Blue Smoke and Murder

20

SEPTEMBER 14

1:49 P.M.

Jill drove up to the old cabin, put on the parking brake of Zach’s truck, and turned off the engine. She was still rather surprised by him. When she’d said that the dirt track leading to the old homestead was hard to find unless you knew what you were looking for, he’d just handed her the keys to his truck.

Altogether an intriguing man. Unexpected, too. She could tell he liked the way she moved, but he hadn’t even hinted at a pass, much less made one.

Very intriguing.

Irritating, too. The longer she was with him, the more the idea of a pass appealed.

“Home sweet home, such as it is,” she said.

Zach closed the computer he’d been using. Silently he took in the weathered old cabin backed up against a red sandstone cliff and tucked beneath a massive old cottonwood.

He whistled softly. “And here I thought I lived with pieces of history.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I’m not on a contract for St. Kilda, I collect abandoned industrial art-old muscle cars of the ’60s and early ’70s-and restore them. Carcheology, as it were, relics of a time before OPEC ruled. But this cabin goes back to a time before internal combustion engines owned the world, a time when seeps of crude oil in Pennsylvania weren’t worth the land they sat on.”

Jill smiled. “I’d like to have lived then.”

“You’re one of the few people I’ve ever met who could actually do it.”

The compliment surprised her. She glanced sideways at Zach. He was looking at the cabin, his light brown eyes like a hawk’s, missing nothing.

Intriguing, irritating, intelligent. Sexy in a lean, easy-moving way.

She shook her head at the direction of her thoughts. She’d never jumped a man. She wasn’t planning on starting now, no matter what her hormones were pushing for.

“What did St. Kilda say about Blanchard?” she asked, turning away from anything personal.

“There are art dealers in east Texas, and there are men with the last name of Blanchard in east Texas, but no man fits in both categories. Or woman.”

“He could have been just visiting, or looking for art.”

“He could have been a figment of his own imagination.”

She smiled rather grimly. “Yeah, that occurred to me when I saw my trashed car.”

Zach studied the weathered cabin with its thick, crooked shutters and rifle slits that had been filled in during a later, safer era. He’d seen the bones of pioneer cabins while he scoured the rural West for old muscle cars, but he’d never seen a place this old that people still occupied.

“The dude was hoping you’d bring the paintings with you,” Zach said.

“I’d have to be dumb as road apples to do that.”

Laughing, he turned and watched the sunlight burn gold and red in Jill’s hair. “You’d be surprised how dumb people are.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I’ve had men refuse to get in my raft because-”

“-you’re a girl,” Zach cut in. “Stupid. Any man who looked at more than the usual places would see that you’re an athlete.”

“Usual places?”

“Tits and ass.”

She snickered. “I think it comes with the Y gene.”

“So Y gene equals stupid?”

“It can.” She opened the truck door and slid out. “Ditto for XX. I’ve seen all kinds of stupid on the river.”

Zach got out, looked once more at their back trail. No dust, no sign of watchers. The idea of her living here alone made him twitchy. No matter how fit she was, a professional with a knife or a gun-or a torch-would make short work of her.

But he wasn’t dumb enough to say it aloud. She’d get mad, he’d get mad, and they’d get nowhere fast.

The wind picked up again, playing with the cottonwood leaves that had already fallen and tugging more free from the tree’s broad crown.

Zach followed Jill into the cabin and through the small kitchen to the pantry. She fiddled at the back of one of the cabinets, it moved, and an opening into the sandstone appeared.

“Cool,” Zach said, grinning. “My great-great-grandmother used to tell stories about living like this on a pioneer homestead in what became New Mexico. Never expected to see one of these old hiding places still in working order.”

“We lived simply, but we lived on our own terms.”

“That’s the way my mother’s family felt.” He watched as Jill bent over and tugged at something. The much-used material of her jeans shaped a very nice ass. “Need any help?”

“Need? No. But I wouldn’t mind.”

In the name of duty, Zach crowded close to Jill until he could look into the opening. Her hips felt even better than they looked.

“The trunk?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

He rubbed past her until he could reach a handle on the old steamer trunk. The leather was worn and brittle with age, but it held when he pulled on it.

Jill lifted her end of the trunk and staggered slightly, surprised. The trunk felt a lot lighter with him on the other end. After a few bumps and missteps, they got it into the kitchen.

“Was your great-aunt’s note in here?” Zach asked.

“No. It was under the primer bucket at the sink.”

“Smart. Only someone who planned to use the pump would lift the bucket.”

“Modesty was smart. Hard, too. That’s how she survived.” She looked up at Zach. “And you’re one of the few people in my generation who knows about hand pumps and primer buckets.”

“That’s me.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Just an old-fashioned sort of guy.”

“Got a bridge to sell me, too, right?”

“Any time you’re in a buying kind of mood.”

Jill hid her smile as she bent over and opened the trunk. Zach was a lot of things, but she doubted that old-fashioned was one of them. Old-fashioned men were in a hurry to prove how strong they were. And the electronics he worked with so casually were as slick as any she’d seen. Part of her itched to get her hands on his computer. Most of her itched to get her hands on him.

With a muttered curse, she opened the trunk.

Zach saw a beaten-up leather portfolio and six rectangular packages of varying sizes. “What’s that?” he asked, touching the portfolio.

“Family stuff-fading photos and old letters, legal documents, water rights, ranch boundaries, lease-lands, and whatever else somebody thought was worth keeping for the next generation. I went through them already. None of them has anything to do with the paintings.”

