Дэвид Балдаччи - The Collectors

“So would now be a good time to see the tapes?” She shot a furious glance at Caleb, who was still halfway out of his chair. “I mean, you can see that he’s desperate.”

Caleb slumped in his chair, his head hanging between his knees.

Annabelle looked back at the chief and eyed his name tag. “Dale, I can call you Dale, can’t I?”

“Well, sure. Okay.”

“Dale, do you see the clothes I have on?”

Dale looked at her attractive figure and said sheepishly, “Yeah, I noticed.”

“You see that my skirt color is red. That’s an empowering, positive color, Dale. But my jacket is black, a negative vibe, and my blouse is beige, a neutral color. This represents that I’m halfway through my goal of helping this man back to a normal, healthy life. But I need your help, Dale, to finish the job. I want to be able to wear all red for Caleb. And I’m sure you want me to as well. I say let’s finish the job, Dale. Let’s just do it.” She ran an appraising eye over him. “I can tell, you’re with me, aren’t you?”

Dale looked at the miserable Caleb and said, “Well, okay, I’ll get the tapes for you.”

After he had left the room, Caleb said, “You handled yourself very professionally.”

“Thank you,” she said tersely.

When she said nothing further, Caleb added, “And I think I did reasonably well.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “Do you really?”

Hours later Annabelle and Caleb sat back after watching the comings and goings in the reading room before and after DeHaven’s murder.

“It’s just the typical flow of traffic,” Caleb said. “There’s nothing there.”

Annabelle ran a tape over again. “Who’s that?”

“Kevin Philips. He’s the acting director after Jonathan died. He came down to ask me about Jonathan’s death. And there’s Oliver dressed as a German scholar.”

“Nice,” Annabelle said admiringly. “He carries it off very well.”

They looked through some more footage. Caleb pointed at one scene. “That’s when I got the notice about becoming Jonathan’s literary executor.” He stared at the screen more closely. “Am I really that chubby?” He pressed a hand to his stomach.

“Who gave you the notice?”

“Kevin Philips.”

Annabelle watched on the tape as Caleb stumbled and broke his glasses.

He said, “I’m not usually that clumsy. I wouldn’t have been able to read the damn thing if Jewell English hadn’t lent me her glasses.”

“Yeah, but why did she do a switch on you?”

“What?”

“She switched out the glasses she was wearing with another pair in her bag.” Annabelle rewound the tape. “See? It’s a pretty first-rate move, actually. She’d make a good mechanic... I mean, she’s very nimble-fingered.”

Caleb watched in surprise as Jewell English palmed the glasses she was wearing and drew out another pair from her bag. It was this pair she gave to Caleb.

“I don’t know, maybe that was a special pair. The ones she gave me worked well enough. I could read the message.”

“Who is this Jewell English?”

“Just an elderly lady who’s a book fanatic and reading room regular.”

“And she has hand moves like a Vegas blackjack dealer,” Annabelle pointed out. “I wonder why that is,” she added thoughtfully.

Stone was sitting in his cottage thinking about his conversation with Marilyn Behan. If she was telling the truth, and he had no reason to think that the bitter woman wasn’t, then Stone had been wrong. Cornelius Behan hadn’t killed Jonathan DeHaven or Bob Bradley. However, he’d apparently stumbled on the method used to kill the unfortunate librarian and, in doing so, had prompted others to murder him. So who else benefited from DeHaven’s death? Or Bradley’s, for that matter? He desperately needed something to connect the dots.

“Oliver?”

He glanced up. Milton was standing in the doorway.

Milton said, “I knocked but no one came.”

“I’m sorry, I guess I was preoccupied.”

Milton carried his laptop as usual and a small briefcase. He put them both down on the desk and drew out a folder. “Here’s what I could find on Bradley’s staff.”

Stone took the papers and read through them carefully. There were numerous documents highlighting Bradley’s political career, including the House Intelligence Committee that he’d chaired for years.

“Bradley was a very capable politician, and he instituted many good reforms in the intelligence fields,” Milton said.

“Which maybe got him killed,” Stone commented. “Nice reward.”

Stone started going through the backgrounds and photos of both Bradley’s congressional office staff and his underlings on the intelligence committee. As soon as he finished, Annabelle and Caleb arrived. Stone told them and Milton about his encounter with Marilyn Behan.

“Well, that certainly kills the theory about Behan’s involvement in Jonathan’s death,” Caleb said.

“Appears so,” Stone said. “What did you two find out today with the tapes?”

“Well, our initial hunch that we might see someone coming in or out of the vault that might be helpful didn’t play out. But we did find something else that might be very important.” Annabelle explained about the sleight of hand pulled by Jewell English.

“You’re sure about this?” Stone asked, looking puzzled.

“Trust me, I’ve seen that move a million times.”

And done it yourself at least as often, Stone thought. He turned to Caleb. “What do you know about this woman?”

“Just that she’s an elderly widow, a regular patron, a lover of old books, very nice and enthusiastic and...” He turned red.

“And what?” Stone asked.

“And she’s always hitting on me,” he said in a low, embarrassed voice.

Annabelle had to hold back a laugh.

Stone said, “But presumably, you know all these things about her because she told them to you. They’re not verified.”

“That’s true,” Caleb conceded.

“So why the glasses switch?”

“Oliver, it could simply be that she didn’t want to give me those because they’re special to her for some reason. She lent me another pair so I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

“I wouldn’t read too much into it either, Caleb, except one wouldn’t expect elderly widows who frequent rare book reading rooms to have such exceptional sleight-of-hand skills. If she didn’t want you to wear those glasses, why not just say so and hand you the spare pair?”

Caleb started to say something and then stopped. “I don’t have an answer to that.”

“I don’t either, but I’m starting to believe that we need to find an answer if we’re going to discover what happened to Jonathan DeHaven.”

“You can’t possibly believe that sweet old Jewell English had anything to do with Jonathan’s death,” Caleb protested.

“We can’t rule that out right now. And Behan was killed because he guessed how DeHaven died. I think he discovered that the gas cylinders at the library had been deliberately mislabeled. That may be why he came to the reading room asking questions and wanting to look at the vault, Caleb. He was fishing for information as to why DeHaven might have been killed. Remember, he wanted to know if DeHaven was friendly with everyone at the library. He wasn’t looking to pin the murder on someone else, he genuinely wanted to know if DeHaven had any enemies.”

“In other words, the key isn’t Behan, but DeHaven, and maybe something at the library ?” Annabelle said.

“Possibly,” Stone replied. “Or something in his private life.”

Caleb flinched at this remark but remained silent.

“But where does the murdered Bob Bradley figure into all this?” she asked. “You said you thought that was connected.”