Blue Smoke and Murder

56

SEPTEMBER 16

9:14 A.M.

Jill 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 artist in 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 mug of 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 itself. Kind of a self-frame.”

Zach made a sound that said he was listening.

She read from the computer and paraphrased quickly. “One of Moran’s brothers tried to cash in on the master’s reputation by creating spectacularly inferior canvases and signing them ‘Moran.’”

“Cheesed off old Tom, did it?”

“Sure did. Thomas Moran began to use his unique thumbprint to prove that there was only one Moran worth owning.”

“Not a thumbs-up after all,” Zach said, heading for the Dunstan canvases leaning against the wall. “A thumbprint.” He reached for the first canvas. “Which side?”

“Could be anywhere, even in the painting itself. Moran put it on the part of the painting that wrapped around the stretcher. That way it didn’t disturb the elements of the painting. But Dunstan’s paintings are more textured, so it could be anywhere and not stick out like a-”

“Don’t say it.”

“Sore thumb?” she asked innocently.

Zach smiled but his eyes were fierce as he examined the canvas. Indian Springs was certainly textured. He flipped it over and looked at the canvas wrapped around the stretcher frame.

“Right,” he said. “No one could see it if canvas was framed.” And I’m not seeing it now.

He moved to better light.

Jill picked up another canvas and held it a few inches away from her eyes, examining its surface. She saw nothing but brushstrokes and blocks of color. Then she remembered the reference to Moran’s placement of his trademark on the wrapped edge of the canvas.

“Black light,” Zach muttered.

“What?” she asked, caught in her own examination of a painting.

“Frost left it on,” he said, holding out the lamp, pointing to the switch, which was in the “on” position.

“So?”

“So he was using it after we went to bed, and forgot to turn it off. Batteries are dead.”

Zach went to the kitchen, banged around in drawers, and found batteries. He popped out the light’s old batteries and replaced them. Purple light glimmered.

“Bring a painting,” he said, grabbing a Dunstan at random.

Jill followed him into the walk-in vault that stored some of Frost’s most valuable pieces of ancient and more recent art.

“Shut the door and turn off the light,” Zack said.

As soon as she did, black light blossomed. The painting glowed in eerie transformation. All colors changed. Forms became almost three-dimensional. Brushstrokes took on an even deeper, very distinct texture. Thin spots in the coverage of the canvas and places where the artist had laid down extra pigment for esthetic effect were as clear as black print on a white page.

“Do you see anything in the painting itself?” she asked.

“Not at first glance.”

“Try the edges.”

He shifted the canvas in his grip, turning it so that the top edge was within the black light’s magic sphere.

“See anything?” she asked.

“Paint.”

He flipped the canvas at a ninety-degree angle.

Both of them stared at the new strip of canvas.

“Nothing but paint,” she said.

“Yeah. Hope we don’t have to go over the face of the canvas itself,” he said, turning the painting another ninety degrees. “It could take for-” His voice cut off like a switch had been thrown.

“Toward me, just a little,” Jill said, her voice husky with excitement.

He tilted the painting very slightly, throwing the textures into higher relief.

“Is that what I think it is? “she said, touching the canvas lightly.

“Yeah, it is.” He flipped the painting again. “On the bottom edge of the stretcher. No mistaking those ridges and whorls. Give me the canvas you have.”

Jill turned the painting she carried upside down, presenting the bottom edge of the stretched canvas to the black light.

“I will be damned,” Zach breathed. “Another thumbprint. Same place.”

“How can you tell it’s a thumb rather than a finger?”

“Experience.”

“So Dunstan ‘signed’ even his unsigned canvases?”

“Looks like it. I’ll get Frost’s paintings.”

Jill took the black light he handed her and tried to wait patiently for him to return with the other Dunstans.

She would have paced, but the vault was too small.

It got even smaller when Zach returned with the two larger canvases. He turned them bottom side up and leaned them against a case of ancient red and black pottery. He tilted the black light.

Jill stared at the strips of canvas. “There, a few inches from the corner.”

“Just like the other ones.”

Frost’s second canvas had a thumbprint as well.

“I’ll get the rest of my paintings,” she said.

Very quickly the vault was lined with upside-down paintings.

All of them had a thumbprint along the bottom edge of the stretcher, a few inches in from the right side.

“You’re frowning,” Jill said. “You should be grinning and giving me high fives.”

“I’m just wondering how unknown thumbprints will stack up in court against droit moral and the entire Western art establishment.”

“Unknown thumbprints? Don’t you think it stretches credulity to believe that someone other than Dunstan put his thumbprint on all these canvases?”

“Lawyers live to stretch credulity. It’s how they make money.” Zach said something under his breath. “If only Dunstan had lived twenty years later, his fingerprints would be on file somewhere.”

“They might be.”

Zach’s head snapped around toward her. “Where?”

“Canyon County jail in Blessing. That’s where he hung himself.”

“They took fingerprints?”

“All the lawmen in the Purcell family were medieval in their views of women,” Jill said, “but the men prided themselves on being on the cutting edge of law enforcement.”

“Polygamy excepted?”

“There’s no polygamy in the Mormon West,” she said sardonically. “That’s just a figment of prurient media imagination. Doesn’t exist.”

“Makes it a lot easier not to find something if you aren’t looking for it.”

“Is your middle name Purcell?”

“God, I hope not.” He grabbed her, kissed her soundly, then released her slowly. “We’ve got too much to do for what I really want to do.”

She took a deep breath. “Right. What comes first?”

“I call St. Kilda and start spending money.”

“Start? You’ve been doing that since we met.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet. Framing pictures costs as much as chartering planes.”

“Why are you framing pictures?”

“First thing Frost taught me was that when it comes to selling art, presentation is all.” Zach pulled his sat phone out of his back pocket and looked at the battery indicator. Deader than Kelsey’s nuts. “Where’s your sat phone?”

“Cell is cheaper.”

“St. Kilda will pay.”

“I’ll get it.”

Zach started making lists in his mind. When Jill returned, he took the phone and punched in some numbers. Then he punched in more numbers. Finally he talked to someone long enough to get transferred to Joe Faroe.

“Faroe here. How’s Frost doing and what happened to your phone?”

“As well as can be expected and the battery died,” Zach said. “I’m running barefoot, so listen up. I need the same cargo experts I had for yesterday’s flight, and I need them now. Make sure they come ready to party. Have them bring an extra car. And another airplane card. Mine’s about done and I need it for at least one flight immediately.”

“How’s your own party gear?” Faroe asked.

Zach felt the weight of the pistol in the holster digging into the small of his back. “Ready, willing, and waiting for an invitation to dance.”

“Hold.”

He waited with outward patience while Faroe called logistics and got everything in order.

“Bet Faroe is regretting the day he insisted on running this whole op himself,” Zach said to Jill. “I outright love giving that man gofer orders.”

“Have I mentioned that you’re a real Y gene?”

“You didn’t complain about it after dinner.”

She smiled slowly. “Sometimes Y genes have a place.”

“Yeah, and it’s right between-” Zach broke off and listened.

“You’ll have what you need in half an hour,” Faroe said. “And you’ll have a new sat/cell phone, too. Try not to kill it before the op is over. What’s your destination?”

Zach thought quickly and then shrugged. They had to file flight plans, and flight plans were public. “Closest airport to Blessing, Arizona, and a car on that end.”

“Hold.”

Faroe was gone for only a few moments. “Go to the All West charter agency. A plane will be waiting for you. There will be a car on the other end. Where do you want the cargo to go?”

“I’ll tell you when I’m not running barefoot.”

“I’ll be waiting for your call.”

Faroe punched out before Zach could.