23

The next day passed quietly, with no new developments in Gladys’s or the other art theft cases. Detective Irwin continued to stonewall me out of access to Capone’s apartment, while Tanner turned over every rock, log, and snitch for a lead on who was bent on terrorizing me. I mean, we were both pretty sure the order came from Dmitri, but we didn’t have a sliver of proof and every known slimeball goon who did his bidding had a solid alibi.

So I caught up on all my reports in the relative safety of FBI headquarters and then tugged a little more on the Lucille Horvak thread. Nana’s reaction to the photograph I’d found in Capone’s apartment was bugging me, and I had a hunch Nana’s fired housekeeper might offer some insight. If I could find her.

Tanner stopped by my desk at the end of the day and must’ve read my failure to turn up any leads on my face. “I guess you’re wishing you had a hotline to the legendary Madame M?”

I laughed. “Yeah, she would’ve tracked Horvak down days ago.” Madame M was a CIA operative who in her day, if the rumors could be believed, helped ferret out countless cases of international espionage.

“The woman could squeeze information out of stone.”

I grinned at the reference to an exploit in which she found a secret message etched into the side of an Italian statue by a suspect she’d been tailing. “I want to be just like her when I grow up.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel so grown up with Tanner insisting on following me home. Yeah, he had a vested interest in nailing Dmitri’s guys if they happened to pick up my tail, but if I’d been a guy, I was pretty sure he’d have just told me to be careful out there.

After supper, Nate and I finally sat down and watched How to Steal a Million. It helped me take my mind off my unproductive day, but despite the perfect segue of the hero helping the heroine steal her father’s fake masterpiece, it hadn’t loosened Nate’s tongue about his brother’s relationship with the unsavory side of the art world. Or, come to think of it, prompted him to tell me whatever it was Randy had asked him if I “knew.”

But by Friday morning, things started looking up. Aunt Martha called before I left my apartment for work. “I found Lucille Horvak!”

“How? Where?” As it turned out, Aunt Martha had had the same idea about finding the gossipy housekeeper as I had, although her motives probably swayed more toward digging up dirt on Nana. And thanks to the connections Aunt Martha had cultivated during her globetrotting years, she’d managed to track down the since-married-and-widowed woman, who now went by the name Lucy Rice, to a retirement home in St. Louis County.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Aunt Martha concluded.

“What? Why?”

“You can’t go in there spouting you’re an FBI agent or Stella Jones’s granddaughter or she’ll never talk to you. She hated the woman.”

“How do you know that?”

“Stella fired her!”

Okay, she had a point.

Aunt Martha’s voice lowered to that conspiratorial tone that always made me a tad nervous. “We can pretend we’re assessing the place as a possible home for me.”

“I appreciate the offer, but look what pretending to house shop got us last time—a busted car door. Besides, my favorite great-aunt once told me honesty is the best policy.”

Aunt Martha snorted. “I believe what I said is the closer you stick to the truth, the less chance you’ll get caught in a lie.”

“Hmm.” Given Aunt Martha’s maxims, I sometimes wondered just what kind of assisting she used to do for her boss on all those business trips.

An hour later, I sat across from Lucille Horvak, aka Lucy Rice, in the empty dining room of New Life Retirement Home, minus Aunt Martha. Lucille eyed me over her cup of coffee. Her hands circling the cup were covered in age spots and fine lines. Her fingers, gnarled with arthritis, looked nothing like the ones I remembered replacing the book on Granddad’s shelf. Although after all these years, they wouldn’t resemble them, would they?

If she’d been in his office that night.

Her salt-and-pepper hair was cropped just below her ears. “You don’t look like I remember,” she said.

She was one up on me. I hadn’t remembered her at all, even though she’d cleaned at my grandparents’ house three mornings a week. “Could you tell me what you remember about the day my grandfather was murdered?”

Her gaze dropped to her coffee. “I didn’t work at their house that day. When I showed up the next morning, the police questioned me, then your grandmother fired me.”

Just like that? “Why?” Did Nana suspect Lucy of being involved somehow? Maybe tipping off the burglars about when the house would be empty? Supplying a photograph of the painting so it could be replaced with a forgery?

“She told her old biddies I was a lazy gossip. None of them wanted to hire me then.”

Hmm. Keeping up appearances was everything to Nana. She probably feared Lucy might let something untoward slip if she stayed on and was privy to investigators’ questions.

