The Flinck Connection (Book 4) (Genevieve Lenard)
Read The Flinck Connection (Book 4) (Genevieve Lenard) Online
Authors: Estelle Ryan
Estelle Ryan
The Flinck Connection
Table of Contents
A cryptic online message leads nonverbal communications expert Doctor Genevieve Lenard to the body of a brutally murdered politician. Despite being ordered not to investigate, Genevieve and her team look into this vicious crime. More online messages follow, leading them down a path lined with corruption, a sadistic assassin, an oil scandal and one of the biggest heists in history—the still unsolved 1990 Boston museum art theft worth $500m.
The deeper they delve, the more evidence they unearth of a conspiracy implicating someone close to them, someone they hold in high regard. With a deadline looming, Genevieve has to cope with past and present dangers, an attack on one of her team members and her own limitations if she is to expose the real threat and protect those in her inner circle.
e Flinck Connection
A Genevieve Lenard Novel
By Estelle Ryan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First published 2014
Copyright © 201
4 by Estelle Ryan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely incidental.
With every book it becomes harder for me to write the acknowledgements. These people are my pillars and words fail to impart the depth of my appreciation for each one. I am honoured to be surrounded by such incredible individuals who support, love and understand me.
As always, Charlene, for your interest, love and support. Linette, for continuing to be the best sister. Anna, for your interest and support. R.J. Locksley for your astute editing. Julie, Wilhelm and Kasia, Kamila, Paula, Jola, Ania S, Alta, Krystina and Maggie for your continued interest and support. Piotrek for allowing me to use your surname, and for being a good friend during your short time on this mortal plane. Ania B for being such an amazing woman and friend. Jane, for your love and support.
And to every single reader who has contacted me and who keeps in touch through Facebook – thank you. Every email, every comment carries great weight and is more appreciated that I can ever express.
“And I will always love you.”
The melodramatic, yet oddly memorable song jerked me out of a restful sleep. It took me a mere second to go from a state of relaxation to utter annoyance. I grabbed my smartphone from the bedside table where it had been perfectly aligned to the corners. As I sat up, a few things registered in my mind, the face flashing on my smartphone’s screen being the most vexing. I swiped the screen.
“You changed my ringtone. Again.” I hated when Colin did that. He had started this unacceptable behaviour the first time I’d met him eighteen months ago.
“Jenny, you need—”
“—to have my old ringtone back. You know how much I hate it when you do this. Why do you continue doing this? Will you ever stop being a thief and stealing into my smartphone?”
“Jenny!” The urgency in his tone not only stopped my annoyance, but also triggered a shot of adrenaline to enter my bloodstream. “You need to phone Millard.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” It wasn’t just his tone that alerted me to a problem. For the last seven weeks, Colin and Colonel Manny Millard had been at odds.
Colin Frey was a thief, reappropriating art that had been taken during conflicts or illegally obtained. He did this to return these artworks to their rightful owners.
Even after knowing him for eighteen months and being romantically involved with him for eleven months, I still felt conflicted accepting his profession. The fact that he was secretly employed by Interpol did nothing to aid my discomfort.
Before he had entered my life, everything had been much simpler. I had successfully divided everything in black and white categories. Things had been either right or wrong. Colin had taught me that life consisted of grey areas.
One of those areas was his cooperation with Manfred Millard. An Interpol agent and lifelong law enforcement officer, Manny headed our team of five as we investigated art crimes. Our team existed on the order of the president of France, and the probes into art illegalities were second priority to any case the president requested us to look into. This position was well suited for Manny, but it was a daily conflict for him working with the rest of the team, especially Colin.
They shared a turbulent past and it often seemed they took pleasure in antagonising each other. Something had happened seven weeks ago between Manny and Colin that had caused renewed hostility between them. Neither one was willing to talk about it. Colin had stubbornly refused to talk to Manny. The current state of their relationship would not allow Colin to ask for Manny’s assistance. That was why Colin’s request for me to contact Manny was a surprise.
“Jenny, are you listening?” He wasn’t as patient as usual when I got lost in my thoughts. There was an unfamiliar sharpness to his tone.
“I’m listening. Why do you want me to phone Manny? Why don’t you phone him?”
“I’m standing in Claude Savreux’s home office, looking at his dead body.”
“Oh my God, did you… No, of course you didn’t kill him. Why are you there? What are you stealing? Are you talking about Monsieur Claude Savreux, the Minister of Defence and Veteran Affairs? Why do you want to steal from him?”
