LARK CURSED.
The late afternoon sun slanted through Lark’s kitchen window, throwing a glare onto Shelby’s laptop screen. She didn’t even glance up at the profanity. Lark had been swearing for the past hour.
After their visit to Olga Berkowicz, the three had eaten lunch in Kingston upon Thames before returning to London. They’d stopped to buy more clothes and gun-cleaning supplies for Trevor. Now the two women worked at the kitchen table while Trevor grumbled in the living room.
While Lark searched for the cargo ship manifest from Nandi and Max’s return to England, she combed every news source she could think of to find records of robberies or mutilations of artwork in Europe, then expanded her search to include South Africa.
She could get the information so much faster, she mused, if she could use the resources she had at her fingertips as a political analyst. Interpol member countries fed their data into a global network to facilitate multinational investigations, and included a stolen arts database. Their enormous store of information might give them what they needed. She glanced into the living room at Trevor, who had broken down all six handguns and was cleaning them. He’d never approve.
Dare she risk it? She needed her State Department credentials to log in, which would flag her account. On the other hand, they couldn’t go on this way for much longer. All three of them had lives to return to.
“Lark.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t pause as her fingers raced across the keyboard. “I’m going to find the shit out of you, you mother—”
“Lark,” she hissed.
Lark’s head came up and she focused on Shelby, who scooted her kitchen chair close.
“I need your help,” she whispered. “I need to use my ID to log into Interpol. Can you make it so no one can track me that way?”
“Easy peasy. I’ll mask your IP and bounce you through proxy servers. They’ll never know what hit them. Let’s do it on my computer. I wrote an app to do just that.”
While Lark started some programs running, Shelby stared blindly out the kitchen window. The Bedlamites would strike again and again until Max either found what he sought or gave up. They had the small advantage now of knowing the truth, but everything hinged on beating him to his next target. They had to be stopped. All of them.
And after they succeeded, she would invite Trevor to go away with her. Two weeks somewhere tropical, where they could laze away the days sipping piña coladas by the pool and making love on the beach after dark. She craved Trevor’s sweet, drugging kisses. His strong fingers caressing every inch of her. His hard body rocking against her as they . . .
She stopped cold as realization hit her. They hadn’t used protection. She’d been so lost in his touch two days ago that the thought of a condom hadn’t even entered her mind.
She’d had unprotected sex.
Mentally calculating her cycle, she felt a wash of relief. Mother Nature would visit soon. It was highly unlikely she’d conceived. Still, the chance always existed. Without conscious volition, she opened her laptop and did a quick search. There was a pharmacy only a few blocks down. She could go and be back in ten minutes.
Now too anxious to sit still, she pulled the remains of her emergency cash from her pocket and counted. Six pounds and some coins. Not enough.
“I have to run to the pharmacy,” she said, voice low. “Can I borrow a little money?”
Lark nodded, eyes still glued to her screen. “There’s fifty pounds in the pantry, under the canned tomatoes. I’m almost ready.”
“I’d . . . like to do this without Trevor breathing down my neck.”
That got Lark’s full attention. “Why?”
“It’s personal, that’s all.”
Lark rose from the table and ran water into the kettle. As it heated, she found a scrap of paper and handed it to Shelby.
“Give me your login ID and password. And what I should be searching for. I’ll start that while you’re gone.”
Shelby scribbled down the information. “I need you to access Interpol’s crime database, and cross reference robberies or mutilations with their stolen artwork database.”
“If it’s there, I’ll find it,” she promised. Walking over to the now-whistling kettle, she grabbed a mug, put her left hand over the top of it, and poured the boiling water onto her hand and into the cup. She cried out in pain, dropping the kettle.
“Lark, what the hell did you do?” Shelby leapt to her feet and rushed over. Trevor was by her side in an instant.
“What happened?”
“Lark burned her hand.”
Trevor took Lark’s wrist gently and examined the burns.
