The Violin Conspiracy(9)

“Yeah,” he said, “I always put it on the nightstand at night.”

“But it wasn’t there,” Bill said to Ray, and then to Nicole, “so how did you know to look on the floor? Did you look through his coat first? Anywhere else it maybe could have been?”

“No,” Nicole said. “Why would I not look on the floor? Wouldn’t you? That’s normal. This whole thing is normal.” Now her voice was breaking. “I went into the bedroom, I came back out, I gave her the money, and she left. That’s it.”

“That’s not it,” Bill said. “Somewhere during that time, the violin disappeared.”

Nicole had been inching toward him, as if she could convince him by her proximity, but now she fell back in her chair as if her spine could no longer hold her up. “It was thirty seconds,” she repeated. “It was a minute.”

“Was it?”

“It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Three. Five, tops.”

“She probably swapped out the violin in less than a minute. Stashed it underneath the cart. It would have taken her seconds.”

Because the violin, all this time, lay casually in its unlocked case across the chair closest to the wall. The cart would have blocked Nicole’s view of it.

Ray remembered seeing the violin case there when he went to grab breakfast. He’d been slightly surprised, because he usually left it in the bedroom, but the night before they’d all had a bit too much to drink. He’d probably come in, laid the violin on the chair, and collapsed into bed without thinking.

“So she had the opportunity to swap the violin for the shoe,” Bill Soames confirmed.

For a moment no one said anything. Nicole sniffed—a tiny sound, but it seemed very loud in the silence.

“I’m not saying this is what happened,” Bill said, “but it seems very possible.”

“You mean it’s my fault,” Nicole said flatly.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re damn right you didn’t say that,” Ray said. “It’s not her fault.”

“It’s not a question of fault,” Bill said. “It’s just a question of opportunity. This was an opportunity, and it’s possible that the woman took advantage of it.”

“All the stars must have had to be aligned perfectly in order for her to pull this off,” Ray said.

Bill Soames shrugged. “You’d be surprised. A lot of crimes really boil down to moments of opportunity. This woman may have been coming by, delivering your breakfast, a bunch of times, with the shoe and the ransom note in her cart. She finally got lucky.”

Ray squeezed Nicole’s hand. Maybe now his luck would change.



* * *



—

He spent the evening practicing, even though it still felt traitorous to be playing the Lehman. Stradivarius violins were unique. They commanded a mystique unlike any other instrument, with what many believed to be the purest, most extraordinary sound a violin could make. But the power and pull of the violin went well beyond its sound and its beauty: his own violin was in his blood, in the pulse that beat in his wrists and temples.

He skipped dinner. The Tchaikovsky Concerto blossomed.

Just after 8:00 p.m., the phone buzzed. A woman’s voice, firm and no nonsense. “Rayquan McMillian? Alicia Childress here. I’m downstairs and I’m coming up.” Minutes later a stout woman in her late fifties or early sixties was shaking his hand. Her curly gray hair was trimmed very close to her skull, and she wore khakis and a loose sweater. Without asking, she moved past him into the suite, pulled out her laptop, cleared a space on the dining-room table, talking the whole time.

She was done with pleasantries. “So let me make this clear,” she said without preamble. “I’m focusing on three factors, and I’m going to drill into all of them: access, forensics, and motive.”

He and Nicole sat down across from her. Ray removed Nicole’s cup of cold half-drunk coffee from the table, laid it on the sideboard behind him. Where it had rested on the glass top, a half-moon glared up like a giant ghostly fingernail.

“So my first job, Rayquan,” Alicia said, “is to determine who had access to the violin—I’m going to start by going over your story, every inch.”

“Ray,” Ray said.

“What?”

“Ray,” he said. “Please call me Ray. Nobody calls me Rayquan.”

“Ray it is, then,” she said. “I’m still going to go over your story,” she told him, “and then I’m going to go over yours,” she said to Nicole. “You both had the most access, obviously.”

“Pilar Jiménez,” Nicole said.

“I keep telling everybody, it was either my family or the Marks family,” Ray said. “It had to be one of them.”

“I’ve heard this, and I’ll get to them in a minute.”

Ray twined his fingers with Nicole’s. He felt more confident: this woman really was a bulldog. No time to chat and be friendly; Alicia was on a mission and he was not about to stand in her way. “Anything you need.”

“Second, forensics. The FBI and the art squad have already shared everything with me, and I’m in the process of reviewing it. It’s unfortunate that you didn’t discover the theft until after the crime scene was tainted.”