Die in Plain Sight (2 page)

Los Angeles

January

Tuesday morning

I
an Lapstrake hadn’t been raised by fools. When Dana Gaynor, copartner of Rarities Unlimited, started in on him with a voice like an ice-tipped whip, he stood up straight and paid attention.

“Listen, boyo,” she said, borrowing one of her partner S. K. Niall’s favorite nouns, “I’m getting damn tired of you ignoring your e-mail. How are we supposed to keep you up-to-date on your projects?”

“I always have my pager turned on.”

“Screw your pager.”

“I’m not that desperate yet, but thanks for the thought.”

Dana glared at Ian’s dark eyes and gentle trust-me smile. She opened her mouth to tear a strip off him, but snickered instead. He looked as innocent as a puppy.

He wasn’t.

“You and Niall,” she said, shaking her head. “I always end up laughing when I should be furious.”

That wasn’t quite the truth, but Ian knew better than to point it out. The times when Dana had
not
ended up laughing were vivid in his memory, like a fresh brand.

She watched him with eyes as dark as his own and said simply, “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. The Donovan is worried.”

“Kidnap threat?” Ian asked instantly.

“No one is threatening to steal Susa and ransom her for a few mil,” Dana said. “Your job is to be real visible so that it stays that way.”

“So he wants a guard for her, not her paintings.”

“As her husband, the Donovan, put it, Susa can create more paintings but no number of paintings can create more Susa.”

Ian smiled. “A man with priorities.”

Dana all but winced. “And not shy about sharing them. Normally one of the Donovan men would be traveling with Susa, but…” she shrugged. “Sometimes a husband, four sons, and two sons-in-law just aren’t enough to go around.”

“What are friends for?” Ian said, accepting the quiet assignment with grace. “One strapping gofer coming right up. What about the Lazarro icon shipment?”

“Niall’s problem, not yours.”

“The Kenworth scrolls?”

“Belong to Mary.”

“The possible Louis Fourteenth—”

“As of now,” Dana interrupted, “Susa Donovan is your full-time assignment. Your other projects have been parceled out.”

Ian grinned. “You’re really determined to get all the Donovans into the Rarities Unlimited fold, aren’t you?”

“Haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” Dana winked and walked away. “Check your e-mail for details of where and when you pick up Susa this afternoon.”

Ian watched the smooth locomotion of Dana’s hips with a male appreciation that didn’t need to fondle in order to enjoy. Then he shoved his hands in the pockets of his slacks and headed for the coffee machine. Right now it looked like caffeine was going to be the only excitement in his life until Susa Donovan’s big charity bash was over.

That and checking e-mail.

Savoy Ranch

Southern California

Tuesday morning

E
ven the stately colors and textures of Ward Forrest’s big dining room couldn’t soothe him this morning. Watched by the worried brown eyes of Honey Bear, his golden retriever, Ward was up and pacing the Persian rug. He avoided the antique furniture without even seeing it, and didn’t spare a glance to the paintings of founding ancestors. They weren’t his anyway, as his dead wife had taken great pleasure in pointing out. Even if the paintings had been of his blood kin, he would have ignored them. Right now he was riding a real hard mean.

He hadn’t run a profitable land-based empire into the twenty-first century by being sweet-tempered and churchgoing. Hell, in all his seventy-odd years, no one had expected him to act like a sugar cookie.

Until now.

Angelique White was a pain in the ass. Too bad she held the future of Savoy Ranch in her pious little fist. Talk about a Savoy Curse. Christ. There was one for the supermarket headlines.

“God damn all women to hell anyway.”

Honey Bear thumped his tail enthusiastically at the sound of Ward’s voice.

Rory Turner, sheriff of Moreno County and Ward’s former son-in-law, looked up from the report he’d brought to the ranch house. Unlike Ward, who was dressed to go pheasant hunting, Rory was in uniform, right down to side arm and hat.

“What are you talking about?” Rory asked.

“Saint Angelique makes Mother Teresa look like a party girl.”

The ripe disgust in the older man’s voice made Rory want to laugh, but he knew better. Ward had really wanted some dirt on the CEO of New Horizons, who happened to be the only daughter of a televangelist and a Savannah socialite. NH was a cash-rich investment fund looking to diversify by building communities with “room for family, community, church, and God.” Savoy Ranch had been courting NH and Angelique for ten months, but every time it got down to signing papers, something happened. Blissy, usually. His daughter had a genius for hitting the headlines at all the wrong times. Or one of his grandkids would be on TV spouting something offensive to somebody—Christians, usually—and Angelique would draw back.

Each time she backed away, she screwed another concession out of Ward before she returned to the bargaining table. She might spend a lot of time in dim places with her head bowed while she talked to the air, but she was one of the coldest negotiators he’d ever sat across the table from.

“Well, she’s as near to sainthood as anyone I’ve ever investigated,” Rory agreed, tossing the report on the table in front of Ward’s empty chair. “No lovers of either sex, no drugs, no booze, no bad loans or over-drawn accounts or maxed credit cards. No tickets or outstanding warrants. She tithes regularly and goes to church twice a week. Dresses well, and why shouldn’t she? She can afford it. She runs the family business and does it damned well. Pays all her taxes and then some. Drives her accountants and lawyers nuts demanding that they stay cleaner than clean. Doesn’t even break the frigging leash law with her dogs.”

