He sorted through the canvases again, checking their backs. “Holy shit,” he murmured. “It can’t be.”
“Can’t be what, Agent Keller?” Director Kass demanded.
“I don’t think these are forged,” Griffin said. “I think they’re the originals. And I’m pretty sure they were stolen from the White House.”
Everyone around him started talking at once.
“Are you sure about this?”
“How could someone get inside the White House and steal a painting without anyone noticing?”
“Aren’t these things rigged with some sort of alarm?”
All their questions were valid, but there was a bigger question that consumed Griffin. “How many others are missing?”
“Agent Keller, we still don’t know definitively that these aren’t forgeries,” Director Kass said. “Before we jump to any conclusions, why don’t you take these down to the forensics lab at DC headquarters and have an expert check them out. With any luck, they might be able to grab a fingerprint from these. Agent Morgan and the FBI can keep working the case from here.”
Griffin hesitated. He didn’t want Leslie and her team grabbing his collar. But this gang of counterfeiters had been methodical and thorough so far. His gut was telling him Leslie wouldn’t find anything of use in the truck. The paintings, on the other hand, just might lead to something. The Secret Service forensics lab was the best in the country at finding trace evidence on an item—fake money, in particular. The director was right; it was worth a shot. If nothing else, while he was back in DC, he could grab a beer with Adam and check out the sniper angle.
“I’ll drive down tonight.” He rolled up the paintings and carefully slid them back into the tube, except he couldn’t quite make them fit the way they had before. Griffin pulled the paintings back out and laid them on the table before turning the tube upside down and shaking it. A white cloth fell to the floor.
“What’s that?” Leslie asked.
Griffin reached down and carefully picked it up, shaking it out as he did so.
“It’s a dish towel.” His gut clenched when he caught sight of the monogram on the towel. “From the White House kitchen.”
The group was somber as Griffin shoved the towel into an evidence bag. “I’ll head out now if you don’t mind, Director,” he said.
“Be sure and brief the agency director first thing,” Director Kass said.
Nodding to the field office director, Griffin headed for the SUV he and Silva had arrived in forty-five minutes earlier.
“Agent Keller,” Leslie called after him.
He stopped in his tracks and turned to face the FBI agent who was his sometimes lover. The stark contrast of the bright lights of the warehouse bay against the dark night left her in silhouette so that he couldn’t make out her expression.
“Don’t forget to brief me as well,” she commanded, hands on her hips.
He was pretty sure that was code for “call me.” Griffin wasn’t in the habit of calling any woman except his mother. And despite a few exerting nights in bed, Leslie didn’t warrant being added to his phone log. It seemed a trip to DC couldn’t have come at a more strategic time.
CHAPTER2
“It’s not even seven a.m., and you’re already on your way to work?” Marin Chevalier tried not to cringe at her cousin Ava’s condescending tone. “You really need to get a life.”
Marin stepped off the escalator at the Farragut North metro station wishing her cousin had called a few minutes earlier. That way she would still have been deep in the tunnel, and the call would have gone straight to voicemail. She didn’t normally avoid her family, but, with Ava’s wedding a little over a week away, her cousin was more cranky than usual.
“I have a busy few days ahead of me, Ava, and you know I do my best work when the kitchens are quiet. Besides, if you’re up, it can’t be that early.”
Looking both ways, she crossed K Street and headed into Farragut Park, mingling in with the line of federal workers trudging toward their offices. The sun rose over the Washington Monument, making it look like a giant pinwheel.
“I’m headed to spin class, Oompa Loompa,” Ava said. “Something you’d have time for if you got out of the kitchen once in a while.”
Waiting for the light to cross I Street, Marin checked her exercise tracker on her wrist. She suddenly regretted skipping the added steps that walking the entire way from her condo in Dupont Circle would have given her. Ava always had a way of making Marin feel inferior. It didn’t help that her cousin had called her by the childhood name their grandfather had dubbed Marin when she was a pudgy adolescent; one who would rather spend time in the kitchens of her family’s hotels than by the pool with her much prettier—and always more popular—cousin.
“You can’t fight genetics,” her grandfather would say, patting his formidable belly. “You’ve got the Chevalier genes, Oompa Loompa. Blonde hair, blue eyes, and a build that, when you are older, men will call statuesque, while your cousin got her mother’s dark, beauty-queen genes. Let’s just hope Ava didn’t inherit the woman’s cheating ways,” he’d always add with a disappointed whisper. Aunt Vanessa had left Uncle Clay and the family compound in the Garden District of New Orleans when Ava was just seven. Marin couldn’t remember whether her former aunt was on husband number three or four.
“Is your mother coming to your wedding?” The words slipped out of Marin’s mouth without forethought as she passed the Hay-Adams Hotel and waited to cross H Street. It wasn’t like her to antagonize Ava. As hateful as her cousin was to Marin sometimes, she always took the high road. Not because she was more forgiving than Ava, but because Marin didn’t have the patience to argue with her domineering cousin. It was always easier just to let Ava have her way.