Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

spend a lot of time in dim places with her head bowed while she talked to the air, but she was one of the coldest negotiators he’d ever sat across the table from.
    “Well, she’s as near to sainthood as anyone I’ve ever investigated,” Rory agreed, tossing the report on the table in front of Ward’s empty chair. “No lovers of either sex, no drugs, no booze, no bad loans or over-drawn accounts or maxed credit cards. No tickets or outstanding warrants. She tithes regularly and goes to church twice a week. Dresses well, and why shouldn’t she? She can afford it. She runs the family business and does it damned well. Pays all her taxes and then some. Drives her accountants and lawyers nuts demanding that they stay cleaner than clean. Doesn’t even break the frigging leash law with her dogs.”
    Ward scooped up the report and read the summary. “Jesus. The woman really should have been a nun.”
    Living up on that kind of high moral plane—or even appearing to—was a tightrope act and the Forrest family couldn’t afford to fall. Themerger had to go through. If it didn’t, Savoy Ranch would be just one more big family ranch holding nibbled to death by taxes, environmentalists, and generational incompetence.
    Not that he was worried about incompetence. Blissy and Savoy might have control of Savoy Enterprises, but their daddy still held the purse strings. After he was dead they could piss it away—if they could get around his lawyers—but by God they wouldn’t fuck it up while he was alive to see it.
    “Keep digging,” he said to Rory. “We’ve got a little time until the final negotiations. Get me just one handful of mud on Saint Angelique and I’ll sit down at the table with real pleasure.”
    “You better have a fallback position,” Rory said bluntly. “Getting dirt on her isn’t looking likely.”
    “You do your job. I’ll do mine.”

Corona del Mar
    Tuesday
4
    L acey Quinn stood in the middle of her partner’s large storage unit and wondered how she could ever select only three out of the hundreds of her grandfather’s powerful paintings. So much depended on finding the right ones, the best, for Susa Donovan to appraise.
    But choosing just wasn’t possible. Maybe I misread the rules, Lacey thought hopefully. She glanced at the flyer in her hand. Nothing had changed. The paper still discreetly insisted NO MORE THAN THREE PAINTINGS PER PATRON, PLEASE.
    “Damn,” she muttered.
    “Now what?” Shayla Carlyle asked from the other side of the room.
    Lacey started. She’d forgotten that her business partner and old friend was with her. Painting—and paintings—had that effect on Lacey’s brain, as people had pointed out more than once. Guiltily, she looked over her shoulder. Shayla was sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, price stickers clinging like confetti to her black bike tights and red sweatshirt. Hersleek laptop computer balanced uneasily on her long legs as she updated prices and inventory for their shop. That was work Lacey should be doing, or at least helping with.
    “Oh, I just was hoping I’d read the pamphlet wrong,” she muttered.
    Shayla glanced up. “Huh?”
    “The charity auction. They only let you bring three paintings for Susa Donovan to look at and I can’t get past these six.”
    Shayla bent over the computer again. “I don’t blame you. I like all your paintings.”
    “Not mine. Grandfather Quinn’s.”
    “You’re better than he is.”
    “You’re sweet, but you’re no judge of art.”
    “I know what I like, and it’s your paintings I like. So there. Sue me for lewd and dissolute taste.”
    Laughing, shaking her head, Lacey turned back to the six Quinn canvases and rearranged them yet again. Maybe this time a different angle of light would reveal flaws or flatness or slightly skewed compositions—anything to put three paintings out of the running.
    Five of the six paintings were solidly in the tradition of southern California Impressionism, lyrical yet muscular evocations of a landscape that had long since gone down beneath D9 Caterpillars and belly dumps gouging out pads for upper-class MacMansions overlooking the ocean. Sandy Cove was a case in point. The paintings done by her grandfather showed a landscape more than fifty years in the past. There were golden beaches with no human footprints, coastal bluffs with no houses. The ravines were green with grass from winter rain and graceful with eucalyptus trees dancing in the breeze, instead of