“I have burn ointment in the medicine cabinet, in the bathroom. Which is where we should go. Right now.” She leveled a meaningful look at Shelby as she led Trevor from the room.
For long moments, Shelby wavered between the need to leave and worry for her friend. But Lark had burned herself deliberately to give her the chance to leave undetected. Best not to waste the opportunity.
Crazy woman.
She jogged nearly the whole way to the pharmacy. Inside, with shaking hands, she picked out a pregnancy test. Should she take it right away?
Now that she held the box in her hands, common sense reasserted itself and she halted in place. After only a couple of days, a test would tell her nothing. She had been silly to panic and run out of the apartment. And Trevor and Lark would be done in the bathroom by now and wondering where she was.
What if she were pregnant, though?
Trevor had told Lark they were a couple, but what did that mean in his world? And how on earth was she going to raise a child on her own if he let her down?
Teenage pregnancy had been almost a town tradition in Coon Bluff. Her sister had gotten knocked up her junior year of high school, married Zeke Skelly, and went to live with his parents. By the time Shelby left for college, she had two babies and a third on the way. She was miserable, depressed, and drinking heavily.
Raeanne’s situation was even worse. Six months after she married her husband, she ended up with bruises so bad she lost her baby. She’d stayed with him because, in her mind, what choice did she have in that small town?
Babies meant lost opportunities and dead dreams.
She set the box back on the shelf. She wouldn’t know for a couple of weeks one way or another. And she’d exposed them enough just by leaving the apartment.
When she walked back into the living room, Lark was curled up on the sofa with one hand in a bowl of water and her computer balanced on her lap.
“How’s your hand?”
She closed the laptop and set it on the coffee table. Shelby sat next to her and looked into the bowl. Lark’s skin had reddened where she’d burned herself, leaving three small blisters.
“That was a crazy thing to do, Lark.”
“Did you get what you needed?” she asked, voice low.
“Yeah.” Shelby squeezed her good hand and went toward the kitchen.
Trevor was stirring a pot of sauce that smelled so good her mouth watered. He stopped what he was doing as she paused in the doorway. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, everything’s fine.”
“Where did you go?”
“Just for a walk. I needed to clear my head. Too much staring at computer screens.”
“Please don’t go out again without me,” he said, obviously trying to sound calm. “We know Jukes is actively searching for us through the city’s surveillance system. I worried when I saw you gone.”
“I was gone ten minutes. He couldn’t have found me in that time.”
“I don’t know that, and neither do you.”
Looking more closely, she saw how upset he was, though he was trying to conceal it. He had been more than worried.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “I won’t do it again.”
He nodded and returned to the pot, but she saw how tense the muscles in his back were. It had taken a lot for him not to try to find her, she realized.
Lark moved into the kitchen with her computer. Shelby scooped up the bowl and followed her, setting it in her lap. She dropped her hand back into it with a sigh. Trevor measured out pasta and placed it in another pot. While he finished shaping homemade meatballs for the spaghetti, Shelby brought mismatched plates and an odd assortment of cutlery to the table, and thought how domestic this felt—and how right. Lark added a bottle of Chianti and three wineglasses. When the table was set, Lark grabbed Shelby’s hand and dragged her out of the kitchen.
“I’m going to see if I can find some candles,” she called over her shoulder. Shelby followed her to the tiny linen closet at the end of the short hall. Lark yanked it open, but instead of searching for candles, she looked Shelby over curiously.
“So what was so important for you to buy earlier?”
She was surprised it had taken Lark this long to ask. The woman’s curiosity was insatiable. “Nothing. I’m sorry I brought you into this.”
“It was condoms, I bet. Was it condoms? You two seem pretty hot and heavy.”
Shelby gave an internal eye roll. “No, it wasn’t condoms. Leave it, okay?”
“Sure.” The silence lasted all of two seconds as she rummaged through a plastic bin on one shelf. “He’s really into you.”
“He might change his mind if . . .” She just shook her head, unable to continue.
