate plot is top-notch.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Innocents Club

“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spell-binding tone of immediacy.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Best of Enemies

Taylor Smith
The night Café

This one goes out with love and thanks to The Plot Queen, Linda McFadden—ally, muse and coconspirator. Neither time nor distance can squelch a great friendship.

It’s been a decade and a half (hard to believe) that I’ve been working with the wonderful people of MIRA Books, and I feel as lucky today as I did fifteen years ago when they offered to publish my first book. My deepest thanks to Miranda Stecyk, my editor, with whom it’s a joy to work—and to hang out, on those happy occasions where we find ourselves in the same city.

My family, near and far, is unfailingly supportive. Love and thanks especially to my amazing husband, Richard, and our beautiful, brilliant and all-grown-up daughters (how is that possible?), Anna and Kate.

I am thinking of frankly accepting my role as madman.

—Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother,

Theo, March 24, 1889

Just because I am always bowed down under this difficulty of paying my landlord, I made up my mind to take it gaily. I swore at the said landlord, who after all isn’t a bad fellow, and told him that to revenge myself for paying him so much money for nothing, I would paint the whole of his rotten shanty so as to repay myself.

—Vincent van Gogh

Letter to his brother Theo

Arles, 8 September, 1888

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Prologue

Los Angeles

January 1

“People remember pain. They’ve done studies. You want to make a point with a person and make it stick, hurt ’em. Works every time.”

Afterward, before she stopped talking altogether, volunteer museum guide Dorrie Schaeffer kept repeating over and over what one of the intruders had said. She was in shock, of course, what the shrinks call posttraumatic stress disorder. But there was disbelief in her quavering voice, too—incredulity at the monstrous callousness of the man.

It wasn’t that Dorrie was naive about the potential for human cruelty. You don’t get through seventy-six years without witnessing some real wickedness. But this brutality at the Arlen Hunter Museum came out of nowhere.

The sun had gone down after a showery New Year’s Day, and Santa Monica Boulevard twinkled under holiday lights still strung on buildings and over the roadway. There’d been long, snaking queues outside the museum since opening, patrons anxious for one last chance to see the Madness & the Masterpiece exhibit, the high point of the Arlen Hunter’s fall season.

When the trouble started, Dorrie should have been far away. The crowds had gone home, the doors were locked. For the next twelve hours, a skeleton security staff would have the treasure to themselves, enjoying the collected masterpieces for a few hours more before the group was split up and the borrowed art returned to its owners.

Dorrie was in the underground parking lot, hurrying to get home to Wuthering Heights on Masterpiece Theatre. But as she was unlocking her car door, she remembered the van Gogh print she’d bought for a niece who was coming by the next day. Her brother’s daughter never failed to remember her birthday or to include her in family holiday celebrations. Knowing how much Renata loved van Gogh, Dorrie had bought her a beautiful lithographic reproduction of The Night Café, signature piece of the Madness & the Masterpiece show. Except, like a nitwit, she’d left it in her locker.

Bemoaning her absentmindedness, she reentered the building, backtracking toward the staff room located off the south gallery. She was in the hall just outside that gallery when she heard a shout. She froze at the sight of two men near the end of the gallery, their backs to her. Bert Fernandez, an old night guard, was on his knees facing her, although the intruders had his full attention. A brutal kick from one of them suddenly sent him sprawling, blood spurting from his mouth.

Luck found Dorrie standing next to an unlocked custodian’s cupboard and fear drove her inside. Her entire body shaking, she watched through a crack between the frame and the door as a third man, black-hooded like the others, rounded the corner from the west hall, shoving another security guard ahead of him.

There was no doubt this last man was in charge. He looked young to Dorrie, his body lithe, yet he seemed to harbor a sense of his own intellectual superiority and to feel a mission to instruct his colleagues on the efficacy of torment to ensure compliance. There was no other explanation for the violence. From what Dorrie could see, neither security guard offered any real resistance.

“People remember pain,” the leader said. “A bullet to the brain shuts ’em up, of course, but what if you need a pass code or something later? Bloody corpse on the floor’s not gonna do you much good.”

And so they used fists that flashed with metallic gleam—brass knuckles. Dorrie watched, stunned and terrified by the casual brutality. The younger guard, just a boy, really, tried to protest, but the leader swung a short wooden bat and the lad’s knee shattered like a teacup. Dorrie clamped her hands over her mouth as he crumpled, screaming, to the floor. Bert tried to drag himself over to help him and was rewarded with an equally vicious clout with the stick.

The leader bent down next to Bert, murmuring in a voice too quiet for Dorrie to hear. The old guard raised a shaking hand and pointed around the corner.

“Wait here,” the leader told one of the others. “If they move, shoot them.” He cocked a thumb at the other intruder and the two disappeared into the east wing.

Dorrie’s body shook like a thing possessed. The young security guards lay on the marble-tiled floor, crying and writhing with pain, his arms wrapped around his battered leg, while old Bert, face bloodied and swollen, glared at the thug standing guard over them.

Time seemed to stand still. Later, Dorrie couldn’t say how long it took until the other two thieves returned carrying the one item they had obviously come for—the van Gogh.

As the guidebook for Madness & the Masterpiece reminded visitors, Plato had called creativity “divine madness, a gift from the gods.” Psychobabble in the accompanying text discussed how great angst fed the vision needed to produce great art.

That “gift from the gods” was a mixed blessing, Dorrie had told her “goslings,” the chattering patrons who pattered along behind on her guided tours of the galleries. The celebrated artists represented in the show—Jackson Pollock, William Blake, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe and a dozen or so others—had all suffered from severe, debilitating depression or other psychological disabilities. And Vincent van Gogh, of course. No exhibit linking art, anguish and madness could possible ignore the gaunt, ear-slashed Dutchman. Most of these artists, Dorrie told the goslings, had been institutionalized at some point in their lives. Several, like Vincent, had committed suicide.

It was Vincent’s The Night Café that was featured on posters and banners promoting the exhibit. The painting showed a nighttime scene in a harshly lit bar peopled by bereft-looking patrons who seemed to have nowhere else to go. Vincent had lived over the café during his time in the south of France, when his psyche finally began to unravel. Not long after creating this piece, he sliced off a piece of his ear and presented it to a prostitute.

