Promise Not To Tell(30)

“I’ve got an alarm system installed there. I haven’t been contacted by the security company or the police so…”

“Same brand as the system in here?”

She sighed. “I got a deal in exchange for adding the second system.”

CHAPTER 17

Traffic was light downtown. The result was that a short time later Virginia eased her car into an empty space at the curb near the front of the gallery.

She got out. So did Cabot. Neither of them spoke as they walked quickly to the front door. Virginia’s hands shook a little when she tried to insert the key into the lock. It’s the adrenaline, she told herself. Perfectly natural under the circumstances. You’re not having a panic attack. You’re just extremely tense. You’ve got a right.

She got the door open on the second – or maybe it was the third – attempt. Cabot had the good sense not to offer to take the key away from her and perform the simple task himself. That would have really pissed her off.

Once inside she hurried to the box on the wall and forced herself to concentrate long enough to punch in the code. Mercifully she got it right the first time. She flipped the wall switch. The overhead display lights came on. A quick look around reassured her.

“It doesn’t look like anything has been disturbed in here,” she said.

Cabot looked at the rear of the long gallery. “You said Brewster’s pictures are stored in a storage locker.”

“In the back. Right. I’ll show you.”

She went behind the elegant steel-and-glass sales counter and opened the door to the back room. A strange, disturbing sense of wrongness wafted out of the opening. It was followed by an odor that some primal part of her recognized. Instinctively she clasped a hand across her nose and mouth, took a step back and came up hard against Cabot’s immovable frame.

“What in the world?” she whispered.

“Stay here,” Cabot said.

He moved her aside and hit the switch on the wall. The overhead fixtures came on, illuminating the jumble of packing crates, draped canvases and art objects that littered the back room.

Cabot moved slowly into the space. Ignoring his order, she followed him. He did not try to stop her. The door of the storage closet was open. The light was off inside. Virginia tried to connect the dots but her brain seemed to have gone numb.

“He was here,” she said. “He found Hannah’s paintings. But what is that smell?”

Cabot went around the end of a row of packing crates. He stopped and looked down.

“He was here but he wasn’t alone,” Cabot said.

The shivery feeling got more intense. She knew she did not want to see whatever it was that Cabot was looking at, but she forced herself to go around the crates and confront the truth.

For a heart-stopping moment she stared at the body lying in a pool of dried blood.

Cabot crouched beside the dead woman and reached out to check for a pulse. It was obvious he wasn’t going to find one. He looked up at Virginia.

“Recognize her?” he asked.

“No. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

CHAPTER 18

“The cops have confirmed the ID of the victim,” Cabot said. He put his phone down on the dining counter that overlooked the kitchen. “Sandra Porter. She was a computer programmer who, up until a few days ago, worked in the IT department at a local company called Night Watch. Evidently, Porter recently left the company to pursue other opportunities.”

“That’s usually a euphemism for getting fired,” Virginia said.

They were eating a midnight dinner of pizza and red wine in her condo because by the time the police had cut them loose, neither of them had felt like trying to find a restaurant that was still open.

Just as well, Virginia thought. She was too wired to try to pass for normal in a public place. She wasn’t very hungry, either. After a couple of bites of pizza, she had decided to focus on the wine.

“It’s possible she really did quit,” Cabot said. “Good programmers often move around a lot simply because they can. Their skills are in high demand.”

“Sandra Porter certainly didn’t show up in my back room because she wanted to apply for a job.”

“True. The question is, who else was in your back room?”

Virginia swallowed some more wine and slumped back in her chair. “Think it might have been the phony plumber who broke into my condo yesterday?”

Cabot picked up another slice of pizza. “I’d say that’s a definite maybe. Too early to tell. We don’t have enough information.”

“This thing is getting very complicated, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but we now have a couple more facts than we had earlier.”

“The name of the dead woman?”

“And her place of employment.”

“I suppose the police will chase down all the obvious leads and connections.”

“Sure.”

Virginia examined her almost-empty wineglass. “The cops are not going to buy into our conspiracy theory, are they? They’ll think we’re crazy if we try to convince them that a onetime cult leader has emerged from the past and, for reasons yet to be explained, started murdering people.”

“The police will spend their time investigating more plausible explanations. That’s their job. It’s up to you and me to try to find a connection to the past.”