“Okay. I’ll put the portfolio on the bottom of my research list.”

Right now he wanted to see the paintings that someone wanted bad enough to threaten Jill with death.

And maybe, just maybe, kill her great-aunt.

The timing of the death after the painting had been sent out for appraisal was a coincidence, to say the least. The missing, then destroyed, painting was another coincidence.

He didn’t trust coincidences.

“Modesty inherited the trunk from her sister,” Jill said, setting the tray aside. “My grandmother. She was a wannabe artist who was Thomas Dunstan’s on-again, off-again lover.”

Zach went still. Thomas Dunstan. No wonder some mystery man was trying to get his hands on those paintings.

“I know the name,” Zach said neutrally, eyeing the rectangles stacked neatly in the big trunk. “Fine painter. Erratic output. I’ll bet he’s pretty pricey now.”

“So I hear. There were thirteen paintings in this trunk. Twelve, now. The dude who trashed my car ripped one of the paintings to ribbons. Just a small one, but…” Her clear eyes hardened. “It was a piece of beauty, of history, and now it’s just scraps shoved into my belly bag.”

Zach made a mental note to check out the bag when he went back to the truck. Garland Frost would whelp a litter of green lizards if a Dunstan had been destroyed.

“Twelve paintings.” He whistled softly. “If they’re Dunstans and can be documented, they’re probably worth enough to pay taxes for the next century.”

She paused in the unwrapping of the paintings. “Really?”

“Yeah. At a minimum.”

“I know as much about the market for Western art as I do about finding, um, so-called industrial art in old junkyards,” she said.

He grinned despite the adrenaline humming in his blood.

Twelve new Dunstans. Sweet God.

If they’re real.

“I loved these paintings as a child,” Jill said, pulling out a fat, carefully wrapped rectangle. “I used to sneak up into the attic, where Modesty had them hidden, and look at them. That stopped when Modesty caught me. She smacked me but good.”

“And you sneaked back anyway.”

She shook her head. “Mother told me Modesty would throw us out if she caught me in the attic again. I was a kid, but I’d learned how precious shelter was when we ran away from New Eden. I never saw the paintings again until my great-aunt was dead.”

“Did Modesty say the paintings were valuable?”

“All she said about them was to stay away and never mention them again. To anyone.”

Zach really wanted to peel off the wrapping and have a look at what Jill was holding, but made himself wait. One of many things he’d learned from Frost was patience.

Of a predatory kind.

“What do you think now that you’ve seen them?” Zach asked. “Valuable or trash?”

“I look at things as an artist, not as a merchant.”

Ah, finally, he thought.

There was information about Jill in the files from St. Kilda, but he preferred to compare facts on file with what she willingly told him. He’d been real curious about some of those facts, given that one of Jill’s three college majors was fine art.

Some of the best counterfeiters were frustrated fine artists.

“Do you paint?” he asked.

“I studied painting in college,” she said. “I loved playing with oils, but making a living at it wasn’t likely. So I went to my second love, the river.”

He wondered what she wasn’t saying. He didn’t ask, hoping that she would keep talking. He needed her to trust him.

Part of the job, he told himself.

But he’d never been quite so determined to win a client’s trust as he was with Jillian Breck.

“The more I learned about how to create certain effects with oils,” she continued, “the more I began to wonder if these paintings weren’t quite valuable. They’re very good. In my opinion, anyway, which isn’t worth a penny.”

Zach wanted to rip the fat rectangle out of Jill’s hands. But all he did was ask, “Didn’t your great-aunt ever have the paintings appraised?”

Jill shook her head. “My grandmother never wanted the paintings seen by anyone. Modesty agreed, and kept that promise even after her sister died.”

“That’s odd.”

She shrugged. “Modesty raised odd to an art.”

“Then why did she finally send one of the paintings out to be appraised?”

“I’m guessing it was the taxes on the ranch. We’re land poor. I just keep wondering…” Jill’s voice faded.

“What?”

“If she would still be alive but for the tax bill. It’s paid now, by the way. Back taxes, death taxes, the whole greasy tortilla. It took every head of stock she owned, plus the insurance settlement for the fire and accidental death. Next year…” Jill shook her head. “Next year the land will be on the market. Unless those paintings are worth something, I can’t afford to keep the Breck ranch. And I’m damned if I’ll hand it over to my fundamentalist brothers.”

Zach looked out the cabin’s open door, across the sloping bench of land the ranch sat on to the dry canyons and low ridges that ran all the way to the north rim of the Grand Canyon ten miles distant. The ranch was beautiful in the way of the arid West, the kind of spare, demanding beauty that most people couldn’t see.

Jill could. Her eyes and her voice told Zach that she loved the land. She was hoping the paintings would allow her to keep the ranch.

“Art is a funny business,” he said. “Getting funnier every day.”

“From what I’ve gathered online, there’s huge money in the art market.”

“And no way to value a painting but its last auction price,” he said. “Or the second-to-last price-that’s the one two people were willing to pay.”

“What do you mean?”

“Art is like everything else. It’s worth what someone’s willing to pay for it. Period. In order to make people pay more, much more, auctioneers and experts churn out a lot of blue smoke. The painting being flogged doesn’t change from one decade to the next. Only the volume and quality of blue smoke varies. And the price of the art.”

“You think my paintings are worthless?” she asked.

“I haven’t seen them, have I?”

She smiled slowly. “Thought you’d never ask.”