The thieves’ leader wrapped the painting in a sheet now, knotting the corners. Then he turned to his men.

“Okay, we’re done here now. Finish them.”

Dorrie watched, horrified, as one of the men fired into the head of the old security guard. The explosion echoed through the marble halls and Bert crumpled in a pool of blood. The other intruder hesitated long enough for the boy to start scrabbling away, dragging his bloody leg across the floor. The leader snapped a command. Then, eyes flashing contempt, he grabbed the gun, strode over to the boy and took him out with a quick tap of the trigger.

Tears coursing down her cheeks, Dorrie watched the intruders stroll out toward the lobby. A moment later she heard the opening and closing of the stairwell door leading down to the parking lot.

Then there was only silence.

“People remember pain.”

Afterward, the police kept pressing Dorrie to remember more. Some tiny detail, they said, could be the key to bringing the security guards’ killer to justice. Try, they insisted. But Dorrie didn’t want to remember. She wanted to forget it, all of it.

Eventually she stopped answering their questions. Clammed up when the LAPD Robbery/Homicide detective in charge of the investigation pressed her for more details. Refused to speak to the gray-suited agents from the FBI’s art theft division who showed up at her door. Even snapped at the kindhearted elderly neighbor who stopped by her home to ask how she was doing.

God, how Dorrie wanted them all to just go away. She became detached and unapproachable. Her sister in Minneapolis said she stopped returning phone calls. Her L.A.-based niece left reluctantly on a business trip, determined to call in professional help if her aunt didn’t seem any better by the time she got back.

Except by then it was too late.

The manager at the local Vons supermarket down the road from the seniors complex where Dorrie lived said she started phoning in her meager food orders. The delivery boy said she left her payment in an envelope under the doormat and made him leave the bags on the threshold. The only time she scuttled outside was to snatch the mail when it started overflowing her curbside box. A neighbor who saw her out there one day reported that Dorrie’s tidy brown helmet of curls had grown lank, frizzled and gray at the roots. Her normally pin-neat clothes hung rumpled and loose on a frame that seemed to have turned spindly and frail overnight.

One day the postal carrier found bills and junk mail spilling out of her box. When he knocked on her front door, he hoped she’d simply forgotten to arrange a vacation hold, but the dread in his gut told a different story. When no one answered, instinct made him call the police.

It was the cops’ experienced noses that picked up the faint, sweet odor seeping from the cracks around the barred doors and windows. Hearts heavy, dreading what they knew they were going to find, they jimmied the locks, ripped the chain bolt from the wall and broke in.

Dorrie Schaeffer had been dead about a week. Sleeping pills, the medical examiner’s report said. She’d swallowed enough to euthanize a horse.

People remember pain…

Dorrie Schaeffer had remembered. And like Vincent, when the agony became too much to bear, she had put an end to her suffering.

One

Orange County, California

Sunday, April 16

Hannah Nicks, loser. Black sheep. She whose bizarre line of work is not really suitable dinner-table conversation.

The accusations ran on a loop through Hannah’s brain during these family get-togethers. How could anyone not feel inadequate faced with the perfection that was her sister Nora?

Sliding onto a tall stool, Hannah tucked her unruly dark hair behind her ears and helped herself to a homemade scone from the linen-lined basket on the kitchen island.

The island was a granite oasis in a sea of domestic perfection. Nora’s home in the upscale seafront community of Corona del Mar was right out of Architectural Digest. Her kitchen was a Tuscan-inspired designer’s vision of terra-cotta and honey tones, run through with a grapevine motif. Outside the mullioned French doors that covered the entire west side of the house, the view was of tented gazebo, patio and pool, the blue-gray Pacific Ocean beyond stretching to the horizon.

Selecting a jar from a carousel in front of her, Hannah spread preserves on the scone. She took a bite, then leaned back and sighed over the warm, flaky pastry. “Oh, Lord, these are bliss.”

Nora, standing on the other side of the island, looked over and smiled. “Those are the last of the raspberries the kids and I picked at the cottage last summer.” Her husband’s family had a three-thousand-square-foot post-and-beam house in Ogunquit, Maine, where the California Quinns spent part of each summer. It was a “cottage” like the Hope Diamond was a bauble.

Hannah’s travel destinations tended to be war zones, where accommodations were spartan, at best. Her own home, a condominium in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, was a replacement for the only house she’d ever owned—well, not owned, exactly, given the size of the mortgage, but it had been a real house, an old Craftsman bungalow in Los Feliz. Her ex had signed the property over to her in the divorce but sadly, before she got around to renovating the place, it had been blown up by Russian gangsters intent on her demise.

In addition to a condo and a broken marriage, Hannah was the proud possessor of a son she saw only intermittently and a bank balance that constantly hovered near the red zone. She, needless to say, was not the daughter their mom bragged about to the other white-haired ladies in her Tuesday-Thursday Aquasize classes. Nora, oldest child of immigrant parents, was the American Dream personified. For Hannah, a major achievement would be getting through a week without being shot at, maimed or killed.

She spooned another dollop of raspberry jam onto the scone. “Can I just say for the record that these are going to be the death of me?” She popped it into her mouth. “Want me to slather one for you?” she mumbled.

“No, I’m good. Thanks so much for that view, though.”

Hannah opened wide. “Bwah-ha-ha.”

Nora rolled her eyes. “Very mature.”

Hannah grinned. She couldn’t help it. Put her in a room with Nora and she was ten all over again.

On first encounter, Nora was often mistaken for Hannah’s better-groomed twin. No one ever guessed that dark-eyed, glossy-haired Nora was a dozen years older than the misfit baby of the Demetrious clan. Of course, in affluent Orange County, the trickery of Botox and the surgeon’s knife kept a lot of women looking preternaturally young. In Nora’s case, though, the only magician at work was Mother Nature herself. At forty-two, she was an elegant beauty, grace personified. She knew the names of china patterns, the art of Japanese flower arranging and how to put together a gourmet dinner for twenty on a few hours’ notice.

Hannah knew aliases and suspected hideouts for a dozen of the world’s worst terrorists, the art of covert message drops, and how to dismantle and reassemble an M-16 assault rifle in sixty seconds flat. Nora invariably put others at ease. Hannah, who leapt into high alert at the snick of every opening door and scrutinized every stranger for signs of lethal intent, didn’t even know how to put herself at ease.

