They’d been driving for about five minutes when it occurred to Vivian that nowhere in the course of their interrogation in the bar parking lot had the names of the victims ever come up. She’d told Owen that the victims were art appraisers and though he’d seemed shocked he’d never asked for their names.
"Owen," Vivian said, looking over Sterling as she spoke. All three of them were in the surprisingly spacious back seat. Owen had been looking balefully out of the driver’s side window. “You were once quite respected in your field, correct?”
“Yes,” he said, with a bit of bitterness.
“So I assume you knew important people, right?”
“Yes. Why?”
“The three women that have been killed…they were Elena Rivera, Cassandra Holt, and Natalie King. Did you know them?”
She studied him intently, noting the way his gaze shifted behind his wire-frame glasses, seeking some form of escape that wasn't there. The interior of the car had started to feel claustrophobic.
"Should I?" he replied, almost too quickly, a layer of hesitance in his voice that spoke volumes.
"Three people are dead, Owen. Think carefully," Vivian urged, her patience fraying like the hem of her worn leather jacket. She watched as realization began to dawn upon him, the gravity of the situation settling like sediment at the bottom of a once turbulent river.
“The name Cassandra Holt sounds familiar,” he admitted. “I believe she may have been one of the appraisers who threw me under the bus when things got bad for me a few years back.”
“Threw you under the bus?”
“Yeah. And she wouldn’t have been the only one. When news of my alleged crimes went public, I was a scapegoat. I was the one everyone pointed at, the auction manager who might have been skewing things for his friends. And while the attention was on me, those crooked appraisers just kept inflating prices.”
It was the very same M.O. she and Sterling had been considering, one they’d already heard in the course of this investigation. She was now quite certain Owen wasn’t their killer, but he had literally just recited the train of thought Vivian expected their killer to have. Maybe it was a mindset more people in the art world had than Vivian expected.
“And Cassandra is the only one you’d heard of? You’re certain?”
“Yes. I mean, it’s very possible that I could have crossed paths with any of them and just don’t remember. But Cassandra Holt is the only one that sounds familiar.”
“And what, exactly, was Cassandra and so many others accusing you of back then?”
Owen shifted, the handcuffs clinking—a discordant chime in the tense silence. "There were a number of high-ranking names in the museum and auction world who were accusing me of selling fakes at an auction house once." He glanced up, his eyes reflecting a storm of emotions. "There was no proof, though. They had to drop the case."
"But surely you weren’t the only man ever accused of such a thing, right?" Vivian pressed. She couldn’t help but sense the undercurrents of a deeper narrative.
“Oh, God no. I mean, some had actually done it. Done it and gotten away with it. There was a man in the early 2000s that sold nearly thirty million dollars’ worth of fake pieces at auction—some paintings, some ceramics. By the time anyone caught on, he’d fled the country. No one knows where he went.”
"And Owen…did you do it? Given what you’ve admitted to us just today, you understand why I might think you were guilty.”
“As I said, there was never any proof. Back then…no, I didn’t. But I was so pissed off with the way the public had viewed me that I turned my back on that world.”
“And are now working to dismantle it, I suppose?”
He had no comment on this. His attention went back out the window as the cab continued to drive them toward the precinct.
“When things got dicey for you, were there others that reached out to you? Maybe some that thought you had done it and were sympathetic? People that potentially wanted to work with you?”
Owen seemed surprised by the question. He started nodding almost right away, but slowly, as if he’d just retrieved some memory from long ago that he’d nearly forgotten about. “Yes, actually. And…my God…I haven’t thought of them in a while.”
“Who?”
“There was this small auction house. They approached me with an offer to steal from a private collection. And…God, I don’t remember exactly, but it might have involved Cassandra Holt. But I honestly can't remember that part." His brows knitted together as if the memory itself was a knot he was trying to untie.
"Who were they?"
"Oh, I didn’t know them personally,” Owen admitted. “It was just an offer over the phone.”
"An offer?" Sterling asked. He had to turn rather awkwardly to look at Owen straight-on, given that they were sitting directly beside one another.
"A lot of money," Owen said, a tinge of regret lacing his voice. "But I turned it down. I've done some dodgy stuff, but I never—I knew if I took that job, it would only be a stubborn and spiteful reaction to the way I was being treated by the public and this sick little art world I’d tried so hard to please for so long."
Owen shifted uncomfortably, his cuffed hands rustling. His eyes darted around the car before returning to Vivian. "I was tempted, though" he confessed, his voice barely above a whisper, as if the admission pained him. "The money they were offering was more than I'd seen in a long while."
Sadly, Vivian understood where he was coming from. She had been where Owen was, at the crossroads of temptation and integrity. "But you didn't take it?”
His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. "No," he said. " I draw the line at taking advantage of those who create. Artists pour their souls into their work. It'd be like stealing a piece of them. Of course…shit, now…now I see that a bit differently.”
She supposed so, given that he’d admitted to recently breaking into an artist’s studio and stealing several pieces.
"What do you remember about this auction house?” Vivian asked.
“Just that it was called Serenity Auctions and they offered me a lot of money to help them steal from people.”
Owen’s story was a path winding through the murky forest of his past; Vivian knew she had to tread carefully, to follow wherever it led.
“You never actually met anyone?”
“No.” Owen shifted uncomfortably, his handcuffs clinking against the door. "No names. Just a voice on the other end of the line. And when I refused the job, they were polite about it. Never bothered me again. I did continue to hear about them, though. Even after they made that call, they kept working as if they were perfect. Aggressive, though, that was for sure.”
“Aggressive how?”
"If I recall, they were an overnight sort of thing. And this would have been…I don't know, four or five years ago, I guess. They came out of nowhere, trying to carve out their slice. Aggressive, like I said, hungry for fortune and reputation. Very competitive."
"What do you mean?” Vivian asked. But she thought she already knew. She was a bit ashamed of it, but she’d once worked for the sort of people Owen was currently describing.
"Cutthroat," Owen elaborated. "They wanted the high-profile pieces, the attention-grabbers. They'd do anything to get ahead, even if it meant playing dirty."
"Playing dirty or playing deadly?" Sterling interjected, his voice like gravel.
"Didn't think they had it in them," Owen admitted. "But when there's desperation..."
"Desperation leads to drastic measures," Vivian finished for him, her words slicing through the tension like a knife. It sounded a bit cliché, but in her brief time with INTERPOL, she’d seen the deadly measures people would go to in order to make money and in their own sick way, try to preserve the nature of art.
The car went quiet again as they drew closer to the precinct. Serenity Auctions didn’t exactly feel like a significant lead, but if the owners had been seeking people to steal art from others who had been wronged and pushed aside by their peers, they were at least worth looking into…especially if they had been interested in stealing from Cassandra Holt.
And in a case that had presented them with nothing more than a string of dead ends, she supposed any potential link was worth a look.