Chameleon's Death Dance Read online

  “Is that anything like asking me up to your flat to see your etchings?” I asked with a laugh. “I would like that, or maybe dinner, or some live music?” I handed him my card. “I haven’t decided whether I should get a place of my own, yet, so I’m still roughing it in a hotel. Give me a call.”

  Chapter 2

  Inspecting Danielle in the full-length mirror, I let the illusion go and watched the woman in the mirror grow three inches, her hair lighten to yellow-blonde, her face fill out and her cheekbones flatten. Her shoulders broadened, and her body thickened while her breasts shrank a bit, and her hips narrowed. The teal evening gown and diamonds disappeared, leaving a skin-tight black cat suit. It wasn’t very sexy, because of the pockets bulging with weapons and tools. Even after twenty years, it still astonished me that I could do that.

  The Libby Nelson I’d spent my life seeing in the mirror was a very different—and more comfortable—woman than Danielle Kincaid.

  I stripped out of the cat suit as I made my way to the bathroom to take a shower. I really wanted a bath, but the hotel room tub was too short.

  After a month in Vancouver, I was finally making some progress. Of four people I hoped to meet at Marian Clark’s that evening, I’d managed to connect with three of them—Marian, Langston Boyle, and George Crawford, owner of a large jewelry corporation. Edward Buchanan, my fourth target, had been tied up for most of the evening in what appeared to be a deep discussion with another man I didn’t recognize.

  Crawford didn’t evidence the least bit of interest in me, which I thought was surprising given the jewelry I sported. His wife seemed even less inclined to make my acquaintance. I knew they had a daughter in her early twenties and a son in his late twenties. If I needed to get closer to Crawford, I might have to look into befriending his children.

  My presence in Vancouver was at the behest of Myron Chung, an investigator with North American Insurance Corporation, who contacted me at my home in Toronto. I had done some work for NAI in the past. As I took my shower, I replayed Chung’s call in my head.

  “Miss Nelson, I have some work for you if you have some time.”

  “How much time are we talking about?” I asked.

  “Maybe as much as six months to a year, maybe only a few weeks.”

  That would mean putting the rest of my business on hold for too long a time. “Mr. Chung, I don’t think I can do that. Where is this work?” I figured I might be able to fit it in if it was in Toronto.

  “Vancouver,” Chung said. Then he mentioned what he was willing to pay. Then he said he’d pay all expenses, with a quarter of a million credits as an up-front deposit.

  That’s when I said yes. Never let it be said that I couldn’t be bought.

  My boyfriend threw a fit.

  “What do you mean you’re going away for six months?” Wil asked, clearly upset.

  “That’s how long Chung told me it might take. Six months to a year. But who knows? I might figure it all out and be back in a couple of weeks.”

  “I don’t like you being gone so long.”

  That stopped me cold. Wilbur Wilberforce, Director of Security for the North American Chamber of Commerce and one of the handsomest men alive, had recently moved to Toronto. Our relationship was definitely on the hot and heavy side, as new relationships often are. But we didn’t live together, and neither of us had broached the subject of “long term.”

  Besides, his job required a lot of travel. I started feeling a little itchy, as I usually did when a man got a little too possessive.

  “How many days did you spend in Toronto last month?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “How many days?”

  I could see him counting in his head.

  “Uh, six. No, wait, eight. Six days early in the month and then a weekend at the end.”

  “Uh huh. And how many days did you spend in Vancouver?” Before I had to endure the counting again, I said, “Four. Eight days here, four there. Just switch things around, and we can spend the same amount of time together.”

  He glanced at my face, then did a double take. Wil was a smart guy, and I was pleased to note that he recognized that the look in my eyes and my cynical half-smile didn’t bode well for his end of the discussion.

  “Well, I guess we could work something out,” he said.

  “That’s the proper spirit. Come on out and I’ll treat you to some seafood.”

  The items Myron Chung and North American Insurance wanted me to find were two paintings and a dozen or so pieces of jewelry. With a total valuation of close to a billion credits, they had changed ownership in Pittsburg. Through what probably was an oversight, the legal owners hadn’t been consulted, and they got upset. They filed a claim with their insurer, and Chung’s bosses were willing to pay an outrageous amount of money to try to recover the articles and prevent having to pay the claim.

  Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders and Van Gogh’s A Wheatfield with Cypresses were famous. The jewelry included pieces from the crown jewels of England and France. Those collections had survived the nuclear bombings of London and Paris, but over the centuries, they had been broken up and scattered.

  The theft in Pittsburg had been a sloppy, violent job, and three people died. Two of the thugs involved were subsequently captured and executed, but the leader of the heist and the collector who paid for the operation were never identified. The paintings and jewelry disappeared. That had been three years before. When Chung heard rumors that the paintings ended up in Vancouver, he contacted me.

  I spent two weeks studying everything Chung could give me, then consulted my father, who often brokered high-end stolen goods.

  “I remember the Pittsburg job,” Dad said when I visited him. “A rich industrialist married into an old-money family who owned the paintings. He had pretty good security on his mansion, but the crew that pulled the job simply used brute force. Killed two security guards and Mrs. Crabtree. Only took those two paintings and the jewels, although there were plenty of other high-end artworks they could have grabbed.”

