Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

temper. The meetings resembled nothing so much as the family brawl they were. It had always been that way. It always would be. The only thing that changed was the names of the players snarling at each other, wasting time when there wasn’t any to waste.
    He hadn’t even brought up the New Horizons merger yet. When he did, Bliss would really go ballistic—most of the proposed development was on land she thought of as “hers.”
    But there was no choice. Angelique White had made it clear that the suit with Concerned Citizens for Sane Development had to be settled before she would consider a contract merging the future of Savoy Enterprises with that of New Horizons. From what he had seen of the balance sheets, there wasn’t any choice about that merger, either. In the brave new world of the twenty-first century, it was merge or die.
    Savoy took another drag on his cigarette. Even if nothing else went wrong, it was going to be a hairy bitch of a month.

Newport Beach
    Tuesday afternoon
6
    L ost Treasures Found was located off Pacific Coast Highway, several blocks up on the inland side where monthly rents weren’t the same as the national debt of an emerging nation. The streets weren’t swept as often as they should be and the homeless people took up informal residence at night, but there were no drugs or prostitutes. Yet.
    One day Lacey fully expected to own a shop facing traffic on the water side of the heavily traveled highway. One day, but not this one. Today she was happy to meet the rent with enough left over from her half of the profits to buy groceries and finance her twice-weekly forays to flea markets, garage sales, thrift stores, and estate sales. Along with handicrafts that Shayla found in the United States and South America, informal noncommercial sales were the major source of the contents of the store—the lost treasures of other days and places, waiting on the shelves to be found in the here and now.
    Awkwardly Lacey let herself in the back door of the shop, jugglingthree bundled-up paintings along with a big cloth purse that often did duty as an overnight bag. The frisky ocean wind wasn’t any help. She felt like a kite without a string.
    Lacey kicked the door shut behind her and listened for the sound of her partner, who had left the storage unit earlier to take the afternoon shift in the store. But even with the door shut, she couldn’t hear anything except the muted steel river of Pacific Coast Highway traffic pouring by a quarter mile away.
    “Shayla?” Lacey called out.
    “Back here, admiring your latest painting.”
    “Ouch. Sounds like a thrilling day at the retail level.”
    Shayla’s laughter floated from the apartment over the shop. “Between one and two o’clock, we made overhead and then some, and we don’t close for a couple hours yet.”
    “Thank you, Lord.”
    “You need any help getting that stuff upstairs?” Shayla asked.
    “So far, so good.”
    Lacey headed for the back staircase that led to the upper floor where she lived, painted her own kind of plein air dreams, and kept extra merchandise when the downstairs got too full and Shayla’s brother didn’t have any spare storage units to give them rent-free.
    The sound of something bumping against the walls brought Shayla to the head of the stairs. She saw her friend struggling under bundles that were half as big as she was.
    “Told you I should have taken at least one of them,” Shayla said.
    “Nope. Anything happens to these suckers, I want to be the one in line for the butt-kicking.”
    “Hon, they aren’t that valuable.”
    “We’ll leave that for Susa Donovan to decide. As far as I’m concerned, my grandfather is the undiscovered genius of California plein air painters.”
    Shaking her head, Shayla descended the stairs in time to catch a painting that wanted to cartwheel off into the great unknown. “Which one is this?”
    “Don’t know.” Lacey blew a chestnut curl out of her eyes.
    “I’d hate to think I rescued that wretched murder painting.”
    “Then don’t.”
    “Rescue it?”
    “Think.”
    Shayla started to say something, then shook her head. Following her friend’s unexpected turns of thought was more than Shayla was up to right now. Between packing for her next buying trip to the Andes and trying to catch up on inventory, she had a headache big enough to share with a stadium.
    “Right,” she said. “I won’t think.”
    Lacey propped the wrapped paintings against a stack of