Found Art (Maine Justice Book 3) Page 4

  He gave in and helped himself to a stack of pancakes. I made a mental note not to tell him any details if Jennifer had more stomach upsets. To my surprise, she sat down and ate a pancake, too. Maybe things were on the uptick. Eddie started making jokes, and she laughed at them. Definitely a good sign.

  When we arrived at the station, Arnie and Clyde went up the stairs with Eddie and me. I gathered them around to talk about their cases, and Nate came in while we were planning the day for the unit.

  I updated them on the art theft case. Kennebunk had e-mailed me a digital photo of the Nevar painting stolen there. It matched the one we had found on the raid, so I sent Arnie to Kennebunk with the painting. Their department would document it as evidence and return it to the owner. Clyde had to spend the morning at the courthouse, and Eddie and Nate planned to pick up the Québécois Club suspect for questioning.

  A report came in from the chief in Cape Elizabeth after the men had left. They’d had an art theft in May. A couple’s home had been burglarized while they were out of town. The security system had been deactivated. In addition to artworks, the thieves had stolen their electronics, two collector shotguns, and a target pistol.

  Hard on the heels of that email, I received a fax with a chilling report from the Westbrook P.D. In late July, a night burglary had gone awry, and the homeowner had been shot with his own weapon. He’d survived, but had undergone extensive rehabilitation. I wondered why I hadn’t heard about the case, until I realized it had happened during my honeymoon. Small sculptures, a coin collection, a portrait, and guns had been taken.

  I called upstairs to see if Mike was available. He was, and I went up to discuss the new developments with him.

  “Could be the same guys who did the two jobs in Portland,” he said thoughtfully, chewing gum as he looked over the printouts. His jacket lay over a chair, and his tie hung around his neck untied.

  “Should I look farther afield?” I asked. “Portsmouth, maybe?”

  He shrugged. “They could be crossing the state line.”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that Nevar painting was headed for Quebec.”

  Mike snapped his gum, frowning. “Let’s concentrate on Maine. You can catch new crimes from the updates. How about you check with Scarborough, Biddeford, and Saco P.D.’s for past cases?”

  “Yeah, I’ve sent out inquiries. And I thought I’d visit the Portland Museum of Art today and broaden my education.”

  Mike grinned. “Atta boy! Go for it.”

  I drove to the art museum and told the curator about the art thefts. He had heard about a couple of them, but was surprised to learn we’d found several more in the area. I asked him how museums went about buying artworks, and how they knew they weren’t stolen. He explained a little bit, the novice version, I’m sure, about how they investigated the provenance of each piece they acquired. He was also able to tell me some things about the sculptor and a couple of the painters whose works had been stolen in the recent burglaries.

  He put a print-out in my hand. “Here’s a list of organizations and e-mail sites we offer free to our patrons. You can go online and sign up for notices for art shows and auctions.”

  “Great.” I folded it, tucked it in my pocket, and gave him my business card. “Please call us at the Priority Unit if you notice anything not quite right—or very wrong.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  It was one o’clock when I left the museum. I grabbed a sandwich and went back to the office and tried to concentrate on work.

  Eddie and Nate came in and asked me to run over to the Québécois Club with them. They had brought in the disgruntled former employee, Thomas, and questioned him, but now were having second and third thoughts about his guilt. We drove to the club in Eddie’s truck and talked some more with the manager, the chef, and the waiters.

  “I don’t like that waiter, Jason,” Eddie said. “He’s evasive.”

  “Something’s a little off with him,” Nate agreed.

  We had given the club the okay to open for lunch that day, and a dozen or so men sat in the dining room. After a quick chat with the manager, we went out to the kitchen. Eddie cornered Jason and talked to him some more while Nate and I assured the chef that we were working hard on the case.

  “I am tasting,” he said with a grave nod. “I taste everything now.”

  I hoped he used a clean spoon.

  Eddie rejoined us, and I looked a question at him.

  “I don’t know. Nothing solid.”

