Still As Death (24 page)

“I talked to the family,” Ellie said suddenly, confusing him. “They let me look around in her room. I found a textbook.”

“What?”

“Luz Ramirez. A textbook. College chemistry.”

“Oh.” For a second he thought she’d been talking about Willem Keane’s family. Willem Keane didn’t have any family. Tad Moran had already told them that. There was a brother in L.A. whom he offered to notify, but apparently they’d been estranged for years.

Watching Tad Moran’s face when he heard the news, though, Quinn had decided that maybe this guy was as close to family as
Keane had gotten. Moran said he’d worked for him for more than twenty years, and he had the look that Quinn knew so well from years of being the one to knock on the next of kin’s door, pure, disbelieving grief, the kind that made you fall down, the kind that made you lose control of your bodily functions, the kind that would eventually, mercifully, wipe all memory of those first few minutes of knowing from your brain.

Ellie went on in the way she had of stringing a new sentence on the end of the old one. “Which is strange, because she wasn’t in college. She worked at this salon and she hung around with her friends, but the family told me she definitely wasn’t in college. So I couldn’t figure out why she would have something like this. I talked to the girls at the salon where she worked. Most of them didn’t have much to offer, but one of the hair stylists, who’s also from El Salvador, she told me that Luz told her she was in love. She told her his name was Jason and he was a ‘college boy.’ She met him when he came in to get his hair cut.”

Quinn just listened, sensing she didn’t want him to talk.

“Remember that outfit she was wearing? We both thought it looked like something you’d wear to a job interview? Well, I was thinking that maybe it was the kind of thing someone like Luz might wear on a date with a guy who she saw as different from the boys in her neighborhood. A guy she really liked.”

Quinn was impressed. “Okay,” he said. “So what do we do next?”

“I was thinking I could call all the colleges in town, ask to speak to someone in the Chemistry Department, find out if they have any students named Jason. What do you think?”

“I think that’s pretty good,” he said. “I think you’ve got it.”

She watched as the gurney was wheeled into the elevator and the doors closed. They were silent for a few minutes. “If you don’t want to work with me anymore,” she said finally, “you could tell Havrilek that we don’t get along. I bet he’d transfer me.”

“Do you not want to work with me anymore?”

She brushed a piece of slightly greasy hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind an ear, looking down at the ground as though she was afraid of him. “No, but it just seems like …”

“Like I have a problem with you?”

She nodded.

He thought for a minute, trying to figure out how to get out of telling her the truth. “I don’t. It’s me, so you shouldn’t worry. No, I want to work with you, and I’m sorry if I’ve been short with you. I have a lot on my mind right now.” He reached for the easy, the uncomplicated explanation. “You may have heard about my wife.” Her quick glance up at him told him that she had.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Thanks.” He looked across the gallery. “I’m going to need your help on this now,” he said. “This is getting messy. The museum wasn’t open to the public today. Unless he let his murderer in or someone was really freaking smart about breaking in, it was someone who had access to the building.”

“Murderer?”

“He didn’t jump. There were contusions on his face. Someone hit him before he went over, and there are marks on the banister upstairs that indicate there was a struggle. He was on the fourth floor, outside the gallery where Jeanne Ortiz’s show will be.”

“Was she here?”

He nodded. “All day. She said she didn’t hear anything. She’d been working in the gallery and went for a walk around the museum at some point, to clear her head, she said. She seemed pretty nervous to me.” In fact, she’d seemed more than nervous. She’d seemed so edgy that Quinn was afraid she might jump over the balcony herself.

“Who else was here?”

“Everyone. Tad Moran, Fred Kauffman, Denny Keefe.”

“Sweeney St. George? Was she here earlier?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t look at Ellie. She knew he and Sweeney had been together when they found the body. Had she added a little
something, a little emphasis, to Sweeney’s name, or was he just being paranoid?

“But he could have let someone in, couldn’t he?”