“She’d been setting me up for weeks,” Lucy went on. “She’d made irate comments about my work every time someone stopped by for tea, when the truth was, she couldn’t afford to pay me, and she was too proud to admit it.”

I found that hard to believe. Not the pride part, but Nana and Granddad had been very wealthy. Or so I’d always thought. “Did you tell the police?”

“Right, and give them a reason to think I had motive to steal the painting myself? Not likely.”

I fell silent, a confusion of emotions churning up my insides.

“I didn’t kill your grandfather, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Lucy said, pushing her untouched coffee aside. “The painting the thief stole wasn’t even real. Although I’m sure your grandmother didn’t mention that to her insurance company.”

My heart jumped to my throat, making my next question sound a little breathless. “How do you know that?”

Her lips squished from side to side as she retrieved the coffee mug and once again twisted it in her hands. “Because I’d already contemplated stealing it myself. For my retirement money.”

My mouth gaped. In my experience, only suspects with guilty consciences admitted to things they weren’t being accused of. Suspects with very guilty consciences.

She shrugged. “I figured I’d replace the painting with a photo reproduction and by the time they noticed the switch, I’d be long gone, but the joke was on me, because when I took a photo of it to an out-of-town dealer to find out what he’d give me, he told me it was a fake.”

“A fake?” My pulse rioted. Could I believe her? Or was this some elaborate ruse to hide her crime? Or a trick to get back at the old lady’s granddaughter? “And you think my grandmother knew?”

“Sure, I confronted her about it. Didn’t tell her how I knew, of course. She fired me on the spot.”

Ah. That I could see. “Did you tell anyone else what you knew?”

She shook her head.

“How about Petra Horvak?”

She smiled, clearly recognizing the name. “Yeah, I met her when we were both working in housekeeping at a hotel.”

“You weren’t related?”

“Not that we could trace. But it was the common last name that sparked our drumming up a friendship.” Lucy’s gaze drifted, her finger absently tapping her lips. “I think I did mention your grandfather’s murder to her. She was a talkative one, that one. Always asking lots of questions.”

That sounded like Petra, always looking for information to prove her thesis that anyone could be bought. I braced myself. “Did you tell her who you thought killed my grandfather?”

“No, how would I know?”

I scrutinized Lucy for a full thirty seconds and saw no signs of deception. Chances were, if she’d implicated Nana in swapping out the painting, Petra had automatically figured Nana had also arranged for it to be stolen for the insurance money.

Nana’s proclamation—I trust you will ensure the police don’t reopen the investigation—whispered through my mind, and the churning in my gut grew downright choppy.

What was Nana hiding?

Hours later, the question continued to haunt me as I slid into my black cocktail dress for the evening’s fundraising gala. I shoved it to the back of my mind to deal with tomorrow and put on my favorite dangly gold-and-rhinestone earrings. Harold sat on my dresser, eyeballing them with a curious glint in his eyes.

“Don’t even think about it, buster.”

His responding meow sounded like a who, me?

“Yeah, you.” I dumped the contents of my purse onto the bed and transferred the bare essentials into my black clutch. The gun didn’t fit. I studied the reflection of my clingy, knee-length dress in the mirror and contemplated pulling a Miss Congeniality, gun-strapped-to-the-thigh scenario. Nah. There’d be enough armed fellow FBI agents at the event to handle any problem that might arise.

I grabbed my ringing phone.

“The bad guys make any more plays for you?” Zoe asked.

“With Bulldozer Billy camped on my fire escape? They wouldn’t dare.” Billy and Tanner had tag-teamed keeping an eye on the place.

“So you haven’t seen any more guys following you in pickup trucks or anything else?”

“No.” Pete hadn’t even gotten the color of my assailant’s pickup truck right, when he put in the 911 call, and by the time we figured out his mistake—if that’s what it was—the assailant was long gone. Not that they’d been on my mind since my visit with Lucille Horvak, aka Lucy Rice.

“Then I suppose I can risk showing up at the gala, but don’t take it personally if I don’t get within twenty feet of you.”

I laughed aloud. “No problem. So you and Jax patched things up?”

“Yes,” she said with a smile in her voice. “How about you? Is Nate driving you tonight? I heard the two of you had a movie night last night.”

“Who told you we watched a movie?”

“Your Aunt Martha. She visited the art museum yesterday.”

Yesterday? As in before our movie night? Not to mention before we’d even made the plans.