Lark’s face fell. “You won’t tell me? You suck. Here’s a candle.”
They ate dinner under the flickering flame of a pear-scented Yankee Candle.
Lark raised her wineglass. “Here’s to us. Three caped crusaders seeking justice while being hunted on all sides. As Fezzik said to Inigo, I hope we win.”
She said the last bit in a fair imitation of André the Giant in The Princess Bride. Shelby laughed.
“Hell, I’ll drink to that,” Trevor muttered.
“Where did you learn to cook?” Shelby asked. “This is delicious.”
He rested his elbows on the table, pushing his plate away with a contented sigh. “Boarding school. I lived there a good part of the year from thirteen on, until I took my A-levels at eighteen. Our house master taught us during mid-afternoon tea. I found I enjoyed it. It calms me.”
Lark forked a huge mouthful of pasta and slurped the strands into her mouth. “I have no patience for it. Why bother?”
“Yes, I did notice the SpaghettiOs in the cupboard.” Trevor’s lip curled. “That slop isn’t even fit for hogs.”
“No, well, this is so much tastier,” Lark hastened to assure him.
Shelby eased back in her chair, twirling the wineglass idly by the stem. As dire as their predicament seemed, she would miss this easy camaraderie when they each went back to their individual lives. She collected the used plates and washed up while Lark got back on her computer, typing and muttering and swearing. Joining Trevor on the sofa, she curled her legs under her as he watched Top Gear on BBC Three. When he put an arm around her, she relaxed into his chest as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Two and a half hours later, Lark bounced into the room. “So, I’m brilliant.”
“What’s up?” Trevor sat up, dislodging Shelby. He put a hand on her knee in apology.
Lark winked at Shelby and said, “I had the clever idea to use Interpol’s enormous databases to cross-check known pieces of stolen art from private-home or museum robberies slash mutilations.”
Trevor gaped at her. “You hacked into Interpol? Are you off your rocker?”
Lark gave him wide doe eyes. “Heavens, no. That would be illegal. They were out there in public, just waiting for someone to happen along.”
“Right. And pigs will fly and demons rise from hell to save mankind.”
“Hey, it could happen. Anyway, do you want to know or not?”
“Definitely,” Shelby said.
“All right, then.” Lark seemed mollified. “So that didn’t get me anywhere, so I built an algorithm instead. Max scanned the ship manifest from when his grandfather sent his family and valuables to Cape Town, so I swiped that off his computer. But we don’t have the corresponding list of what made it back to the UK, so we don’t know for certain which pieces are missing. So I sent this search algorithm out . . .”
“This what?” She was talking so fast Shelby had a hard time following her.
“ . . . after anything that refers to Max’s art over the past thirty years. A search algorithm. It’s a linear series of data queries that utilizes a cross-referencing model to turn a multistep operation into a single, recursive function . . . Do you want a lesson in mathematical algorithm engineering, or do you want to know what I found?”
“What you found,” she said faintly. Trevor nodded encouragement.
Lark put her hands on her hips. “I wrote a program kind of like it in high school. Anyway, it searched news articles, interviews, photographs. Art associations or groups who’ve done news pieces about Max’s collection. New purchases. Other sorts of interviews inside his home, or any pic from inside his house. I cross-referenced that with a couple of art databases to identify pieces he currently owns. His grandfather sent two hundred and twelve objets d’art to South Africa. I’ve identified, to a reasonable, imperfect certainty, almost a hundred and ninety. Max is extremely proud of his art collections and his freaking huge mansion. Mansions. There have been a lot of photos taken in various parts of his houses over the years. Anywho, so I’m missing about twenty-two pieces. Then I wrote another algorithm to search half a dozen or so art databases, to see if any of those pieces currently resided in museums. That narrowed it down to a handful.”
“A handful of . . . what?”
Lark stopped talking, looking Shelby over in surprise.
Shelby tried again. “So you’re pretty sure twenty-two pieces were stolen from Max on his way from South Africa to England?”