Ward scooped up the report and read the summary. “Jesus. The woman really should have been a nun.”

Living up on that kind of high moral plane—or even appearing to—was a tightrope act and the Forrest family couldn’t afford to fall. The
merger had to go through. If it didn’t, Savoy Ranch would be just one more big family ranch holding nibbled to death by taxes, environmentalists, and generational incompetence.

Not that he was worried about incompetence. Blissy and Savoy might have control of Savoy Enterprises, but their daddy still held the purse strings. After he was dead they could piss it away—if they could get around his lawyers—but by God they wouldn’t fuck it up while he was alive to see it.

“Keep digging,” he said to Rory. “We’ve got a little time until the final negotiations. Get me just one handful of mud on Saint Angelique and I’ll sit down at the table with real pleasure.”

“You better have a fallback position,” Rory said bluntly. “Getting dirt on her isn’t looking likely.”

“You do your job. I’ll do mine.”

Corona del Mar

Tuesday

L
acey Quinn stood in the middle of her partner’s large storage unit and wondered how she could ever select only three out of the hundreds of her grandfather’s powerful paintings. So much depended on finding the right ones, the best, for Susa Donovan to appraise.

But choosing just wasn’t possible.
Maybe I misread the rules,
Lacey thought hopefully. She glanced at the flyer in her hand. Nothing had changed. The paper still discreetly insisted
NO MORE THAN THREE PAINTINGS PER PATRON, PLEASE.

“Damn,” she muttered.

“Now what?” Shayla Carlyle asked from the other side of the room.

Lacey started. She’d forgotten that her business partner and old friend was with her. Painting—and paintings—had that effect on Lacey’s brain, as people had pointed out more than once. Guiltily, she looked over her shoulder. Shayla was sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, price stickers clinging like confetti to her black bike tights and red sweatshirt. Her
sleek laptop computer balanced uneasily on her long legs as she updated prices and inventory for their shop. That was work Lacey should be doing, or at least helping with.

“Oh, I just was hoping I’d read the pamphlet wrong,” she muttered.

Shayla glanced up. “Huh?”

“The charity auction. They only let you bring three paintings for Susa Donovan to look at and I can’t get past these six.”

Shayla bent over the computer again. “I don’t blame you. I like all your paintings.”

“Not mine. Grandfather Quinn’s.”

“You’re better than he is.”

“You’re sweet, but you’re no judge of art.”

“I know what I like, and it’s your paintings I like. So there. Sue me for lewd and dissolute taste.”

Laughing, shaking her head, Lacey turned back to the six Quinn canvases and rearranged them yet again. Maybe this time a different angle of light would reveal flaws or flatness or slightly skewed compositions—anything to put three paintings out of the running.

Five of the six paintings were solidly in the tradition of southern California Impressionism, lyrical yet muscular evocations of a landscape that had long since gone down beneath D9 Caterpillars and belly dumps gouging out pads for upper-class MacMansions overlooking the ocean.
Sandy Cove
was a case in point. The paintings done by her grandfather showed a landscape more than fifty years in the past. There were golden beaches with no human footprints, coastal bluffs with no houses. The ravines were green with grass from winter rain and graceful with eucalyptus trees dancing in the breeze, instead of the modern cement culverts lined with chain-link fences.

Whether David Quinn painted coastal mountains, beaches, grasslands, or chaparral canyons, most of the canvases celebrated southern California before the huge population leap at the end of World War II. The land was filled with light and distance and clean air.

Then there were his other paintings, the ones that Lacey could admire professionally but wouldn’t hang in her own home to be part of her life. Perhaps a tenth of his work was in the dark, brooding school of social realism that had supplanted the plein air painters after the Depression. Not that Quinn’s bleak canvases really fit in that category, either.

There wasn’t any handy art history label for the grim side of her grandfather’s talent.

The Death Suite.

Her artistic conscience wanted her to include a painting from each of the three kinds of death—fire, water, and earth/car wreck—but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it. She’d settled on one of the water paintings with its chilling contrast of blood-red scream, blond hair, turquoise water, and inky night. The figure’s humanity was clearly visible, the death struggle intimate and terrifying.

With a sigh, Lacey kept on trying to pick the three best paintings out of the six she’d set aside. She rearranged them, leaning two against the big fire extinguishers that she insisted be kept in the storage area. Her grandfather’s phobia about fire in the studio or storage room had been thoroughly drilled into her.

When the silence got to Shayla again, she stretched her back and looked over at her friend. As always, Lacey’s hair was a glorious whirl of cinnamon-colored chin-length loose curls, the kind women with straight hair would kill for. The rest of the package was equally casual—faded jeans, sandals, no socks, and a flannel shirt that could have come from one of the garage sales both women haunted, looking for new merchandise for their shop. Old paint stains made startling patterns on both shirt and jeans.