  “Let it rest for now,” I said.

  We went outside, and Nate said, “Captain, do you think we’re on the wrong track?”

  “Maybe. Just let it simmer for a few hours, Nate. Sometimes things sort themselves out.”

  Eddie laughed and looked at Nate. “That’s Harvey’s favorite method of investigating—thinking.”

  “It’s the best tool in the toolbox,” I said. “Your favorite is legwork, and that’s a good one, too, but sometimes you just need to let the dust settle.”

  I stopped on the sidewalk and called Jennifer on my cell phone. Nate and Eddie walked on toward the truck.

  “How you doing, gorgeous?” I asked.

  “Pretty good.”

  “Sure you’re okay?”

  “Well,” she said, “I think I could eat a jelly doughnut right about now.”

  “Great! I’ll send some over.” I had lost my skepticism about jelly doughnuts.

  Nate had climbed into the jump seat, and I got in front with Eddie. We were ready to head back to the office, and I said, “Just pull in at the doughnut shop for a minute, Ed.”

  He stopped at Double D, and I ran in and came out with a box of jelly doughnuts. There was a florist practically next door, so I told Eddie and Nate to hang on, and went in there and got half a dozen pink roses, then asked the florist to call me a cab. While she did, I scrawled a note to Jennifer on a card: “Precious Jenny, you make me very happy.”

  I paid for the flowers and went out and stood at the curb. Eddie and Nate were waiting for me in in the truck. Eddie spread his hands in a silent but unmistakable “What are you doing?” I signaled for them to be patient.

  The cab pulled up, and I opened the passenger door and laid the box of doughnuts and the flowers with the card on the seat beside the driver.

  “Can you deliver this stuff to 137 Van Cleeve Lane within the next fifteen minutes?” I asked. I held up a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Not a problem.”

  I took out my pocket notebook and wrote down the telephone number for the cab company and the number of the car. “All right, buddy.” I handed him the twenty. “Here’s the deal. I’ve got your number. In fifteen minutes, I’m going to call my wife. If she’s not eating jelly doughnuts, I’m calling your boss. Got it?”

  He looked at my badge, the twenty, and me. “Got it. And thanks.”

  I shut the door and walked back to Eddie’s truck and got in.

  “Do we want to know what that was about?” Eddie asked.

  “Jennifer’s got a craving for jelly doughnuts.”

  “That’s a good sign,” said Nate.

  “How can she eat jelly doughnuts?” asked Eddie. “She barely keeps breakfast down.”

  “Don’t ask me, I’m just glad she’s hungry.”

  When I got back to my desk, I called her.

  “Hey, gorgeous! Whatcha doing?”

  She laughed. “Eating doughnuts.”

  “Fantastic.” I was content.

  “The flowers are beautiful.”

  “Are you sick of roses?”

  “As if.”

  I smiled for the next hour.

  *****

  When I got home at quarter past five, Jenny was asleep in our bedroom. I tiptoed in, and she opened her eyes. I scooped her into my arms, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “How you doing?” I asked, pressing my cheek against her hair.

  “Good, but I’m thirsty. I’ve been really lazy today. I should have done some computer wo
rk, but I’m so sleepy.”

  “You needed the rest.” I went to get her some fresh water. When I got back into the bedroom, she was thumbing through a book her obstetrician had given us, on pregnancy and childbirth.

  “Listen to this, Harvey! Our baby is an inch long.”

  “That small?” I pulled a little tape measure out of my pocket and looked at the first inch mark. “That’s pretty tiny to be causing you all this trouble.”

  “Oh, and his heart is beating already. Can you believe that?”

  “Wow.”

  “Mary Rowland called, and I asked her if babies that tiny have a soul. She thinks they do.”

  “I’ll tell Mike.” If our pastor’s wife said it was so, it probably was so, although Mike would give me an argument, just on principle. I think he just enjoyed arguing.

  I went to the other side of the bed and took my shoes off and moved over beside Jennifer. I held her close while she read to me what babies are like at eight weeks after conception. I couldn’t remember being so happy.

