Curse of the Jade Lily: A McKenzie Novel Page 2

  “I think I speak for all of us when I thank you for agreeing to help us, Mr. McKenzie,” he said.

  “I didn’t agree to anything yet.”

  “Oh?” Fiegen’s sad, cold eyes regarded me carefully. “I was under the impression that you had. You see, the future of this fine museum may very well hang in the balance.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  Fiegen spread his hands wide. “For a young institution like ours,” he said, “reputation is everything.”

  “How does this work?” I asked. “Who owns the museum?”

  “City of Lakes is a nonprofit organization,” Perrin said. “By definition, we do not have private owners, and while we are able to earn a profit, or, more accurately, a surplus, none of the moneys are paid out to shareholders. Instead, such earnings are retained by the museum for our self-preservation.”

  “Bullshit,” Anderson said. “We own it. When I say we, I mean the board of trustees, because we’re the ones that’ll be picking up the tab should this place fail. Right now there are forty-seven members on the board. You become a trustee when you contribute half of seven figures or better to the museum, except for the mayor of Minneapolis, two state senators, and a couple members of the state house who are honorary members. The trustees elected the six of us to serve three-year terms on the executive board. I should point out that we all ran unopposed. No one else wanted the job. Madam Executive Director here was hired by the executive board to oversee the day-to-day operation of the museum. She serves at our pleasure. How’s that working out, by the way?”

  Perrin didn’t reply, although, from the look she gave Anderson, I thought it fortunate that the formidable conference table lay between them.

  “Calm yourself, Derek,” Fiegen said. To me he added, “Derek enjoys comporting himself in an insouciant manner. Clearly it is a facade.”

  Anderson smirked. I might have, too, if only I had known what “insouciant” meant.

  “Tell me how the Lily was stolen,” I said.

  “Is that necessary?” Perrin said.

  “It’ll give me an idea of who I am dealing with,” I said.

  Anderson rubbed his hands together. “This is my favorite part,” he said.

  Perrin scrunched up her face, and for a moment she looked less like Heidi Klum and more like Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. She unscrunched and started speaking slowly and carefully, as if she were afraid I might ask her to repeat something. She started by saying that the City of Lakes Art Museum had the most sophisticated electronic security system available; that it had been thoroughly vetted and updated just six months earlier. Anderson had a nice laugh at that, but Perrin continued.

  “A forced-entry theft or a smash and grab, I believe that is what it is called, is virtually impossible now,” she said. “The crime was an inside job.”

  “They usually are,” I said.

  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 L
ily? I mean compared to the rest of your exhibits.”

  “Top twenty,” Donatucci said.

  That made me pause for a few beats.

  “How long did Tarpley work for you?” I asked.

  “He was hired three months before the museum opened,” Perrin said. “We will celebrate our second anniversary a week from Saturday. May I add, his credentials were impeccable and thoroughly vetted. He had worked at several other museums without as much as a whisper of improper behavior. We also investigated his wife, Von. She was the soul of propriety as well.”

  “Do you have a photograph?”

  Perrin found two colored glossies in the file in front of her and passed them across the table. The first was a head shot of Tarpley, like the kind used for identification badges. He was an older man, at least fifty, with features that suggested he might have been handsome once. His eyes seemed flat, though, as if all the energy had been drained out of them. It could have been a trick of the photographer, but the picture gave him all the vitality of a paper bag. The woman in the second photograph, however, seemed full of life. She was perhaps twenty years younger and had a quizzical smile on her lips and dancing lights in her brown eyes, as if she considered her good looks to be a lucky accident, like finding a 1943 copper penny in the street.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Forget asking why this seemingly honest man turned thief or why he waited twenty-seven months before making his move. He could have taken many items, yet he didn’t. Instead, he took only one piece, and the piece he took didn’t even rank in the top ten in value. What’s wrong with this picture?”

  “If he wished to harm the museum, he couldn’t have done better than taking the Lily,” Perrin said. “It was the cornerstone of our year-two celebration. We are a young museum, as Mr. Fiegen stated. It was hoped that the publicity and attention garnered by the exhibit would help us gain the same respect and prominence currently enjoyed by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center.”

  “If Tarpley was looking to hurt the museum, why would he offer to sell the Lily back?” I asked.

  “Who gives a shit?” Anderson said.

  “Derek, please,” Fiegen said.

  “C’mon. We’ve already had this discussion.” Anderson gestured toward Donatucci, who continued to stare at the painting. “McKenzie, we’re not asking you to solve the crime or catch the thieves. As far as we know, you might be in on it.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  Anderson raised the palms of his hands toward heaven. “The thieves asked for you,” he said. “Why is that?”

  I didn’t know, and not knowing was the only reason I didn’t get up and walk out of the room; maybe slap Anderson a time or two before I left.

  “Well?” Anderson said.

  “Kiss my ass,” I told him.

  “Whoa,” he said. He pointed at me even as he turned to the man sitting next to him. “I like this guy.”

  Perrin set her large hand on my wrist.

  Fiegen leaned toward me. “Mr. McKenzie,” he said, “I hope you will forgive Derek’s outburst.”

  “No, I won’t,” I said. “On the other hand, it is a question that needs asking, isn’t it? Look, this go-between business is all a matter of trust. You’re trusting me with one-point-three million bucks because Mr. Donatucci convinced you that I won’t take it to the nearest Indian casino and bet it on red; that I’ll use it to get the Lily back. I’m guessing that for some reason the artnappers trust that I’ll give them the ransom with no tricks; that they won’t end up with a suitcase filled with old telephone books and a face-to-face with a SWAT team. As for me, I have to trust that the artnappers won’t take the money and the Lily and leave me with a bullet in my back.”

