Chapter 2

Liddy, being, as I said, human, shrugged. “It would be for you too, if they got you in the heart, and you know it.”

“She has a point,” Duff said, ruffling her blonde hair. He can do that since they’re a couple. If I tried it I’d probably lose a hand—or worse. She’s a sweet kid, but feisty that way.

“Can we get back to what we were talking about before all this chit-chat?” I asked, adding, “downstairs.”

Part of the ground floor is Duff’s apartment. Liddy has hers on the second floor, across from mine. Another part of the ground floor is a small art gallery that handles works by local artists. To all intents and purposes it’s how we support ourselves. It’s managed by Vince, a very nice young man who has no idea what goes on behind the scenes.

To the rear of the building is our true business area, if you can call art theft a business. It consists of two rooms. One is our office/workroom where we can do our planning without fear of being overheard. The other, smaller one is where we store our ill-gotten gains until we can pass the article, or articles, in question on to a buyer. Both rooms have more security than…the Pentagon? They have to, for our own protection. There are people out there who would love to prove we’re not the upstanding citizens we purport to be.

We all trooped down to the office. Okay, Rob took the easy way, vanishing then reappearing there before we arrived. There’s something to be said for being able to go through walls and floors rather than taking the stairs.

Once we were all settled in, Liddy and Duff in armchairs, me at the antique desk I’d picked up back in the early nineteen hundreds, and Rob on the surprisingly comfortable French antique loveseat that we’d gotten on whim from a gallery on Royal while we were on a job many years ago.

After booting up our top-of-the-line computer, I brought up the website for the Prentice Gallery. It didn’t give us the information we needed about the building itself, but then I’d have been surprised if it had. A check of real property records would do that. I just wanted a look at the interior set-up before we paid it a visit.

“Two main rooms,” Duff commented after getting up to look over my shoulder at the monitor. “The large front windows might be a problem. That door—” he tapped the screen, “—probably leads to the office area and maybe…No, there’s the restrooms. We need floor plans, Philip.”

I nodded, minimizing the website and then doing a search. “Now this is nice,” I murmured when I found an article about several galleries in the city that showed their floor plans, including one for Prentice Gallery. I printed out four copies, handing everyone one.

“I was wrong,” Duff said. “There’s three showrooms, the main one, one through the arch at its rear, and the third down the hall from that one. So where are the offices and storage area?”

“Best bet,” Rob said, “on the second floor. Those stairs at the end of the hallway must lead to them.”

“The Kiefer retrospective is in the main showroom?” Liddy asked.

“Yep,” I replied.

“Which painting are we going after?”

I went back to the gallery’s website to bring up the information on the Kiefer exhibition. There were photos of each piece. “My thought was one or all of these three.” By then everyone was hovering behind me to look.

“None of them have a price, which is good,” Liddy pointed out.

“Because they’re not for sale. They belong to a private collector who lent them to the galley just for this exhibit,” I told her. “It was in the newspaper article I was reading.”

“All right, Liddy and I will pay the gallery a visit to see exactly where they’re hanging and check out what sort of security the gallery has,” Duff said. “Obviously we won’t be able to get up to the second floor offices.”

I nodded. “Rob can handle that. I’ll go with him but—” I glanced at Rob. “As always, I’ll need to know if there are motion sensors up there before I can move around freely.”

“And,” Duff shot me a hard look before going back to sit down, along with the others, “we need a buyer before we do anything.”

“Yes, bossman,” I replied, giving him a mocking salute. “I actually have two people in mind who might be interested.”

The men I was thinking about were veryprivate collectors. No one saw what they owned except a few like-minded people who understood the virtue of silence. One of the men was a fairly regular client. The other was someone he’d told me about during our last transaction.