Take Me Two Times Read online

  McDougal looked into her eyes for a second too long. Then he shrugged. “Friend on the force. He heard it on the police radio.”

  She nodded slowly, but her legs began to tremble again. How had he really known? His explanation seemed a little too glib. She sat back down on the porch steps. “I don’t think they’ll let me leave yet. They want to talk to me some more.”

  “You’re not a suspect, surely?”

  “I don’t think so.” God, was she? No, it wasn’t possible. She had an alibi. She’d been in her house, then in the hot tub with Quinn. Old Mrs. Santos had seen them and would back up her statement.

  “Gwen, it’s eighty-five degrees in the shade and you’re shivering. I think you’re in shock.”

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  “Hang on a sec.” McDougal crossed the street to his Kawasaki and unlocked a small storage compartment at the rear of the bike. He pulled out a rolled-up khaki jacket and stuffed it under his arm while he relocked the compartment.

  Khaki jacket. Oh, God. Gwen shivered again. She was leaping to ridiculous conclusions. He was probably right and she was in shock.

  McDougal couldn’t have blown two holes through an unarmed Carlos Velasquez. What motive would he have to do such a thing? It didn’t make sense.

  McD strode across the street and rounded the back of the cruiser. He shook out the khaki jacket—she saw no visible rips in it—and leaned in to put it around her shoulders.

  Gwen gave an inward sigh of relief, only to choke on it when Bullwinkle came out of the house and down the steps again.

  “Sir, I’m Eric McDougal with ARTemis. I’d like to take Ms. Davies home now, if you’re through questioning her.”

  Bullwinkle’s lips formed a somewhat goofy, disarming smile, but no humor reached his eyes. “We’re not quite through with her, Mr. McDougal. And as long as you’re here, we may as well ask you some questions, too.”

  “In regard to what, sir?”

  “In regard to that damn peculiar business that employs you two. ARTemis. Hunting down stolen art. You’re aware that there’s an FBI task force on that, aren’t you? And a central database of missing art?”

  “Yes, sir.” Neither she nor McDougal made any reference to the fact that the Nerd Corps often hacked files they weren’t supposed to have access to.

  “Then why don’t you guys back off and let us and the feds do our jobs?”

  McDougal looked him right in the eye. “Because, with all due respect, sir, sometimes the owners and the insurers want things handled quietly. Not to mention that, just like you in the property crimes unit, the FBI task force is overwhelmed with cases.”

  Bullwinkle’s large nose twitched. He drew up his upper lip, exposing his teeth. Then he sneezed forcefully, as if he were allergic to both Gwen and McDougal.

  “Bless you,” they said in unison.

  The detective pulled out a pocket hankie and blew his nose, never taking his eyes off them. “You mind if we search your car, Ms. Davies?”

  She blinked at the change in subject. “Go right ahead. I have nothing to hide.”

  He nodded and signaled to a uniformed officer, who gave the body of the Prius a perfunctory search. He paused longer when he looked at the driver’s side floor mat. Frowning, he beckoned to Bullwinkle, who joined him. The uniformed officer spoke into a radio, and a slight man in latex gloves came out with a box.

  Gwen and McDougal watched as he took a swab of something.

  “What’s he got?” Eric asked her.

  “I don’t know.” Still cold, she shoved her arms into the sleeves of his jacket and they waited.

  Gwen insisted that she was able to drive. McDougal insisted that she was not. Bullwinkle asked if there was any reason that she’d have blood in her Prius.

  Blood? “No,” Gwen said blankly.

  Then Bullwinkle solved the dispute between her and Eric by giving Gwen a ride down to the Miami-Dade police headquarters to fingerprint her and get a DNA sample.

  Eric looked worried as they pulled away in the squad car, but she couldn’t ignore her doubt. Had he been at the Velasquez brothers’ home before she had? Was he a murderer? Had he set her up?

  He had access to her fingerprints—and lip prints, for that matter—just by virtue of being an office mate. He could have taken a discarded coffee cup and pulled prints from that. What if he’d planted them inside the house? What about her DNA?

