Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

paintings at random. The first one portrayed breakers foaming on the beach and the ocean in every shade of blue and green imaginable. The rocky cliffs were darkly textured, a solid masculine presence against the fluidly feminine sea. Though no people appeared in the painting, Lacey loved the canvas for its sheer sensuality, almost sexual in its impact.
    “Now that one is worth looking at,” Shayla said.
    For the third time, Lacey jumped.
    Both women laughed.
    “Score one for blind chance,” Lacey said, pleased that Sandy Cove would be one of the three she presented to Susa Donovan.
    “What else is going with it?” Shayla said.
    “Don’t know yet.” Lacey reached out to the second of the three blindly selected paintings. “Let’s find out.”
    The second painting was an untitled portrait of eucalyptus trees silhouetted against sunrise. The shadowed, textured masculine strength of the trees stood in stark contrast to the fluid, multicolored sigh of dawn. Again, the near tangible sensuality of the painting left Lacey with the feeling of having been stroked by a lover who savored the difference between male and female.
    “Excellent choice,” Shayla said dryly, like a waiter approving a dinner selection. “Or is it just that it’s been a long dry spell in the XY department for me?”
    “Does it really seem that sexy to you?”
    Shayla fanned herself. “Your granddaddy might have been twisted, but he knew that a woman’s mind is her most erogenous zone. Probably because when it comes to sex, a woman’s imagination is always better than reality.”
    Lacey made a face. “I hear you. I never started out to spend my life alone, but men keep changing my mind. After some of the specimens we’ve known, being single looks real good.” With a shrug for the state of manhood in modern America, she added, “Give me a good painting any day. Speaking of which…”
    She reached for the third painting and turned it around.
    Scream Bloody Murder.
    Shayla grimaced and went back to her stickers.
    “Um,” Lacey said, her brown eyes intent on the canvas. “Maybe not. It’s brilliant, no doubt, but this is a charity event and…”
    Her voice trailed off. The savage, almost abstract whirl of turquoise water and black night, pale hair and blood-red mouth distorted in a death cry stunned Lacey each time she saw it. It made her stomach clench as if she’d stumbled onto a murder scene too late to do anything but close the eyes of the dead.
    Art, like humanity, wasn’t always kind.
    “Do you think he really saw that?” Shayla asked reluctantly, drawn in spite of herself to the raw reality of the painting.
    “I think he dreamed it.”
    “They call those kind of dreams nightmares.”
    Lacey couldn’t argue that. “But anyone who can look at this and not feel something doesn’t deserve to be called human.”
    “Some really sorry pieces of mobile protein are called human.” Shayla turned away from the painting. “It’s too real. The difference between being able to imagine something that violent and actually doing it seems small enough to make me nervous.”
    Lacey didn’t answer. Part of her had always wondered if her grandfather—who always painted from life “en plein air”—had once seen violent death. But most of her really didn’t want to know what his inspiration had been.
    Maybe that was what her father had meant when he told her: Leave it alone, Lacey. Some people aren’t what you want them to be.

Southern California
    Tuesday afternoon
5
    G lass walls on all sides of Savoy Tower’s penthouse conference room showed the colorful sprawl of Moreno County’s high-tech industrial parks, world-class shopping centers, skeins of freeways, and subdivisions that ranged from six-bedroom McMansions to luxury beach condos for the itinerant and truly rich. Low mountains, chaparral-choked canyons, rolling hills where white-faced cattle grazed, citrus groves, strawberry fields, marinas, and a few highly endangered saltwater marshes were interlaced like fingers through the various developments. Bounded by mountains to the northeast and ocean to the southwest, the Savoy Ranch was both fulcrum and lever of a power that reached to the state governor and the United States Senate, and had a hefty down payment on the present vice president.
    The portrait above the head of the sleek cherry conference table was as imposing as the view: old man Benford Savoy himself, the merchant who had made a fortune selling