“A what?”
“A magpie. ‘Oh, look at that! So shiny, so bright and beautiful. I want that. I want it for my nest even if I have to lose what I already have.’”
“What he already has? He gets tired of it, bored with it. Needs the new. The next piece of art that belongs to someone else, the next shiny jewel. For women, the new again, the younger.”
“Yes. A constant need to possess. I doubt he was ever fully happy for any length of time. He couldn’t love, not deeply, not for the long term. But he could, and did, desire.”
“The vic wasn’t like that. One marriage, and solid. The work they’d done so far on Barrister House makes it more… homey? More like a family lives there.”
Eve set the tea aside, pushed up. She needed to move. “The thief knew about the vault. They didn’t just stumble on it.”
“No.”
“The family, the staff—and they come off devoted and pretty damn straight—all state they told no one outside the lawyer—and that was only a few days before the break-in. I have a hard time swallowing that, but they’re all sticking. But there’s Henry.”
She made herself sit again. “By all accounts he’d gone into decline, mentally, physically, too, but it’s the mental deterioration that applies.He’d gotten forgetful. The last wife told me he let her know he had something important put away for her.”
“They stayed on good terms?”
“Good enough—I’ll come back to that. They talked now and again, and he told her this not long before he died. He’d started to mix things up—like calling his daughter-in-law by the name of one of his exes. Mixing up his granddaughters’ names, forgetting what he did, where he put things.”
Eve leaned forward. “And during this period, he had a houseguest. A much younger blonde, someone he met when she was about twenty. Someone his fourth and final wife said was her last straw.”
“I see. Has this woman been involved with him in the intervening years?”
“According to the staff, she’d been an overnight guest a time or two over those years. Slept with him. This last time, she had her own, adjoining room. They spent some time in his office when she wasn’t out shopping on what’s going to prove to be his credit.”
“I see. You think he showed this woman the vault.”
“He never told his family—so they say. If I hold that as true, would he have told this woman?”
Taking a moment, Mira sipped more tea. “I’d like to look at his medical records, and I’ll see if I can arrange that. If he was suffering from cognitive decline, sundowning, the early stages of dementia? It’s certainly possible. With his need to possess, he might have shown this woman as a way of keeping her, at least impressing her.”
“But she didn’t stay.”
“She may have promised to come back. Just needed to tie some things up, arrange the move. And he may have forgotten he showed her in the meantime. I’ll push on those medical records.”
“Let me move to the thief. You read the report. It all went smooth, until.”
“Which tells me completing the job—and it was a job or else why not load up, why take only the most priceless and most recognizable pieces? Completing it took priority over a human life. Ruthless, self-preservation above all, mission complete.”
“Not just panic.”
“Panic, yes. That may have played a part, but—”
“They only had to get away from a man who almost certainly looked weak, sick, maybe even a little dopey from cold meds.”
“According to the autopsy, he would have been all of that, and,” Mira added, “not much of an obstacle to escape.”
“Possible he bashed Barrister before he evaluated that, but that still tells me it’s not just get the hell out. He’d been in there long enough to take the goods, and the timing… The wife heard Barrister fall. So it was bash, then run. Fast enough he left the vault open—but still closed the window to cover his escape route.”
Eve rose again, paced again. “She called out. He could’ve given her a bash, too, but this time he runs. He runs, leaving the vault open, closing the window, and he flips the security back on after he’s clear.”
She puffed out a breath. “Too much of a rush to close things up. Possibly just knee-jerk on the security. I don’t like it.”
Now Mira set her own tea aside. “He may have had a partner.”
“Yeah, I’m toying with that. A lookout, or somebody waiting in a vehicle handling the jammer. It could work that way.”