He was tired, but there was so much to be done now. He’d have to call Patience and see if she could stay. Luckily, she didn’t seem to mind. He forced his mind back to the matter at hand. “It’ll be on the tapes anyway,” he said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

They took them back to headquarters and viewed them in one of the conference rooms. Ellie went to get sandwiches for dinner, and he ate his BLT while they watched the static shots of the front entrance to the museum. The tapes confirmed the times that all of the museum employees claimed to have arrived that morning. Because the museum was closed, there was a long stretch of inactivity between ten—when Keane himself had been the last to arrive—and one-thirty, when Fred Kauffman had gone out for a sandwich and then come back an hour later. Keane himself had gone out around two and returned holding a paper cup of coffee.

He and Sweeney had found Keane’s body at six, so it was the late afternoon they were interested in. Ellie fast-forwarded the tapes, both of them watching for any action.

“Wait. Stop,” Quinn said. “Look at that. Who’s that?”

She rewound back to the point where a figure appeared at the main entrance to the museum. It was a man, dressed in a shirt, tie, and sports coat, and carrying a newspaper in one hand and a tote bag in the other.

“I think it’s Cyrus Hutchinson,” Ellie said. “I Googled him before I called him about the whiskey, and there were some pictures of him online. From charity events, that kind of thing.” They watched as he slowly climbed the steps to the museum and tried the front door, then appeared to wave at someone on the other side of the glass.

“He must be calling one of the security guards to open the door,” Ellie said. Sure enough, the door opened, and Quinn saw Denny
Keefe in the corner of the television screen before they both stepped out of frame.

“Keane must have been expecting him. I don’t think they would have let him in otherwise,” Quinn said. “Let’s see when he leaves.”

They watched for another few seconds. But instead of seeing Hutchinson leave through the main entrance, they saw what looked like a teenage boy wearing a backpack approach the camera, try the door as Hutchinson had, then cup his hands around his face and peer through the window. This time, though, they saw Keefe come to the door, speak to the boy for a few minutes, then close it again.

“He’s not letting him in,” Quinn said. “Do you know who that is?”

“Uh-uh,” Ellie said, watching as the boy stood in front of the door, waiting for something. After a couple of minutes, the door opened again and the boy spoke to Keefe, gesturing with his hands as though he was trying to explain something. Finally the door was pushed open and the boy stepped in. “They let him in,” she said.

Nothing happened for the next hour. “Okay,” Quinn said, checking the time stamp. “It’s now five-thirty. We found him at six and neither one of them has left yet. When did they leave?”

His question was answered when they saw Hutchinson walk out through the front door at five forty-five and the boy come out a few minutes later. After that, no one arrived or left until six-ten, when a group of uniformed police arrived in response to Quinn’s call. A few minutes later, Ellie herself came running up the steps and was let in by the uniformed cop at the door.

Quinn stopped the tape. “Ellie, tell Johnny to locate Cyrus Hutchinson. I want to talk to him as soon as we’ve got him. And I want to talk to whoever we can get from the museum. I want to know who that kid is. Get him going on that, and then we can see what else is on the tapes.”

She ducked out for a minute and came back as he was getting the first of the tapes from the inside of the museum loaded in. “He’s on it,” she said.

There wasn’t much of interest on the gallery tapes. They
watched Jeanne Ortiz come into the fourth-floor gallery where her show was going up and spend a few minutes measuring walls, then go out again.

“There’s not going to be anything,” Quinn said. “They were all over in their offices. But we should watch just to make sure.” The cameras swept the rooms at sixty-second intervals, switching back and forth between the galleries.

Ellie fast-forwarded and stopped the tape as two figures came into view in the third-floor galleries.

Quinn sat up. “Oh,” he said. “That’s me and Sweeney. We … I mean, she showed me her exhibition. That was before …” He was silenced by the sight of the two of them, standing in the gallery and talking. He watched himself turn to look at her, his head slightly inclined toward hers. They were standing much closer than he remembered.

It was strange, watching himself on camera. He saw that he stooped slightly. Had he always done that? He wasn’t sure. Next to Sweeney, he didn’t seem as tall as he’d always thought he was, but perhaps it was just that she was taller than most women. The camera seemed to follow them as it swept across the room, and he watched as they stood together, their shoulders nearly touching, his body leaning toward her. Their bodies were like letters, two inverted V’s, forming an M. He wanted to lean forward and stop the tape, but he couldn’t, and he and Ellie watched for an agonizing thirty seconds before the camera swept away and switched to one of the other galleries. They were silent as they watched the empty rooms. Quinn felt as though she must be able to hear his heart beating out of his chest.