“No, Nate’s not driving me. I need to drive myself. Nana asked me to pick up some last-minute donations on my way to the silent auction.”

Thankfully, handling details for the fundraising gala this past week had kept Nana too busy to chide me over the stalled case. I supposed that reprieve would end after the gala tonight.

“Are you sure that’s the only reason? Or would a handsome, dark-haired federal agent have something to do with it?”

“Zoe!”

“Just saying. He looked pretty shook up Wednesday night after that pickup truck took off your door.”

“Uh, yeah. Because a pickup took out my door!”

“You know what I mean. I may have been a tad hysterical, but I saw the way he squeezed your arm after you ripped into Pete.”

“Was there anything else you needed?” I asked.

Zoe laughed. “No, my work here is done.”

I clicked off the phone and stuffed it into my clutch, then gave Harold a rubdown. “You be good, and I’ll bring you home some caviar. Deal?”

Harold cocked his head.

“They’re fish eggs. You’ll like them.”

He pawed my hand as if to say, deal.

I hurried out to my newest company vehicle. This one, another sedan. An ancient, bare-bones one. I guess the powers-that-be decided the SUV only made me a bigger target. And that I’d already gone through my annual quota of vehicles. I punched the address Nana had given me into my GPS and set out.

As I wound through the shadowed streets of Soulard in St. Louis’s east end, it occurred to me the last-minute donation call might be a setup. My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Don’t be ridiculous. The donor had no way of knowing Nana would send me to pick it up.”

“Call Nana,” I said to my phone.

“Where are you?” Nana asked, forgoing preliminaries. “Mr. Bateman had to give up waiting for you and leave his donation with the babysitter.”

“So he knew it was me specifically coming?”

“Yes, of course. What happened?”

“I’m almost there. See you soon.” I turned onto Bateman’s street, my palms sweating. The area was known for its pub crawls and Mardi Gras, although the extent of my familiarity with the neighborhood was the farmers’ market—the oldest one west of the Mississippi.

Several houses from the address Nana had given me, I pulled to the curb and called Tanner. I filled him in on Nana’s request. “You think it’s a setup?”

“Give me a second, and I’ll run the address.”

Three minutes later, he came back on the line. “The address is legit. A business owner. A member of the MAC. Clean record.”

“No connection to Dmitri?”

“Not that I know of.”

Okay, that didn’t sound as reassuring as it should have.

“If you can wait, I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“That’s okay. Nana won’t be happy if I’m late for the gala.” I did a visual scan of the area. The blue flicker of TV screens lit the windows of most of the nearby houses, including the one I wanted. I climbed out of the car and walked to the house.

A freckle-faced teenager with spiky hair and a couple of nose rings answered the doorbell. “You here for the clock?”

“Uh, is it the silent auction donation?”

She shoved a toaster-sized cardboard box into my arms with a nod, and at the sound of a deep male voice, turned her attention back to the TV in the corner.

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing,” she said, her eyes still glued to the heartthrob on the screen as she shut the door in my face.

“Okay then. Lots of worrying for nothing.” I strode back to my car and opened the trunk. But as I set the donation inside, the rhythmic tick tock kicked my heart into a not-so-rhythmic frenzy.

I whipped out my phone. “Tanner, it’s ticking. She said it was a clock, but what if it’s a bomb?”

“Bateman owns an antique store. It’s probably fine.”

“Or maybe that’s just what Dmitri wants us to think.” An SUV pulled up behind me, and I jumped to the side of the car to put as much of it between me and the SUV as I could manage.

“Serene . . . uh.” Tanner’s gaze met mine through his windshield, and he waggled his phone at me teasingly.

“You could have warned me it was you!” I yelled over the roaring in my ears, then clicked off the phone.

Tanner joined me behind my car, a dimple winking in his cheek. “I could get used to seeing you in dresses.”

The blood pulsing past my ears slowed to a dull roar. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” He was wearing a black tux and looked ten times better than any James Bond actor ever. “You look nice too,” I conceded.

The only hint he’d caught on to the huge understatement was a slight deepening of his dimples. He peered into the trunk. “The bomb squad is on its way.”

“Are you sure that’s necessary? Nana will kill me if I’m late for the gala.”

“Better her than Dmitri.” Tanner closed the trunk lid and took my keys.

I groaned.

“It’s no problem.” He steered me away from the vehicle. “I’ll drive you, and we’ll leave the package with Douglas. If it’s safe, he’ll deliver it to the MAC.”

