6. Reid
REID
PLAYLIST: COME WITH ME NOW – KONGOS
Rachel enters the room with the signed paperwork and the ankle monitor.
It took me an entire week to finally convince the AG’s office to go forward with the deal, and if not for her insight on the Ford Robbery and my personal vouching for her, they wouldn’t have done so.
It is a thing I will probably regret eternally, but the insights she has are extremely valuable and I’d rather have her under controlled supervision than hunting her.
Because I am certain, she’d be gone the minute she arrived at Danbury.
“Everything set,” Rachel says, quite elated. I know she couldn’t wait to meet Avery Zayne. “Your leg, please.”
Avery looks at her, her head in her typical demeanor, slightly tilted, eyes narrow. Something about her gaze always radiates a sense of superiority, sprinkled with a hint of judgment.
“What is it with your voice?” Avery asks.
Like I said, superiority and judgment.
Gone is the woman I saw for just a few minutes when she had the panic attack. Now, she’s back to her arrogant self, which I dislike on a molecular level.
“What’s with my voice?” asks Rachel.
“It’s too high,” Avery says. “It hurts my ears.”
Rachel opens her mouth, catches herself, breathes in deep, and says, “Well, it’s my pleasure to annoy you as much as you annoy us.”
I snigger. Avery’s eyes flash at me, back at Rachel, and back to me.
“Huh,” she huffs out without another word, a very knowing look on her face, and finally stretches out her leg.
Rachel fixes the ankle monitor.
“That should be forbidden,” says Avery. “It’s a crime for the eyes. Aren’t there any less obvious models?”
“Many things are forbidden,” I say. “Let’s not forget it’s our courtesy to you.”
She laughs.
“You would get nowhere without me,” she says arrogantly. “You should be grateful I am willing to share my knowledge and help you.”
I close my eyes for one second as I breathe in. That woman will cost me my last nerve.
I open my eyes again, grimace a grin, and say, “I have the highest case closure rate in over three decades. Nowhere is not quite the term.”
“And yet, you didn’t solve the most important ones. Like The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.”
I dislike the way she emphasizes the name of the lost Rembrandt, which hasn’t been seen since 1990.
“Are you telling me you know where it is?”
“I am,” she says. “Hedda has it, just like she took the Mona Lisa.”
“It was your signature,” I say.
“Hedda is an honorless cunt,” Avery says, and her lips purse in disgust.
“So you two weren’t working together?”
“We had aligned interests,” she says, but does not elaborate further. Her gaze wanders away to stare at the blank wall.
While I am massively annoyed by her, I am also curious what motivates her. She is saved by Hedda, and yet they despise each other?
It all makes no sense to me.
“Alrighty,” she says, getting up.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I ask her.
“I need some food and a bathroom,” she says.
It is something I can’t deny her, so I show her the bathroom and wait in front of it.
I almost expect her to have already fled the scene, but then she comes back outside.
“You are aware you can track me with the monitor, yes?” she asks.
“I am,” I say. “But I don’t trust you.”
“You better not,” she says, laughing. She walks to the elevators.
“Ehm—“ I say when she presses the button.
“Food,” she says. “I am hungry. You are welcome to join me.”
“I have lunch with me.”
“Join me anyway,” she says. “We can talk about your cold case file.”
I will so regret this, but I get in the elevator with her.
She walks out of the building with her newly issued credentials.
“This is fun,” she says. “Never thought I’d walk in and out of here with my own card.”
“Can easily change.”
“You are a ray of sunshine,” she says brightly.
“I know what you’ve done,” I say. “I have every right to believe someone like you won’t be reformed.”
She leans in on me while walking.
“So, since when are you jumping into bed with your colleague?” she asks me silently, and my eyes widen.
How does she even know?
What else does she know?
My hands clench into fists.
“I don’t,” I say coldly.
She chuckles and asks, “Who’s the liar now?”
And I have to revoke my earlier statement. She will cost me not only my career, but also my sanity.
Five minutes later, we turn onto White Street, where she holds her hand to a pin system at a door without a number, and the door opens automatically.
I follow her inside.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“I need different clothes,” she says as she opens the elevator and presses the button with the word penthouse on it.
Of course, I think to myself. That’s how you live when you steal millions in art pieces.
We ride all the way up in silence. I am quite curious where she lives, and most of all, how. One day, I will write a paper about her, and this is as close as I can get to a criminal's mind of her caliber.
We arrive and step outside into a dark corridor with a single door and a spiral staircase leading to a roof window labeled EXIT.
I register and store it because she has several exits with it.
“Just a reminder,” she says, “Whatever you see in here, you will have to forget. The clause in the contract leaves me with everything I own; however, I acquired them.”
“I am aware,” I say, an eyebrow drawn up. So she has been hiding in plain sight, in front of all our noses, the entire time.
The guts she has.
