Feeling a bit embarrassed, Leopold followed the commissioner back to where Connie was sitting. He was relieved to see her smile at the news. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all night. I’ll call the squad room on my car radio and tell them the good news.”
She went out to the car while Leopold and the commissioner spoke of technical matters involving the appointment. In a moment she was back, speaking quickly to Leopold. “Max Rosen walked into headquarters twenty minutes ago. He heard about the shooting at his apartment, and knew we’d want to see him. Spencer is talking with him now.”
Leopold was on his feet. “You stay here till Fletcher is out of surgery, Connie. I’ll talk to Mr. Rosen.”
He didn’t remember having seen Max Rosen among the few workers he’d spoken to at Vladimir Petrov’s condominium. He was a middle-aged man of average height, with a short neatly trimmed beard. “My neighbor said you were looking for me,” he told Leopold in the interrogation room. “I came in as soon as I heard. I bartend a few hours at night.”
Leopold told Spencer to take a break and settled down opposite the bearded man. “Your record shows a conviction for armed robbery, Max. What about that?”
“I served my time. That’s in the past. I’ve been living a new life for five years now.”
“Do you own a gun?”
“I can’t as a convicted felon.”
“But do you?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you know Vladimir Petrov?”
“Not really. Al Haskins was showing him our work one day and he told me it was a nice job. That’s all the conversation I ever had with the man.”
“He was killed with two shots from a nine-millimeter weapon, probably a pistol like police carry now.” He placed an unloaded Glock on the table between them. “Ever seen a gun like that?”
“Yeah, I see them on these TV cop shows all the time.” He brushed back his sandy hair nervously. “Look, do you think I’d have come forward if I had anything to hide?”
“Maybe. Did Petrov ever mention any Russian icons to you?”
“I told you we barely spoke. I hardly knew the man.”
Detective Spencer opened the door and said, “Captain, could I see you for a moment?”
Leopold went outside. “What’s up?”
“Rosen gave us permission to search his apartment. Frawly just got back from looking it over. Want to see what he found?” Spencer and Frawly were both new since Leopold’s days with the department, but he’d known them both as patrolmen. Frawly was the younger and more excitable of the two. Right now he had reason to be excited. “Look at this, Captain! I found it hidden away at the back of a closet!”
Leopold watched while the detective unwrapped the soft cloth from around the wooden panel, knowing what it would be. “Another icon,” he said, studying the painted angel with all the scrutiny of an art professor. “The technique seems similar to the first one.”
“I guess that clinches it, Captain.”
“I wish it did, Frawly. The man who shot Fletcher may have planted it to incriminate Rosen for Petrov’s murder and been caught in the act when Connie and Fletcher arrived.”
Max Rosen, of course, denied all knowledge of the icon, insisting it had been planted in his apartment. “Why would I agree to a search if I knew you’d find that?” he argued.
“Because you had no choice,” Leopold countered. “You knew we’d get a court order anyway.”
The questioning went on past dawn, and Leopold took a break to phone Molly before she left for court. He told her what he knew about Fletcher, and then what the commissioner had asked him to do.
“Is it what you want?” Molly asked softly.
“What I want is to have Fletcher back here. What I want is to find out who shot him.”
“Let’s talk about it later,” she said.
Connie phoned from the hospital just before nine. “It was a long operation but he’s going to make it, Captain. Both bullets are out and ballistics is already running tests. They’re nine-millimeter, the same type that killed Petrov. I’m on my way in.”
“Go home and sleep for a while, Connie.”
“I’m on my way in.”
After Connie arrived, Leopold wrapped the icon in its soft cloth covering, identical to the cloth around the one in Petrov’s trunk, and drove over to Rachel Dean’s shop. He wanted confirmation that this one was the real thing too, and not some forgery. He couldn’t imagine a killer sacrificing a valuable art work simply to frame someone else for the crime, but stranger things had happened.
The first thing he noticed when he pulled up in front of the shop was that the front door was standing slightly ajar. He stepped inside, calling out, “Mrs. Dean? Rachel Dean? It’s Leopold.”
There was no answer. He walked to the back office, tried the door, and found it locked. He could see light coming from under the door, but no one answered. Then he remembered the barred back window and went outside. He walked around to the rear of the row of shops and counted down until he found the window in question. Looking through the dirty glass, he saw Rachel Dean slumped over her desk. Breaking the window would have done no good with the bars still in place. He hurried around to the front of the shop and put in a call for help. When a patrol car arrived, two burly police officers helped him break down the locked door.
Rachel Dean was dead. She’d been shot in the chest, like the others. He looked around the office, at a blood-soaked handkerchief with which she’d tried to stanch the flow from the wound, at the pencil with which she’d tried to print a dying message: ICON.
Just that one word. She hadn’t gotten any further.
Just before noon, Leopold faced Connie and Spencer and Frawly in the squadroom. He was working at one of the vacant desks, somehow reluctant to reclaim his old glass-enclosed office that now belonged to Fletcher. “We now have two murders and one close call. Happily, the news from the hospital is good. Fletcher is conscious after his surgery and the doctor says it looks good. What else do we have, Connie?”
“The bullets they removed from Fletcher came from the same gun that killed Vladimir Petrov, which is no great surprise. The one that killed Rachel Dean was a nine-millimeter too. We’re after one killer, and those icons are the motives for the crimes.”
“Any theories?”
She thought for a moment before responding. “From what we know, including what his wife Sally told you earlier, Petrov smuggled a half-dozen valuable Russian icons into this country five years ago. He sold two soon after his arrival, and when he decided to purchase the condominium at Bellview Sound Estates, he needed to sell some of the remaining four. Rachel Dean valued one at four hundred thousand dollars, but apparently didn’t see the other three. I have two theories about what happened next. Petrov might have decided to keep a good thing going by faking some mosaic icons, approaching one of the condo’s tilers for help.” She smiled. “I got that idea from you, Captain. The other possibility is that someone simply killed him to steal the icons, and then shot Fletcher when he was caught leaving one of them at the Rosen apartment.”
“Or else Rosen did it himself and is trying to appear innocent by coming in,” Spencer suggested.
Leopold frowned. “How’s the timing on that? Could he have killed Rachel Dean before he showed up here?”
Connie had the answer. “He walked in shortly before four A.M. The medical examiner estimates that Rachel Dean died around three, but keep in mind she was shot sometime earlier. She lived long enough to write that single word of her message. The killer shot Fletcher around twelve thirty-five. We got him to the hospital, and then I came over to get you, Captain. While I was doing that, the killer had plenty of time to go to Rachel’s gallery and shoot her. Then, if it was Rosen, he showed up here before four.”