  “Sounds like a commissioned job,” I said.

  “Exactly. From what I remember, the Crabtrees owned three Van Goghs, all hung on the same wall, but only one was taken. The three together would be worth much more than the total they’d bring individually, which makes me think the people pulling the job weren’t pros. They didn’t know art. They were shown pictures of what to take, and that’s all they took.”

  “So, what can you tell me about the collectors in Vancouver?”

  He grinned. “A lot of very high-end art is disappearing in Vancouver. A couple of pieces you lifted went to a contact there. I got the impression that some very wealthy collectors didn’t care where the art came from, and neither did their friends.”

  “Really?” One of the things that made famous art relatively safe to own was that it was famous. Steal a Rembrandt, and where do you sell it? Collectors of such pieces usually had to hide them away. “You’re saying that people are knowingly buying stolen art and displaying it for other people who know it’s stolen?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. They think they’re so far above the law and common ethics that they’re untouchable.” He mentioned several names, one of which was Marian Clark.

  Dad gave me the name of his contact in Vancouver. We talked about a strategy for finding the stolen pieces, and he also gave me a list of artworks owned by collectors in Vancouver but desired by collectors elsewhere—just in case I might stumble across one or more of the priceless pieces some evening when I wasn’t busy. If all the rich collectors were honest, art thieves would go out of business.

  I spent three days and nights creating Danielle Kincaid, kissed Wil goodbye, then took a train to Vancouver. Wil flew all over the continent for his job, but I preferred to avoid the all too frequent airplane crashes due to violent weather. I spent most of the time either reading or studying the international Art Loss Database to brush up on those artworks that had gone astra
y at one time or another.

  A month later, I was starting to get a good feel for the upper end of Vancouver society. It had always been a rich city, and the devastation of the other large west coast ports had shifted a lot of money north. Although the climate was much warmer than it had been a couple of centuries before, it was still a lot cooler in the summer there than in Toronto. In fact, a lot of the upper crust from Toronto, Chicago, and other eastern cities had summer homes in and around Vancouver.

  The Salish Sea area, from Vancouver Island down to Vancouver and south to Seattle and Olympia, had almost completely drowned over the previous two hundred years. A huge earthquake and a tsunami had piled onto the sea-level rise from the melting polar icecaps. Hundreds of new islands had been created, and ocean-going ships could dock as far east as Abbotsford, fifty miles east of Vancouver. Even more than San Francisco, Vancouver had become the western gateway to North America.

  Driving over any of the bridges in Vancouver brought a jarring reminder of how much things had changed. The tops of skyscrapers still visible above the surface of the water drew the eyes down to the drowned city below. I had done the obligatory tourist thing of standing on the bridge between Central Island and Stanley Island. The tops of hotels and office buildings looked like man-made islands. Looking down, I could see streets running between the buildings.

  Two nights after Marian Clark’s charity fundraiser, I stood outside Sheila Robertson’s home, which was right down the road from Marian’s. The local society gossip site on the infonet reported that the Robertsons were attending another charity event in San Francisco.

  I’d spent most of the previous two days scouting the property. Using my chameleon mutation, I had evaluated the walls surrounding it. Nice little walled estate, approximately forty acres in size, with riding stables, two swimming pools, and a mansion almost as large as the Clark’s home. It had very good security, with some of the same top-end equipment I had installed on a couple of homes outside of Toronto.

  But the guards had to open the gates when the non-resident staff went home. Blurring my form, I crawled through the opening and then lay next to the driveway while the minibus drove through, and the guards closed the gate again. Half an hour later, with no detectable activity inside the compound, I rose and trotted toward the house.

  The Robertsons were rich enough to own a Rembrandt, which they did, and were close to their neighbors, the Clarks. Banking on Dad’s intelligence about Marian and the stolen art clique in Vancouver, I figured Sheila and her husband might be a potential market for the paintings. And if not, then the jewelry she had been wearing at Marian’s soiree was a tempting target. Besides, I didn’t like the woman. How dared she sneer down her nose at a Kincaid?

  Some of the windows in the house showed lights. I knew from my research and previous surveillance of the property that the Robertsons employed twenty-two staff, including landscapers, and fifteen security guards on around-the-clock shifts. Twelve of the staff had departed in the minibus. Chances were that other staff had taken the night off with the Robertsons being out of town.

  The blueprints for the house showed ten bedrooms in the attic, arrayed around an open space. With the owners gone, I expected that most of the staff still on site would have retreated to their rooms for the evening.

  I used a grappling hook and line to climb up to a balcony. The windows behind the balcony were dark. It only took a few seconds to disable the alarm on the door, and I slipped inside.

  Creeping through the house, I found a cook still working in the kitchen. A man I took to be the butler sat in a library or study with his feet up on an ottoman, watching a sporting match on a giant screen and drinking brandy or something from a snifter. The room had a few paintings, mainly of hunting scenes in a nineteenth-century style.

  Searching through the other rooms on the ground level, I didn’t find anything exciting. Climbing back to the second floor, I found a long hall with art decorating the walls. Some of the pieces I could identify, others weren’t famous enough that I would have studied them in school.

