As soon as Remi discovered the sales catalog including Pestilence by Geert Janssens, she called Daniel.
“Is that Interpol agent with you?”
“Torsson? Yeah, he’s here.”
“I discovered Pestilence was sold forty years ago. We need to track down who has it now and we need his legal authority to do that. If I make the call, they’ll ignore me.”
That’s why I need to be officially with the FBI. They’re going to have to listen to me if they want my help next time.
“I’ll put him on,” Daniel said.
She heard the phone being passed to the Interpol agent. Before he could even say hello, Remi poured out all the information she had learned. Sensing her urgency, all Torsson said was, “I’ll get on it,” and handed the phone back to Daniel.
“Good job, Remi. I knew I was right in getting you on board,” the FBI agent said.
Remi smiled. “I hope Torsson can trace that painting to its present owner. Whoever it is will be on the killer’s hit list.”
“Our Swedish friend looks pretty competent to me. You eaten yet?” Daniel asked.
“No. Now that you mention it, I’m hungry. Have you eaten?”
“Yeah, we went to McDonald’s an hour ago.”
Remi stared at the phone. “McDonald’s.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re in one of the culinary capitols of the world and you went to McDonald’s.”
“They don’t have Wendy’s here.”
Remi rubbed her temples. This man was going to be the death of her.
“I’m going to go get some food,” she said. “Actual food.”
“Righto. When I did a search for McDonald’s I noticed one right next to the Louvre. You can get there in five minutes.”
“Goodbye, Daniel.”
She hung up.
* * *
Daniel shrugged. Remi seemed to be in a bad mood for some reason. Perhaps it was the jetlag.
As Torsson got on the phone to track down the lead, Daniel looked around the back room of Pierre Lafontaine’s art gallery once again, not at the sad bloody scene in the bathroom down the hall, but here where the confrontation no doubt had taken place.
The worktable was strewn with tools, bits of canvas, and a few wrapped paintings. Lafontaine had been a bit messy. Only the end of the table was kept clear. Just enough room for a mid-sized painting like the one missing from Dyson’s mansion. A spot lamp focused a soft light on the spot.
So Lafontaine had been standing here studying the painting when the murderer had clanked in and chased him into the bathroom.
Looked pretty straightforward, except for the motive. Nothing else appeared to have been stolen. He saw no missing spaces on the walls, and the bookshelf on the far wall was crammed to overflowing with volumes.
Daniel walked to the front room. The shutters in front had been brought down and a lone light shone, dimly illuminating the numerous Impressionist paintings adorning the walls. A female police officer stood there. Through an open doorway to the side, he could hear a faint sobbing.
“Is that assistant ready to talk?” he asked.
“Yes,” the officer said in passable English. “And she speaks your language.”
That came out almost as an accusation. Daniel shrugged. He didn’t have time for any European attitude. Guillaume Blanchet, the assistant working in the front room, was still in the hospital. He had made his statement to the police and had nothing really to say other than a man in armor had walked into the gallery and conked him over the head.
Blanchet was suffering from a bad concussion and couldn’t be questioned at length, but fortunately there had been another assistant on the scene, a woman named Béatrice Lavigne who had been upstairs in a workshop that was used for restoring artworks. The room was accessed from the back room through a door that happened to be hidden from view by a large canvas standing in the middle of the room showing a Napoleonic battle scene. The killer had apparently not realized the door to the upstairs was there, which was probably why Lavigne hadn’t been assaulted like her boss and coworker.
Now it was time to question her.
He stepped through the doorway with the female officer and into a small viewing room. A few plush chairs in imitation Louis XIV style were arrayed in front of a blank wall with a strip of lighting above. Here paintings could be hung and put on various strengths and angles of lighting so potential buyers could inspect the work better.
Béatrice Lavigne sat on one of the chairs, wiping at her eyes and snuffling. She looked up when they came in, eyes going wide.
Fear? Guilt? Daniel wasn’t sure. A lot of people acted nervous around the police, especially at a crime scene. That didn’t mean they were guilty of anything.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
“Y-yes.”
“Tell me what happened, right from the beginning.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t much to tell,” the young woman said in good English with traces of a posh English accent. Daniel figured she had studied for a time in London or Oxford. “I was upstairs restoring the gilt on an eighteenth-century frame. I heard some screaming downstairs and rushed down, thinking we were being robbed. I rushed down to the bottom of the stairs and suddenly got frightened, so I stopped.”
“Then what happened?” Daniel asked gently as she wiped her eyes, trembling too much to continue. His first instinct was that she wasn’t the killer and wasn’t involved, but he suspended judgement until he heard more.
“I listened at the door for a moment and didn’t hear anything except a strange metal clanking. I now know it was that insane man in armor. At the time I didn’t know, and I listened until the clanking faded away. Then I plucked up the courage to open the door.”
Béatrice Lavigne shuddered, wiped her eyes, and pulled herself together enough to continue.
“At first I didn’t see anything amiss. Then I noticed Monsieur Lafontaine’s painting was gone.”
“What painting was that?” Daniel asked, deciding to play dumb. It was best when interrogating people to let them supply as much of the information as possible. They could reveal a lot that way.
“A Flemish painting from the 17th century. War by Jan Mertens. He had recently acquired it and was obsessed with its study. He gave up all other work. Guillaume and I had to work extra hours.” Suddenly her eyes widened in realization. “Did the intruder steal it?”
“Yes,” Daniel admitted. “Why did you assume that?”
Lavigne wiped her brow. “Monsieur Lafontaine acted very protective of it. He gave us strict instructions not to tell anyone he had purchased it, and not to let anyone in the back room where it might be seen. He also wanted to find the other three in the set, but he didn’t want us researching it. That was odd, since he does most of his research while he oversees the buying and selling and any major restorations. He was so secretive about these paintings, which was unusual for him. We didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. It isn’t all that valuable.”
“It’s valuable to whoever came in here.”
The gallery assistant nodded sadly. “When I noticed the painting was gone from its spot, I entered the room further and I saw the broken door to the bathroom. I went there and I … I … ”
Béatrice Lavigne put her face in her hands and wept. Daniel, pitying her, rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Sorry to make you go through all that. Did your boss ever mention an American collector named Montgomery Dyson?”
After a moment to pull herself together, she replied, “No. But he worked with many people over the years.”
“Never mind that for now. It appears the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were all painted by different artists?”
The young woman nodded.
“Did Monsieur Lafontaine have a database or library on these painters?”
Lavigne gestured to the back room. “The bookshelf has several volumes, and his computer has many documents. There is no one book on any of the painters. They were all minor. But he has pieced together information over the years from a number of sources.”
“Do you have the password to his computer?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on. That gives me an idea.”
Daniel got back on the phone and called Remi.
“Hey Remi, where are you now?”
“Going to lunch at a proper restaurant.” Why did she stress those last two words? “I’ve found all I can find at the Louvre.”
“Eat quick and get over here,” Daniel said. “We might just have found a gold mine of info.”
“I’ll order something to go.”
“You can order to go in France?”
“You can if you’re hunting a murderer.”
She hung up. Daniel chuckled, knowing she’d be here as fast as the Parisian taxis could carry her.
And she’d come up with some good information too.
They needed it. It looked like their killer was still on the hunt.