Deadly Little Secrets Page 0,112

adding, “Then again, nothing in this whole affair has been easy. Why would there be extra manpower here in the city where it’s needed?”

As peace offerings went, it sucked, but she’d take it. “Tell me about it,” she muttered and saw Gates smile. “NYC detail has their hands full with a bunch of other operations.” She waited a heartbeat for any further comments. When none came, she decided she should be asking some questions. “So what is all this?” She waved toward the walls.

“You mean my brainstorming?” Gates said with self-deprecating humor.

“Yeah,” Ana said, pivoting in her chair to look around the walls. “There’s a lot of it.”

“Start at the beginning, Gates,” Dav said, and it sounded more like an order than a request. A flush darkened Gates’s face, but he complied.

“The map was Dav’s idea. A graphic representation of all the pieces we knew about, as well as the two extras.”

“You’re missing the five from Florida,” she said, moving around the table to put markers on Miami, using the bright pink Post-it markers to point northward to New York. “They all came here, to Moroni.”

“Where’d they go from there?” Gates asked, hands poised over the keyboard in front of his chair.

“Berlin.”

“Pratch.” Gates and Dav said the name together. Gates entered the data in the first computer and scooted the chair down to add the list to the running program on the computer next to her. She was dying to know what that one was doing.

“Exactly,” Ana said, watching closely to see if she could decipher his program by his entry vectors. “Here’s the other bit of data you probably don’t have. They found Pratch’s remains.”

Dav made a low sound, and she saw his lips move, perhaps in prayer. She knew he was Greek Orthodox, when he practiced. “Rest his soul. I didn’t like him,” Dav added. “But the woman I mentioned—”

“Fraulein Messer.” Ana supplied the name of the woman he’d told her about early on, the one he’d returned one painting to.

“Liza,” Dav agreed. “She knew Pratch well. He was related by marriage, which was why she did business with him. Does she know?”

“I’m not sure, but in this case, I’d ask that you don’t contact her just yet. Obviously someone’s still monitoring a lot of the pieces of this puzzle, or people wouldn’t be shooting at us,” she said smiling, actually feeling the humor of the whole crazy situation. “One of the things Pretzky said,” she held up her phone, indicating her boss. “Was that an agent in the cold case office is compromised as well.”

“Wonder when you’ll find his body,” Gates muttered. He saw her quick frown, and realized how that might have sounded. “Sorry,” he apologized. “But this is getting ugly. There are already what, four bodies on this deal?”

“Officially, five. However, I think it’s at least seven.”

“Seven?” Gates paused, then tapped the keys on the third computer. “Let’s have it,” he said, his mouth set in a grim line.

“Put them up on the map,” Dav suggested. “Here—” He handed over more Post-its in a different color.

Using Dav’s elegant pen she wrote down the names. “There were two victims in New York. One was associated with the Moroni Gallery. A clerk, for all anyone could figure out. No one that important, in the scheme of things.” She wrote down the woman’s name, Colleen St. John, and posted it by the city. “She was tortured.”

She printed the second name. “The second body was Nathan Rikes, small-time thief, bag man, and general petty criminal. There was nothing to tie him to the crimes, nothing to tie him to Colleen, but he was found with her, dead the same way. Also tortured.”

She stuck the second name up and moved to the left side of the map. “The two here, in San Francisco, were killed execution style. Clean and simple. No torture.”

Posting the names of Keith Griffin and Rod Atwell, she continued near the Bay Area. Next, she wrote down both Kelly Dodd and Luke Gideon’s names, but didn’t put them up. She looked at Dav, trying to decide how to phrase her request.

“What?” Dav said, noticing her obvious pause.

“I need to ask you not to say anything about one of the next names I’m putting up. I have no proof that this is connected. Just a…hunch, a feeling.”

“Data’s data,” Gates said, looking puzzled. “Put it up, we’ll sort out whether it belongs.”

“Why do you hesitate, Ana-aki?” Dav asked. His tone was all business, but she saw that his hands