  *****

  The next morning I offered to call one of our friends from church to come and keep Jennifer company and do a little housework, but she insisted she didn’t need to be baby-sat. I wasn’t totally convinced, but I said, “Okay. I’ll run home for lunch if I can.”

  Eddie and Nate were at the office when I got there, already working on the poisoning investigation. They got out their notes and hashed it out, arguing a little and reading bits to each other from their interviews. All of the Québécois Club’s arsenic victims had survived, but three were still in the hospital. The doctors said the poison had been too diluted to be fatal. I got coffee and checked the e-mail and crime updates on my computer, keeping one ear on their conversation.

  “The guy that got fired, Thomas, was in there late Wednesday,” said Nate. “He could have done it.”

  “But his new boss says he was at work,” Eddie reminded him. “He’s got an alibi.”

  “But they don’t watch him all the time,” Nate argued. “Somebody saw him at the Québécois.”

  “Who?”

  They both pawed through their notes.

  “Jason,” Nate said. There was a moment’s silence.

  “Who else?” Eddie asked, his voice rising.

  Silence again.

  “Jason was the only one to see Thomas in the club,” Eddie said at last. “Suppose he wasn’t really there.”

  “Why would Jason lie?” Nate asked.

  Their eyes met, and they were out the door.

  Paula answered the phone on her desk and said, “Just a moment, please.” She pushed a button. “Harvey, line two. Those boys sure are persistent, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah, I think they’re close to breaking this case. Who is it?” I nodded toward my blinking desk phone. I didn’t like surprises.

  “The social worker on the Hadley case.”

  “Thanks.” I took the call, rescheduled the appointment I’d made the previous week, and went back to my pursuit of fine art.

  Nate and Eddie reported to me an hour later. The waiter, Jason, had skipped work that morning without an explanation. When they heard that, they went right to his house and picked him up. He was hustling his girlfriend to pack, about to leave town. They took him into custody, but he refused to talk without a lawyer present.

  “He’s down in the holding cell. Terry’s going to call us after he has a chat with the lawyer.” Eddie flopped down into his chair.

  I filled them in on what I’d been doing on the art case while they waited. Finally Terry called Eddie, and he and Nate went down to get the prisoner. They took him and the court-appointed lawyer into the interview room. After they’d talked for a while, Jason Cuvier was ready to confess.

  “That idiot thought he could extort money from the manager,” Eddie told me later. “How stupid can you be? He practically closed the whole club down.”

  “What, he was threatening to poison the food again if they didn’t give him money?”

  “Something like that,” Eddie said. “He thought he had this brilliant plan, but when he saw how sick people were, he got scared and didn’t ask the manager for money. I ask you, how profitable is it to blackmail someone whose business you ruin?”

  “Really bright guy,” I said.

  “Yeah. He must be Swedish.”

  “Oh, tell me about it,” I said, but I smiled.

  He and Nate were doing all right. They were learning to make their different ways of working complement each other, and I hoped they’d be good partners in the end. Eddie definitely had the edge on Nate in experience, but Nate had a way of seeing the whole picture that I thought would be helpful, if Eddie would listen to him.

  After they’d returned the prisoner to holding, I checked the crime updates on my computer, keeping one ear on their conversation. A painting by one of the artists I’d flagged was reported stolen in Yarmouth, to the north of us. I printed out the data and took it to Eddie.

  “Can you call the Yarmouth P.D. and get a complete report on this?”

  He scanned the sheet. “Another painting stolen.”

  “Yeah, they’re very active.”

  “Maybe there’s more than one set of burglars,” Nate said.

  “It’s possible.” I went back to my desk.

  Eddie at last hammered out a plan of action for the rest of the day, and he and Nate left the office. Paula brought me a fax from the police chief in Biddeford. They’d had an art theft in their city a month before. The thieves had broken in while the family slept, disarming the burglar alarm. They had stolen a good painting and some antique ink bottles. Also, two televisions and a computer with a laser printer, a CD player, and a motorbike.