  Gwen’s stomach churned acid. Why would McDougal have gone to the house, though? What motive would he have had? Was he trying to horn in on her case?

  Five-point-four million dollars, the value of the mask, was a lot of money, and the ten percent commission on it was more than five hundred thousand dollars. McDougal made great money, but he had expensive sporting tastes. He’d been talking a lot about buying a boat. He’d been dating Angeline Le Fevre, who was tops on Gwen’s list of suspects.

  But he couldn’t hate Gwen that much—not enough to let her go to jail for a crime she didn’t commit. She couldn’t reconcile the idea with what she knew of him. People did do desperate things to save their own skins, though. . . .

  “You’re awfully quiet back there, Ms. Davies,” said Bullwinkle from the front of the Crown Vic.

  She met his gaze in the rearview mirror and nodded. “Yes. I’m not in the habit of stumbling over dead bodies.”

  “I have to wonder, ma’am, if that’s Carlos Velasquez’s blood in your car. Did you shoot him last night, throw the gun under the floor mat, and go dispose of it, not realizing that it would leave trace evidence?”

  “No, Detective. I was in my hot tub last night, as I told you. And if I had done such a thing, why would I come back to the house this morning and pretend to discover the body?”

  “Makes you look innocent.”

  Gwen sighed. “Your theory is wrong. I don’t even have a motive.”

  “I’d say it’s enough motive that you recovered a fake mask from the Velasquez brothers. You want the real one. You went to the house to question them, according to your statement this morning. Carlos wouldn’t tell you what they did with it, so you lost your temper and shot him.”

  “No. That’s ridiculous. I don’t go around shooting people, Detective. You won’t find any gunpowder residue on my hands.”

  “Scrubbed them real good last night, did you?”

  “No! Look, if you continue to question me like this, I’ll have to request an attorney.”

  Bullwinkle didn’t answer, just sneezed again. She guessed he was allergic to defense attorneys, too.

  “Bless you,” she said again.

  He nodded.

  She thought about redirecting him toward McDougal, but frankly she wanted to grill Eric first. Gwen peeled off his jacket even though she was still cold.

  Bullwinkle hit the brake at a stoplight, and Gwen absently watched a too-skinny woman in brown spike-heeled boots cross in front of the car. She had a snakeskin-patterned bag slung over her left shoulder and a briefcase in her right hand.

  Wait. Snakeskin.

  “Detective, I can tell you where the blood came from,” Gwen said, almost smacking herself in the forehead. “I shot a very large python a few days ago.”

  Bullwinkle’s head swiveled. He looked her up and down, from the orange streaks in her hair to her rosy apricot-painted toenails in their four-inch, spike-heeled sandals. “You shot a what?”

  “A python. I think.”

  Bullwinkle looked as if he thought that was a good one. “You think you shot it, or you think it was a python?”

  “I definitely shot it. I believe it was a python.”

  Bullwinkle digested this for a moment. “Right. So you shot a snake. And . . . stuffed it into your Prius?”

  “No, of course not. But some blood spatter could have been transferred from my shoes to the floor mat.”

  The light had changed, and a horn blared from the car behind them. Only in Miami would somebody honk at a cop.

  Bullwinkle glared into the rearview mir
ror but stepped on the gas. “Ms. Davies, this story is colorful, to say the least.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Where is this python now?”

  “Probably still in the warehouse where I shot it.”

  Bullwinkle pulled a hand over his face, lingering at his mouth. Okay, so maybe her story did sound a little far-fetched, but she was tired of people not taking her seriously. Sheila thought she was fragile; McDougal thought she was dumb enough that he could set her up; Quinn still thought of her as a spoiled little princess. . . . Enough already.

  “I’ll need the address of this warehouse, Ms. Davies,” said the detective.

  “Fine,” she muttered.

  The Miami-Dade police station was a massive concrete block. Inside it smelled of commercial-grade cherry disinfectant, stale, burned coffee, and traces of BO. They went upstairs to a bare-bones room with light gray cubicles and walls and industrial metal desks with faux-wood tops.

  While the officers did some paperwork, Gwen balled up McDougal’s jacket and mashed it into her Jimmy Choo handbag.