  The ballroom was another story. Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, was stolen from a museum long before The Fall, and had surfaced when the Robertsons bought it ‘from a private collection’ only a few years before my foray into their house. A number of other priceless works hung on the walls, including a Vermeer, a Potter and a Van Loo, along with those of lesser-known artists. Obviously, the Robertsons were partial to Dutch Golden Age artists.

  The third floor revealed the family rooms, including his and her bedrooms. In his bedroom, I found a Manet that was on the list of missing stolen paintings I had studied, but no more Rembrandts or Monets.

  The safe behind the Manet held some men’s jewelry, a few large loose gems, and a few storage chips. I copied the chips using a portable chip cloner, and pocketed a diamond, two rubies, and a very large sapphire. I tucked the Manet under my arm as I left his bedroom. There wasn’t a chance he would report it as missing.

  Her bedroom had a lot of tapestries and schlock landscapes on the walls. When combined with the pink and green color scheme, the overall impression was of a woman with zero taste. Her safe, however, was worth the trip. Sheila hadn’t taken the fantastic diamond necklace she wore at Marian’s to San Francisco. I pocketed it along with the matching earrings and bracelet.

  It upset me that I had to leave four other paintings and a Rubens bronze, all listed as stolen in the past decade, but there was a limit as to what I could carry.

  Exiting the house the same way I had entered, I walked through the gardens to a point opposite the front gate and went over the wall, setting off alarms and lights. Assuming that the guards would focus their attention inside the walls, I slipped into the woods and made my way to my car—a utility van I’d leased with an old identity I often used.

  I drove over the bridge into Central Island and downtown, then over the next bridge to a middle-class neighborhood on the mainland. I parked the van in the garage, stashed the painting and all the jewelry, and sent the data from the copied chips to my mother. If there was anything on them that could be turned into money, she’d figure it out. All of that done, I changed clothes and took Danielle’s sports car back to my hotel.

  Chapter 3

  Langston Boyle called the following day and asked me out to dinner. I researched the restaurant he suggested, taking a look at the pictures on their infonet site, and created an ensemble that seemed to be appropriate.

  The next evening, he picked me up at my hotel, escorting me from the lobby to a waiting limousine.

  “I was beginning to wonder if I had been too forward the other night,” I said as we drove across town.

  With a wrinkled brow, he asked, “Why would you think that?”

  “Well, I hadn’t heard anything from you, so I thought you were just being polite when you mentioned us seeing each other again.”

  He chuckled. “Hardly. It’s been a busy week. I had meetings with donors, and we’re working on our annual fundraiser.”

  “Oh, really? And when will that be?”

  “Three weeks from tomorrow,” he said.

  “Is that how long I’ll have to wait for my personal guided tour?”

  “Oh, no, we can do it before then.”

  I looked at him through my lashes. “Maybe this evening after dinner?”

  His surprise was evident.

  “I think museums are so romantic,” I purred. “Don’t you? In the evening, with no one around, and the lights all dimmed? I once took an evening tour of a museum when I was at university. It was very rewarding.”

  “Well, I think we could work that out. I wasn’t aware that your love of art was so deep.”

  “Art is enhanced by the company with which it is enjoyed,” I said. “And I do appreciate deep enjoyment.”

  I continued to flirt with him throughout a lovely dinner that included huge crab legs. I didn’t know if he had anything to do with stolen art, but it would be a surprise if he wa
s totally ignorant of shady dealings in his own city. He was paid well, but my research showed that his consulting side business paid even better. An idea occurred to me.

  “Langston, if I were to decide to buy a painting, who would you suggest I contact here in Vancouver to authenticate it?”

  “I do that sort of thing,” he replied. “I can also refer you to a couple of other people. What are you looking at?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular right now, but I heard a rumor that an unusual piece might be coming on the market. I would need to have it authenticated, and get an objective appraisal. I don’t think the broker can be trusted to operate in my interests when he’s representing the seller.”

  Of course, there was no such painting. The idea had just popped into my head. But I was willing to bet that my father could supply a stolen painting if I asked him to. Hell, I could even use the Manet.

  After dinner, the limo took us to the museum, and Langston used a passcode and retinal scan to get into the building, then an ID card to pass by the guard desk at the entrance. I memorized the passcode. Getting a picture of his retina would be a bit more difficult.

  He led me into the main gallery and we strolled along. Occasionally, I would stop in front of a painting or sculpture, and he would tell me about it. He also pointed out pieces that he either thought I would enjoy or that he thought were particularly interesting. Our tastes didn’t always mesh. I didn’t appreciate certain abstract paintings as much as he did.

  “I’ve seen all this,” I told him, moving closer and placing my hand on his chest. “I was hoping I might get to see some of the non-public areas. Surely you have some special pieces you’d like to show me. Maybe some non-museum pieces you’re appraising?”

  He cleared his throat and looked a little uncomfortable. I moved closer, pressing my body against his.

  Dropping my voice, I said, “All of this is covered by security cameras. Don’t you think we could have more fun if we weren’t so public?”