“For a bridesmaid’s dress? That’s a hate crime. I won’t keep you, but I need to know—the other information that was accessed besides the Lazarov file. What was the job?”
She told me and I listened, then asked a follow-up question or two. I thanked her, and just before I hung up, I asked another. “You don’t think there’s any possibility that Lyndsay could be your mole, do you?”
There was a taut silence on the line. “I don’t like that question.”
“I don’t like asking it, but you have to at least consider the possibility.”
“Good-bye, Billie.” The phone went dead.
I turned to the others. “The security breach in Provenance that Naomi was investigating—whoever did it accessedthe Lazarov file and one other. An assassination that happened two months ago.”
Mary Alice looked alert. “Whose?”
“She said it was some nasty piece of work, an art collector named Jovan Muric.”
Helen raised her brows. “That was us?”
I nodded. I’d seen a brief mention in the newspapers about the death. Muric’s car had rolled down a mountainside and exploded into a fireball. There hadn’t been any hint of foul play which meant the killer was good—really good if they were one of ours.
“That was us. But I don’t think this is about the hit itself. Pasha was working a deal in Montenegro—a deal that Galina now has to finish. And Jovan Muric was Montenegrin.”
“Shiiiiiiit,” Nat said under her breath. Helen was nodding slowly while Mary Alice just looked grim.
Akiko glanced around. “What did I just miss? Why would the Museum kill an art collector?”
I turned to her. “Because he wasn’t just an art collector. That was a front for his real job as an arms dealer. Muric was indiscriminate. He sold to the highest bidder, everything from handguns to rocket launchers.”
Mary Alice picked up the thread. “The implication is that somewhere in the Museum is a mole, accessing information from secured files they shouldn’t be looking at. And then it seems this source in the Museum sold information to the Lazarovs—information about the mission that took out their father so they could exact a little revenge.”
“Starting with Lilian Flanders,” Nat put in.
“Starting with Lilian Flanders,” Mary Alice agreed.
“Why would the Lazarovs also buy information about Muric? Is it so they could avenge him too?” Akiko asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. As far as Provenance can tell, there’s no previous connection between the Lazarovs and Muric, no reason for them to be out to settle any scores on his account.” I paused, thinking. “The point of Muric’s art dealing was that it provided a cover for moving paintings around without attracting undue attention.”
“Why is that important?”
“In the underworld, lots of money changes hands, only it isn’t always in the form of cash. You can leverage a deal with drugs, guns, jewels. And art. Anything that has intrinsic value. And accepting a painting as collateral has one huge advantage over a shipment of heroin or handguns—it’s not criminal. You can hang it on your wall if you want. If it’s too hot for that, too well-known, you wrap it up and put it in a storage locker or under the bed. Nobody would think twice about it.”
“There are more advantages than that,” Helen put in. “Art theft is a hugely underinvestigated crime. Nobody but insurance companies really care about it. The FBI didn’t even have a team dedicated to it until 2004. Interpol is trying to make up for lost time, but there are thousands and thousands of pieces missing thanks to various wars and thefts with little to no hope of recovery.”
“Interpol has an app now,” Minka added. “I can show you later.”
Akiko looked at me. “What do you think is happening?”
“I think,” I said slowly, “that there was something in that file that the Lazarovs wanted—information that would help them level up in the underworld. In our briefing materials, it said they deal mostly in club drugs. They’re not big-time players. They have money, but it’s not oligarch money. And if Pasha dumped a few Russian gangsters out of his windows in Mayfair, he may well have burned his bridges there. From what Wolfie told us, Galina was ambitious, pushing Pasha to do more. Intercepting something of Muric’s and selling it to the right buyer might just put them in that category. And I think that’s why Galina is on a train to Trieste. It’s on the way to Montenegro.”
The others fell to arguing about how likely that was, with Mary Alice siding with me while Helen and Nat thought otherwise. Akiko kept batting back and forth like a tennis ball, agreeing with whoever was talking, usually her wife. Minka gave a whoop of triumph from behind her laptop.
“What are you doing, Minka?”
“Being ace investigator and cracking this case wide open,” she said as she tapped.
“Minka, have you been watching Humphrey Bogart movies again?”
“William Powell,” she corrected. “Thin Man. I like Myrna Loy’s clothes.”