She opens the door by holding her hand up to a spot on the door, and it opens with a soft, hydraulic sound.
“How do you open everything?” I ask her because she has nothing in her hand.
“Magic,” she says as if I am stupid.
Breathe, I tell myself, and follow her inside.
What appears in front of my eyes is everything and nothing of what I have expected at the same time.
This is not the penthouse I expected. And yet it fits her in ways I always believed she was like.
The penthouse, more like an at least 6000 square feet big room, and probably a 30-foot-high ceiling with full window fronts on both sides of the building.
White walls, white floor, and dozens of Greek-style columns.
I feel like somewhere between the Acropolis and psychopathic cleanliness.
The latter is a word Rachel has invented when we searched a villa while back that was so clean there could’ve been a mass murder that happened and no one would know.
And this here is the same.
It’s like a clean art gallery, with a Japanese bed and a bathtub and—
My eyes fall onto a glass casing with Napoleon’s Imperial Crown in it.
“You took it,” I shout out as I walk up to it. “And you—you don’t even try to hide it!”
I glance at her and around the entire Studio.
There is art everywhere.
I identify a stolen Cezanne. Lost statues, a golden chandelier—I recognize it as the one lost from the Castle of Versailles.
I blow my cheeks.
“Impressed?” she asks while she undresses in front of me.
I turn away, because I don’t feel comfortable seeing my consultant naked. It’s unprofessional and against every rule.
Rules, she gives a fuck about.
“The moment you violate your contract, I’ll seize all of this,” I tell her as my eyes fall onto a golden egg.
“Is that Soray’s egg?” I ask and walk up to where it sits on a white display with a glass casing around it.
“Uh-huh,” she says and follows me. “I won it in a bet.”
She stands next to me, completely naked.
“For fucks sake, get dressed!” I curse at her.
“I like being naked,” she says, grinning. “I like it even more when it enrages others.”
I mean, it’s not that she can’t pull off walking around naked with her perfect breasts that stand out, and a body that could put her on every catwalk on this planet.
I am built differently, muscular, smaller, with broad shoulders. I mean, I am trained, but never would I have the confidence to just walk around naked in front of someone else.
“You’re so uptight,” she says as she removes the egg’s case. “Feel free to look at it. Don’t you dare try to take it; I sold part of my soul for it.”
“What soul?” I ask her as she walks away to the back of the room. There is a door.
A door she leaves open, and I hear the sound of running water trail into my ears.
I take my phone and photograph everything while she is showering.
“Fuck me,” I breathe out when I turn and make my way to the back around a wall, and a massive, hanging, golden orb comes into view.
I shake my head in disbelief. How did she even get it in here? That thing needs a crane!
Wet steps behind me.
I turn—
And groan.
She still has no clothes on. She stands there, dripping wet, with nothing but her ankle monitor, smirking at me.
She knows exactly what she is doing, and she’s doing it for the sole purpose of annoying me as much as possible.
I stare at the ceiling.
Breathe, I tell myself again. Breathe.
“I thought you said you were hungry,” I say.
“I am very. Stop snooping around.”
“Get dressed,” I tell her, annoyed, “I don’t have time for this shit.”
She only sniggers.
Twenty minutes later, she stands in front of me. Long, soft fabric pants in black, a black blouse that opens just an inch too much, and yet reveals nothing.
She bends down to slip into her high heels, and I realize she’s not even wearing a bra, and her decolletage is perfectly shaped.
I laugh internally in mosquito-stitch breasts. Some women are just blessed.
“Ready?” I ask her when she finally has her shoes on.
“Yep,” she says. “Let’s go, lunch is waiting.”
We walk to a restaurant two blocks away that’s located on Worth Street, just a minute from HQ.
She opens the door to a building with no sign on it.
“Get in,” she says.
“After you,” I say, and she shakes her head as she enters.
We walk down several stairs and are welcomed by an Italian-looking man.
“Mia bellissima amica!” he says loudly when he sees Avery, and they hug intensely. “Ciao!”
“Antonio,” she answers him, “Che bello vederti, amico!”
I don’t understand Italian. But from what I can tell, they are very familiar. I make a mental note in my mind.
“Ho bisogno di un tavolo per due,” she says, and Antonio confirms something, pointing us towards a table in the back. The restaurant, held in all black, is packed, but for her, he seems to have a table in an instant.
We get the menu and wine without asking. I refuse intentionally; Antonio doesn’t take no for an answer, so I push back my jacket to show him my badge.
“That was completely unnecessary,” says Avery.
“I decide what’s necessary,” I say as I glance at the menu. A menu with things on it I’ve never heard of before. There aren’t even prices on the menu.
“I don’t think this here is in the federal price range for lunch,” I say and close the menu. I feel out of place, and I dislike eating what I don’t know.
“You’re not paying. I am.”
Of course she is.
This was a mistake. A big, big mistake.