REID
PLAYLIST: SEVEN NATION ARMY – THE WHITE STRIPES
“What’s up with you?” asks Rachel as she knocks at my open office door.
“Don’t ask,” I say as I lift my head entirely. I have been brooding over everything I have learned about Avery Zayne.
“She’s pretty cool, isn’t she?” Rachel asks.
“Cool?” I ask incredulously, because it’s the last word I’d describe her with.
“Yeah,” Rachel says. “I mean, the way she solved the Met case, but she’s also funny and combines things we didn’t even consider looking for.”
“She’s driving me mad in ways that make me aggressive on a cellular level,” I say blankly. “And I am quite sure she is playing us.”
“What makes you believe that?”
“Come here and close the door,” I tell her.
When she stands next to me, I show her the images.
“She gave me these,” I tell her. “The thing is, if she is tricky enough to document things like these, what if she knows even more? Does even more? What if they all worked together? What if none of what we see is real? What if she just wants the things for herself? Something about these photos makes me hesitate. Something is not right, but I can’t tell what.
I know she was in the Fullerton’s house yesterday, but I can’t prove it. What if she’s orchestrating all of it?”
“You think she orchestrated the Met thing, too?”
“It was too good. She was too good. The entire deal was too easy. She didn’t try to escape. Didn’t try to sneak out. It feels too slick, too perfect. What if she’s trying to keep us close to get information? Get access?”
Rachel stares at me.
“I mean, I have to agree, the Met thing was—looking back—pretty performative.”
Rachel looks at the photos.
“You know what’s interesting about the photos?” she asks after a while.
“Tell me.”
“The most valuable object was Cleopatra’s bracelet.
But it’s nowhere on them. There’s the Chinese vase, the elephant skin, the flute, and the coins.
Almost all of them appeared on the black market.
But not the elephant skin, nor the bracelet.
The latter is neither in the photos nor on the black market. ”
I snatch the photos from her hands and look through every single one.
And Rachel was right; it is not in there.
“I’m telling you, something is going on, and it’s happening right under our noses.”
“I mean, we could search her home,” Rachel says. “Any judge would grant the warrant if we suspect her of breaking the deal.”
“There’s also the possibility that Fullerton committed insurance fraud.
We should look into his finances and talk to Susie.
Maybe she’s ready to snitch on Avery when we tell her about the photos we got from her,” I say.
“Also, Avery, she’s too good. She wouldn’t have anything about it lying around.
Not a bracelet, nor an elephant skin. I would have seen the latter.
She had her proudest possessions on display in that studio. ”
In my mind, I walk through the studio again. There was definitely no elephant skin.
“By the way, that studio is a fortress,” I say. “You can only enter with a sensor, and I am quite sure by now she has a chip implanted in her arm.”
“A chip to open the doors?”
“She held her wrist against sensors. No phone, no nothing in her hands. I tell you, that studio will be a pain to get into, and I don’t even want to know what happens when someone enters forcefully.”
“She’s not gonna self-destruct the art,” says Rachel. “It means too much to her.”
“True,” I say, and get lost in my thought.
“There is only one way,” I say after a while. “And what’s that?”
“I have to make her trust me enough to lower her guard,” I say.
Rachel draws up an eyebrow.
“Sure you wanna do that?”
“No,” I say, because it stands against everything I am. But if it makes me catch her in the act of violating the deal, I will. Because with all that happened yesterday, I am certain she is manipulating me, playing me to get what she wants.
And with that, I silence the conscience that tries to talk me out of it.
I don’t see Avery all week. I track her with the ankle monitor, and she is in her place, not going outside once. I thought she’d go for another run or at least go out to have some food, but the signal only moves within a couple of meters of her studio here and then.
I still remember that run. A run that kept me awake and made me follow her by bike to find out what she was doing. Like a crazy person.
No, not crazy. I tell myself. Your gut feeling has never misguided you.
I try to wrap my head around everything she has told me, given, done, and shown me, and compare it to what I know about her. I even go so far as to get my old notes from university.
Everything she does is somehow consistent and yet completely unpredictable. She is a consistent walking contradiction.
My phone rings.
“Jane,” I say when I answer. “Perfect timing.”
“How come?”
“I am combing through my thesis about her, comparing data.”
“I’m sending you a profile,” she says. “Handle it with care. I believe it looks very interesting, but none of this is fixed, because at this stage we usually work with biomarkers and questionnaires, not just external framing. But it gives a glimpse.”
“Thank you, Jane,” I tell her. “Let's have lunch soon.”
“Sure,” she says. “We’ll be in Europe for two weeks, but afterward, we’d love to.”
We.
She always talks in we now.
A stitch in my chest, because I want that too. I want the love where it’s us and not me against the world. And instead of finding that, I am married to my job, kissing a woman who gets on my last nerve.
My email program alerts me of the incoming mail.
I stare at the profile.
Scoring high on antisocial behavior, belief of entitlement, and grandiose behavior. There is not much new from what I already know.
I open my own notes from university.
Grandiose narcissistic behavior. Detached behavior. Father was a charming man who scored high on all the dark triad traits during his interviews after he was caught.
I find a note with a single word on it.
Psychopathy??
The closer I get to her, the more I believe it to be true. She is emotionless and careless, but there are moments when she does feel something. I don’t know what’s behind it, but there is something she cares about, something that touches her.
When I caught her, she was obsessed with that hat; she showed an emotion for just one brief second. And the running after last night—
Maybe she does feel, but her past made her dissociate emotions?
Her words still linger with me.
“Did it ever occur to you that all of it might be a way for me to protect myself?”
She said she is selfish, but what if she’s not? What if she’s doing everything for a reason?
“Stop it,” I tell myself in my mind, because I register what is happening. My mind is trying to make a human out of her, trying to validate that kissing her wasn’t the greatest mistake I could’ve ever made—and I won’t go down that road.
She is a thief.
A con artist.
A liar.
A manipulator.
And I will not let myself be seduced by her.
What I will do is watch her closely. I will watch her and find that Rossi person. She has to communicate and meet with him somehow, and I will get to him, even if others haven’t.
“What do you think?” I ask Rachel, as we sit back in the car, to drive from the FCI Danbury back to Manhattan a week later. I have my own train of thought, but I want to hear Rachel’s first. She is extremely good at reading people.
“You might not like to hear it, but I don’t think they worked together. If Susie is telling the truth, and with everything she gave us, I believe she did, it would make her husband look very guilty, which means Avery did nothing more than the shipping.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Telling lies about a complex story like this isn’t easy. Unless you know the truth. I also think she’d snitch on Avery after what we told her.”
I had the same thought, even though I had to admit it. I had such high hopes of getting Avery with Susie, but apparently, I was wrong.
Maybe she had nothing to do with the bracelet, says a voice in me. A voice I don’t listen to.
“We’re gonna have to look into Fullerton again,” I say. “We’re building a case of insurance fraud. If he committed the fraud, that bracelet will be somewhere in his mansion. If not, we know Avery got to it somehow.”
I groan because looking into Fullerton is like stepping in dog poop. He is arrogant, wealthy, well-connected, and has a lawyer who is a bigger asshole than Avery.
Wonderful, really, really wonderful.