Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

wrapping gear in the back.”
    “Anyone following?”
    He frowned and told half of the truth. “Hard to be sure.”
    But he was. He’d seen the unmarked car following them to the airport. Now the car was hanging way back because there wasn’t any need to work in close. Tailing an old truck on a sunny Sunday morning highwaywas a piece of cake. Getting away from the deputies again would be about as likely as hiding an elephant in an ashtray.
    “Susa’s gone,” Lacey said, turning toward Ian. “Why would the sheriff care what we do?”
    “Because he’d like to stick me with the theft of Susa’s paintings.”
    “What? That’s ridiculous!”
    “You know it and I know it, but look at things his way. It was an inside job. His security cops were on the inside. So was I. Guess who he’d rather tag for jail time?”
    “That’s crap.”
    “A lot of cop work is crap.”
    “He’s more likely to have stolen them than you,” Lacey muttered.
    “I’ll be sure to tell him the next time I see him.”
    Lacey backed the truck into a parking space right next to her unit. Carrying armloads of tape and packing material, they lifted up the front door of the storage area and looked around.
    The interior of the storage room hadn’t changed. Paintings were still stacked in racks and leaning against various surfaces in a way that looked haphazard yet still managed to keep the surface of each canvas from rubbing against anything.
    Ian pulled out the digital camera he’d purchased and the portable computer he’d bought to use along with it. “Let’s photograph, then wrap them.”
    Lacey was reaching for the closest painting—another version of the drowning pool—when Ian stopped her.
    “We’ll do the dark ones last,” Ian said. “I want to look at them all together in good light before we wrap them up.”
    “Then stack them to one side so we have room to pack the rest.”
    He started collecting the various scenes of violence and set them out of the way. As he did, he couldn’t help studying them. They were alike, yet different. Sometimes the numbers on the front were painted in red, sometimes not; sometimes the numbers were circled, sometimes not; but the numbers themselves were the same on each of the drowning pool canvases.
    “Did you ever see your grandfather paint one of these?” Ian asked.
    “No. Hand me that roll of bubble wrap, okay?”
    “Let me photograph the painting first.”
    She waited while he photographed, then she began wrapping. He photographed another painting while she worked, then set aside the camera long enough to tape up what she’d already wrapped while she went to work on the canvas he’d just photographed.
    “I’m only going to tape once around each way,” he said, “unless you really want the mummy thing.”
    “Mummy thing?” Lacey looked up from the canvas she was rolling into a sheet of bubble wrap. “Oh, the way I brought the paintings for Susa to look at. No need for that now. I was just worried about the crowds of people pushing and shoving.”
    For a time the only sounds inside the unit were the rustle of plastic wrap and the soft ripping hiss when Ian stripped tape off a roll. Shouts, laughter, and the occasional curse drifted in from the alley out front, where people shoved things from car trunks into overstuffed units. With part of his attention, Ian listened to the outside sounds in the same way a jungle animal listens to its surroundings—just another way to keep track of what was happening behind his back.
    Most of Ian’s attention was on the numbers on the paintings. He kept thinking they should mean something, have some logic to explain their presence, like the numbers written on the back of the canvases indicating that each was part of a series.
    No inspiration came as he wrapped paintings for shipment to Rarities. He and Lacey would rent a big truck and drive the paintings to L.A. as soon as they could take the time away from putting her shop back together.
    But first they were going to move the paintings to a different storage unit, one at the far end of the complex. Shayla Carlyle’s brother-in-law had been curious about why the switch was necessary, and happy to settle for cash instead of answers as to why the unit would be rented to Mark Jones instead of Shayla or Lacey. Lacey was curious, too, but Ian just had shrugged and said, “Humor me.”
    Ian and Lacey quickly found a rhythm: after he photographed a canvas, she would wrap, tape and stack it