"My sister. What did you do to her?"
"Nothing. Nothing. We just talked."
"Talked." The man smiled. "What did you talk about?"
"Nothing. Nothing important. Did that fellow Pendergast send you? I already told him all I know."
"And what doyou know?"
"All she wanted to do was look at the painting. The Black Frame, I mean. She had a theory, she said."
"A theory?"
"I can't remember. Really, I can't. It was so long ago. Please believe me."
"No, I want to hear about the theory."
"I'd tell you if I could remember."
"Are you sure you don't recall anything more?"
"That's all I can remember. I swear, that's all."
"Thank you." With an ear-shattering roar, one of the barrels vomited smoke and flame. Blast felt himself physically lifted from the ground and thrown back, hitting the floor with a violent crash. A numbness crept across his chest, remarkable in the lack of pain, and for a moment he had a crazy hope the charge had missed... And then he looked down at his ruined chest.
As if from far away, he saw the man--now a little shadowy and indistinct--approach and stand over him. The snout-like shape of the shotgun barrels detached themselves from the form and hovered over his head. Blast tried to protest, but there was now another warmth, oddly comforting, filling his throat and he couldn't vocalize...
And then came another terrible confusion of flame and noise that this time brought oblivion.
39
New York City
IT WAS SEVEN FIFTEEN IN THE MORNING, BUT already the Fifteenth homicide division was hard at work, logging in the several potential murders and manslaughters of the night before and assembling in breakout areas to discuss the progress of open cases. Captain Laura Hayward sat behind her desk, finishing an unusually comprehensive monthly report for the commissioner. The poor fellow was new on the job--having been hired up from Texas--and Hayward knew he would appreciate a bit of bureaucratic hand-holding.
She finished the report, saved it, then took a sip of her coffee. It was barely tepid: she had already been in the office more than an hour. As she put down the cup, her cell phone rang. It was her personal phone, not her official one, and only four people knew the number: her mother, her sister, her family lawyer--and Vincent D'Agosta.
She pulled the phone from her jacket pocket and looked at it. A stickler for protocol, she normally wouldn't answer it during working hours. This time, however, she closed the door to her office and flipped the phone open.
"Hello?" she spoke into it.
"Laura," came D'Agosta's voice. "It's me."
"Vinnie. Is everything okay? I was a little concerned when you didn't call last night."
"Everything's okay, and I'm sorry about that. It's just that things got a little... hectic."
She sat back down behind her desk. "Tell me about it."
There was a pause. "Well, we found the Black Frame."
"The painting you've been looking for?"
"Yes. At least, I think we did."
He didn't sound very excited about it. If anything, he sounded irritated. "How'd you find it?"
"It was hidden behind the basement wall of a doughnut shop, if you can believe it."
"So how did you get it?"
Another pause. "We, ah, broke in."
"Broke in?"
"Yeah."
Warning bells began to ring. "What'd you do, sneak in after hours?"
"No. We did it yesterday afternoon."
"Go on."
"Pendergast planned it. We went in pretending to be building code inspectors, and Pendergast--"
"I've changed my mind. I don't want to hear anything more about that. Skip to afteryou got the painting."
"Well, that's why I couldn't call like I normally do. As we left Baton Rouge, we noticed we were being followed. We had quite a chase through the swamps and bayous of--"
"Whoa, Vinnie! Stop a moment. Please." This was exactly what she'd been afraid of. "I thought you promised me you'd take care of yourself, not get sucked into Pendergast's extracurricular crap."
"I know that, Laura. I haven't forgotten it." Another pause. "Once I knew we were close to the painting, reallyclose, I felt like I'd do almost anything--if it helped solve the mystery, to get back to you."
She sighed, shook her head. "What happened next?"
"We shook the tail. It was midnight before we finally returned to Penumbra. We carried the wooden box we'd retrieved into the library and set it on a table. Pendergast was unbelievably fussy about it. Instead of opening the damn crate with a crowbar, we had to use these tiny tools that would have made a jeweler cross-eyed. It took hours. The painting must have been exposed to damp at some point, because its back was stuck to the wood, and that took even longer to tease loose."
"But it was the Black Frame?"
"It was ina black frame, all right. But the canvas was covered with mold and so dirty you couldn't make anything out. Pendergast got some swabs and brushes and a bunch of solvents and cleaning agents and began to remove the dirt--wouldn't let me touch it. After maybe fifteen minutes he got a small section of the painting clean, and then..."
"What?"
"The guy just suddenly went rigid. Before I knew it, he bundled me out of the library and locked the door."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that. I was standing there in the hallway. Never even got a glimpse of the painting."
"I keep telling you, the guy's not all there."
"I admit, he has his ways. This was about three in the morning so I thought, the hell with it, and crashed. Next thing I knew, it was morning. He's still in there, working away."
Hayward felt herself doing a slow burn. "Typical Pendergast. Vinnie, he's not your pal."
She heard D'Agosta sigh. "I've been reminding myself that it's his wife's death we're investigating here, that this all must be a huge shock to him... And he is my friend, even if he shows it in weird ways." He paused. "Anything new on Constance Greene?"
"She's under lock and key in the Bellevue Hospital prison ward. I interviewed her. She still maintains she threw her baby overboard."
"Did she say why?"
"Yes. She said it was evil. Just like its father."
"Jesus. I knew she was crazy, but not that crazy."
"How did Pendergast take the news?"
"Hard to tell--like everything with Pendergast. On the surface, it barely seemed to affect him."
There was a brief silence. Hayward wondered if she should try to pressure him to come home, but she realized she didn't want to add to his burdens.
"There's something else," D'Agosta said.
"What's that?"
"Remember the guy I told you about--Blackletter? Helen Pendergast's old boss at Doctors With Wings?"
"What about him?"
"He was murdered in his house the night before last. Two 12-gauge shells, point blank, blew his guts right through him."
"Good Lord."
"And that's not all. John Blast, the slimy guy we talked to in Sarasota? The other one interested in the Black Frame? I'd assumed he was the one tailing us. But I just heard it on the news--he was shot, too, just yesterday, not long after we snagged the painting. And guess what: once again, two 12-gauge rounds."