Curse of the Jade Lily (Mac McKenzie #9)

I glanced at Donatucci for confirmation, but he sat quietly, his hands folded on the table in front of him, his half-closed eyes staring at a painting on the conference room wall. I don’t know why. The painting consisted solely of primary colors that looked like they had been splashed on the canvas by a frustrated third grader.

“We have a rear entrance,” Perrin said. “It consists of a series of small rooms. It is impossible to unlock and open the street door leading to the first room without first closing and locking the interior door. You cannot unlock and open the interior door without first securing the next door. And so on. A door that is left open for more than twenty seconds will activate an alarm. Also, digital cameras cover each room. Guards monitoring the cameras can electronically seal all the doors if they see anything amiss.”

“Bandit traps,” I said.

“Just so,” Fiegen said, to prove that he was listening.

“Here,” Perrin said. She opened the folder in front of her and slipped a half-dozen photographs off the top and pushed them before me. The photos had the muddy feel of stills taken from a videotape. They showed a figure dressed in black with a black ski mask hiding his face working a keypad, opening a door, moving through a room, and then heading outside.

“At two o’clock last night,” Perrin said, “or this morning if you prefer, our deputy director in charge of security, a man named Patrick Tarpley, carrying a package under his arm that we now believe contained the Jade Lily, walked through the bandit traps. Cameras show that he opened the doors using codes that he punched into the keypads and strolled—he wasn’t hurrying at all—to an unidentified red SUV that pulled up just as he was leaving the building. He handed the package to someone sitting in the passenger seat of the SUV. The SUV drove off. Tarpley then went into the parking ramp adjacent to the museum, got into his own car, and drove away.”

Two thoughts piled on top of each other. The first—three thieves, the man dressed in black, the driver of the SUV, and the passenger. Donatucci must have lost a step, my inner voice said. He said earlier that he didn’t know if there were more than two thieves. The second thought I spoke out loud—“How do you know it was Tarpley?”

“He checked in at 4:00 P.M, but there is no evidence of him checking out,” Donatucci said. “Only two other people knew the security codes, and they were both accounted for. No one has seen him since the theft was committed. Also, he knew the schedule of the guards. He made his move at the exact moment of a shift change. That’s why the guards that were supposed to be watching the monitors didn’t override the codes.”

Why bother with a mask, then? my inner voice asked.

“Had he ever conducted security drills similar to this?” I asked.

“No,” Perrin said, “but our director of security had.”

“Where is the director of security?”

“On vacation in Africa.”

“Did you contact him?”

“Why?” Anderson said. “What can he do about it?”

“Have you contacted the police?”

“We are hoping that will be unnecessary,” Perrin said.

“The Lily was stolen last night, but you didn’t get a ransom call until eight this morning. You waited six hours without reporting the theft because you expected a call, didn’t you? Why were you expecting a call? Anybody?”

Fiegen shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “That was my decision,” he said.

“This has happened before, hasn’t it?”

Neither Fiegen nor anyone else said yes. They didn’t say no, either.

I said, “The cops don’t like it when you neglect to report a major crime. They especially frown on it when you arrange to buy back stolen property.”

“Yet it’s done all the time,” Donatucci said softly, as if he didn’t care whether he was heard or not. “You said so yourself.”

“We prefer to deal with this quietly if at all possible,” Fiegen said.

“Trying to protect your reputation,” I said, repeating what he mentioned earlier.

Fiegen gently tugged at his hair just behind his right ear as if he were fingering an heirloom. “Some of the artwork we exhibit is on loan to the museum, like the Jade Lily,” he said. “In addition, there are the numerous traveling exhibits that we compete for. If word should leak that we are unreliable custodians…”

“City of Lakes doesn’t own the Lily?” I asked.

“No,” Perrin said. “The owner of the Lily lives in Chicago. He was good enough to loan the piece to us. He has not yet been informed of the theft.”

“Who is on the hook for the insurance, you or him?”

“We are. The lending agreement clearly states that the borrower—City of Lakes—is responsible for the loss or damage to the artwork while the art is on our premises, in the amount of the stated value of the art.”

“Who decides what the stated value—”

“We agreed to insure the Lily for the same amount that his insurance company had insured it for,” Fiegen said. “Is this important?”

“How valuable is the Lily? I mean compared to the rest of your exhibits.”

“Top twenty,” Donatucci said.

That made me pause for a few beats.