Page 84 of Twisted Enemy
The movers are waiting with push brooms and plastic trash bags. There’s little for them to clean up, but they take their job seriously. When they’re finished, the gallery is stripped down to bare concrete floor and walls.
I leave the door open.
The reverse process goes even faster at the bank. A nervous manager waits for us outside the building, his bald head sweating in the June heat. He’s flanked by two armed security guards. The movers have everything stashed in the vault in less than half an hour.
Kate’s phone rings as the manager starts to spin shut the vault door. She glances at the screen and frowns. “Hold on, Breagha,” she says. “I need a better signal.”
Nilsson takes care of tipping the workers, peeling off stacks of hundred-dollar bills for each of them. He hands five hundred to the bank manager who, flustered, tries to give it back. Nilsson insists.
I exit the bank to find Kate shouting into her phone. “Mam! Mam, I don’t care about your migraine! Listen to me, Mam. You can’t do this. You cannot lock her up. Ma?—”
Kate looks up from her phone, clearly stunned. “She hung up.”
As Nilsson sends the movers on their way, I ask, “Your mother?”
Kate nods, still staring at her phone as if she’s never seen one before. “They’re locking my sister in the basement. Same as they did me, before we were married.”
“Breagha?” That doesn’t make sense. Breagha is the good Lynch daughter. She follows all the rules.
Kate’s eyes are so wide I can barely see the green around her irises. “She told them about Nate Cohen. He proposed last night, and she said yes.”
“She’s breaking her engagement to Tarasov?” I’m torn between admiring her courage and questioning her sanity.
“Sheis. But Mam and Da aren’t having any of it. Please,” she says. “We have to go to Baltimore.”
My jaw feels like someone used it for a battering ram. The ache in my gut tells me I’ve spent far too many hours drivingback and forth to DC, and I might need to climb into bed for a week. I just consigned a fortune to makeshift storage, and even as we stand here, auditors at the IRS are receiving an invitation to destroy me.
But Kate needs me. So I turn to Nilsson, where he’s waiting patiently beside my Jaguar. “I’ll need the Land Rover a while longer.”
“Of course,” he says. “Sir.”
“We’ll see you back at the house this afternoon.”
“Certainly, sir.”
It takes almost two hours to drive from Dover to Baltimore. Along the way, Kate tells me about Nate Cohen, the grad student Breagha has decided to ruin her life for.
“And there’s something else you should know,” she says.
I wait as she stares out the window. Her fingers twist in her lap. Her shoulders look like they’re braced for the roof of the Land Rover to cave in. “Go on,” I finally say.
“Last night…”
I knew this was too easy. I arrived with coffee and an apology. She said she was sorry too. We both managed to laugh about my ne’er-do-well con artist of a sister.
But that’s not enough to get past our fight. Something still waits for us. Something bad, from the tortured look on Kate’s face.
“Last night,” I repeat. My foot stays steady on the gas pedal. The speedometer clocks precisely sixty-two miles an hour.
“I gave Viktor to Tarasov.”
The Land Rover swerves into the next lane of traffic, and a horn sounds behind us, long and loud. I look away from Kate for long enough to keep from crashing. Once the vehicle is back under control, I say, “Tarasov tricked his way into my home… He stole my Picasso… He knows about the fake paintings... He’d never trust a line of code I wrote.”
She looks like she’s chewing on aspirin. “I convinced him.”
“How?”
Her throat works. She starts three separate explanations and abandons each of them. Finally, she says, “I told him I hated you for leaving me at the freeport. I said I was betraying you.”