Then Shayla noticed the six paintings lined up. “Hon, you aren’t going to show
that
one in public, are you?”

Lacey jumped again, having forgotten again that she wasn’t alone. She looked at the dark, savage painting. “I don’t know.”

“It creeps me out.”

“That’s what it’s meant to do. That’s what makes it so good.”

“Well, yippee-skippy. Give it to a horror museum or the public morgue. Should fit right in. How many of those damn things did he paint anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Lacey said. “I inherited thirty of the dark ones, but they’re numbered one through forty-seven. So my grandfather either sold, gave away, or destroyed the seventeen missing paintings. Or some combination of the three. The man was nothing if not unpredictable.”

“I’m voting for destroyed.”

Lacey sighed and swept her hand through her unruly cloud of curls.

“I’m not. Even though the subject matter of the paintings isn’t exactly warm and cuddly—”

Shayla snorted. “Ya think?”

Lacey ignored her “—the Death Suite—”

“Now there’s a name to draw little children.”

“—is nothing short of brilliant,” Lacey finished loudly.

“What about the others? Just because they don’t make you want to scream, does that mean they’re not good?”

“Of course not. The landscapes have the same emotion and energy and finesse as the bleak paintings. Quinn painted light and dark, yin and yang, heaven and hell with equal skill and emotion.”

“Maybe he was bipolar,” Shayla said, bending over her inventory again.

“Could be. My dad said as much once. But I think my grandfather was simply a gifted artist who was able to create both sin and salvation with equal power.”

“Give me heaven every time.”

“Hey, I didn’t say I was going to hang any of the Death Suite in my apartment. But that doesn’t make those paintings bad. Just uncomfortable to live with.”

“Uncomfortable. Yeah. The way a bed of razor blades is uncomfortable.”

Lacey ignored her friend and went back to staring at the six canvases.
Well, Grandpa Rainbow,
she thought, using the nickname she’d given him for the paint splatters on his clothes,
you’ve given me an impossible job. I’ve been hovering over these six paintings forever, and they all still look equally good to me.

She turned the paintings to a wall, shuffled them like a con artist moving a pea beneath walnut shells, and then picked three paintings at random. The first one portrayed breakers foaming on the beach and the ocean in every shade of blue and green imaginable. The rocky cliffs were darkly textured, a solid masculine presence against the fluidly feminine sea. Though no people appeared in the painting, Lacey loved the canvas for its sheer sensuality, almost sexual in its impact.

“Now that one is worth looking at,” Shayla said.

For the third time, Lacey jumped.

Both women laughed.

“Score one for blind chance,” Lacey said, pleased that
Sandy Cove
would be one of the three she presented to Susa Donovan.

“What else is going with it?” Shayla said.

“Don’t know yet.” Lacey reached out to the second of the three blindly selected paintings. “Let’s find out.”

The second painting was an untitled portrait of eucalyptus trees silhouetted against sunrise. The shadowed, textured masculine strength of the trees stood in stark contrast to the fluid, multicolored sigh of dawn. Again, the near tangible sensuality of the painting left Lacey with the feeling of having been stroked by a lover who savored the difference between male and female.

“Excellent choice,” Shayla said dryly, like a waiter approving a dinner selection. “Or is it just that it’s been a long dry spell in the XY department for me?”

“Does it really seem that sexy to you?”

Shayla fanned herself. “Your granddaddy might have been twisted, but he knew that a woman’s mind is her most erogenous zone. Probably because when it comes to sex, a woman’s imagination is always better than reality.”

Lacey made a face. “I hear you. I never started out to spend my life alone, but men keep changing my mind. After some of the specimens we’ve known, being single looks real good.” With a shrug for the state of manhood in modern America, she added, “Give me a good painting any day. Speaking of which…”

She reached for the third painting and turned it around.

Scream Bloody Murder.

Shayla grimaced and went back to her stickers.

“Um,” Lacey said, her brown eyes intent on the canvas. “Maybe not. It’s brilliant, no doubt, but this is a charity event and…”

Her voice trailed off. The savage, almost abstract whirl of turquoise water and black night, pale hair and blood-red mouth distorted in a death cry stunned Lacey each time she saw it. It made her stomach clench as if she’d stumbled onto a murder scene too late to do anything but close the eyes of the dead.

Art, like humanity, wasn’t always kind.

“Do you think he really saw that?” Shayla asked reluctantly, drawn in spite of herself to the raw reality of the painting.

“I think he dreamed it.”

“They call those kind of dreams nightmares.”

Lacey couldn’t argue that. “But anyone who can look at this and not feel something doesn’t deserve to be called human.”

“Some really sorry pieces of mobile protein are called human.” Shayla turned away from the painting. “It’s too real. The difference between being able to imagine something that violent and actually doing it seems small enough to make me nervous.”

Lacey didn’t answer. Part of her had always wondered if her grandfather—who always painted from life “en plein air”—had once seen violent death. But most of her really didn’t want to know what his inspiration had been.

Maybe that was what her father had meant when he told her:
Leave it alone, Lacey. Some people aren’t what you want them to be.