Code of Honor Page 13

  He scoffed. “I imagine you see some pretty unsavory parts of the country in your work.”

  I shrugged. “Some. But I can always find someplace green and something interesting to see. It’s not all fugitives and criminals.”

  He glanced at me, then at the portfolio, and back at me before he came to some sort of decision. “I’d intended to take you to dinner the last time we saw each other. May I do so now?”

  I hesitated. My reasons for not seeing Darius were still valid – there was no way I could lie to the man, and telling the truth put much more at stake than just my own freedom. He continued before I could say no. “I won’t ask about Gray’s painting, I promise. I just want to get to know you a little better.”

  His eyes had lost all the flinty edges they’d flashed at me earlier, and I felt myself wishing I could sink into his gaze.

  “Depends,” I said as I tried desperately to cling to whatever self-preservation instincts I had left.

  “On?”

  “Whether the restaurant you choose happens to be shaped like a taco truck.”

  He burst out laughing, and the damn butterflies winged into flight.

  “Are you parked someplace secure?” Darius asked as we waited at the light.

  “Sure. It’s a crappy rental. Why?”

  “Because I’m staying just here,” he said as he pointed to an apartment building on the next block, “and it’s a good place from which to plot our tour of the museum tomorrow.”

  Our tour? I was in sooooo much trouble.

  “That’s convenient. It’s not really a taco truck area though, is it?”

  He smiled. “You let me worry about hunting down the tacos.”

  We actually found an excellent taco truck parked outside the lot where my rental car was, so we grabbed the tacos to go and went to Darius’s apartment.

  “You got this place for a week?” I said as I looked around the fairly spacious one-bedroom, modern-style apartment. “Why?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to discuss the Gray theft,” he said as he held up a bottle of red wine. “Would you like a glass?”

  I glanced at the bottle and nodded. “Sure, but what does Gray have to do with Boston?”

  “Markham Gray is from Boston, and much of his fortune was made here.”

  “So?” I dropped my bag and the portfolio on a chair and parked myself on a barstool at the counter as Darius pulled the cork on the bottle.

  “I have some questions I’d like to ask Mr. Gray about the origins of the painting that was stolen from his panic room.” His eyes remained on me as he poured two glasses of red wine.

  My heart hammered in my chest, and I felt sure he could see my pulse beating in my throat. Or maybe he was one of those shapeshifter princes whose animal senses let them hear the blood rushing through someone’s veins. Would he be a dragon prince, or maybe something lupine or feline? He was definitely a predator of some variety – the question was, what kind of creature was I? Predator? Prey? Non-binary? Other?

  I suddenly realized he was still watching me, waiting for me to take the wine glass from his outstretched hand. “Where did you just go?” he asked me quietly.

  “I wondered what kind of animal you shapeshift into,” I said with forced cheerfulness, in hopes that a smiley tone would cover for the still-pounding heart.

  “What kind of— what? No,” he seemed to shake himself. “Never mind.”

  Whew. I raised my glass to him. “Cheers,” I said, taking a sip.

  He drank from his own glass, and I thought I heard him murmur, “Jaguar.”

  That did it. The fact that he could play with the sheer nonsense I came up with was the battering ram that took down the last piece of self-defense I had. I exhaled, winced at myself for what I was about to do, and then said the words that had been pushing their way forward since we’d left the museum.

  “Want to see something cool?”

  21

  Darius

  “The handwriting on the wall might be a forgery.”

  Reza Masoud

  I studied the painting of Madame Auguste Manet that lay on the kitchen table in front of me. Anna stood back, holding the now-empty portfolio.

  “Come and tell me what you see here,” I said, indicating the painted canvas. I wasn’t accusing her and deliberately kept my tone of voice mild.

  She stood beside me, and I pretended not to notice how close she was. Then my gaze returned to the painting.

  It was beautiful. Not the subject, because no matter how well-painted Madame Auguste was, she would never be a lovely woman, but the art itself. Manet had caught the tension around her mouth, the fine hairs of a dark mustache on her upper lip, and the disapproving lift of her right brow. She was slender and looked small, even slouchy, in her chair, and the fat sausage rolls of her hair didn’t look like they’d have been in fashion even then. And yet, the black satin of her mourning gown gleamed against the black wall, and the gold of her rings shone with only slightly less fire than the light in her eyes.

  “The brush strokes are long and loose, and her skin tone has the flat light of a photograph,” she said. “My mother calls this style early modernism. Everything about it seems impossible.” The last words left her in a whisper.

  “What does?” I watched her eyes as she looked up into mine. There were flecks of gold in the irises that seemed to glitter in the light.

  She shook her head.

  “What’s impossible?” I persisted.

  She exhaled. “It’s impossible that this painting could look so much like a Manet. I mean, obviously it’s in his style, but Madame Auguste was bought in 1920 and has been hanging in the Gardner collection since then.”

  “Not so impossible, really, if you consider digital photography,” I said thoughtfully. “Theoretically, someone could paint this from a photograph.”

