Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

“Do I look desperate to you?” I asked, leaning close to him again. “Well, I am. I am desperate. I know what you think. You think I’m a piece of low-life scum who crawled onto your big yacht like a cockroach. But I know some pretty big words for a cockroach. Like accessory . You know, like in accessory to murder ?”

Heusen was breathing hard. Under the admiral’s jacket, his chest heaved up and down. “You wouldn’t dare,” he whispered. “You would turn yourself in? Admit to murder? And drag me down with you?”

I nodded. I was enjoying this. “I told you. I’m desperate.”

Heusen’s shoulders slumped. He narrowed his eyes until they were thin slits. “What do you want, Artie? Money?”

“Yes. Good guess. I want money. A lot of it.”

“Okay. Okay. Money. And then you’ll go away?”

That went verywell.

Now I had one more call I wanted to make. One more call before I left town for good. I had a fat wad of money from Heusen. But I wanted more. A lot more.

I needed to make the call. Call it closure. Or call it my sadistic streak. Or maybe a victory lap. Ha-ha. And more money.

I had gotten the number out of that cowardly worm Peter.

I punched it in eagerly.

“Hello?” I recognized the voice right away.

“I have information on Christopher Thomas.”

A silence. Then: “Who?”

“Don’t you recognize my voice?”

“You-you have the wrong number.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.” He hung up.

I laughed. It felt good to laugh.

“Call you back later,” I said into the silent phone.

I pulled on a jacket and headed out.

With his four-fingered hand, Christopher Thomas poured ancient Rémy Martin cognac into a glass obviously bought at Wal-Mart. The Trompe l’Oeil Hotel, a good one, had scrimped on a few details. Still, it made sense. It was logical. Nice booze, cheap delivery .

He glanced into the large window at his own reflection. Even after nearly ten years with his new appearance, he was never completely used to this version of himself. Not that he disliked what he saw; the plastic surgeon had been an artist.

Dr. 90210…

A zip code, he reflected, whose numbers represented about one-third of the doctor’s bill.

Now he looked past his image and gazed through the early-evening dusk.

He was angry and he was troubled. He’d heard on the news, of course, about the bungled robbery at the museum last night and had gotten brief text messages from Peter Heusen about the debacle. The sloppy keyboarding suggested the man had been drinking.

Thomas sighed. The theft had been so perfectly planned, the haul so astonishing… When Heusen had heard that Tony Olsen was putting together a memorial for Rosemary, Christopher and Heusen had immediately put together a plan that would allow them to snag one of the biggest troves in the history of art: works by da Vinci and Michelangelo, mostly, but also by Rembrandt, Watteau, Rubens, Tiepolo, and de La Tour. Christopher had buyers for virtually all of the pieces in place, and the net to him, after expenses, would have been millions.

But it’d all turned to dust…

And topping off the tragedy, just today he’d received that phone call.

“I have information on Christopher Thomas…”

Information? Christopher Thomas had been murdered by his wife and stuffed into an iron maiden. Christopher Thomas was dead and buried. Christopher Thomas was a faded memory-a despised or hated or, in a few cases, envied memory. That’s all the information he wanted anyone to have.

But he knew the caller.

A noise behind him intruded. He swiveled around to see Tanya-no, her name was Taylor , right?-pulling her tiny dress back on. When he’d yanked the handful of Lycra off her an hour ago and flung it to the floor, he’d been focusing on her supple body and trying to forget about the failed heist. The sex was supposed to distract him from the loss; it had zero effect, and he blamed her for that.

“Oooh,” she said, eyeing his cognac, “I wanna cosmo.”

“No. Leave.”

She blinked. “Well, you’re not very nice.” In a little girl’s singsong tone.

He walked away, ignoring her. He heard her pull together her things and leave, sighing loudly.

Who cared? There’d be more Tanyas. Wait… Taylors .

He called Heusen again, using the untraceable, prepaid mobiles that they relied on in their operations.

Finally an answering click.

“Hello?” said the slurred voice.

“You haven’t been answering me,” Thomas snapped.

“The police’ve been taking statements from everybody.”

“You’ve been drinking. Now is not the time to get drunk. What’s going on? Do they suspect anything?”

“About us? I don’t know. I didn’t hang around at the museum to find out.”

“Where are you? What’re you doing now?”

“Sitting on the boat and getting drunk.”

“Well,” Thomas said slowly, “I think we’ll be fine. There’s been no personal contact?”

“Absolutely no connection.”

“How’d they figure it out?”

“I don’t know.”

Heusen was a snake and a drunk, but he wasn’t fundamentally stupid. After all, the two men had been stealing art for the past decade and had managed to avoid the smartest cops and insurance investigators in the business. Thomas said, “I think everything’ll be fine. We’ll let the dust settle. Lay low for a while.”

“Yeah, lay low.”

Thomas disconnected, resisting the urge to pitch his glass against the wall. He sat down and stared out the window.

Thinking back to the days when Christopher Thomas had an evergrowing need for money and mistresses. And all the while Rosemary had been growing more and more impatient with him, less willing to dole out her family money to him.

So Thomas began to reconsider his future. As a curator, he’d forged connections with shady businessmen and criminals around the world and had learned about the huge market for private art placements .

Tidy euphemism, that.

People thought that some paintings were so famous that they were safe from theft. Ah, but they didn’t know about men-always men, it seemed-in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, China, Japan, Malaysia, and India with limitless funds and a lust for owning genius. They never showed the art in public; sometimes they didn’t show it at all. The passion was about possessing what someone else could not.

And so Thomas came up with his idea, inspired by the iron maiden. He and Heusen, with the help of Artie Ruby, who worked for Christopher, would fake his death and slip another body into the device, and Ruby would arrange to have the maiden shipped to Germany. In a bit of medical trickery, Christopher had to break off one of his teeth and cut off his own finger, placing it strategically in the dead guy’s thigh so the body would be identified as his. Hell, what was one finger and a chipped tooth compared to escape from his debtors and billions? Besides if he hadn’t taken such elaborate measures to ensure his own safety, he’d probably have been killed years ago by one of his “connections.”

But framing Rosemary had been Peter’s idea. Thomas went along with it reluctantly because he had to. He needed Peter. Even now, twelve years later, the memory of how he’d smeared her blouse with his blood and torn a button off and placed it with the dead body disturbed him occasionally. Still, better Rosemary should die than he. That’s probably how she would have wanted it anyhow. That was always the problem with her in the first place, the more she gave him, the more he despised her. She’d never understood that. Poor Rosemary .