“I’m probably being paranoid.”

“Trust me. Benton would rather you be paranoid than lose you . . . or another vehicle.”

Douglas pulled up a minute later, and Tanner handed him the keys. “The clock is in the trunk.”

By the time we arrived at the gala, most of the guests were already there, and with the backdrop of the MAC’s opulent ballroom, it had all the ambience of the nineteenth-century painter Gaston La Touche’s The Ball. Tanner strode by my side through the large foyer and then urged me into the ballroom ahead of him. His light touch sent a tingle down my spine—a sensation that morphed into a different kind of tingle at the attention our appearance seemed to generate.

Numerous colleagues were congregated around the punch bowl, and one by one their gazes snapped our way, followed by fevered whispering. Aunt Martha stood with Nate beside an easel featuring one of the silent auction items. She cast me a sour look, but that didn’t bother me as much as Nate’s frown. What must he think of me—showing up with Tanner after I declined his offer of a ride with the lame picking up donations excuse?

Mom and Dad crossed the dance floor toward us. Dad thrust out his hand to Tanner. “Good to see you.”

Mom beamed at me with a knowing smile.

I shifted uncomfortably. Clearly she thought I’d drunk her find-a-man-and-get-married Kool-Aid. Maybe I shouldn’t have whitewashed the details of my recent “collisions.” Then she wouldn’t be so pleased to see me with a fellow agent. Not that I was with him.

She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You two make a handsome couple.”

Tanner’s dimple winked.

At least he didn’t embarrass me by busting a gut laughing. I glimpsed Nana instructing one of the waiters. “Excuse me,” I said to Mom, Dad, and Tanner. “I need to speak to Nana about the donation she was expecting.” I headed her way, greeting guests as I passed.

Aunt Martha and Nate intercepted me before I reached Nana. Aunt Martha wore a stylish lavender dress suit with a floral blouse that made her look fifteen years younger. Nate wore a tuxedo and looked like a movie star walking the red carpet. Namely, Bradley Cooper.

“You look stunning,” Nate said.

“Thank you. You clean up pretty nice yourself.” I bit my lip. Oh man, was I flirting? His wide smile did funny things to my tummy.

Nana materialized at my side. “There you are. Where’s the clock?”

“It’s coming. I had a bit of a concern about the way it was tick—uh, working, and asked an expert to have a quick look at it before we set it out.”

Aunt Martha’s eyes flared as if she’d guessed what the concern might be. Not surprising since she’d had a front-row seat to my pickup truck encounter. Even Nate seemed to sense I was sugarcoating, if his furrowed brow was anything to go by.

Nana let out an unladylike snort. “Russell would’ve ensured it was working to perfection before handing it over.”

I didn’t doubt it. The question was to whose perfection. “Then I’m sure my friend will arrive with it in no time.”

The music swelled, and Nate extended a hand. “Care to dance?”

I must’ve nodded, because he swept me onto the dance floor before Nana could say anything more. “Thanks for the rescue,” I whispered. Oh, wow, did he ever smell good—a spicy, masculine, forest-like scent.

His fingers splayed across my back and drew me a fraction of an inch closer. “I suspect I wasn’t the first rescue of the evening. What happened with the clock?”

“I was probably being paranoid, but between the collisions and drive-by shooting and—”

“Wait. Collisions? There’s been more than one?”

I let out a humorless laugh. “Aunt Martha didn’t mention it? A guy in a black pickup took off my door. So needless to say, when I heard the ticking, I had a sudden vision of a bomb.”

He stiffened. “So I take it your expert friend is a bomb specialist?”

I grinned. “You’re quick.”

His grip on my hand tightened. “Is that why you arrived with Tanner?”

“Yes.”

“And these”—his voice seemed to get squeezed off. He cleared his throat—“these incidents, are they all connected to the art thefts you’re investigating?”

My mind did a sort of double take. Were they? We’d assumed the threat left scrawled on a restaurant napkin on my door had been courtesy of one of Dmitri’s goons. And we knew the Lexus that followed me belonged to one of his companies, although maybe it really was stolen. After all, two of my suspects in Gladys’s case—Ted and Lucas—were connected to the pawnshop. Not to mention, the Lexus driver had picked up my tail outside Capone’s—the suspected forger supplying the thief. And the pickup driver targeted me after I met with Pete—another suspect in the case. Maybe the scares were meant to derail my investigation.