her usual breeziness and showed no compunction about dragging him off to the couch when Tony left. Bloody hell, it was complicated having an affair with your own wife.
Ian brushed that aside, looking at Tony. “What did you find?”
“A tattoo gun. Tucked away very carefully in Kolb’s workshop.” Tony had been using his work shifts to discreetly search the premises for anything Kolb might have hidden. If he kept information on his former clients, and was cautious enough not to stash it at home, what better place than the McBride shop? “I’ve learned a fair amount about the antiques business in the last few weeks, and there is no reason why that workroom would need a tattoo gun.”
“He’s probably covering up blood-type tattoos.” Someone paranoid enough to pay for a new name and background would be paranoid enough to cover a tattoo. “Something to hold over his head if we take another crack at him.”
“When?”
“Not yet. I don’t want him warning anyone, I just want him nervous.” Nervous people made mistakes.
“Start on these while you’re waiting.” Tony fished some papers out of his pocket.
“Bloody hell, I haven’t even got through your first batch—”
“Put your foot on the gas, boss.” Lists were the main thing Tony was looking for, on his careful searches through the McBride files. If I were hiding information in that shop on the location and identities of war criminals, Ian had speculated last week, I’d list the names and addresses as buyers, customers, or dealers. False names tucked among real names. Lorelei Vogt’s new name and address could very well be in one of those drawers, hiding in plain sight.
Tony slapped down a stack of lists copied over in his untidy scrawl. He never took the originals—if and when police became involved, Ian had no intention of seeing their evidence muddied up with accusations of theft. Tony asked permission every time he accessed the file cabinets and took nothing that wasn’t put back. Gray territory, but they were used to working in those shadows. “Besides,” Tony had pointed out, “if we need to act legally on any information we find, that’s when we go to the McBride family, lay out everything, play on their civic duty in the apprehension of a criminal, and obtain full permission to act on the information we’ve found. My persuasiveness, your gravitas—always works like a charm.”
Flipping through the new sets of lists, Ian reached for the telephone. Names of antiques sellers and customers: they’d all have to be cross-checked and confirmed that they were what the list said they were. So far all the names had checked out as legitimate, but they’d only been at it a week. The telephone bill was going to be astronomical. Slow and steady, Ian reminded himself. Most chases took months.
“I’m not combing any shop files further back than last year.” Tony was trying to impose some order on the worktable, layered with maps and notes like an archaeological dig. “Kolb arrived in Boston with the early waves of refugees coming after the Displaced Persons Act; I slipped that out of Miss McBride. So it’s doubtful he could have helped our huntress until early ’49 at the soonest.”
“According to Frau Vogt, her daughter left Europe late ’45.” Ian crossed off the name of an auction house in Dutchess County. “But if die Jägerin arrived in Boston before the Displaced Persons Act—”
“—it was probably something shady through Italy or the church routes,” Tony finished. “No sponsor or family here, she’d have scrambled to establish herself.”
“Unless she came with wads of cash, which isn’t likely.” Ian had never yet found a war criminal who had managed to flee his homeland and then set up in luxury. “So Lorelei Vogt spent some years getting by. Kolb came in late ’48 or early ’49; she found him and learned he could provide assistance . . .”
“Only then does she write urging her mother to join her. Do you think—no,” Tony interrupted himself, leveling a finger at Ian. “Absolutely not.”
Ian paused, reaching up to pin the latest list to the wall. “We’re running out of room.”
“Next it’ll be taped-up photographs and colored string crisscrossing to connect different theories, and before you know it we’re stuck in one of those god-awful flicks where some general is jabbing at a map saying ‘The Yanks are here, the Limeys are here, and the Jerries are here.’ No,” Tony repeated, and Ian grinned.
“You take over the telephoning, then.” It had been a while since Ian took