“What?” she asked breathlessly.
I did my best to ignore the attraction zinging between us. “Do you have a signature? A way of identifying your work?”
“Here.” She pointed to a small squiggle in the bottom left corner of the canvas in her hand. If I squinted and cocked my head, I supposed it looked like an F and an R.
“What about Bergen? Does he have one?”
“Most artists do.” She placed the canvas down and tapped on her phone, then handed it to me. “Here.” She pointed at the corner of a painting of a path through a park that filled the screen. This is his.”
The signature was larger than Fiona’s, and more obvious, with a looping B.
“He does this on everything he paints?” I asked.
Her lips twisted. “He did it on all of his commercial pieces, but if he was trying to pass off a forgery, he wouldn’t sign it. He might have an ego but he isn’t stupid.”
“Would he do something to leave his mark on it though?” I was getting a feel for who Bergen Cole was, and men like him liked to put their stamp on things. Their self-centered attitude could be their downfall.
Fiona’s expressive face shifted as she considered the possibility. “Maybe,” she allowed. “But he already has a distinctive brush stroke pattern that isn’t totally aligned with painters such as Monet. Unless he’s changed that over the past four years, he would already have a signature of sorts on the forgery.”
“Interesting.” I leaned against the wall. “Would you recognize his work without a signature?”
She pursed her lips. “If you gave me a few paintings and told me he’d done one of them, I’d probably be able to pick it, but without any context, I doubt it.”
Damn. It would have been helpful to know she could identify his work if we could somehow get our hands on aphoto of the forgery from either the Monet or the Black Swan case.
I twisted one of the rings on my left hand absent-mindedly. “If you wanted to sell a piece of stolen art on the black market, how would you go about it?”
She didn’t even pause to think. “I’d try to find a fence.”
“Do you know any fences?” Because if she did, that would make my job much easier.
“No.” She sighed. “Or at least, if I do, I don’t know what they are, if you get what I mean.”
“I do.” I twisted the ring the other way. “I’ll have my team put out some feelers. Assuming, for a moment, that Bergen has the Monet, where do you think he’d store it?”
“Somewhere with a lot of security that he controls.”
“Like a bank vault?” I asked.
“God, no. Bergen is paranoid. He’d find a place no one else knew about and install the best electronic system he could find. He wouldn’t want to risk even a single person knowing what he had. It would have to also be somewhere the painting couldn’t be damaged. Maybe an industrial or commercial building rented under an alias, or even a second apartment, although that would be riskier if there’s a chance the super might drop by.”
I thought on that. If I was trying to hide a priceless painting, I’d probably choose a derelict storefront and make sure it was absolutely impenetrable. The trouble was, there were too many possibilities in Chicago for us to sift through them all, and there was nothing to say the painting was even still in the city.
Of course, if Bergen was the guilty party, and if he was as paranoid as Fiona claimed, there was one thing he’d almost certainly be doing, and that was keeping a very close eye on her.
“I have an idea,” I told her. “I need you to trust me though. Can you do that?”
“Um…” She looked confused. “Like, with my life, or what?”
I shook my head. “Just stay here. I need to step outside. Don’t leave the apartment. If you have to feel like you’re doing something useful then write out some ideas for how you’d go about the crime if you were going to commit it.”
She put a hand on her hip. “How long will you be gone?”
“Hopefully not too long.” I shot her a smile. “I’m not abandoning you, okay? I’m testing a theory.”
“Fine.” She looked reluctant, but hey, agreement was agreement.
“Great.” I backtracked out of the room. “Lock up behind me, and don’t open the door without making sure you know who’s on the other side.”