“Jenny.” His voice was low, the tone he took when he needed me to focus. “Phone Millard, tell him to get people he trusts and a warrant or something that will get him into this house.”
I took a moment to think this over. “Are you sure he’s dead?”
“Very.”
“Then I’m not going to phone Manny until you tell me why you are there.”
A few hard breaths sounded through the connection. “Wake Nikki up and ask her. I have to leave. I don’t want to overstay my welcome here.”
“Nikki?” My voice raised a pitch and a few decibels. “You’re involving Nikki in your crimes?”
Nikki was an eighteen-year-old student who had come into our lives five months ago. She was the daughter of the late Hawk, a notorious arms trader. When he had died, Nikki had been seventeen, not yet an adult. She had refused to be placed in the government system and threatened to run away. We had become her foster parents until she came of age three months ago, yet she was still staying with us.
“Jenny.” He sighed. “Just wake her up and let her tell you. I’ve got to go. I’ll keep an eye on the house until Millard arrives, but I’m leaving now.”
Before I could give more voice to my outrage, he gave me the address and promptly hung up on me.
I trusted Colin with my life. I even loved him, despite his life being shadowed by unclear moral and ethical lines. He was also the only person whose physical touch and closeness I could bear. Time and again he had proven himself to be a man of integrity. That was the reason I swiped my smartphone’s screen and tapped on Manny’s number.
“What’s wrong, Doctor Face-reader?” Manny’s voice was gruff from being woken up.
“Colin is in Minister Claude Savreux’s house and he’s dead.”
“What? Who’s dead? The minister?” His voice was decidedly clearer and louder. “Did Frey kill him?”
“Colin didn’t kill him. I don’t know any details. Colin phoned me to tell you to get to Minister Savreux’s house as soon as possible. With a search warrant.”
“Bloody hell.” A grunt came through the connection. “Do you know what the time is?”
“Of course I do.” What an inane question. “It’s fourteen minutes past two.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, and Colin asked that you get people you trust for this. I don’t know why he would say this, but his tone implied that this was particularly important.” I didn’t want to tell him about Nikki’s involvement yet, particularly since I didn’t know how she had become entangled in this. With her unfailingly cheerful disposition, she had won the hearts of everyone, including Manny’s. He was overly protective of her, hence my reticence in telling him.
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Manny said after a few quiet seconds. “Give me the address and let me see what I can do, Doc. I’ll phone you in a bit and you had better have more information for me by then.”
“How long is a bit?”
“A bit?” He groaned. “I will phone you in twenty minutes, Doc.”
I stared at my smartphone after Manny disconnected the call. Was the death of Minister Claude Savreux a murder? I hadn’t even asked Colin about that. He wouldn’t have asked for Manny’s help if he hadn’t considered it important. The strain I had heard in his voice caused me great concern. He had seen something that had worried him more than he had wanted to say. I put on my dressing gown and slippers to go wake Nikki.
After months of Colin’s persistence, I had relented and we had combined our neighbouring apartments. It had been a particularly difficult three weeks for me when the builders had broken through the wall separating the two living areas. In my apartment, we now had a larger sitting area with my two sofas and one of Colin’s. I had refused to allow his unsightly recliner chairs in my living space. We had combined our libraries into a very large reading area on Colin’s side. I spent many a night in one of the reading chairs while Colin and Vinnie watched some television show. Colin had converted one of his bedrooms to a multimedia entertainment area—a room I seldom visited. With two bedrooms left on Colin’s side, Vinnie stayed in one and Nikki in the other. Colin and I were the only ones living in my side of the large combined apartment.
Vinnie was Colin’s best friend, a large man with a violent criminal history, but with fierce loyalty towards his friends. I counted him as a very close friend and caught myself more frequently disregarding his past. Two years ago, I would’ve held it against him and refused to have any connection with him. Like Colin, Vinnie had proven to me that a man could be more than his past. He was the protector of our team, making it logical for me to first go to his bedroom before waking Nikki.
I knocked on his door and waited. After knocking for a second time and not getting an answer, I opened the door and turned the light on. The room was empty, the bed made. Vinnie wasn’t home. He often went out at night, staying in touch with his criminal contacts in case we might need information from them. I sighed, turned off the light, closed the door and went to Nikki’s room. It was physically painful for me to enter her room. Typical of her personality type, she felt comfortable in cluttered chaos. Her room brought panic clamping down on my mind. On mutual agreement, I never entered her room and she always kept the door closed.
