“No. The alarm bells sounded for me when I heard our widow-in-mourning bought a piano and left town for the delivery. Does Kimberly strike you as someone who’d leave rearranging her precious antiques to a work crew and a dimwit nanny?” Nikki ambled to the Steinway and tinkled one key. “We checked with the building super. He confirmed the piano movers came here in the morning with a huge crate, but didn’t recall them leaving with one. It fell off his radar, I guess, after all the confusion around the blackout.”

Noah smiled and shook his head. “Wow.”

“I know, pretty sneaky, huh? They never left the building.”

“Ingenious,” said Paxton. “And not a word I associate with Kimberly Starr.”

“Well, she wasn’t as smart as she thought.”

“What do you mean?”

Nikki had run this over and over in her head so that it was crystal clear to her. Now she would bring Noah along on the ride. “Did you know Matthew had changed his mind about selling his collection?”

“No, I didn’t know anything about that.”

“Well, he had. The same day he was killed, a woman from Sotheby’s named Barbara Deerfield came over here to appraise it. She was murdered before she got back to her office.”

“That’s horrible.”

“I believe her murder was connected to Matthew’s.”

His brow darkened. “It’s tragic, but I don’t understand the connection.”

“Neither did I. I kept wondering, Why would anyone kill an art appraiser? Then I discovered that Starr’s entire art collection was made up of forgeries.” Nikki watched a pallor wash out Noah Paxton’s face.

“Forgeries?” He let his gaze wander the walls. Nikki saw his eye fall upon a piece of art near the archway. The one covered by a shroud.

“Fakes, Noah.” His attention snapped back to her. “The whole collection.”

“How can that be? Matthew paid top dollar for these paintings, and from reputable dealers.” Paxton’s color was coming back and then some as he grew more agitated. “I can assure you when we bought these they were not fakes.”

“I know,” said the detective. “The insurance documentation pictures bore that out.”

“Then how could they now be fakes?”

Nikki sat on the arm of a sofa that cost more than most people’s cars. “The appraiser took her own set of photos of the collection as notes. We found her camera and her pictures didn’t match the insurance shots. She had documented a roomful of forgeries.” Heat paused to let that sink in. “Sometime between the purchase and her appraisal, someone switched the art.”

“That’s unbelievable. You’re sure of this?”

“Absolutely. And Barbara Deerfield would have come to the same conclusion if she had lived to study her pictures. In fact,” said Nikki, “I’d say that the reason Barbara Deerfield was killed was because somebody didn’t want it to get out that the sixty-million-dollar Starr Collection was bogus.”

“Are you saying Matthew was trying to palm off fakes?”

Heat shook her head no. “Matthew never would have hired an appraiser if he knew they were fakes. And after all the money and ego he invested in his Little Versailles? He’d have had a meltdown if he ever found out.”

Noah’s eyes widened in revelation. “Oh my God. Kimberly…”

Nikki rose and strolled over to the John Singer Sargent oil of the two innocents, enjoyed it for just a glance, and said, “Kimberly beat someone else to stealing that art collection. I arrested a second crew that broke in here later, during the blackout, and they found nothing but empty walls.”

“Everyone went to a lot of trouble just to steal something that’s worthless.”

“Kimberly didn’t know the paintings were worthless. The grieving Mrs. Starr thought she was scoring her multimillion-dollar Lotto hit for a shitty marriage.”

“Obviously the other burglars thought it was valuable, too.” Paxton gestured to the art. “Otherwise why would they try to steal it?”

Nikki stepped away from the painting and faced him. “I don’t know, Noah. Why don’t you tell me?”

He took his time before he answered, looking at her to gauge if she was asking a rhetorical question or something with more stink on it. He couldn’t have liked the way her eyes were boring into him, but he went for rhetorical. “I could only guess.”

If her session at the medical examiner’s that morning was theater, for Nikki this was Brazilian jujitsu and she was done boxing. On to the grappling. “Do you know a Gerald Buckley?”

Paxton squeezed his mouth into an upside-down U. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Curious, Noah. Gerald Buckley knows you. He’s the overnight doorman here.” She watched him work his earnest face. Nikki found him almost convincing; he wasn’t bad. She was better. “Here’s a refresher. Buckley’s the man you hired to set up the second burglary during the blackout.”

“That’s a lie. I don’t even know him.”

“Now that is truly weird,” said Ochoa from the archway. Paxton was edgy. He hadn’t seen the other two detectives return, and he flinched when Ochoa spoke. “Me and my partner took a drive up to Tarrytown this afternoon. To a bar there.”

Raley said, “Place called the, uh, Sleepy Swallow?”

“Whatever,” said Ochoa. “Guess that’s your regular hang, right? Everybody knows you. And the bartender and a waitress both ID’d Mr. Buckley sitting at your table for a very long time a few nights ago.”

“During the blackout,” added Raley. “About the time Buckley should have been in for that shift he canceled.”

“Buckley is not your strongest point man,” said Heat. Noah’s eyes were getting less focused and he whipped his head from detective to detective as each spoke, like he was following the ball at a tennis match.

“Dude caved like a sandcastle,” added Ochoa.

“Buckley also says you called him up and told him to hurry over here to the Guilford and let Pochenko in the rooftop door. That was just before Matthew Starr was murdered,” said Nikki.

“Pochenko? Who’s Pochenko?”

“Smooth. Not going to trip you up, am I?” said Heat. “Pochenko’s somebody whose picture you didn’t recognize in my photo array. Even though I showed his picture to you twice. Once here, once at your office.”

“You’re fishing. This is all speculation. You’re putting everything on hearsay from a liar. An alcoholic who’s desperate for money.” Paxton was standing in a direct sun ray from one of the high windows, and his forehead glistened in the light. “Yes, I’ll admit I met this Buckley guy at the Swallow. But only because he was shaking me down. I used him a couple of times to arrange hookers for Matthew and he was trying to extort hush money out of me.” Paxton raised his chin and thrust his hands in his pockets, body English for that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, thought Nikki.

“Let’s talk about money, Noah. Remember that little transgression of yours my forensic accountants uncovered? That time when you fudged the books to hide a few hundred grand from Matthew?”

“I already told you that was for his kid’s college.”

“Let’s pretend that’s the truth for now.” Nikki didn’t believe him but was applying another rule of jujitsu: When you’re closing in for a takedown, don’t get faked into a sucker hold. “Whatever your reason, you managed to cover your tracks by putting that money back two years ago, right after one of the paintings from this collection, a Jacques-Louis David, got fenced for that exact amount. A coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Ochoa shook his head. “No way.”

“The detective is definitely not coincidence-friendly,” said Raley.

“Is that how you started, Noah? You needed a few grand so you had one of his paintings forged and then swapped it for the real one, which you sold? You said yourself that Matthew Starr was a philistine. The man never had a clue the painting you put on his wall was a fake, did he?”

“That’s bold,” said Ochoa.

“And you got bolder. After you saw how easy it was to get away with that, you tried it with another painting, and another, and then started flipping the whole collection like that, piece by piece, over time. Do you know Alfred Hitchcock?”