As if grace, brains and beauty weren’t enough, there was also Nora’s gorgeous, castlelike home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her doting, successful husband, Neal, and their two picture-perfect kids, Nolan and Natalie. (Nora, Neal, Nolan, Natalie—they were big on alliteration, the Quinns. Even the dogs, golden retrievers with sleek Lady Clairol coats, were called Nugget and Noodle.) Nora’s entire, flawless life was a page out of frigging Martha Stewart Living.

Hannah, at thirty, was on her own but already on her second career, one she’d taken up after eight years as an L.A. cop. Switching from police work to the world of private security contractors was supposed to have been a lucrative career move, one she’d hoped would put her in a better financial position to regain custody of her son from her wealthy ex and his current squeeze. It hadn’t worked out that way.

She finished her scone, then glanced down and froze. On her wrist, a red drop glistened under the glow of the pendant lights hanging over the island. Hannah could almost feel the pain of the gash, even though her rational mind said it was just a dollop of raspberry. Her memory flashed on gunfire in a dark desert night. On a young man’s bleeding head cradled in her lap. On his life slipping away before her eyes.

“Here, use this.” Nora reached across the island.

Startled by the sudden movement, Hannah shoved back, the legs of her bar stool screeching on the travertine floor.

“Hannah?” Nora’s brow creased with the worried look she often took on when her baby sister was around. She indicated the blue gingham napkin in her hand. “It’s okay. I was just trying to help.”

Hannah gave her best Alfred E. Neuman dopey grin. Bringing her wrist to her lips, she licked away the sweet drop of jam, but when Nora sighed, she relented and took the napkin, dutifully blotting her wrist dry. She might have resented the fact that Nora still treated her like the awkward child she used to be, except she knew her sister couldn’t help feeling the heavy responsibility of serving as maternal figure in Hannah’s life.

They had an actual mother, mind you. Ida Demetrious—“Nana” to her three grandchildren—was snapping green beans over at Nora’s antique pine trestle table this very minute. Nevertheless, Nora had been overheard on more than one occasion to say she’d “raised Hannah.” Not altogether accurate. Not something you’d think she’d want to brag about, either, all things considered.

It was true that at seventeen, Hannah had been sent from Chicago to live with the Quinns in Orange County. It was about the time that their father, Takis Demetrious, began showing signs of the Alzheimer’s that would eventually strip him of his mind, his great physical strength and finally his life. Poor Nana. A sick husband and a rebellious teenage daughter were a tough hand to be dealt, especially when she was also trying to keep their import company afloat in those early days when Takis’s intermittent confusion, intransigence and paranoia were threatening to run the family’s once-thriving company into the ground. Something had to give and, in the end, that something was Hannah.

Nora’s kids had been four and seven at the time. Hannah could give Nora a hand, the thinking went, and maybe if she escaped Takis’s unpredictable rages, she might be less inclined to act out. But she arrived at Newport Beach High School carrying a lumber-sized chip on her shoulder. That, and shyness that came across as aloofness, pretty much guaranteed her the caption of “Most Inscrutable” in her senior yearbook photo. She hadn’t set out to be antisocial, but even the Porsches and BMWs in the student parking lot seemed to be sneering at the hopelessly uncool Midwestern import with the wild hair and the uneasy dark eyes. She stayed with Neal and Nora for two years before moving into a dorm at UCLA. By February of her freshman year, she was pregnant. She dropped out of college and went to work as an L.A. Sheriff’s Department dispatcher so that her hastily married hubby could finish law school.

Pathetic—which only made Hannah wonder why Nora would take the rap for raising her.

“Yee-haw!”

Home on spring break from Stanford, Nolan galloped into the sprawling kitchen, his surfboard-scaled flip-flops slapping the floor. Close behind came ten-year-old Gabe, grinning as he aped his big cousin’s galumphing stride.

“Last one in is a horse’s…um—” Nolan paused, glancing at his mom “—patootie!”

Hannah raised a hand, traffic-cop style. “Hold it! Gabriel Nicks, don’t even think of going out there before I get sunscreen on you.”

The boys’ bodies were winter-pale but spring in Southern California meant the beginning of pool season, and this particular Sunday had turned out to be a scorcher. The thermometer on the blue-and-white striped cabana outside hovered in the mid-eighties. Neal was out there in shorts and T-shirt, stretched on one of the plush chaise longues, working the Sunday crossword, while Natalie was at the beach with a friend. With the pool heated to a balmy eighty-eight degrees, even the adults might venture in, if only for a toe-dabble.

Gabe moaned. “Ah, Mom, it’s only April. I’m not gonna burn. Besides, I’m tough like you. I can handle anything.”

Hannah couldn’t miss the exchange of another of those “what are we going to do about Hannah?” looks between Nora and their mother. Hers wasn’t the sort of family where fearlessness in dark alleys was considered a desirable trait.

“Ultraviolet rays don’t read calendars,” she said, restraining her wriggling son with one hand while she snagged the sunscreen off the kitchen counter with her other.

“Yeah, that’s a fact, bro,” Nolan said, turning back.

Gabe immediately stopped squirming. His mother might be a worrywart, but if Nolan, bless his heart, said something was so, then it was gospel.

“You slather up, too,” Nora said over her shoulder.

The two boys exchanged eye-rolling grins, but Nolan took the plastic squeeze bottle from Hannah and went to work on himself.

At the granite island, Nora went back to spreading phyllo dough for the baklava she was preparing for dessert. Sunday dinners were a big deal at the Quinns’. Today, they would be eight—Nora and her gang; Hannah and Gabe; Nana Demetrious, who’d moved out to Orange County after Takis died; plus Nora’s former college roommate. That wasn’t many. Nora often fed what seemed like half the lonely hearts in Southern California, including single guys invited for the express purpose of meeting her unattached sister—and didn’t Hannah just love being set up like that without her knowledge? Would there ever come a day when she would no longer be the official family fix-it project?

