“Like the Friedrich. But that was a fake.”
“This is where it gets interesting. Honeycutt uses dirty money to buy one legitimate painting or sculpture—”
“Or Anglo-Saxon armring.”
“—sells it for clean money, and banks it openly. But then he sometimes also gets a copy, a fake, made, and sells that, too. This time, the money goes into his own personal account. I suspect he was using the money to pay off a blackmailer. When you spot the fake, he panics: tries to have you, your colleague and the evidence all go up in smoke. But the good news, the very good news, is that the cartel doesn’t know about it.” Just the blackmailer.
In the dim light, surrounded by swirls of sweet hash smoke, she was as clear as a cut-glass figurine. “Explain.”
“Honeycutt hired in someone used by the man who used to run the drug trade in the Southeast—not someone who the Tijuana cartel would employ. Besides, the cartels pay a lot of money for good, quiet, loyal service. They don’t want their employees or consultants drawing attention to themselves by silly stunts for personal gain.”
“So Honeycutt is terrified the cartel will find out….”
“And we can assume, for now at least, that they know nothing of you, or me.” And I would dearly like to keep it that way.
“Then if the cartel doesn’t already know…” She tapped her fingernail on the table while she thought. I couldn’t hear it. “Who planted cocaine in Jim’s garage?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could it have been Honeycutt?”
“I doubt it. He is strictly a money man. He probably wouldn’t have had access to the drugs. And that coke was worth a lot of money. He would rather have pocketed the proceeds.”
“Then who?”
“The blackmailer. Those three men at Honeycutt’s house were there to remove any evidence of a link between him and the blackmailer. They didn’t succeed. It might have been better for us if they had. I have no idea who the blackmailer is, or how much they know about you, or what they might do about that. The whole operation smells of calculation and organization and money.” Which, of course, made absolutely no sense: where would someone who was blackmailing for money get the cash to pay for several kilos of cocaine? Assuming that it was, in fact, the blackmailer who planted those bags.
“They’re going to come for me, aren’t they?” She could have been talking about a taxi pickup.
“I don’t know.”
“How would they do it?”
When I had been three months in the APD, my partner and I had pulled over two men on a routine traffic stop. Officer King had stepped up to the car and asked for some identification. They had backed up their car and run him down. I still remember the crunch the tires made going over his left arm. I shot out the perps’ rear tires, called in their license plate, and drove King to the Piedmont emergency room. He had sat there, perfectly composed, while the doctor and nurses clipped away his uniform, cleaned up torn flesh and muttered over X rays. When they told him they were going to have to operate, to put all the bones back inside the flesh and then screw on a steel plate, he had pursed his lips, nodded, and said curiously, “What size screws do you use?” Partly shock, partly genuine curiosity, partly a need to drown the reality of the whole in a flood of incremental and essentially useless details.
“There are as many different methods as there are killers.”
“I thought we agreed no evasions, no elisions, no sugarcoating.” She folded her hands again, a neat, tidy package between the empty glasses, beer rings, and salt.
“I would be guessing.”
“Then guess.” Her gaze was unwinking.
“Death is not something I like to play guessing games with.”
“I don’t consider obtaining information in order to stay alive a game.” Her voice was suddenly savage. “I feel as though I’m spinning in a greased barrel here, with nothing to hang on to!” She picked up her brimming glass of akevit, swallowed it down in one gulp, and slammed the empty glass down. “So help me out.”
“If I were the mystery person who sent those men to Honeycutt’s house, I would kill you in Norway. Less chance of it being connected back to Atlanta. There again, no one knows you’re here, so that’s unlikely.”
“I gave Mrs. Miclasz the name of the hotel. But she promised not to mention it to anyone else.”
Promises were useless in the face of torture. “You might want to give her a call, just to make sure everything’s all right.”
Her hand tightened around the glass until the webbing between her thumb and index finger was quite white. “They wouldn’t!”
“Probably not. Just a precaution.” But I was still uneasy. Why? What had I missed?
“Go on.”
“Supposing he knew you were here, it would be child’s play to bring you down from a distance with some kind of scoped hunting rifle, and those would be easy to get hold of in Norway. You were a perfect, stationary target in the park.” I imagined her folding down in surprise, eyes wide, hot red blood splashed on bronze. “But it’s not hunting season, there’s no way to make such a shot look like an accident, and that’s what he’ll want this to look like. He might shoot you, but if he did it would be with a World War II relic, an old Lahti pistol maybe, and it would be set up to look like an accidental discharge while you were cleaning it.” No. A tourist wouldn’t be cleaning a gun. “That’s unlikely.” I sipped at my beer. So much depended on how much time he had, what kind of person he was. I had a sudden image of an iceberg: cold and unwinking, nine-tenths hidden. “If he thinks he can afford to wait to bring in professional talent, then it would be an elegant accident: a drowning in the harbour”—Julia, hauled blue and swollen from the cold fjord, winch chains dripping, onlookers gawking—“maybe electrocution in your hotel bath”—thrashing water, hum and sizzle, stink of sphincter letting go. “But if he was in a rush, then it would be local talent with less finesse. A mugging gone wrong might be the way to go. Have you ever seen a body that has been bludgeoned to death?” Her face was pale and set but I couldn’t stem the flood of words. “The body is remarkably resilient. Take skin, for example. It has to take a blow over a bone before it will split.” Those lovely cheekbones, gaping wide. “And you can live with a dozen broken bones, with the loss of a kidney or lung, pierced by one of those splintered ribs.” Hiss of air like a punctured tire. “The surest method would be a blow across the throat, then the larynx swells and death by asphyxiation follows in two or three minutes. Most likely they would just beat you around the head for a while. The skull, though, is designed to take punishment. If they hit the wrong places you’d be conscious for quite a while….”
She watched me, eyes soft as a doe’s, and I imagined a hand lashing out, a fist reddened by working on an offshore trawler, pulping her cheekbone, tearing open her cheek, ripping loose one of those eyes, and my throat tightened around the ugly words.
“…there’s always fire. The way Jim went. Only if it’s a fool doing the setting it will be in a place where it won’t be fumes that take you but the flame itself….”
My voice went on and on, harsh and brutal, and the pictures in my head flickered like a series of Technicolor slides: Julia, blackened like charbroiled steak, bits of clothing sticking to raw muscle; Julia, butchered like a goat; broken like a painted doll on the rocks…. I couldn’t stop talking, and I couldn’t stop the pictures. Those beautiful hands, folded so neatly before her on the table, would lash out but he would have her from behind in a garrotte. When she fell she might have five seconds’ strength left, which she would spill out scrabbling against the pavement, tearing out her nails.