  “Isn’t that why we’re paying you a hundred and twenty-five grand?” Anderson asked, “To take that risk?”

  “It’s a hundred and twenty-seven, and while I expect to be paid, if I do this thing it won’t be for the money.”

  “What would trigger your participation?” Fiegen asked.

  I shook my head slowly because I didn’t have a satisfactory answer for him. So far, I had been motivated by curiosity—but as the proverb says, curiosity killed the cat.

  Satisfaction brought it back, my inner voice said.

  Cats have nine lives, I told myself. I have only the one.

  “No hard feelings, McKenzie, huh?” Anderson said. “We just need to know—will you help us get the Lily back?”

  The timing of the question couldn’t have been better, because a few seconds after Anderson asked it, the cell phone in Donatucci’s pocket rang. He answered it and listened for a moment.

  “Ask him yourself,” he said. “He’s sitting right here.”

  Donatucci set the cell on top of the conference room table and slid it toward me.

  “It’s the thieves,” he said.

  TWO

  Lake Calhoun is the biggest of the twenty-two lakes found within the City of Minneapolis. When TV networks come to town to broadcast live sporting events, they usually set their cameras on the southwestern shore of the lake because it gives them a gorgeous establishing shot of the city skyline reflected in the water. That’s where I had parked, on the southwest shore, as the thieves had instructed. Now I was walking along the 3.1 miles of plowed jogging trail that circled the lake with a red rose in my hand—also as I had been instructed. The sky was brilliant blue and the sun was dazzling, but that was just for show. It was so damn cold that the petals of the rose froze solid a few moments after I left my Jeep Cherokee. My hands and feet nearly froze, too. I was dressed to endure the chill that I expected to encounter dashing between warm buildings and warm cars, not for the numbing cold that blew off a frozen lake in Minnesota in January.

  The rose was for identification purposes. It meant that while the artnappers knew my name, they didn’t actually know me or what I looked like. Demanding that I carry it around the lake gave them a chance to get a good look at me. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish them from all the other men and women who nodded and smiled as we passed on the trail. Or maybe they were hiding in a snowdrift or camped out on one of the countless benches taking my photograph. It was unlikely that Tarpley would have risked being discovered—he had to know that I would have seen his photograph by now. Of course, it could have been just a test designed to see how well I followed instructions. They demanded that I give them the number of my cell phone when we spoke. Maybe they’d call and tell me to drive to the Mall of America. Maybe they’d tell me to jump in the lake. The only thing I knew for certain was that everything they’d done so far, including involving me in their affairs, smacked of deliberation.

  I had been circling counterclockwise around the lake, walking at a brisk pace for no better reason than to keep warm. I hoped Donatucci wasn’t following me. The artnappers demanded that I come alone, and I said I would. I made Donatucci promise that there would be no surveillance of any kind, either at the lake or later when I delivered the money; nothing that would make the thieves twitchy. It might seem counterintuitive, but I felt I would be much safer without backup than with it. ’Course, I’ve been wrong before.

  I passed the Thirty-second Street Beach and the sailing school, making my way toward West Lake Street and the edge of Uptown, an eclectic neighborhood of bars, clubs, restaurants, cafés, coffeehouses, retail shops, movie theaters, and one decent blues joint. I thought about the blues joint and the bars and restaurants as I made my turn around the top of the lake, telling myself how well a warm beverage would go down right about then. Like I said, though, the artnappers might have been testing to see how well I followed instructions, so I kept walking, moving past the North Beach and following the trail until I was heading south.

  I was at about the 2.5-mile mark when they made their move, two men coming up fast behind me. I heard their footsteps and turned my head just as the larger of the men knocked me to the asphalt. The trail was icy and I skidded a few feet—I dropped
the rose. The large man put a knee against my spine, pinning me down while he cuffed my hands behind my back. The smaller man pulled a black hood over my head. I protested.

  “This isn’t necessary,” I said.

  They didn’t care. They yanked me to my feet and half carried, half dragged me through the snow. A woman screamed. A man shouted, “What’s going on?” The two men paused. I heard the sound of a door being pulled back on rollers. A van, I guessed. I was shoved into the vehicle. The door was slammed shut. The vehicle started moving, picked up speed. There were a lot of sharp turns taken too fast. The van hit a patch of ice and fishtailed dangerously after one turn before the driver brought it under control.

  “Anyone ever teach you how to drive in the winter?” I asked.

  The driver didn’t respond. Perhaps he didn’t hear me through the hood.

  Minutes seem like hours in a situation like that, so I couldn’t tell you how long we drove. I tried to remain calm. I reminded myself that the thieves needed me to get their money. They might try to frighten me to death, but they weren’t going to kill me. There was no profit in it.

  I wasn’t kicked or punched or slapped around, although rolling about the van floor with my hands cuffed behind my back was hardly the most comfortable I’ve been. The kidnappers didn’t threaten or curse me, and I didn’t threaten or curse them. Nor I did I demand that they tell me who they were or where we were going or what they wanted. There didn’t seem to be much point. I just tried to maintain my balance and concentrate while we whipped around corner after corner.

  Sharp corners meant city driving, my inner voice told me. No freeways; no long country roads.

  Eventually the van slowed to a stop. The door slid open again. I felt the frigid wind blow into the cargo area. A woman said, “Are you sure you weren’t followed?”

  A man answered, “I’m sure.”

  “Did you search him?” the woman asked. “Did you check for a wire, for a GPS transmitter?”

  “Oh shit,” the man said.

  Suddenly there were hands patting me down, checking my pockets.