Deadly Little Secrets Page 0,113

were clenched on the arms of the chair.

“It’s Luke Gideon,” Ana said, slowly. Watching Dav. “Carrie McCray’s husband.”

“You think he was involved?” Gates stopped keyboarding and looked over.

“I don’t know, but there were only two fraudulent deliveries from Prometheus after his death. Six prior to that, two of which were to you,” she reminded Dav.

“Poor Carrie,” Dav said, showing where his allegiance lay. “Do you think she knew?”

Ana wanted to say no, but at this point, no avenue was closed and she said so. “I hope not, but,” she shrugged. “It’s not off the table.”

“It is, for me.” Dav was firm on that point, but he looked her way, managed a less belligerent demeanor. “I understand why you need to keep it in mind, however.”

Gates said nothing, but he looked thoughtful. When he wasn’t snarking, or asking questions, he was watching her with an intensity that was beginning to make her twitchy.

“The seventh?” Dav asked, obviously wanting to move on.

“Pratch, of course,” Ana said, sticking up another Post-it. “When he went missing, and was presumed dead, his connection to most of the paintings was thrust into the forefront. While he’s a prime suspect in the whole thing, I think someone went to a lot of trouble to make Pratch look more guilty, more involved than he was. I’ll know more when we can get the report from our German counterparts, find out if they can tell how he died, when, and more importantly where he was found and how.”

“What about the Moroni people?” Gates asked.

“I don’t know, Gates,” she admitted. “Part of me thinks I should add Nils Lundgren, one of the Moroni buyers, to the list of possible bodies; part of me wonders if he’s the mastermind.

“Add him for now to the body count,” Gates said, decisively. “Let’s see what falls out. He’s missing, so that’s a data point.”

“True. He didn’t go missing till weeks later, though,” she pointed out, sticking Lundgren’s name on the wall. “Neither did Shelby Waters, his gallery manager.”

“Did they disappear at the same time?”

Ana didn’t remember and said so. “Hang on, I’ll look it up.” She unpacked her laptop, booted it up. When the data came up, she read off the info. “Nils was reported missing by his landlord six weeks after the gallery closed, which was two weeks after the investigation turned up their involvement. He hadn’t paid his rent.”

“Date?” Gates demanded.

She rattled it off and continued. “Shelby Waters was reported missing sooner, only three weeks after the investigation, one week after the gallery closed.”

“Six confirmed, two more suspected,” Gates said. “Whoever this is, they’re not afraid to get their hands dirty. Hang on a sec,” he said, and his fingers flew over the keys. “There’s a gap in the pattern on the dates,” he declared. Gates plugged the laptop he was using into a projector, displaying the data on the cream-colored wall. “See? The dates for the two torture murders in New York are the first, then the Moroni people disappear. If Luke Gideon’s a factor, he’s next, see?” He pointed toward the screen, where the dates now appeared on a calendar page, the graphic lending credence to his theory. “The other California killings don’t take place for at least a month after the New York murders, and there isn’t any torture.”

“Different killer? Different hire?” she offered. “I’ve been wondering that for a while. Such different styles.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they got the information they needed from the tortures. They just needed to get rid of the other people who knew about the con.”

An idea occurred to her, and she rounded the table to her laptop to do some key-punching of her own. Icons at the bottom of her screen flashed a fast green. She had incoming e-mail on four different addresses. Probably Jen, she decided, setting it aside for a minute as she brought up more info. She needed to look at those. If what she suspected about D’Onofrio was correct, he might be involved in all this mess. She hated to burst Jen’s bubble about Millionaire Jack, but she was afraid he wasn’t really named Jack, or a magazine mogul.

The thought that it might be TJ, finally answering her e-mails, also crossed her mind, but Gates was asking a question and it distracted her.

“Got another idea?” he asked. “What are we factoring in?”

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “Let’s factor in when Hines, the bad-apple member of the original investigatory team, transferred to Oregon.” She added the dates to the mix, posted