Prague, the Czech Republic

The straight razor gleamed in the morning sun as it passed it back and forth, back and forth over the brown leather strop hooked to a towel ring embedded in one of the blue-and-white ceramic wall tiles. Former Detective Superintendent William Teagarden of Scotland Yard always fell into a reverie as he went about his morning toilette. What he liked about the straight razor was that its handling couldn’t be rushed. The slow rhythm of the archaic shaving routine—blade on strop, brush in bowl, steel on whiskers—forced him to slow his pace, order his mind and think.

He was deep in thought now. Setting the razor on the lip of the white porcelain hotel room sink, he took up the soap bowl and swirled his shaving brush round and round, each circuit of the bristles whispering the same refrain: Where, where, where was the bloody van Gogh?

The straight razor and boar bristle brush were old-fashioned things, but they were appropriate accessories for a man with such tall military bearing and a handle-bar mustache straight out of the days of Empire. Teagarden had spent thirty years as an officer of London’s Metropolitan Police, the last six and a half as head of the Yard’s Arts and Antiquities Unit. He’d been raised in Manchester, the only child of a decent but rough-about-the-edges mill worker father and a beautiful, cultured mother whose family had withdrawn after she married down. She had been stoic about her reduced circumstances, living on a drab council estate, never an extra shilling for travel or pretty things, but she had engendered in her son a love of music and art, taking him to every free gallery, concert and museum she could, exposing him to library books that described the wonders of the world. Little surprise, then, that given the opportunity to help recover some of the multimillions of pounds’ worth of art stolen annually, Teagarden had jumped at the chance.

As he soaped his cheeks, chin and neck, his memory skimmed the lists of stolen art documented in the British Art Loss Register and the New York–based IFAR, the International Foundation for Art Research. The number of masters alone sickened him—nearly three hundred Picassos, a couple of hundred Miros and Chagalls. Several Rembrandts. Manet, Munch, Vermeer, da Vinci, Goya—the list went on and on. And of course, there was the van Gogh.

Heading up the Arts Unit had not only capped his career at the Met, it had been his crowning achievement and the job of his dreams. He could happily have labored at it until his dying day, had he not been forced into retirement by bureaucrats. “Medically unfit for duty” after his second heart attack, they said, but that was bunk. The commander to whom he reported had been looking for a pretext to get rid of him. A diminutive micromanager with delusions of brilliance, the commander had transferred in from borough operations with a chip on his shoulder and lofty ambitions, and God help anyone he perceived as a threat to his aspirations. It had been annoying enough that Teagarden was impervious to his bullying management style, but the last straw had been a splashy Daily Mirror spread on the work of the Arts Unit, complete with of full color photos of Teagarden and some of the works he’d recovered—da Vinci’s priceless Virgin of the Rocks, a Brancusi sculpture, one of Degas’s ballerinas. “Unseemly,” the commander had sniffed. Of course, he never objected to any press piece that included a quote from him or a picture of his ugly mug, even in a rag like the Mirror.

Teagarden took up the razor and set to work on his face. He hadn’t given a damn about the press, but every time one of those puff pieces appeared, hits on the unit’s Web site had skyrocketed, as did tips from the public. No matter. Not long after the Mirror piece, the commander had ordered Teagarden to submit to a medical, then seized on the results to quote departmental policy at him and hustle him out the door. Within three months, the unit was downsized and swallowed whole by another section—a “redeployment of resources to higher priority tasks.”

It was a travesty, sidelining a specialist at the peak of his operational effectiveness, but Teagarden’s dismay had been short-lived. There were plenty of deep-pocketed private patrons who would pay extremely well, thank you very much, for the same investigative work that had netted him nothing more than a civil servant’s meager pension and a flipping here’s your hat, what’s your hurry shove out the door from the Met. He’d solved hard-to-crack cases during his tenure there and that reputation had served him in good stead, oiling hinges and opening doors at Interpol, the FBI and other international police agencies. They even referred clients to him when their own investigative resources were constrained. That was how Yale University, owners of The Night Café, had made contact. Teagarden had been on the trail of the painting since forty-eight hours after its New Year’s Day theft from the Arlen Hunter Museum.

These thefts were almost never carried out for the love of art. Faced with the possibility of discovery or arrest, thieves were more likely to destroy a painting than let it survive as evidence. With every day that passed, the risk grew exponentially that the fragile old canvas would be gravely damaged or lost forever.

The police in Los Angeles had been rather less welcoming, focused as they were on the murders that had accompanied the burglary. Teagarden, too, was appalled at the human tragedy, but as he tried to point out to the homicide detectives, the only way to find the killers was to learn who might have sought one masterpiece alone among the dozens that had been on view during the Madness & the Masterpiece exhibit.

Previous cases had taught him that the culprits often turned out to be petty thieves. Occasio facit furem—opportunity makes the thief, like a vagabond stealing laundry off a garden line. That was why so much stolen art was never recovered. As soon as the clothesliners felt the law breathing down their necks, they got rid of it. One thief’s mother, hoping to keep her precious boy out of prison, had actually taken her kitchen shears to dozens of the priceless masterworks her little bastard had nicked, and chucked several others into a nearby canal. It turned his stomach to remember the torn, water-damaged, charred and vermin-gnawed masterworks he’d seen.

The business of art theft had changed, however. In the past, a thief might hope to turn a quick profit through a ransom demand, but that was fraught with risk of capture. Finding a buyer these days was no easy matter, either. Recognizable works were impossible to sell to reputable collectors or dealers, even for pennies on the pound. In the old days, even if a buyer suspected a shaky provenance, he need only claim ignorance and wait out the clock. Once the legal statute of limitations had run out—five, seven, ten years, depending on the jurisdiction—thief and buyer alike were home free, and a lucrative payday might be worth the wait.

But these days, there was no pleading ignorance—not in an Internet age when the alarm was sounded far and wide for art gone walkabout. Many nations had also imposed stark penalties on trafficking in stolen work, and the publicity surrounding colonial plundering of antiquities and theft from Holocaust victims put intense pressure on buyers to err on the side of caution. When a California Getty Museum director went on trial in Italy for purchasing stolen antiquities, her ordeal did more than anything else to put the fear of the gods into buyers around the world.

So, Teagarden mused, if not for resale to some reclusive billionaire aficionado or corrupt broker, who else would be in the market for a sixty-million-dollar van Gogh? There was only one other likely scenario—someone wanted to use it as collateral for another business transaction. The drug trade, gunrunning, human smuggling and fraud were all interrelated, and a painting like The Night Café, more compact than a comparable amount of cash, could serve as useful security until funds could actually change hands on a shipment. The masterpiece as currency.