When it finally ended, Quinn leaned forward and ejected the tape.

He felt like he should say something, but he didn’t know what it would be and so he just silently turned off the television.

“I’ll go check on Johnny,” Ellie said and left him alone.

“THAT FRIEND OF MINE, the one in London? He said he might have something for your cop,” Ian said, covering his wheat toast with the marmalade he bought at a special shop on Beacon Hill. “He said he heard a rumor about the chest.”

Sweeney looked up from her own breakfast, toast fingers that she was enthusiastically dipping into a soft-boiled egg. She registered that he’d said, “your cop,” and looked up. “What’d he say? Do you want to tell Quinn?”

It had become their little Sunday ritual, the papers and their own particular favorite breakfasts at the dining room table. Ian liked listening to what he called “Sunday morning music”: Bach, very loud, making Sweeney’s apartment feel a little like a church. This Sunday, she had turned to the ritual to try to enforce a sense of normalcy. But things were far from normal. Willem was dead.

“You can tell him,” Ian said a little too casually. “This fellow said that he heard of a very rich Japanese collector who’s obsessed with Egyptian antiquities and made it known that he would pay top dollar for any items that became available.”

“In other words, items stolen from other people’s collections.”

“Right.”

“So who might have carried out the theft?”

“Well, he was saying that he’d heard, through the grapevine, that it was the Irish mob in Boston that carried out the 1979 job. They did it on behalf of the IRA, which needed money for guns, and it was planned and executed by guys connected with a gang in Northern Ireland who had carried out some other big art thefts. He mentioned the name Naki Haruhito. I don’t know if that’ll mean anything to him, but that’s all I was able to get.”

Sweeney got up to get a piece of paper from the pad next to the phone. “Haruhito with a ‘u’?” she asked, writing it down.

“Yes, that’s right.” He popped the last piece of toast into his mouth. “What are you up to today?”

“I said I’d go to this rally,” she said. “I have to talk to this woman who’s visiting, and Jeanne really wants me to go too. She’s trying to get me to be the faculty adviser to the women’s group. They’re called the WAWAs and she thinks it would be a good thing to have someone younger. I don’t know. How about you?”

“I guess I’ll go to the office.” He seemed annoyed suddenly, and Sweeney watched as he stood up and took his dishes into the kitchen.

When he came back, she reached out to touch his hand. “Was there something you wanted to do? Because I don’t have to go to this thing.” He looked up to meet her eyes, then looked down at her hand as though he wasn’t sure he wanted it there.

Ever since her lunch with Aggie Williams, there had been a layer of chill between her and Ian. She’d been furious about him telling his partners they were coming back to London, and instead of apologizing, he’d asked her what she wanted him to do. “I have to go back, Sweeney. I’m going back. And if you’re not going with me, I need you to tell me.” He’d seemed tired lately, and she’d felt tired staring at him. She’d finally told him she just needed more time.

And then Willem had been murdered. She’d tried to explain how it had happened that she and Quinn had found the body, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and he acted as though he didn’t want anything to do with any of it, with the investigation into
Willem and Olga’s murders, with Quinn, with the museum. “No, you go. I have things to do at the office, anyway. You remember about the dinner Tuesday night, right?”

“With Peter and Lillie?” Ian’s partner and his wife were in town, and they were having dinner at some hot new restaurant that Ian had been excited about getting a reservation at for weeks. “It’s on my calendar.”

“Good. Well, I’m going to have a wash and get going. I’ll see you tonight.” He didn’t kiss her good-bye.

“The thing with the guy in London,” Sweeney said as he left the room. “You think this guy really knows what he’s talking about?”

“Who knows? There’s not much honor among thieves.”

“Okay,” she said, trying to read his stony face. “I’ll tell him.”

On the way over to the rally, she watched the hordes of students walking around the yard wearing almost nothing against the heat. Maybe it was Willem’s death, but they seemed disgustingly carefree to Sweeney, as though they were on vacation. They weren’t really here to learn. They were here to say they had learned something, so they could get high-paying jobs and so they could say their own children were going to an Ivy League school and so forth and so on. If she really thought about it, only about two percent of the students she’d had over the past few years really cared about what she had to teach them.