  She looked sharply at me. “So, it must be a copy.”

  “You tell me,” I said simply.

  “I can’t. I don’t know.” She blew out a frustrated breath and then picked up her wine glass. She stepped back from me and took a sip.

  “What do you know?” I asked casually.

  “I found it,” she finally said, studying the red wine in her glass. It seemed to pain her to say the words, and then they tumbled out as if she had no control over them. “It was hidden behind another painting on the same stretcher.”

  There it was … and yet wasn’t. She seemed unable to hide the truth from me, and yet it wasn’t the whole truth. It was too much to ignore, and not enough to condemn, and every word she uttered stabbed me with the certainty that this was somehow a part of the theft at the Gray mansion. I studied her for a long time. “What else do you know about it?”

  This time she met my eyes directly. “The edges of it were left behind on the stretcher – about half an inch, I’d guess. It was stuck to the back of the other painting.”

  My heart sank and lifted at the same time. There’d been another set of edges behind the painting that had been stolen from Gray, but this was just one more piece of circumstantial – not damning – evidence that she was giving me. Giving freely rather than having it wrestled or tricked from her. And despite my warring thoughts, all I could see were eyes the color of the sky on a stormy day, with flecks of light that shone through dark gray clouds. I wished I could see into her brain, to know her thoughts, to understand her, but I couldn’t seem to find my way past her eyes.

  “I find hidden paintings pretty intriguing, don’t you?” I finally said.

  “As it happens, I do.” She breathed deeply, as if she’d been holding her breath before that moment.

  “I’m inclined to see if the Manet is back in public view tomorrow and perhaps study the two paintings side by side,” I said, still in the casual tone of voice I’d adopted to cover all the questions I wasn’t asking.

  “We could go tonight.”

  “No,” I said sharply, “we can’t.”

  She smiled slowly as she took anothe
r sip of wine. “You’re no fun.”

  My gaze narrowed. “You were joking?”

  Her smile got bigger. “Maybe.” She shrugged. “Probably.”

  She finished her glass of wine and stepped around me to tuck the painting back inside its portfolio. Then she slung her messenger bag back across her chest and turned to face me.

  “Thank you for the tacos and the wine. I’m going to go find a place to sleep now, and I’ll meet you back at the Gardner when it opens. Cool?”

  Apparently, she could read faces, because I hadn’t realized I’d been so transparent until she nodded as I walked her to the door.

  “Good choice. Not trusting me to show up would have been a bad move, and definitely would have pushed all my ‘you’re not the boss of me’ buttons. Also, you’re still pissed because you feel like I lied to you, and I get that. So, have another glass of wine. I’m going to stop off at the taco truck for more carne asada, because I haven’t hit my taco limit yet. Come to think of it, I don’t think there is a taco limit – at least not an enforceable one.”

  I smiled at that, but it was a fleeting thing. I didn’t trust her, and that bothered me. The part of me that wanted to invite her to stay was silenced by the part that wondered if it was because I was attracted to her or because I didn’t trust her not to run. Neither was acceptable under the circumstances, and she seemed to know it.

  “Anyway,” she said brightly, “have a good night, Darius. Dream about things that make you smile.”

  When I closed the door behind her, I had no idea what those things could be.

  I poured myself another glass of wine and sat down at the table where the painting of Madame Auguste Manet had been. I could still catch hints of Anna’s scent in the air. It was disturbing, disconcerting, and utterly distracting – just like her. My concentration had been shot since I spotted her in the museum courtyard, and I couldn’t seem to focus on more than one thing in any given moment: the tone of her voice, the riot of curls and the way the light shone in her eyes. I was in danger of becoming a poet’s nightmare of bad verse and trite metaphors, and through it all I was still so angry.

  Angry at having been lied to, angry that she was a thief, and angry that I was so fucking attracted to a liar and a thief.

  My cell phone rang, and I was surprised to see the Cipher office number onscreen.

  “Masoud,” I said as I answered.

  “Darius, it’s Shane. You’re on a speaker with Jorge, and we’re down in his Swordfish lair at Cipher.”

  “It’s almost midnight. You should be home with your man and that ridiculous beast who vaguely resembles a dog,” I said, happy for the distraction from the noise in my head.

  “I know, right?” Jorge said with a grin evident in his voice. “But he’s not really my man, and this task-master won’t let me leave until she tells you what I’ve been digging up.”

  The sound of a playful punch carried through the speaker phone. “Hey!” Jorge complained.

  “Shut it, genius,” Shane said impatiently, and then apparently to me she added, “We’ve been digging for information on your twins.”

  My twins. No, they weren’t mine, she was. Except she wasn’t. She was a suspect in the burglary of a home protected by one of my security systems. That was all.

  I realized Jorge was talking, and I had to focus on his words to hear them. “…hard to find the public record connection between Anna and Colette Collins. It was tough to even link them together as sisters, much less as twins. They were born in a little coastal town in Massachusetts that still has all their birth records on microfiche, and they haven’t lived in the same city for a decade.”

