Killers of a Certain Age(87)

Minka spoke up. “You need more ginger.” She pulled a tin of ginger chews from her pocket and passed it over. Naomi took one and started to suck.

“I am nice to you as long as you are nice to my friends,” Minka said sternly.

“Minka, sit down. Your Ukrainian is showing,” I told her.

Naomi looked up. “Ukrainian?” She rattled off a few phrases and Minka brightened, answering her in a chirpy voice I’d never heard her use before.

“You speak Ukrainian?” Helen asked.

Naomi shrugged. “I speak seventeen languages. Most for work. Ukrainian was just for fun.”

“Your Duolingo score must be the absolute shit,” Natalie said.

Naomi smiled. “So yes, to answer your thinly veiled accusation, Billie, I watched while Martin set you up and the board issued the termination order. I considered sending a warning, but in the end, I chose not to. The board thought four old broads—their words, not mine—wouldn’t be a match for Brad Fogerty, so they only sent one assassin on the cruise. They assumed you’d never see him coming. But I thought they were wrong. You have experience and instinct. You knew to keep your eyes open and you saved yourselves. I was betting you would.”

“You wagered with their lives,” Akiko put in suddenly.

Naomi didn’t bat an eye. “I took a calculated risk. We do that in this line of work.” She went on. “When they realized you made it off the boat, the board was divided. Paar was inclined to let it go. He had been the most reluctant to issue the termination order in the first place. But Gilchrist and Carapaz pressured him and he agreed to let the order ride. They thought you might turn to a friend for answers, so they were already onto Sweeney.”

“They tapped his phone and sent Nielssen to finish the job in case he buggered it to hell,” I guessed.

“Exactly. And when that failed, they assumed you left New Orleans, but they couldn’t get a line on where you were. It drove Gilchrist nuts. Carapaz decided he would just hole up in Paris and double his bodyguards. Paar never thought you’d be ballsy enough to come out to find them, so he went on with his spa trip. I guess he thought wrong,” she said, saluting us. “Paar was a creature of habit. I’m not surprised you found him, but Carapaz must have been trickier. How did you manage that?”

We took her through the process and she looked impressed. “And you grabbed the dossier off the bed without knowing what it was?”

I shrugged. “Maybe subconsciously I recognized it as Museum business. I don’t know. It was instinct to take it. And when I read it, I saw the code in the margin and realized it had been compiled by Martin.”

“Of course, Martin didn’t realize Billie was onto him when he left her the message about Tollemache’s,” Mary Alice put in.

“He thought he was being subtle,” I said with a smile.

“And he needed some way to get you to figure out the painting was at Tollemache’s to draw you into Vance’s trap,” Naomi said, putting the pieces together.

I filled in the rest. “We didn’t know where the plot started, but we knew at that point that Vance and Martin were sharing information. And that any plan to take them out would only work if we could turn the tables and get them here.”

“So you strolled into Tollemache’s bold as balls and offered yourself up,” Naomi said, giving me an approving look. “You’ve got brass ones.”

I shrugged. “The goal for them was the four of us. I figured I was safe until we were all together. Vance has been holding a grudge against me for forty years. Making me watch him kill my friends would be a nifty little bonus for him.”

Naomi sucked harder at the ginger chew and rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if this is the best thing I’ve ever had or the worst.”

“I say the same about tequila,” Minka said.

“You did a good job of making Paar’s death seem natural,” Naomi went on. “Carapaz and Gilchrist had a debate over how to handle it. Carapaz figured he would just wait you out. He argued that you didn’t have the resources to conduct a series of hits, especially against them. Gilchrist was more cautious. When you took out Carapaz, he decided the best defense would be a good offense.”

“And the Anguissola went up for auction to draw us out,” Helen put in.

“It did the trick,” Naomi said, smiling again. “And someday I’d like the whole story of exactly how it went down. But I hear noises in the garden. The cleanup crew is here.”





CHAPTER FORTY-ONE



We watched from the shed as the crew, dressed in discreet grey coveralls, rolled the bodies up into tarps and stacked them neatly in the back of a paneled van. They slammed the back door and drove off without speaking to anyone.

“Where will they take them?” Natalie asked.

“There is a waste facility with an industrial incinerator just outside of Bristol. It handles all of our needs in southern England and Wales. Northern England and Scotland are a different division,” Naomi explained. “The ashes are dumped in the landfill. Within the hour, every trace of them will be obliterated.” She glanced around. “Just out of curiosity, how were you planning on disposing of them?”

“There was some discussion of pigs,” I told her.

She nodded. “Pigs are always a good option in the country.” She looked around the group. “So, let’s discuss the future, ladies. I am here to make you an offer.”