  “Motorbike?” Arnie Fowler’s eyebrows shot up when I told him. “These guys haven’t stolen anything that big before.”

  “Right. Computers and TVs were the biggest items, other than paintings.”

  I went home for lunch. Jennifer had it on the table, and she ate with me, just a little macaroni and a few carrots, and a couple of bites of my piece of pie, but she was drinking milk today, and she smiled into my eyes while she did it.

  “Janice brought the pie,” she said.

  Bud and Janice Parker were our neighbors, in a well-kept ranch across the street. Bud had given me lawn care advice, and Janice had been friendly to Jennifer. They were nearly sixty, and Bud was looking forward to retirement from his insurance career. Janice was a dedicated homemaker and had helped Jennifer keep the flower beds healthy through August. Jennifer had gone over when they bought a new computer and helped set it up, and she’d taught Janice how to Skype with their Air Force colonel son.

  That afternoon I looked at the unit’s budget for the previous year. I went through it three times and asked Paula a few questions before it totally made sense.

  Eddie and Nate were busy on another robbery case, wrapping it up and doing the paperwork. I put Arnie onto compiling the details from all the art thefts, so we could spot common factors, and I asked Clyde to try to determine where the victims had bought their artworks.

  I continued educating myself on the artists whose works had been stolen. Most were respected, living American artists. Their media varied. Most were oils or watercolors, but two acrylics had been snatched, as well as the three small sculptures in the Biddeford burglary, and small antiques from several homes.

  About three o’clock, I called Mike to see if he could pay us a visit. Mike had been going through his own budget woes and was glad to take a break. He came through the stairway door smiling.

  “This place smells like home.”

  All of the men welcomed him, though Nate seemed a bit shy with the chief. The rest of us were on a first-name basis with Mike, and that must have seemed odd to Nate. I’d been a little scared of the last chief myself, in the old days, and anyone called upstairs to his office knew it couldn’t be for anything good. But I knew Mike so well, I didn’t think he could scare me—unless he started talking about
retiring again.

  I went over what we had with him and let Arnie and Clyde add their bits. Some of the stolen items had been bought directly from the artists at shows, some through galleries, and a few at auction.

  I folded my hands on my desk and looked at Mike. “My preliminary theory is this, and I could be absolutely wrong, but it seems to me that the art thefts are for one person or group, and the electronics are for another. I’m not sure about the antiques and coin collection yet. They could go either way.”

  “So, you’re saying the thieves split the loot between at least two buyers?” Mike asked.

  “Yes, or maybe they’re commissioned to steal the art, and can pick up whatever else they want for themselves at the same time. So far, they haven’t gone into bedrooms when the owners are at home, and they haven’t lifted any jewelry. But electronics have been taken at all of them, and guns wherever the homeowners had them. The one man who was shot woke up when they were in the house and walked in on them.”

  “What’s with the motorbike?” Mike asked.

  “You got me. One of them took a fancy to it, I guess. But TVs and DVD players they could unload pretty quickly for cash. Not a lot of money in used ones, but some. The motorbike was probably a bonus for them.”

  “You may be right, and there’s an art dealer or collector who sets up the thefts and sends a crew in to do it for him.”

  “So now what?” asked Arnie.

  “For one thing, look at people who’ve been arrested in the past for stealing electronics,” Mike said. “Whoever’s behind the art thefts may have hired some small-time crooks to do the heavy lifting for him.”

  “I think we should go around to galleries and warn them,” I said. “Their customers may be targeted. I don’t see a lot of purchases from the same dealer, though.”

  “Somehow, the thieves know who’s got the art,” Mike mused.

  “There’s some connection,” I agreed, “some way they get word on that. If we could figure out how, we might figure out where they were going to strike next, and then we can catch them.”

  Arnie and Clyde set out to make the rounds of galleries in town, telling the owners there had been a rash of art thefts in the area over the past year and suggesting they advise their customers to take extra security precautions.