  Soon one of the officers took each of her fingers and rolled them on a little electronic pad.

  She gave Bullwinkle the address of the warehouse.

  He wrote it down. “All right, for the moment you’re free to go. But don’t take any sudden trips abroad, Ms. Davies.”

  Darn. And here I’d planned to have lunch in Paris on Sunday.

  “You have someone who can pick you up? This, ah, Eric McDougal, perhaps?”

  Gwen just nodded. “Yes, I’ll find a ride. When will I get my car back?” It had been impounded as possible evidence.

  “When we’re through processing it. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “I see. Thank you.” Gwen hitched her bag over her shoulder and headed for the door, cell phone in hand. She dialed Quinn’s cell phone number with her thumb and braced herself for an explosion of angry testosterone.

  chapter 19

  “Why are you at the police station?” Quinn asked. He listened as Gwen calmly explained that she’d discovered Carlos’s body. With each word, his blood pressure went up a notch.

  “Let me get this straight. You left me sleeping in your home and you went to east Hialeah alone? To talk to known burglars and drug dealers?”

  “Yes.”

  Quinn absorbed this while his brain supplied a movie reel of graphic images as a backdrop. Gwen bruised, bleeding, assaulted, raped. Gwen strangled by these creeps. Gwen tossed into the trunk of a car and disposed of in the open ocean.

  “Are you crazy?” he shouted, unable to help himself. “They should put you behind bars for your own safety.”

  “Listen, Quinn. For one thing, I really do know how to kill a man with a pen. Keep insulting me and I’ll show you sometime. For another, it’s not like I’m some Gothic heroine descending into a crypt at midnight in my skimpy nightie. I went in broad daylight, armed with a gun, a knife, a metal nail file, two spike heels, a cell phone, and a healthy working knowledge of tae kwon do.”

  “You took an unacceptable risk!”

  “Matter of opinion.”

  “You sneaked out and left me here deliberately.”

  “Okay, fine. Guilty as charged. But I’ve found that a little lipstick and a lot of cleavage work wonders in this job, and you would have gotten in the way of—”

  He flat-out snarled at that. “Jesus, Gwen, so leave me in the car! What happened to working together? What happened to—”

  “Look, can you spare me the lecture?”

  “I’ve never met anyone who needs a lecture more than you.”

  “No, what I need is a ride,” she told him. “Can you just come get me?”

  Silence. “Yes. If only to shake you until your teeth rattle. I’ll have to get a cab to your office parking garage. But I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Thank you.” Her voice sounded calm. Too calm. As if she’d had a few too many Xanax.

  “Gwen, are you okay?”

  She hesitated. “Something bad happened today.”

  “Something worse than finding a dead body and being hauled off by the police?”

  “Yes. I’ll tell you when you get here. I don’t want to talk inside the station.”

  “All right. Gwen, everything’s going to be fine. I promise.”

  She said nothing.

  “Gwen?”

  “Yes, I heard you. See you in a few.”

  That eerie calm weirded him out. “I’m on my way.”

  He vaulted into his clothes and called a Yellow Cab, spurred on by an image of Gwen standing forlorn in the big Miami-Dade police building, whacked out on Xanax or Valium because she’d been traumatized today.

  The cab arrived in record time only because he’d promised a double fare. It ferried him to the Brickell parking garage and his Mercedes coupe.

  Minutes later he pulled up outside the Miami-Dade police station. Gwen stood in the lobby, staring out at the traffic. She didn’t see him at first.

  She had a bag bigger than herself on her shoulder and she was slim as a mannequin, looking as if one good blast of air-conditioning could blow her right off those sky-scraper heels. Every protective instinct he possessed surged to the surface and pushed his anger out of the way.

  He opened his door and got out. He was halfway to the doors when she noticed him and emerged from the building, walking as if she were underwater. Something was very wrong, but she was doing her damnedest not to show it.

  “Hey, Quinn.” She gave him a lopsided smile. “Thanks for coming to get me.”

  He wrapped his arms around her, but instead of melding into him, she stood stiffly and patted his back in a weird, mechanized sort of way. Delayed shock? Drugs? He took her shoulders and held her at arm’s length.