Unintelligible mumbling answered my knock. I took it as an invitation and went into her room. I turned on the light and shuddered. The floor was covered in boots, scarves, books and shoulder bags. Nikki’s reaction to the sudden light in her room was to pull her duvet over her head with a groan. “Go away.”
I stepped over three pairs of shoes and stopped next to her bed. “Nikki, wake up.”
She lowered the duvet just enough to peek over it. “What’s wrong, Doc G?”
“Why is Colin in Claude Savreux’s house?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know who this person is.”
There was no deception in her tone or the visible parts of her face. “Lower the duvet, please.”
“Oh, come on! Seriously? You want to read me? Why?” She rolled her eyes, but lowered the duvet to her chest and laid her hands on top of it. In the short time she’d been living with us, she had learned that I needed to see the body as a whole to accurately read nonverbal cues. I didn’t have the natural ability neurotypical people had to read and interpret body language. Having doctorate degrees and being the top in my field in reading body language enabled me to understand what people were saying despite their words. Right now Nikki was telling the truth.
“Colin phoned me five minutes ago to tell me that he was in Minister Savreux’s house and that the man is dead. When I asked him what he was doing there, he told me to ask you.”
Her eyebrows lifted and her eyes flashed open. “Oh, shit. Someone’s dead. That’s not good. I swear I didn’t know whose house it was and I know nothing about him being dead.”
“Take a deep breath.” I had learned through experience that lowering my tone and speaking slower calmed Nikki when she was working herself into a panic. “I believe you about not
knowing whose house it was. Just tell me why Colin told me to ask you what he was doing there.”
Her fingers curled around the duvet while she took a few calming breaths. Her shoulders lifted to her ears in the turtle effect, nonverbal behaviour seen when someone felt unsure. She sat up, inhaled to speak, but stopped when I lifted my hand.
“The truth, please.”
She nodded. “Yeah, yeah. You’ll see the truth in any case. You know, it’s sometimes really hard speaking to you.”
“Nikki.” There was a warning in my tone.
“Someone DM’ed me on Twitter. I don’t know how they got my handle, because I’ve made sure to not have my name attached to it.”
She spoke English, but I didn’t understand her. “What is a DM and what is a handle?”
Nikki pushed herself up and leaned against the headboard. “My handle is my profile name on Twitter. A DM is a direct message. It’s like an email, but it’s sent on Twitter. I received the first one a week ago. I ignored it, thinking it was a kind of spam that sometimes makes it through the filters. But then I got one yesterday afternoon and it was much more specific. It told me to tell you about the message.”
“Me?” How did someone know to reach me through Nikki? “Yet you didn’t tell me. You told Colin.”
She didn’t respond, but fleetingly touched the back of her neck, conveying her discomfort.
I took a calming breath. “Who sent it?”
“I don’t know. This person’s handle is just a bunch of numbers.”
“What did the messages say?”
“Hold on, I’ll show you.” She pushed her hand under her pillow and moved it around until her eyes widened and she smiled.
My mouth opened slightly when she lifted her smartphone. “You sleep with your phone under your pillow?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“No. Why do you?”
“I check my feeds when I wake up in the middle of the night.” Her head tilted back and she squinted. “That sounds bad, doesn’t it?”
“Just show me the message.” I held out my hand for her phone. She swiped the screen a few times before handing it over. I frowned at the screen. “
‘Tell Lenard! IMPORTANT! Flinck @ 224 Rue de Marge. Pervasive reach. 1+1=2.’
”
“At least he can do math.” Nikki twisted to look at the phone.
I pulled it closer to my chest. “How do you know it is a he?”
“I don’t know if it’s a he or a she, but whoever this is is rude.” The confidence in her tone caught my attention.
“Why do you say that?”
“If someone tweets in capital letters, they are shouting at you. That’s rude.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this message?”
She shifted and clutched the duvet on her lap. “I didn’t want to worry you. It’s bad enough with Dukwicz still being around. That is why I told Colin.”
Clearly, I had not been successful at creating the peaceful environment I had wanted for Nikki. Five months ago Dukwicz, a mercenary of international repute, had killed Nikki’s dad, taken part in my and Colin’s kidnapping, and then managed to escape capture. The president had asked us to find him, but after five months of non-stop investigation, we still had not located him.