“We were. We’re not anymore. I trace it back to when Brodie was hired and she started worrying about her job. She changed. Truth? I don’t like being around her.” Shasta buttoned her coat and unhooked her purse strap from her chair. “I hope you find out who’s blackmailing her, though. Or who was blackmailing her. My money’s still on Dalton.”
“If not Dalton?”
“Then Brodie Keegan. Ambitious little rat.”
I left Grove Coffee right after Shasta. It wouldn’t be long before the Mystery Gang showed up at my house, and I needed to eat some sort of dinner first. I’d planned to cook something for Gilroy, too, but time had gotten away from me and I knew he’d grab something from Wyatt’s.
My back door was locked tight when I arrived, everything in order, but I entered my home hesitantly, listening for out-of-place sounds before I shut the door behind me.
Then, the stolen landscape niggling at my mind, I ate a quick dinner of leftover chili and finished it off with a cream puff.
It was only logical that the same person who stole my painting had also stolen the drop-cloth-covered painting from Dalton’s studio. In turn, it was logical that the thief had killed Dalton and, probably, Laura.
Was Mary’s blackmailer at all connected to the murders?
As I was cleaning my dishes, the land line rang. Gilroy told me to check my cell for a photo he was about to send.
Seconds later it came through.
“What does it remind you of?” he asked.
“Holy cow. Where did you find it?”
“I knew I’d seen something like your painting before. Underhill’s been searching art sites most of the day.”
“Dalton called my landscape a study of a study. Now I see what he meant.”
The photo on my phone was Dalton’s painting in larger form. Barren white fields—only more of them—more tattered clouds, more snow-covered hedges, more shivering black birds.
“It’s Winter Nocturne, by a mid-twentieth-century French artist, Jean-Louis Dumont. Taylor’s painting wasn’t a study, Rachel, it was practice for a forgery.”
Now it fit. Of course, of course. “Was the original stolen?”
“No, it’s in a small museum in France. I think Taylor was practicing Dumont’s style so he could create a newly discovered Dumont.”
“That explains why he was so reluctant to give me the painting. But he did. Why?”
“Because you appreciated his skill? Because he was arrogant and didn’t think you or anyone else who saw it would know about Dumont or make a connection to forgery? Most of Dumont’s work is from the 1950s and 1960s.”
“How did you know it was Dumont?”
“I didn’t at first. I must’ve seen that painting or something similar in a book. I was an art major my first six months in college.”
“You? Knock me over with a feather. Why have you never told me?”
“That sort of thing doesn’t really come up decades later, does it? Anyway, we’ll probably never know why Taylor gave it to you, but this explains why his studio was ransacked and two paintings were taken.”
“To rid the place of forgeries and practice paintings. This is how he paid for all his renovations and landscaping. Did Royce tell you how much those cost?”
“Yes, and he told me about Taylor’s will. I don’t know how he gets people to divulge information, but Taylor had a second bank account, this one in Boulder, and he left half the money in it to Alison Larkin Taylor and the other half to a bird sanctuary in Denver. Several hundred thousand, all told.”
“He liked birds,” I said, recalling the heated birdbaths on his deck. I almost laughed. “Does Alison know?”
“She will tomorrow.”
“Is the money legal?”
“That’s outside my purview, and I intend to keep it that way.”
I gave him a quick rundown on Charlotte snooping in the Volunteer Aid Program records and then we ended our call, Gilroy telling me he’d be home late.
As I turned to readying coffee cups and plating the shortbread cookies I’d intended for the station, I again puzzled over who was blackmailing Mary. She hadn’t given in and published an article on Brodie or Isak. Julia subscribed to that rag of a paper and would’ve told me if she had. Anyway, Brodie would never reveal his Idaho secret, and the paper’s owner, liking Brodie, probably wouldn’t have allowed it.
But I’d mentioned Brodie’s DUI to Shasta. Brodie Keegan’s DUI in Idaho. With that, I’d given her all the information she needed to look it up on her own, and she’d been intrigued. I’d mentioned Brodie to several people, in fact. And I’d brought up Isak’s assault charge in Minnesota and Shasta and Dalton’s affair.
Before long, everyone would know about Isak and Brodie and Shasta’s affair. Targets, all of them. The only benign item in Mary’s packet was the first page of her home’s second mortgage. No one cared about that, and Mary herself had complained about it to Shasta and, probably, others.
Who benefited from the blackmail? No one had asked for money, so money was never the point. That raised two more questions: Who had been targeted, and to what purpose?
And asking myself the latter of those two questions, I realized the purpose had already been accomplished. Newspaper articles weren’t necessary when wagging tongues, my own included, would work.
Mary’s blackmail was meant to destroy enemies. Not just people like Brodie, the young drunk and forward-looking pup who didn’t deserve to lord it over his subordinates, but entities too. Like that despised art gallery, which threatened to bring the Blackwells and Karlsens financial ruin.
Gilroy was fond of saying that past behavior was the best predictor of future behavior. The concept had served him well as a detective in Fort Collins and a police chief in Juniper Grove. And Mary had proven she had no problem lying to me.
I phoned Charlotte Wynn and demanded an answer to the two questions I was about to ask. If she wasn’t straight with me, I’d tell Roche and White what she’d been up to in the Records Section.
“Did you locate Brodie’s DUI police report and Isak Karlsen’s Minnesota lawsuit?”