  “How are you doing?” He peered at her pupils, but they weren’t dilated.

  “I’ve been better. How’s your eye?”

  It throbbed. He couldn’t see out of it. Strangers stared at him with pursed lips. He waved a hand dismissively and opened the passenger-side door of the coupe, shepherding her in, settling her onto the cushioned leather seat. “What happened?”

  “Jeweler first,” Gwen said. “Talk later.”

  “Jeweler? Don’t you want to—”

  “No, I don’t. We lost too much time yesterday.”

  “All right. Which jeweler? What’s the address?”

  “Her name is Trudie Hayward. She has a studio inside a gallery in Coral Gables.”

  “Yeah, I know it. Hayward Gallery, right? Contemporary American art and crafts?”

  Gwen nodded.

  “I think I got dragged to an opening there once.”

  Trudie Hayward was a lively blonde with perfect skin and a taste for kimonos and Converse high-tops. Quinn couldn’t guess her age. She wore glasses of a subtle design and silver jewelry as far from subtle as possible. Her long necklace started in a spiral, became a square in the next link, only to transform next into an oval, a shield shape, and so on. The necklace was dotted with semiprecious gems and also sported some gold layered over the silver.

  Quinn shook Trudie’s hand, mesmerized by the necklace and surprised that it didn’t look like an opera-length identity crisis. It worked, somehow. He didn’t know how, but it worked. It was hip; it was cool; he could imagine it on some L.A. starlet.

  Trudie exclaimed over Quinn’s eye.

  “Ran into a door,” he said.

  Gwen exclaimed over Trudie’s earrings, which were asymmetrical and complemented the necklace. One was longer and one had a doodle of some kind on it, a curly silver thing that swung back and forth. He’d never seen jewelry like this. He liked it enormously.

  “Trudie went to the same school as my mother,” Gwen told him. “She was several years behind her, but Mummy knew of her because she’s made quite a reputation for herself.”

  Trudie grinned and slipped her hands into the pockets of her hot-pink kimono. “What can I say—I’m notorious. Well, come on
back and show me what you’ve got.”

  They followed her into a suite of rooms at the far end of the gallery. One was clearly a business office and the other was a studio full of strange machinery, long unfinished wood tables, unassembled parts of jewelry, piles of books, trays of stones, a huge safe, and various odds and ends. In short, it was a colorful creative chaos.

  Trudie seemed to do most of her work at a scarred drawing table lit by a powerful lamp. Next to it was what looked like an acetylene torch. Neighboring that stood a very large tree stump ringed by various tools.

  Quinn eyed the stump and Trudie laughed. “My other desk,” she said. “I beat the hell out of metals there.” She gestured to a couple of stools and sat down in a rolling chair.

  Gwen set her handbag on one of the long tables and rooted around in it. She pulled out a stack of enlarged prints made from the photos taken with her cell phone.

  Trudie whistled as she looked through them. “Very nice work.”

  Gwen dug into a different pocket of her purse and produced a folded Kleenex. “Trudie, I’m positive the mask isn’t solid. I pulled this out of one of the seams.” She carefully opened the tissue, revealing the tiny gray curl of metal. “It smells kind of like asphalt.”

  “Looks like lead. You said the original mask is of solid gold? The person who copied it may have layered gold over lead to approximate the weight of the original. Lead tends to smell like asphalt, too—sweeter, though.”

  Gwen nodded.

  Trudie put on a visual device with big lenses and elastic that wrapped around her head. She turned on the lamp at her drawing table and inspected the little metal shaving. “Yes, it’s lead.”

  She picked up the photos again and continued to look at them under the light.

  “Very good work. Just a little careless at that one seam. Mmmm-hmmm. This looks like thirty-gauge gold, layered over the lead. The stones are probably colored cubic zirconia. More interesting is the fact that this mask has been laser welded. You can tell by the seams.”

  Quinn looked askance at Gwen, who lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

  “And what have we here? Looks like the beginnings of a signature, which has then been scratched out. But the first letter is a B. That I can tell you for sure.”