“We’ll stick with this for now. Did he do anything besides paint? Like eat, sleep?”
“Says the woman at her command center long after the workday is done.”
Since she didn’t have a comeback for that one, she ignored the comment.
“He’s got old, young, male, female. A lot of detail. This one here?Study of a Young Woman? It’s similar to the other. The way the head’s turned, a head scarf thing. Different model. Younger. Jesus.”
Now she scrubbed her hands over her face. “I don’t want to think about him going after a kid.”
As he felt the same, Roarke stepped behind her, rubbed at the tension in her shoulders.
“If he hits again before we find him, and if he sticks with this artist, I’ll have the cheat sheet. I’ll recognize the replication, for what that’s worth.”
She leaned back into his hands. “If he kills again, and sticks this way, there’s a connection to this artist. Vermeer. Maybe he’s delusional and thinks he’s Vermeer reborn. Or just obsessively admires the portraits. And maybe… he teaches or studies this art and artist. I can work with that.”
She looked over her shoulder. “Are any of these in New York?”
He reached over, hit expand on several. “These, at the Met, the Frick.”
“I don’t know what’s weirder, that I knew you’d know that or that you know that. But I can check there, see if anyone’s shown them unusual interest, or claimed ownership, something like that.”
Now she swiveled in the chair to face him. “Did you ever steal one of his?”
“Well, you could say I reacquired one.”
“You’ve got one here?” Reaching up, she pulled at her hair. “One of these?”
“I don’t, no. I might have, but at that time money trumped art collecting for me.” Amused, he smoothed down her hair. “It was stolen before I was born, from a museum in Boston. I happened to, as I said, reacquire it from a private collection in Dublin.”
“You stole it from the thief?”
“I reacquired it from a descendant of the thief, as this was roughly a half century after the original theft.” Nudging her over a bit, he called up the painting in question.
“The Concert. Back in 1990, a group of thieves, disguised as coppers, bagged thirteen paintings from the museum in Boston—where the patron had acquired this particular work for only five thousand at a Paris auction.”
“So it wasn’t worth much.”
“Darling Eve, by the time I reacquired it,The Concertwas valued at nearly four hundred million, and considered one of the most valuable unrecovered works.”
“For that?”
“It’s fascinating—the light, shadows, details. The details in the two paintings on the wall in the scene, the landscape painted on the lid of the harpsichord.”
He paused, and she imagined him imagining holding the painting in his hands, studying that light, those shadows, those details.
“In any case,” he continued, “I arranged for its discovery and return, for a tidy finder’s fee.”
“What’s tidy in your world?”
“As I recall, we negotiated and finalized at thirty-five million.”
“That’s pretty fucking tidy, Ace.”
Bending down, he kissed the top of her head. “It helped build this house. So, in a serendipitous way, it’s why we’re both here.”
“So we’re both here because a bunch of guys pretending to be cops stole a bunch of paintings in Boston last century?”
“And see how well that worked out? And since it did, and we are…” He pulled her up out of the chair. “Save data, close operations.”
