Wolf Untamed (SWAT - Special Wolf Alpha Team #11) - Paige Tyler Page 0,31

made her money in New York’s fashion industry, then moved to Texas to expand her empire. Apparently, she’d pulled an all-nighter at her office, arriving back at her luxury loft on Blackburn Street at six o’clock in the morning to find that someone had stolen the two Jasper Johns paintings she had mounted on the wall of her bedroom. The cost to LMG was about $16 million if they had to pay out on the theft.

Like the Williamson job, the thieves had entered the loft with brute force. The photos the cops had taken showed that the front door had been kicked in forcefully enough to crack the frame around the lock. The other pictures showed pieces of furniture shoved aside, as if the thieves had been in a hurry to get through the apartment. Then there was the crude way they’d sliced the paintings out of their frames, as if the person doing it had no clue how valuable the two pieces were.

And also like the Williamson job, there were little things that didn’t fit.

The sensors attached to the picture frames that should have picked up the movement of the painting being cut never sent any signal to the security company paid to monitor them. Then again, neither had the alarm on the door. The case file seemed to suggest Claudette had failed to turn the security system on…though the woman insisted she had.

When Bree opened the file from the Williamson case and compared it to the Montagne job, it was hard to ignore the resemblance. They had both been assigned to her because they were insured by the same company, but beyond that, they were both protected by security systems that seemed to have been circumvented, and both houses had physical damage, making it look to be the work of common criminals.

Bree couldn’t help thinking this was another case of the client stealing their own property. Either that, or they had the same thief do it for them. She wondered whether Garth and Vera knew Claudette. Since they used the same insurance company, it wasn’t crazy to assume they could have met there.

Bree sat back in her chair, considering the best way to approach the two cases. There’d been a lot of forensic evidence gathered at both scenes, but the thefts had occurred on opposite sides of Dallas within two different DPD divisions. That meant it was unlikely the cops had connected the cases.

Not that it would help her much if they did. There were thousands of burglaries reported in Dallas each year. Even high-profile cases like these would only garner a limited amount of attention. The cops would definitely work the cases diligently, but it would take time, especially if they needed to get the crime lab to go through the forensic evidence in order to come up with any suspects.

Unfortunately, policies written by LMG stipulated that first payments on loss claims had to go out within thirty days. Which meant Bree didn’t have time for the cops to follow their normal process. She needed to do some digging on her own. Even if she only found enough to point the cops in the right direction, that could be enough to limit the damages her company had to pay out.

Taking a pen and notepad out of the drawer, she jotted down ideas on how she might establish a connection between the two cases as well as between Claudette and the Williamsons. It probably wouldn’t hurt to dig into their known associates and see if any of them could be linked to someone who’d had a break-in like the ones in the photos. After that, she’d start working up a list of places that might be able to fence the jewelry and paintings that had been stolen. Off the top of her head, she could already think of a half-dozen different pawnshops she could check out tomorrow.

Speaking of all the stuff she had to do tomorrow, Bree couldn’t stop the image of a certain hunky SWAT cop from popping into her mind. Dinner with Diego was definitely on the list of things she was looking forward to.

Bree knew she should focus on her job. Working two theft cases at the same time—both involving million-dollar claims—would be difficult enough without the gorgeous distraction that was Diego Martinez. Regardless of how much she’d insisted having dinner with Diego wasn’t a big deal, putting the man out of her head was easier said than done. The mere thought of sitting across