  “Were you able to use the tracking device I slipped in her bag?” Shane asked.

  “I waited until she was on the move again before we called,” added Jorge.

  I settled back in my chair. Shane had been a private investigator before she came to work for Cipher, and Jorge was her genius neighbor whom I’d met when he was just eighteen. They worked together with a shorthand that was similar to how Shane worked with Gabriel, and I realized I was a little jealous of their easy relationship.

  “Darius?” Shane asked.

  “Sorry. She was at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to investigate the thirty-year-old heist.”

  “What? She said she was going out of town for a bounty,” Shane said.

  “Apparently the guy had some information on the Gardner heist that he wanted to trade for his freedom. She turned him in to Boston P.D., then went to the museum to learn more. I found her there, and when the museum closed, we came back here.”

  The apartment was one that Cipher Security kept available for its agents who traveled to Boston for work. Dan O’Malley was from Boston, and Cipher still had several clients in the city. The fact that the apartment was a block from the museum was a happy accident for my purposes.

  I traced the etching in my wine glass. “There may be some connection between the painting stolen from the Gray mansion and one hanging in the Gardner Museum.”

  “What kind of connection? That painting wasn’t of any particular value that we know of, was it?” I could hear Jorge’s computer keys clattering in the background as Shane spoke.

  “I don’t have proof of anything substantial, and my suspicion is purely a gut level thing, but the vehemence of Sterling Gray’s refusal to call in the police feels like there may be something else to the story of the painting, its provenance, or what it may have been hiding.”

  “And you developed this theory after your evening with the sister of your thief?”

  “Actually, I’m afraid the sister is the thief, but I can’t prove it.” Suddenly, I remembered a bit of conversation from earlier. “Jorge, can you dig into the twins’ family? Apparently their mother went to MassArt, which is right around the corner from the Gardner.”

  “All roads lead to Boston, huh?” Shane said.

  “Something like that,” I answered.

  “I’ll get you whatever I can find on the family,” Jorge said over the clatter of his computer keyboard.

  “I asked Quinn to have Alex look into the client, Markham Gray. Maybe you could do that too?” I said.

  Shane answered. “Apparently the senior Gray is heading to Boston from Europe as we speak. Quinn’s trying to set up a meeting for you, and Dan may go there to help facilitate.”

  “That would be good. I appreciate Quinn and Dan taking my request seriously.”

  Shane snorted. “We all know what happens when we start investigating the clients, don’t we?”

  I smirked, remembering the case that brought her into Cipher. She’d been investigating one of our clients for infidelity, and it turned out he was guilty of much more than just cheating on his wife. “Quinn has governments on his client list now. It’s in his best interests to cut out any criminal element that might be hiding in the shadows,” I said.

  “There are no shadows deep enough to hide from me,” Jorge said in the background. He already sounded distracted by whatever he was searching up on his computer.

  “Let me know if you need any other help, Darius,” Shane said quietly. “Gabriel and I just finished a case, so we have some time.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.” I didn’t usually work with a partner because in my specialty, it was just me, the electricians, and the engineers. Investigation was something new to me. “Shane?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What did you think of Anna when you met her?”

  Something in the question or maybe my tone must have inspired the smile I heard in Shane’s answering voice. “I liked her. She’s smart and funny and weird enough to be friends with Sparky. He wanted us to meet because he thought we’d have a lot in common.”

  “Was he right?” I asked, thinking about the strength, grace, athleticism, and fierce intelligence of my colleague.

  “Yeah, I think he was.”

  22

  Darius

  “Game shows are designed to make us feel
better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”

  From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins

  Anna handed me a cup of black coffee when I met her in the courtyard of the Gardner the next day. “You didn’t have any cream or sugar on your boat, so I took a chance and left it black.”

  I had the sudden flash of her naked body sprawled in satisfied sleep on my bed, and I was disturbingly glad to think that she had taken the time to know things about me.

  “Your powers of deduction are strong.”

  She grinned. “Comes with the job.”

  I soaked in her smile as though it had rays of sunlight in it, and I allowed myself to relax in the knowledge that Anna had kept her word. She’d met me, as planned, and she seemed to have lost some of the wariness she’d worn around me, almost as though she’d surrendered it. Her smile gave me permission to relax some of the tension I’d been carrying around her too.

  She carried the portfolio on a strap over her shoulder, and I wondered if she had checked her messenger bag or left it wherever she’d slept last night, which made me wonder where she’d slept, which made me wonder if she slept naked. I changed the subject of my thoughts with a question to her. “Speaking of your work, what happened with the case that brought you to Boston?”

  She shrugged. “I stopped by police headquarters this morning where a very nice officer named Kennedy, who takes his coffee with cream, four sugars, and almond flavored syrup by the way, assures me I’ll get credit for his arrest. Boston P.D. is cutting a deal with the Connecticut D.A. They wouldn’t let me see Junior, so I still don’t know what he told them about the heist, but I have a call in to a friend of a friend at The Globe to fill in the blanks from my internet research.”