“You missed me, didn’t you, Marcus?” she asked as he took her bags and carried them to the open trunk with a graceful ease.
“Indeed,” he said in a thick British accent, the origin of which Kat had long ago stopped trying to pinpoint. Then, with a tip of his hat, he finished, “Welcome home, miss.”
“Yeah, Kat,” Hale said slowly. “Welcome home.”
The car, no doubt, was warm. The roads to Uncle Eddie’s brownstone or Hale’s country house were all free from snow and ice, and the two of them might have been settled someplace dry and safe within the hour.
But Marcus’s hand lingered on the door handle a second too long. Kat’s fifteen years as Uncle Eddie’s great-niece and Bobby Bishop’s daughter had left her senses a bit too sharp. And the wind was blowing in just the right direction, perfectly calibrated to carry the word on the air as a voice screamed, “Katarina!”
In all of Kat’s life, only three people routinely called her by her full first name. One had a voice that was deep and gruff, and he was currently giving orders in Paraguay. Or Uruguay. One had a voice that was soft and kind and he was in Warsaw, examining a long-lost Cézanne, preparing plans to take it home. But it was the last voice that Kat feared as she spun away from the car, because the last voice, let’s face it, belonged to the man who most likely wanted to kill her.
Kat stared down the long line of taxis picking up fares, travelers hugging and saying hello. She waited. She watched. But none of those three people came into view.
“Katarina?”
There was a woman walking toward her. She had white hair and kind eyes and wore a long tweed coat and a hand-knit scarf wrapped around her neck. The young man at her side kept his arm around the woman’s shoulders, and the two of them moved slowly—as if Kat were made out of smoke and she might float away on the breeze.
“Are you the Katarina Bishop?” the woman asked, eyes wide. “Are you the girl who robbed the Henley?”
CHAPTER 3
If a person wanted to be technical about it, Katarina Bishop did not rob the Henley—nor did any member of her crew. She was simply one of a group of teenagers who had walked into the most secure museum in the world a few months before and removed from its walls four paintings that were not the Henley’s property. The paintings appeared on no insurance statements. They were never listed in any catalogs. The Henley had never paid a dime for any of those works, so even as Kat herself carried one (a Rembrandt) out the museum’s doors, she was not breaking a single law. (A technicality verified by Uncle Marco—a member of the family who had once spent eighteen months impersonating a federal judge somewhere in Minnesota.) So it was with absolutely no hesitation that Kat looked at the woman and said, “I’m sorry. You’ve been misinformed.”
“You’re Katarina Bishop?” the woman’s companion asked, and although Kat had never met him before, it was a question and a tone she had heard a lot since last December.
The girl who’d planned the job at the Henley should have been taller, the question seemed to say. She should have been older, wiser, stronger, faster, and just in general more than the short girl who stood before them.
“The Katarina Bishop…” The man paused, searching for words, then whispered, “The thief ?”
That, as it turned out, was not an easy question to answer. After all, stealing—even for noble and worthy causes—was illegal. Furthermore, if their accents were to be believed, they were English strangers, and England was home to the Henley, the Henley’s trustees, and, perhaps most important, the Henley’s insurance company.
But the primary reason Kat couldn’t—or didn’t—answer was that she no longer considered herself a thief. Kat was more of a return artist, a repossession specialist. A highly uncommon criminal. After all, the statue she’d swiped in Rio rightfully belonged to a woman whose grandparents had died in Auschwitz. The painting from Moscow would soon be winging its way toward a ninety-year-old man in Tel Aviv.
So no, Katarina Bishop was not a thief, and that was why she said, “I’m afraid you have the wrong person,” and turned back to Hale and the long black limousine.
“We need your help.” The woman moved toward her.
“I’m sorry,” Kat said.
“We were led to believe that you were quite talented.”
“Talent is overrated,” was Kat’s reply.
She stepped closer to the car, but the woman reached for her arm. “We can pay!”
At this, Kat had to stop.
“I’m afraid you really have the wrong person.”
With one look from Kat, Hale reached for the limo door. Kat was halfway inside when the woman called, “He said you…help people.” Her voice cracked, and the young man tightened his grip around her shoulders.
“Grandmother, let’s go. We shouldn’t have believed him.”
“Who?” The word was sharper than she’d intended, but Kat couldn’t help herself. She climbed from the car. “Who told you my name? Someone said where you could find me, who was it?”
“A man…” the woman muttered, fumbling for words. “He was very convincing. He said—”
“What was his name?” Hale stepped closer to the young man, who had maybe eight years and two inches on him.