St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

them…
    Swarming.

56
    TAOS
SEPTEMBER 16
9:14 A.M.
    J ill gave up on the paintings and the black light. No matter how hard or long or where she looked, she didn’t see anything exciting. She glanced toward Frost’s computer. It was either shut down or sleeping. The screen was dark.
    Maybe it wasn’t something he found in the paintings.
    Maybe it was something he found online.
    She went to Frost’s computer. Unlike Zach’s, this was a Mac, the kind she owned. Except this one was twice as big. The screen was huge. But the OS was the same. She could use it with her eyes closed.
    A tap on the enter key woke up the computer.
    So he was using it last night.
    Or he’s one of those people who never shut down.
    She sat at the desk and pulled the computer closer. The screen showed the same Web site that Zach’s had, but a different Dunstan painting.
    Once more, Jill fell under the spell of a landscape that was both evocative and precisely detailed. Dunstan had a grasp of perspective—and an ability to execute his inner vision—that made the artistin Jill frankly envious. Dunstan’s works captured the broad sweep of the West in a way that was both nineteenth-century romanticism and twentieth-century hardheaded realism.
    She sighed, hesitated, and told herself that she wasn’t invading someone’s privacy. She just needed to find out what Frost had tried to say before he went into shock. If the computer could help her, then she had every right to use it. Too many people had been hurt since Modesty had sent the first painting out for appraisal.
    It still didn’t feel right to snoop in Frost’s computer.
    “Maybe I should wait for Zach,” she said under her breath. “And maybe I should just sit in a corner and whine. Life isn’t fair, much less polite. Get over it.”
    She went to the browser’s pull-down menu and opened the “history” file. A list of the Web sites that Frost had viewed recently appeared.
    Even better, there was a memory cache on the computer that gave her a choice of searching sites that had been viewed in the past hours, days, and weeks.
    Again, some of the sites were ones that Zach had visited. The same, yet there was a difference she couldn’t put her finger on. Not surprising. A search was as individual as the person and/or search engine that initiated it.
    Web addresses for Thomas Moran dominated Frost’s search. Granted, Moran was the artist Dunstan was frequently compared to, especially in terms of emotional impact, but some of the other artists Frost had viewed ran the gamut from modern to post-modern to thin slices of the art world that she’d never studied.
    Then she noticed that the word fingerprint was in bold type at all the sites.
    The kitchen door opened and closed. “Jill?”
    “In the great room,” she called out.
    Freshly shaved and showered, Zach strode into the room. A mugof coffee steamed in his hand. He looked at her bent over the computer like a miser counting gold. Her body language was a study in intensity.
    “Find anything useful?” he asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    Something in her voice made adrenaline slide into his blood, more potent than any caffeine. “What do you have?”
    “After we went to bed, Frost was on the computer.”
    Zach smiled with hot memories. “Hope it was good for him, too.”
    Jill snickered, but didn’t look up from the list of sites. “He was searching for fingerprints.”
    Zach paused in the act of drinking coffee. “Keep talking.”
    She gave him the highlights of the sites she’d hit so far. “In the second half of the twentieth century, it was fairly common for artists to authenticate their paintings with more than a signature. Finger-or thumbprints, mostly thumbprints.”
    “Too bad Dunstan was dead by then.”
    “So was Thomas Moran, and he used a thumbprint.”
    Zach came to a point. “Yeah?”
    “Moran started out signing his name just like everyone else,” Jill said, reading quickly from the notes she’d made. “In the middle of his life, he added a Y as a middle initial after art critics called him Yosemite Moran because he painted so many canvases there.”
    Zach wanted to tear the computer out of her hands, but restrained himself. Barely. “Anything else?”
    “Then, early in the 1900s, Moran began to sign his canvases and leave a thumbprint along the edge of the canvas that was rolled—pulled—over the stretcher. A lot of modern artists make that part of the canvas a continuation of the painting