Since the museum’s executive director seemed to be slipping into a state of shock, Lassiter sent him off with the paramedics, who had arrived to make sure none of the museum patrons were similarly suffering, and turned to the only other person in the place who claimed to have a clue about the painting.
Kitteredge seemed happy to be asked. At least, he did until Lassiter made it clear that the conversation would have to take place at the police station. The professor would wait for him there while he finished up with the crime scene.
It was another hour before Lassiter was able to turn the museum gallery over to the techs and race back to the station to talk to Kitteredge. In that time he’d learned a few details about the crime that made it look even more puzzling than he had originally imagined. For one thing, the sword sticking out of the victim’s chest was not the murder weapon. His throat had been slit with a much smaller blade, and only when he was dead had the killer used the sword. That explained why there had been so much blood on the floor, but it raised several questions of its own. Like why use a knife when you have a sword?
Even questions that should have had easy answers turned out not to. The sword was, as Kitteredge had said, part of the museum’s collection, but while the museum staff were busily reviewing their records, no one could seem to figure out exactly where the weapon had been before tonight, or who might have moved it, or when. And while a major art museum is usually as well surveilled as any public institution short of an international airport, all the security cameras in this gallery had been turned toward the walls. When Lassiter asked when and why this had been done, he learned it had been earlier in the day, on the specific instructions of the victim.
The crime scene techs were scouring the gallery, but there was almost no chance they would turn up any usable forensics. Between the removal of the last exhibit and the installation of the new one, dozens of workers had tramped through the room, all dripping DNA wherever they went. The only hope was to find something on the sword, but that seemed to be as clean as on the day it was forged.
That made this interview with Kitteredge even more crucial than Lassiter had originally thought. Lassiter had asked the professor to take a little time to think through the most important information about the painting and consider any way in which it might inspire a killer. When he got back to the station, Lassiter asked the professor if he’d had any thoughts on the subject.
That was five hours earlier.
He hadn’t asked another question since. He hadn’t had a chance.
Kitteredge started off with the story of the painting’s acquisition by the museum. Before he began, he said it wouldn’t take much time, as he’d written out a brief version to deliver to the patrons at tonight’s event. And it might not have, if he’d been able to stick to a single point. But early in the proceedings he’d realized he had to clarify one tiny bit of information about the nature of the art market in nineteenth-century England before he could adequately explain how odd it was that this particular picture came to be held by a private owner without ever having been publicly exhibited. And as soon as he started down that path, he discovered that Lassiter did not have a complete understanding of the place of the Royal Academy of the Arts in relation to the marketplace, and that in turn led him to a parenthetical disquisition on the question of George III’s historical role as patron of the arts. And the only interruptions in the lecture came when Kitteredge suggested again that it would really help if they could continue their conversation while looking at the picture.
Not that Lassiter was sitting quietly during this entire peroration. One of the skills necessary to detective was the ability to steer any conversation toward his desired goals, and Lassiter had always prided himself on his technique in this area.
But steering Kitteredge had roughly the same effect as nudging a supertanker with a stick. He barely seemed to notice the interruption, except occasionally to say he’d get to that point in just a moment.
After a long tour through the politics of the art world in eighteenth-century England, Kitteredge finally returned to the general period of the painting’s conception. Since he still had another hundred and fifty years to go before the painting would make its appearance on the wall of the Santa Barbara Art Museum, Lassiter excused himself to use the bathroom, grab another cup of coffee, and bang his head against the wall until the pain on the outside began to even out the throbbing that came from within.
He’d stayed out of the interrogation room for as long as he could possibly justify, and then kept away a little longer. He checked through phone messages on his desk, and when he couldn’t find any that needed answering in the middle of the night, he checked several other detectives’ desks.
Now he was out of excuses. He’d given the obvious one away to his partner when he told her to look into the victim’s life, see if she could come up with any plausible motives for murder, and check his movements for the past couple of days. There were financial records to dig through; relatives, friends, and possibly lovers to contact; enemies to sniff out and track down. They’d have to interview all of the curator’s colleagues at the museum, and at other museums in case there was interinstitution rivalry. It seemed ludicrous to think that someone who had spent his entire life looking at pretty pictures could have the gumption to commit a murder like this, but if the new acquisition was as significant as Kitteredge believed, was it impossible to consider that a competitor might have thought that Filkins had crossed some ethical line in snagging it and felt a need for revenge?
Of course, this was work that could easily occupy two detectives full time, and he was burning to jump onto the more useful parts of the investigation. But he needed to finish up with Kitteredge first, even if that meant spending the rest of his natural life span stuck in the interrogation room.
Lassiter took a deep breath and was attempting to brace himself for the onslaught of useless knowledge when the door to the observation room swung open and Detective O’Hara put her head out. He could see Shawn and Gus sitting behind her, smirking at his failure.
“Are you almost done, Carlton?” she said. “There’s a lot of work to do on this case, and we don’t have all night for chitchat with the prof.”
“If you think you can do it faster, be my guest,” Lassiter said.
“Not after you’ve spent all this time building rapport with the man,” O’Hara said. “Now get moving. There’s a murderer out there, and we’ve got to stop him before he kills again.”
Chapter Eight
For the past five hours there had been nothing for
Shawn and Gus to do besides listen to Kitteredge expatiate on a series of subjects, each of which managed to be less interesting to Shawn than the one before. At least, Gus kept telling Shawn there was nothing else for them to do.
For his part, Shawn could think of plenty of other things. They could go home and go to bed, for instance. Or they could swing by the Bijoux and see if C. Thomas Howell’s appearance fee at the festival included sweeping up after the show. Or, as Shawn suggested after a particularly riveting aside detailing the chemical composition of oil paint and how it had remained remarkably unchanged over several centuries-unless it had changed equally remarkably over that same period, Shawn thought he’d dozed off somewhere in the middle of this passage-they could throw themselves off Santa Barbara Pier and see if they washed up in Japan before Kitteredge finished talking.
When Lassiter stepped out to take his break, Shawn was ready to drag Gus out of the observation room even if it meant clubbing him over the head with a chair first. But his mood changed when he saw the detective heading back into interrogation. Lassie looked so defeated, so close to cracking, that Shawn knew whatever happened next was going to be good.