He scrutinized his face in the mirror, looking for spots he might have missed, but his mind was on the security tapes he’d studied at the Arlen Hunter. There was nothing opportunistic about that burglary. It had taken just under twelve minutes from start to finish. A review of the museum’s security setup had left no doubt in his mind that the theft had been carefully planned, possibly with inside help.

How could a world-class gallery have made so many blunders with hundreds of millions in borrowed art at risk? The curator of the exhibit had assured the paintings’ owners that the security system was top-notch. Closed-circuit cameras. Multiple vibration sensors behind each painting. Saturation motion detection. Environmental sensors to pick up minute temperature changes, such as those that might accompany fire, smoke or the touch of a human hand.

The ugly truth was that some of the systems weren’t yet fully functional on the night of the theft. Everything was supposed to have been in place before Madness & the Masterpiece opened, but what Teagarden learned was that the Arlen Hunter’s budget for security was so bled dry by other demands that equipment orders constantly lagged. Delivery delays had meant that some crucial pieces of the system hadn’t yet arrived. Overhead bubble covers should have concealed brand-new, 360-degree observation lenses, but the digital cameras and recording equipment were still on a dock in the port of Long Beach the night of the theft. There was an older existing closed-circuit camera system in use, connected via the Internet to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department robbery unit, but that link proved to be a major vulnerability. The thieves had hacked the feed weeks earlier, downloading and recording the video. While the theft was going on, both the internal recording equipment and the external feed were being fed recycled footage. When it was analyzed later, it would be obvious that three of the four security guards seen patrolling on the tape were nowhere near the place on January first. Equally frustrating was that the thieves had managed to erase at least two other sections of the surveillance video, periods that would no doubt have shown them inside the museum, casing the security arrangements.

What a cock-up, Teagarden thought disgustedly, rinsing the razor under hot water and patting his face dry. He took up a small comb and smoothed down his dark mustache, then passed the comb over his thinning steel-gray hair. His eyes, coal-black under heavy eyebrows, flashed annoyance and energy; the former for the botched security that had allowed the painting to be taken, the latter for the thrill of the hunt.

He had little doubt that the theft was a professional operation carried out for strategic purposes that had little to do with art and everything to do with an illegal transaction that required collateral of the magnitude of a stolen van Gogh. There were only so many people involved in deals of this sort, and an even smaller number of subcontractors to whom they could turn to nail down the collateral. Teagarden, in fact, deemed only two or three people capable of the Arlen Hunter job.

Of those, one could be eliminated at once, since he was currently residing in Buckinghamshire, a guest of Her Majesty’s Woodhill Prison, thanks to Teagarden’s own efforts. Another was reported to be in Thailand, but when Teagarden tracked him down there, he learned he’d been knifed in a brothel two weeks before the heist in Los Angeles. Teagarden had visited the man in Phuket, where he was still recuperating. One look at his haggard appearance and the colostomy bag hanging from his belt convinced Teagarden that this fellow’s thieving days were probably over.

It was on his way back to Bangkok airport that Teagarden had decided on a side trip to Prague to look in on another old nemesis.

Teagarden and Shawn Britten eyed each other over a round, zinc-topped café table as they waited for the espressos they’d ordered to be delivered. Britten’s black hair was buzzed short as it had been in his time in the Royal Marines, but the look blended well among the close-cropped heads in the sidewalk cafés of Prague’s Old Town. His three-day stubble was likewise par for the course in a coffee bar frequented by young Western tourists and the edgy shop and gallery crowd.

Britten was in his mid-thirties. He’d seen action in the first Gulf War, and that was where he’d developed his taste for art. Beautiful artifacts often fell into one’s lap in the confusion of war and a smart man learned quickly what was valuable and what was dreck. There was little profit in fencing the latter, but for Britten, the arts became more than a means to earn some ready cash over and above his military stipend. It was, by now, something of a passion.

In addition to his on-the-job training in Middle Eastern artifacts, he soon became a self-taught expert on the Impressionist and Art Nouveau periods. After being demobbed from the Royal Marines, he’d gone independent, working his way up the food chain from estate silver robberies to consignment thefts of high-end art and jewelry. One day, Teagarden suspected, when Britten had built his personal fortune, he might become a collector in his own right—if he lived that long. The kinds of clients who employed contractors with his skills tended to be a difficult lot.

In the meantime, he was one of a very small group of operatives to whom they could turn when rare and valuable objects needed liberating. Jobs like this took finesse. Hire a Philistine and your objet d’art could end up irreparably damaged or destroyed. Then where would you be? Neither history nor the gods smiled on those who despoiled priceless works of art. For that, at least, Teagarden appreciated the man’s professionalism.

The two had crossed paths numerous times, but Britten was both clever and conservative in his style of operation, outwardly maintaining the fiction of working as a freelance appraiser and restorer of minor works. Although suspected of several heists, he had been able to dodge prosecution so far. That said, it was a couple of years since he’d dared set foot back in the United Kingdom. With Teagarden, at least, he no longer bothered with much pretense about the real craft that financed his relatively comfortable lifestyle.

A waiter deposited two demitasses on the table. “Can I get you something else, gentlemen?”

His English was accented but impeccable, Teagarden noted. Like most young Czechs, he would have no memory of his country’s dreary days of membership in the old Soviet bloc. English was the language of commerce in the republic now, and the place was already flooded with young backpackers from western Europe, Australia and America. Group excursions were beginning to show up, too, more timid travelers who preferred to follow backward-walking guides holding neon flags aloft.

“I’d take one of those croissants I spotted in the case, mate, thanks much,” Britten said, adding to Teagarden, “long as you’re picking up the tab.”

“Nothing for me,” Teagarden told the waiter.

“So,” Britten said, leaning back in his chair, “still working freelance, are you, Detective Superintendent?”

Teagarden nodded. He took a tentative sip of the steaming coffee, winced and set the demitasse down to cool.

“What can I do for you?” Britten asked.

“I’m looking for a missing van Gogh,” Teagarden told him. “Naturally, I thought of you.”

