“Flattered. It’s a magnificent brain.”
She noticed one of her conservators sponging roughly at a Polish poster of Rebecca and smacked his shoulder. “Careful! She’s been through a lot, that poor girl. Show her some care. Handle her gently, like a lover.” Taking Evan by the arm, she snapped back to English: “I feel sorry for Mihn’s wife. In bed she must feel like hamburger meat.”
She walked as she talked, casting an eagle eye across the workstations.
“I’m trying to find a man,” he said.
“Me, too.” A sideways glance. “Okay, okay. Let’s find your man. It’ll bring some excitement to my life.”
“I doubt your life lacks excitement.”
“Let me cook you dinner sometime, and you can find out.”
“Deal. But for now—”
“But for now, a man.”
“Yes. I believe he’s left the country. He’s off the radar, and he’s been careful to cover all the usual bases. I was in his house briefly. It was filled with luxury items, some rare. I’m hoping I can track him through unusual purchases he’s made.”
“Why that approach?”
“Because,” Evan said, “that’s how he tracked me.”
“No, no, no!” She paused by a giant plywood worktable, lifting the padded earphone free of a painter’s head to shout in his ear. “Use Bestine to remove the tape adhesive residue.”
She let the headphone snap back to the man’s skull and kept on. “So you’d like to track down which purchase?”
“He had an original Monet.”
“How could you tell it wasn’t a fake?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“If I made it, you wouldn’t be able to tell.”
“I’m assuming you didn’t make it.”
She gave a demure tilt of her chin. Proceed.
“It was of water lilies—”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s always water lilies with him. How many water lilies can a guy paint?”
“He didn’t just do water lilies.”
“Right. Haystacks. Lotsa haystacks.” She sighed. “Give me a Metropolis poster from the thirties any day. Have you seen the Boris Karloff Frankenstein? It just went at auction for—”
“Can you track a Monet like that?”
“Evan, the guy painted hundreds of them. Plus the forgeries — only Starry Night’s been knocked off more. Even if you knew it was real, how could you tell which water-lily painting it was? They all look like … well, like water lilies.”
From his jacket Evan pulled the printouts of the crime-scene pictures and fanned through them. But no dining-room shot of the Monet had magically appeared since he’d last perused the stack.
She read his face. “I’m sorry. Was there anything else you saw in the house that you could track?”
“Lexan.”
“What?”
“Bullet-resistant polycarbonate resin acquired on the black market.”
She screwed up her face. “Good luck there.”
He shuffled the printouts. Files on a Pakistani rug. Punctured IV bags draining onto the basement floor. The barn interior, two Mercedes Geländewagens and a wrestling mat.
He stopped. Stared at the last photo. Not what was in it but what was missing.
Melinda’s tiny hand gripped his elbow. “What?”
“A vintage Rolls.”
Evan had seen Dex drive away with it when he’d taken Despi. But it had never reappeared. René needed his toys. As his operation at the chalet drew to a close, he’d have wanted to get the car clear of the location, ready to meet him at his next stop. What had he said at the dinner table? You could take silk sheets and caviar and inject them directly into my veins. His obsession with luxury might be the thing that exposed him.
“What model was it?” Melinda asked.
“A Phantom.”
“That,” she said, “might prove useful.”
Evan stared at the photo taken outside the barn. The edge of the picture captured the bank of shoveled snow that rimmed the vehicle path. It was indented with dozens of notches made by the G-Wagons when they’d backed up for their three-point turns. Evan focused on a particular imprint in the icy rise. Another bumper mark, much lower, studded with the rectangular outline of a license-plate frame. But he knew there had been no license plate on the Rolls. As he squinted at the shape, Melinda leaned over him, her breath smelling of Juicy Fruit.
“What?” she asked.
“The license-plate indentation in the snow here. I don’t remember it having—”
“We’ll look at that in a minute,” she said. “Right now tell me — the Phantom. Was it a I, II, III, IV?”
“How can you tell?”
“I can’t. But come.” She steered him between two wet tables, the mist from a retrofitted insecticide sprayer moistening their cheeks. “Quan? Quan?”
A man in the far corner raised an arm hesitantly. Melinda beelined for him. He stood at attention as they approached. Covering his vast table, sandwiched between Mylar sheets, were sales brochures for vintage automobiles.
“You deal in car brochures?” Evan said.
“You’d be surprised,” Melinda said. “This Bugatti one here? It’s worth nearly three hundred grand.” She looked at Quan. “You need to help him identify a type of Rolls-Royce Phantom.”
She started to translate between the men, but Evan stepped in with badly accented Vietnamese. “It had big fenders that swooped up over the front wheels. Swept-back pillars so the windshield was on a tilt. And it had those things over the rear tires—”
“Fender skirts? With rivets?”
“Yes.”
“The Brits, they call them ‘spats.’ Close-coupled body style?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Was the passenger compartment somewhat short? Did it look … zoomy?”
“Yes.”
“Like this?” Quan tapped the Mylar covering an old Rolls brochure.
“Not exactly.”
Quan bent over, rummaging beneath his stool, and came up with a coffee-table book. Flipping through the pages. “This?”
“No.”
“This?”
“Too big.”
“This?”
“Yes!”
“It’s a Phantom III.” He smiled, showing crooked teeth. “Goldfinger’s car!”
“How many were made?”
Quan consulted the book. “Seven hundred twenty-seven chassis. Less with the body you describe.”
“That’s a lotta haystacks,” Evan said to Melinda.
Already she’d clamped his hand in hers, yanking him along hard enough to put a sting in his shoulder. Before he could thank Quan, he’d been whisked down a back hall and into a dark-walled photography room with blacked-out windows. The most private space in the building, it was generally reserved for illicit document work. Melinda stopped by a desk, snapped her fingers impatiently.
It took a moment for him to catch her meaning, and then he handed her the printout of the photo taken outside the barn. She slid it beneath an AmScope binocular microscope, the enlarged image coming up on the connected computer. Twisting her long hair in a knot, she flipped it over her shoulder and leaned to the wide eyepiece mounted on a boom arm. She studied the license-plate indentation in the snow. Evan did the same on the mirroring monitor.