hasn’t been shot in the knee, and neither of you is going to prison.”
“Well, I guess it didn’t turn out too badly after all.”
“If you’re smart, you’ll use the money to shut down this place and walk away from it. The police know about it now, and they’ll come calling, sooner rather than later. You should be in another state by then, maybe in another country.” He used his cell phone again. “Fred, bring the car,” he said.
Bill tied the pictures with twine, making bundles of them, and he and Anita carried them outside and put them into the trunk of the Bentley.
Stone started to get into the car with Dino.
“See you around,” Anita said.
“Better not,” Stone replied, then closed the door. Fred drove them away.
“Everything went as planned?” Dino asked.
“I told you, I just improvised. By the way, wait until tomorrow before you send the art squad around here. It was part of the deal.”
46
Stone called the house and asked Helene to make them some lunch. When they arrived Fred brought the pictures into the house and hung them in their original locations while they had lunch, and Stone related to Dino his conversation with Anita Mays and Bill Murphy.
“So we’ve got a witness to the burglary and a description of the burglars?”
“Not really. The burglars were the Drago brothers, and they took the pictures to Crane’s house on East Sixty-first—until they were re-stolen—but Anita and Bill aren’t going to be around to testify against them. They’ll clear out before dawn tomorrow. Your art squad will recover a hell of a lot of stolen stuff, and the previous owners will be happy about that, but the thieves will be gone.”
“So why didn’t I just arrest them today?”
“Because they wouldn’t have told us anything, and now we know for sure that Crane and Dugan were behind the theft.”
“A lot of good that will do us.”
“Wrong. Now you can eliminate all other suspects and concentrate your investigation on the two of them.”
“Well, that’s something, I guess.”
“And you may bag Jake Sutton, as well.”
“The jewelry squad is all over him.”
“I wonder if he’s smart enough to know that?”
“He’s been getting away with it for so long that he’s probably overconfident by now.” Dino’s phone rang. “Bacchetti. What do you mean? How did that happen?” He listened some more. “All right, get warrants for his house and business, and let’s see what we can find. If we’re lucky, we can go for extradition.” Dino hung up. “Jacob Sutton and his wife left their Brooklyn home before dawn this morning and took a nonstop flight to Tel Aviv. They’re probably halfway there by now.”
“What happened?”
“He must have sniffed out our surveillance. I thought we were better than that.”
Stone thought for a minute. “Dino, don’t search his house and business.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Suttons might just be going on a little vacation, and if they don’t get a call from someone telling them that your people are ransacking his house and office, they might just come back. People do take trips abroad, you know.”
Dino got out his phone and made the call. “Cancel the warrant requests and sit on the investigation until further word from me.” He hung up.
“Even if Sutton suspects you’re after him, if nothing happens here while he’s in Tel Aviv, he might think he’s being paranoid and come home.”
“You’re right,” Dino said. “We’ll just wait for him to make a decision. We’ve got a guy in the diamond center. We’ll know if he returns to work.”
“Would what Anita told me about the burglary here and the stealing of the van constitute probable cause for a search warrant of Crane’s house?”
“Well, it’s thirdhand information, and that isn’t good. And the pictures never made it into Crane’s house, so we can’t place stolen goods there. That’s a tough one.”
“That’s why you’ve got the top job,” Stone said, “to handle the tough ones.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You know,” Stone said, “I think we’ve given Anita Mays and Bill Murphy enough time to bolt. Why don’t you send some people down there and wait for them to load up and run, then bust them?”
“Why wait until then?”
“Because they’ll have all the best stuff in the van, so you won’t have to figure that out. Also, I gave them fair warning. One more thing: if there’s anything they didn’t tell me, they might give it up to make a deal.”
“That’s a thought,” Dino said. They finished lunch in the kitchen and went up to Stone’s study. Dino used the landline