“I’m flattered, mate, but I prefer not to mess with the Yanks.”

“So you know which van Gogh I’m talking about?”

“Oh, it sounds like your kind of case, Superintendent. Don’t know what those sods were thinking, mind. They’ve got The Terminator for guv’nor over there in California. Old Arnold’ll stick a needle in your arm soon as look at you.”

“So you know about the murders at the Arlen Hunter, too.”

“I heard something about it, yeah.” Britten glanced up at the waiter, who’d returned with his croissant. “Cheers.”

“What did you hear?” Teagarden pressed.

Britten watched the waiter walk away, then shrugged as he bit into the pastry. “Heard about a security equipment fiasco—some of the equipment not installed, video feeds compromised. Bloody cock-up.”

“That information about the video, that wasn’t reported in the press. So how do you know about it?”

Britten shrugged. “Just because it’s not my work doesn’t mean I don’t take a professional interest. Really makes you think, you know?”

“How so?”

“Well, it’s harder to nick a shirt worth ten quid from Marks & Spencer than a painting worth millions. I mean, even Marks & Sparks have got their merchandise sensors, their plainclothes floorwalkers, their CCTV cameras. When it comes to shoplifting, they mean business—pardon the pun. But your average museum? Pitiful. Minimum wage rent-a-dicks, elderly docents. Scarcely a bit of high-tech equipment to be found.”

Teagarden nodded. “That’s true. But it’s the high-profile exhibits that generate ticket sales, so that’s where most of the money goes.” Even world-class establishments like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre were more vulnerable than they liked to admit.

“That’s what I’m saying. Security’s always the poor cousin to your revenue-generating bling.” Britten shook his head ruefully, like he wasn’t one of those very thieves who took advantage of those security weaknesses. “Mind you, doing the job on New Year’s Day, that wasn’t too daft. Always a good chance half the staff will have come down with cheap champagne flu. And them that are left—well, they’re tired, aren’t they? It’s closing time and the last day of the exhibit, too, so everybody’s guard is down. Prime time to act. You put a team together, get in and out fast, and Bob’s yer uncle.”

Teagarden raised a brow. “But you say it wasn’t you.”

“Give me some credit, mate. Just because Her Majesty trained me in the deadly arts doesn’t mean I’m going to use them against civilians.”

“So who do you reckon it was? One professional to another,” Teagarden added.

“Oh, well, I don’t like to rat out a colleague, even if he is the competition.”

“Hardly a colleague, I would think. As you say, it was a very messily executed job—literally, given the body count. Not very flattering professional company to be keeping.”

“That’s very true. Gives everyone a bad name.”

“On the other hand, who knows? Maybe that’s what passes for professionalism these days.”

“’Scuse me?”

“More efficient, I suppose. Eliminate all the witnesses.”

“Nothing efficient about pulling down that much heat,” Britten sniffed. “Only a rank amateur or a psycho uses that much brute force when he doesn’t have to. And he didn’t have to, did he, given that the museum practically sent out engraved invitations asking to be taken down, the way they mucked up security.”

“Yeah, but this ringleader, whoever he was, showed some restraint, didn’t he? After all, he only took the one painting.”

“Self-restraint!” Britten snorted. “That wasn’t his idea. That was a direct order from the client—take The Night Café and nothing more. You don’t argue with orders like that, not when they come from that client.”

“So you do know who did the job—and who gave the orders. Did the client come to you?”

Britten shrugged. “Might have.”

“And? You couldn’t handle it?”

“Couldn’t handle it? Not bloody likely. A trained monkey could have done that job.”

“Yet you turned it down.”

Britten drummed his fingers on the table.

“Why?” Teagarden pressed.

“Look, mate, you and I have had our differences in the past, yeah? But we’ve got two things in common.” Britten held up the first two fingers of his left hand, then pulled them down one after the other. “A, we both love beautiful paintings, and B, we’ve both done honorable service for Her Majesty’s Government. Here’s the deal—nicking that painting had precisely nothing to do with the client’s love of art. And I spent the Gulf War dodging bullets from guns this bloke sold to Saddam Hussein. So, thanks all the same, no, I did not care to take the man up on his offer.”

“So who was the client? And who told him ‘yes’ after you said ‘no’?”

Britten exhaled sharply. Then, signaling to the waiter for another espresso, he settled in resignedly for a long chat.

Teagarden, to be sociable, did the same. It would appear, he thought, that there was honor amongst thieves after all.

Two

Orange County, California

“Gabe, no more snacking. You’ll spoil your dinner.”

Hannah snatched the last of the nachos away from the poised hand of her son and carried them from the patio into the house. The western sun, low over the ocean, was making rainbows on the walls of Nora’s kitchen. For the past couple of hours, the boys—one compact, the other tall and rangy—had climbed out of the water every twenty minutes or so, water streaming off their bodies. Splattering over to the patio table, they’d practically inhaled the fruits and crackers, cheeses and nachos that Nora had set out for them to snack on while Sunday’s beef dinner roasted in the oven.

By now everyone was ravenous. The table was set, the salad made, the oven turned off and the veggies ready for steaming, but Rebecca Powell, Nora’s college roommate, was late.

Hannah scraped the nachos into the garbage disposal, then rinsed the platter and slotted it into the dishwasher. Nora was at the long trestle table in the kitchen, folding starched linen napkins into swan shapes. Their mother, just down from napping upstairs, was putzing around the room, looking for something to clean or polish. Hannah watched her mother’s slightly frenzied hunt. It was pathological. The woman would probably end up ironing the sheets on her own deathbed.

“Ma, come and sit down.”

Instead, Nana picked up a dish towel and polished the taps and faucet at the sink until they gleamed.

Hannah sighed and turned back to her sister. “Could Rebecca have forgotten the invitation?”

Nora shook her head. “I was just talking to her last night. She won’t have forgotten. She’s probably stuck in traffic.”

“She still living in Malibu?”

“No. The gallery’s still there, but she moved into an apartment in Westwood.”

“I thought she was getting the house in the divorce.”

“Bill reneged. He got himself some shark of a lawyer and the lines suddenly shifted. I’m not sure exactly how he managed it, but poor Becs is fighting for her life here.”

“You think the shark dug up something on her? Like, maybe she had an affair, too?”

