“Some of the best moments in life are the ones you can’t tell anyone about.”
Darius Masoud
The expression on Sterling Gray’s face when Anna turned around and he realized he held a gun on a T. rex was almost funnier than the T. rex herself.
The T. rex said something unintelligible behind the sound of the pump, and then took a step toward Sterling.
He raised his gun a little higher and took a step back at the same moment Shane stepped into the hallway behind him. I held my hand up and said calmly, “Sterling, the dinosaur is going to remove the costume so she can speak. Please lower your gun.”
“She?” he asked, still twitchy and tense.
“Mr. Gray, please do as my partner asks. We both have weapons, and the T. rex,” Shane had to work to keep her voice from breaking, “is unarmed … as it were.”
I was less successful, and a chuckle escaped before I could catch it, which set Shane off into sputtering laughter. She had to lower her gun and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath, and that was what finally got to Sterling.
He lowered his gun and tried for stern, but couldn’t quite remove all the suppressed laughter from his voice. “What the hell is a dinosaur doing in my house?”
Anna mumbled something unintelligible again, and I gestured for her to unzip her suit.
She shut the pump off, unzipped the front of the suit, and her black balaclava’d face finally emerged. “Hot,” she gasped, ripping the balaclava off to reveal her beautiful face covered with a sheen of sweat.
Sterling couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “You! But I just left you at the club.”
Anna glared at him. “You left Colette behind at the club? What’d you do, slip out the back and leave her with the bill? Where’d you learn your manners, a kennel?” she spat angrily.
“You’re not Colette,” Sterling said uncertainly. Granted it was dark in the hallway, but I’d been able to tell the sisters apart within an instant of meeting Colette.
Anna sighed and her anger dissipated. “I’m not. Please tell me she’s fine.”
“She’s fine. I told her that something didn’t agree with my stomach, but that I’d be back.” Sterling seemed to lose his edge as the discussion turned to such inanities. “You’re her sister,” he finally said.
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in my house?”
She compressed her lips together for a moment, then finally spoke through clenched teeth. “Returning something. Are the police really on their way?”
“No, he didn’t call them,” I said calmly. “He must have installed a silent alarm on the panic room door that tripped and alerted him by cell phone.”
“Why are you two here?” she said, including Shane in her questioning look.
“Stakeout,” Shane said.
Anna grimaced. “I hate stakeouts.”
Shane chuckled. “I don’t know, Darius plays a pretty mean trivia game.”
Anna leveled her surprised gaze at me until Sterling interrupted. “I really will call the cops if someone doesn’t tell me what the hell is going on.”
Anna sighed and pushed the button somewhere in the bookshelf to open the door. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
She stepped out of her T. rex costume as she walked, revealing a skin-tight body suit that appealed to every aesthetic sensibility in my body, then she bunched up the costume and shoved it into the tube she wore in a harness on her back. We filed into the small room behind her, and Sterling flipped on the light.
His eyes went immediately to the painting on the wall, as did mine. Shane was busy looking around the room.
“What the hell …?” His voice trailed off, and he looked to Anna for an explanation.
“It was behind the painting of the sisters in the same frame. I didn’t know about it, but your dad did. He’s the one who commissioned its theft.”
“The original theft,” I added for clarification, “thirty years ago from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The person he charged with stealing it for him was Anna’s and Colette’s aunt, because her sister, their mother, had painted an exceptionally good copy of a very valuable original.”
“My aunt substituted the copy, though, and hid it behind a painting she and her sister had done of each other. Your dad refused to give that one back to my aunt, and their Cuban Missile Crisis-level stalemate lasted almost thirty years.”
“You mean because they each had something on the other, so no one could force the other’s hand?”
“Exactly.” Anna said. “Then my aunt died and we found a letter she’d written to us asking us to get the painting back for our mom, so we did. We just didn’t know about the one behind it. And since that’s the painting your dad actually wants, I decided to put it back.”
“In a T. rex costume,” Sterling deadpanned.
I smirked, Shane giggled, and Anna just shrugged. “As one does,” she said.
Sterling put his gun away in a drawer in the desk, then turned back to regard the painting on the wall.
“It isn’t a very nice painting, is it,” he said.
“Nope. It’s a good copy though.”
Sterling sighed and looked at Anna. “I presume you have proof of my dad’s part in the theft of this good copy?”
She nodded. “I do. I really don’t want your dad to know that we know about his involvement in, well, let me just say, something the police in Boston are still investigating, so I’m inclined to just tuck all of this away somewhere and forget about it.”
“Which you would do if all the digital recordings from last week and tonight managed to disappear?”
Anna glared at him through narrowed eyes. “You would really have let your dad plaster my sister’s naked butt all over Chicago?”
He sighed and rubbed his temples. “I didn’t know about that until after he threatened her. That recording will obviously go away too.”
“It better,” she said menacingly. This fierce woman in a black cat suit was the sexiest, most fearless person I’d ever met.
Anna approached Sterling and stood with her hands on her hips. “Sterling Gray, my sister likes you.”
He scoffed. “Despite her criminal tendencies, I like her too.”
I laughed in uncomfortable awareness of the similarities between myself and Sterling Gray. He scowled at me, but Anna grinned, and my heart beat a little faster.
“So,” she said, returning her attention to Sterling, “I’m inclined to pretend nothing ever happened between my aunt and your dad if you and your dad are willing to forget there was ever a painting of two sisters hanging in this room.”
He looked up at the fake Manet on the wall, which, I had to admit, looked pretty great in the fancy gold frame, and then held out his hand to Anna. “Deal.” She shook it without hesitation.
“Shall I help you lose the files?” I asked Sterling.
He scowled at me then waved a hand toward the computer. “Have at it.” Then to Anna, he said, “I’ll have the thumb drive with my naked ass sent to your sister.”
“Or,” she said with a cheeky smile, “you can take her to a nice dinner and give it to her in person.”
He checked his watch. “Speaking of, it’s time for you people to leave so I can get back to my date.”
I was finishing up the file erasure as Anna walked out of the panic room with Sterling. “Do you ever go dancing with the ballerina down the hall?” she asked him.
“The naked one?” he answered. “But … it’s a statue.”
“Of course she’s a statue. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t dance …”
Their voices trailed off, and Shane turned to me with a laugh. “That woman is an absolute delight.”
“She’s the most remarkable person I’ve ever met,” I said.