“Well, leaving some wiggle room for artwork or whatever that Max felt was too valuable to have on display. He probably has a vault somewhere.”
Trevor stood. “And you have a probable list of the stolen art? Well done.”
Lark huffed. “Haven’t you been listening? Oh. Did I forget to mention that when I cross-referenced the twenty-two missing pieces against robberies slash mutilations, seventeen of them lit up like Christmas trees?”
“Erm, yes, you might have forgotten that small detail.” Trevor motioned her over to the sofa. She plopped down next to Shelby.
“Oops. My bad. Okay, so Max has been busy. Of the seventeen, I found five in Portugal and Spain. And I remembered that the Cape Queen, the cargo ship Nandi and Max sailed on when they came back to England, had a Portuguese crew. So that makes sense. It also makes sense that Max wouldn’t want to pee in his own pool.”
“By . . . ?” Shelby decided it was just easier to let Lark run with it.
“By searching the pieces farthest away from him first. Less suspicion that way.”
Trevor started to pace. “So five objets d’art have been either stolen or ripped to shreds?”
“No. Good grief.” Lark sighed heavily and spoke in a melodramatically slow tone. “Sev-en-teen.”
“Sorry,” Shelby said. “Keep going.”
“ ’Kay. Five in Spain and Portugal. One each in Paris, Munich, Salzburg, and Saint Petersburg. Three in the United States, and five in Great Britain.”
“You did all that in three hours?” Shelby felt suitably impressed.
Lark sniffed. “My Internet is slow, or it’ve been faster.”
Trevor stopped pacing. “So of the twenty-two, we can account for seventeen. Were you able to locate the other five?”
“Does the pope wear a funny hat? Four are in really weird places where Max or his lily-white Bedlamites would be remembered. One’s in Palau—I had to look it up—which is near the Philippines and has a population barely over twenty thousand. Strangers would stick out like a sore thumb. Anyway, ask me about number five.”
Shelby felt a grin tugging at her mouth. “Where is number five?”
“Right here in England,” Lark said triumphantly. “In Basingstoke, to be exact. See, the Bedlamites have struck now four times in the London metropolitan area, destroying five pieces of art because they mutilated two paintings at the August Museum. Where you two star-crossed lovers were reunited.” Lark put her hands under her chin and batted her eyes.
She and Trevor shared a warm glance. Shelby cleared her throat. “So, uh . . . so Max has been targeting those seventeen works of art for probably years. Otherwise, a whole string of thefts or destruction of property would have been splashed across the news.”
“Exactly.” Lark beamed at Shelby. “But he uses the Bedlamites here in London to make it seem like a political statement, so no one gets suspicious.”
“And you have a photo of the piece in Basingstoke?” Trevor asked.
Lark tapped a few keys. “I’ve sent it to the printer. Shel, if you wouldn’t mind?”
Shelby hurried down the hall to Lark’s bedroom and snagged the paper off the printer. She found herself looking at a white longcase clock. Curlicues at the apex flared into a wide cap set atop a narrower clockface, which had ornate corners and hands. Faux pillars stood to either side of the clock door. Gold bordered the edges and floral designs decorated the flat panels of the rest of the casing. It was lovely.
She handed it to Trevor, who turned it from side to side as he peered at it. “It’s a grandfather clock. I don’t see any identifying marks, though.”
“It’s actually a grandmother clock,” Lark corrected. “Smaller than a grandfather clock. This one is six feet. Here, let me read you the description. ‘This clock is finished in ivory with gold and hand-painted decorations. It features a swan-neck pediment with finial’—that’s the little topper thingy in between the two swan-neck curlicue thingies. ‘The crystal glass door showcases a deluxe dial with shifting moon phase above the clockface. Gold-plated weights and pendulum bob driven by . . . blah-blah-blah. The rest is the technical stuff. Oh, it was built in 1926. And it’s pretty.”