Nora’s shoulders lifted in a sad shrug. “I really don’t know. Becs hasn’t volunteered and I don’t like to ask. She’s pretty wrung out these days.”

“It’s a blessing she and her husband didn’t have children,” Hannah’s mother said. She’d moved on to wiping the brown speckled counter, even though it was already sparkling. If Rebecca didn’t show up soon, she was going to wear a groove in the granite. Hannah could sympathize. She’d inherited her mother’s restlessness, although in her case, it rarely manifested itself in an urge to clean.

“I suppose,” Nora said.

Nana’s head gave a sad shake. “Divorce is so hard on children.”

Hannah’s gaze dropped to her hands and she tried to ignore the stab in her solar plexus. Her mother wasn’t trying to make her feel crummy about her own messy divorce and lost custody struggle, she knew, but the comment stung just the same.

“Anyway,” Nora added, “I know she hasn’t forgotten about today because she asked last night if you were going to be here.”

Hannah glanced at their mother, then back at Nora. “Who, me? Why?”

“Something about a job.”

“What would she need a security contractor for? Guarding overpriced seascapes?”

Hannah had gone with Nora one time to Rebecca Powell’s Malibu art gallery. The place specialized in the kind of idealized, light-dappled images of coastal California, conveniently sofa-sized, that tourists seemed to favor.

“I don’t know why she needs your services, but here she comes.” Sure enough, through the big, multipaned window next to her sister, Hannah saw a bright red BMW convertible roaring up the driveway. Nora set aside the last in her flock of linen swans and got to her feet. “You can ask her yourself.”

It was courier work, it seemed.

Rebecca didn’t broach the subject until well after dinner. Neal and the boys were in the den, watching a football game, and Nora and Nana were loading the dishwasher. When they brushed off all offers of help, Hannah and Rebecca escaped the warm kitchen and took their coffee out onto the softly lit, tented gazebo on the patio.

“It’s for a client,” Rebecca said, after explaining what she needed from Hannah.

She smoothed her cream linen slacks and crossed her dainty, espadrille-clad feet at the ankles before lifting her china cup to her lips. Rebecca was one of those L.A. women whose voluptuous breasts didn’t seem to belong to her stick-thin body, like she’d ordered them from some mammary mail-order house—Boobs ’R Us. At least she’d avoided the clichéd long blond tresses, opting instead for short, ketchup-red spikes that made her look more arty than bimbo-esque.

“My client ordered a painting and he wants it delivered to his vacation home in Mexico.”

“He never heard of FedEx or UPS?”

“It’s a fairly expensive piece so he wants it hand-carried. A painting by August Koon.”

Hannah shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

Rebecca leaned forward to settle her coffee cup in its saucer on the patio table. As she did, her dangly silver earrings tinkled and a silver charm necklace swayed in the cleft of her ample breasts. Hannah’s personal inclinations left her lusting after manly biceps, not bosoms, but it was hard not to be distracted by that much cleavage. At dinner, she’d caught Nolan’s and even ten-year-old Gabe’s eyes wandering repeatedly to the deep V of Rebecca’s turquoise cashmere sweater although, she’d been happy to note, Neal had had eyes for no one but his wife. Bless his plodding, loyal heart.

“Koon’s work is what they call po-mo. Postmodern,” Rebecca said. “Not what I normally carry in my little gallery, but he’s local and fairly trendy at the moment. His work gets pretty good reviews, although to be perfectly honest, I think he’s overrated.”

“And this client? He’s a regular of yours?’

Rebecca hesitated. She might have been frowning, except her skin from the eyebrows up seemed frozen smooth. Damn Botox. It made reading faces really tough. Take now, for example. Instead of looking puzzled at the question, or cagey, or maybe just discreet, Rebecca only succeeded in looking dim. It was all but impossible to know what she was thinking.

“He hasn’t bought from me before this, but he has a home in Malibu—one of several, I gather, scattered all over the world. Anyway, he called a couple of weeks ago and said he’d been in my gallery a couple of times. I don’t know that I can really place him, but when he asked me about purchasing this Koon on his behalf, I jumped at it.”

“I didn’t realize you did that. I guess I just assumed you sell what you’re showing.”

“I haven’t really done much of this before. I mean, once or twice, I’ve acted as agent for a buyer who wanted something different from an artist I was showing, but never an artist in August Koon’s price range. I’d love to do more of this, though. Much better than running a gallery.” Rebecca shook her ketchup-red spikes. “All that financial overhead. Long hours. Trying to guess which way the market’s going.”

“Is being a buyer a full-time gig?”

“It can be. Most wealthy buyers prefer to work anonymously through a broker to keep the price down.”

“So this Koon deal is a biggie?”

Rebecca’s right hand seesawed. “Middling big. The purchase price is just over a quarter mil, plus my commission. Normally, the agent charges ten or fifteen percent, but when he called the other day, my buyer offered twenty percent before I’d even had a chance to name a rate.”

Hannah did the math in her head, then whistled. “Fifty grand for a few hours’ work. Nice little business you’ve got going there, Becs.”

“I wish. Believe me, I don’t usually get to play in this big sandbox. That’s why I’m not about to say no to this. Whatever this buyer needs, I’m happy to try to get it for him, even if I’m not crazy about his choices. Who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “Schlepping artwork…it’s not really what I do.”

Rebecca looked embarrassed—or that’s what Hannah thought she was meant to look. Her face did seem to flush, but it didn’t exactly register emotion. “No, I didn’t think it was, really. Although,” she added, “I guess I don’t know exactly what it is you do do. I mean, I know you used to be a cop, and Nora mentioned that you’re overseas a lot now, and that sometimes you do bodyguard work for celebrities. I saw the news after you rescued that kidnapped doctor, too, of course.”

Hannah nodded. “It’s kind of a mixed bag, what I do. Pays the bills, though.” Most of the time, she thought. At the moment, she had a whopping tax bill that she was paying off in installments, the aftermath of the big reward she got for the doctor’s rescue—a reward she didn’t keep in the end, donating it instead to the widow of her partner in that caper. She’d forgotten about the tax angle. Dumb move, but when the IRS dropped the big bill on her, she chose not to pass it on to her partner’s widow and negotiated a payment plan instead. No good deed goes unpunished.

“Would you be free to take a run down to Mexico this week?” Rebecca asked. “It’s a quick in-and-out thing. And all your expenses would be covered, of course.”

Hannah winced. She didn’t like the idea of taking work from family or friends—or even friends of family. It was too hard to negotiate her usual steep fee, especially with someone whose messy divorce too closely echoed her own.

“You could do it in forty-eight hours,” Rebecca added. “My buyer authorized up to ten thousand dollars for courier fees, plus expenses. That includes first-class airfare for you and the painting. He wants it hand-carried on board.”

Whoa. Ten grand. For two days’ work.

“Where in Mexico?”

“Puerto Vallarta. He’s got a home down there. Like I said, one of several. I gather he’s got places in NewYork and London, and…where else? Tel Aviv, I think. The man is not hurting for money, from the sounds of things.”

“Tel Aviv? Who is this guy?”

“His name is Moises Gladding.”

Double whoa. Moises Gladding. Not the first time Hannah had heard that name.

“Moises Gladding is a pretty shady character, Rebecca.”

“You know him?”

“I know of him. He’s an arms dealer. They say he supplies arms to some of the shadiest regimes and insurgency movements on three continents—and sometimes to both sides of the same conflict.”

“Really?”

Hannah frowned. “And Gladding’s been in your gallery? Recently?” Last she’d heard, some Congressional oversight committee had been trying to subpoena him to testify about a reported illegal arms shipment to a right-wing paramilitary group in Venezuela that was trying to overthrow the regime of Hugo Chavez. One of Hannah’s security buddies had told her that somebody, probably some spook out of Langley, was suspected of having given Gladding a heads-up and helped him slip out of the country ahead of the legal notice to appear—which would explain why Mr. Gladding couldn’t carry his own damn painting to Mexico.

“I’m not sure when he was last in the gallery,” Rebecca said. “Like I say, I can’t really place him, and the request to make this purchase for him came by phone.”

Hannah sat back on the patio chair, watching the light dance on the surface of the swimming pool, reflecting on the trees overhead, turning the yard into a magic fairyland. “You sure you want to be doing business with a guy like that, Becs?”

“It’s just a painting. Somebody’s going to get the business, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be me. But I really need your help. I don’t know who else to ask. I’d carry it down there myself, except I can’t afford to leave the gallery for two days. Please, would you think about it?”

Hannah sighed. Ten grand was a nice little bite out of her tax bill. She really had no business walking away from easy money, especially since her dance card wasn’t exactly full at the moment. At the same time, experience had taught her to trust her gut about certain people, and instinct told her that anything involving a character like Gladding could come back to bite her in the ass.

Still, as Rebecca said, it was just a stupid painting.

“I’ll need to see this painting before I agree to carry it,” Hannah said. “And to supervise the packing of it. No way am I getting on a plane carrying a sealed package I haven’t thoroughly examined with my own eyes.”

Rebecca actually giggled. “Oh, thank you, thank you! Hannah, this is such a huge help to me, you have no idea. You won’t regret it, I promise.”

Lord, Hannah thought. Moises frigging Gladding. I sure hope not.

It was well after nine when Hannah finally got home from her day at Nora’s. She’d taken Gabe home to his father’s first, enduring the weekly gut-wrench of saying goodbye and then watching him walk inside the house with the very pregnant woman who’d taken Hannah’s place in her son’s life.

Her ex, a high-profile criminal defense attorney, made his living helping celebrities avoid the consequences of their bad behavior. Cal was good at his job—very good. It had rewarded him with a gate-guarded mansion off Mulholland Drive, a gorgeous second wife, and the money to convince the courts that he and Christie offered a safer, more stable home environment for their son than Hannah could. The fact that the judge had probably made the right decision didn’t make it any less painful. Or galling.

Pulling into the short driveway that fronted the row of garages next to her building, she hit the opener switch and watched the door rise. Her condo was on a quiet, tree-lined road that ran steeply uphill from Sunset Boulevard. The low brick building, constructed in the nineteen-twenties, had originally housed offices. Sometime during the real estate boom of the eighties, it had been converted to row town houses, but pleasingly so, retaining period details like deep crown moldings, gargoyled pediments and a few interior walls stripped back to showcase the red brick. It was a rare thing in L.A., real brick. Since the tightening of earthquake codes, nobody built with it anymore. The walls of Hannah’s building had been reinforced with rebar during the conversion. Even so, she suspected it would crumble like a house of cards when The Big One hit, but like everyone else in the city, she lived in a state of perpetual denial.

The lights were on in the open garage bay next to hers. Hannah switched off the nearly silent motor of her Prius, grabbed her purse and wandered over to see what was going on at Travis and Ruben’s. The intensely sweet smell of night-blooming jasmine wafted on the warm night air. Over the sound of traffic from nearby Sunset Boulevard, she heard the faint click of moths batting themselves stupid against the streetlight.

Travis Spielman was inside his garage, crouched next to his ten-speed touring bike. The bike, with a baby seat on the back, was leaning against a worktable that ran down the side wall.

“Hey, Trav. What’s up?”

Her neighbor’s curly blond head bobbed up and he smiled. He was dressed in faded jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, washed so often that the black was now a tissue-thin gray. Jerry Garcia’s hairy mug was barely visible on the faded cotton.

“Hey, girlfriend,” he said. “Not much. Just tightening the bolts on Mellie’s seat. We went for a ride today and it was feeling wobbly.”

Mellie was his two-year-old daughter and she loved going for rides, whether on the back of Travis’s bike or in the jogging stroller that Travis’s partner Ruben pushed ahead of himself when he went for a run. The guys said the wind in her hair made her life. Child was obviously a born speed demon, although the cerebral palsy that threatened to lock up her little body left her unable to travel under her own steam.

There were only three units in the converted building. Travis and Ruben had the biggest space, with two large bedrooms and a massive open kitchen and entertaining space. On the other side of them lived a yuppie couple who seemed to work all the time. The couple had been in the building for over a year and neither Hannah nor the guys had seen either the husband or wife more than a couple of times. Their cars, matching black Mercedes sedans, were rarely in their driveway. Ruben said they were CIA assassins who spent all their time abroad carrying out nefarious plots. Ruben had an overactive imagination.