Ellie couldn’t hold back. “I know you killed her,” she said to Stratton bluntly.

“What?” He looked up, startled.

“You set this up,” Ellie went on, teeming with anger. “There was no affair. The only affair was yours, with Tess McAuliffe. Liz told us everything. How she set you up. But you found out. You did this, Stratton, or had it done.”

“You hear this?” Stratton yelled, and rose from his chair. “You hear what I have to defend myself against? From this bullshit art agent!”

“I was with her,” Ellie said, looking at Breen, “only a couple of hours ago. She told me everything. How she arranged an affair to discredit her husband and he found out. How he was implicated in stealing his own art. Check at the Brazilian Court. Run the photos. You’ll see. Stratton was with Tess McAuliffe. Ask him what Liz meant, that only one painting was stolen.”

There was thick silence in the room. Breen peered at Stratton. Stratton looked around edgily.

“Maybe Liz did know something about the art,” Lawson said. He was holding a gun in a plastic Baggie. “It’s a Beretta.32,” he said. “Same kind of gun used in the killings over in Lake Worth.” He looked at Breen.

Stratton sat down again. His face turned a blank, shaken white.

“You’re not buying this?” Ellie said. “You think Liz Stratton stole the art? That she killed all those people?”

“Or her boyfriend.” Lawson shrugged. He raised the evidence Baggie. “We’ll see…”

“You got it all wrong,” Ellie said, eyeing the smirk creeping onto Stratton’s face. “Liz asked us here. She was going to lay it out for us. That’s why Liz Stratton’s dead.”

“You keep saying us, Special Agent Shurtleff,” Lawson finally said. “You mind telling us who you mean?”

“She means me,” a voice came from the entranceway. Everyone spun around.

Ned had entered the room.

Chapter 77

“THAT’S NED KELLY!” Lawson’s eyes popped.

Two Palm Beach policemen grabbed me and slammed me onto the tiled floor. A knee drove into the small of my back, and my arms were pinned behind me. Then my wrists were twisted into cuffs.

“I turned myself in this afternoon to Agent Ellie Shurtleff,” I said, my cheek pressed to the floor. “She met with Liz Stratton today. She was about to testify against her husband. Liz no more killed herself than I killed Tess McAuliffe. Agent Shurtleff brought me here to confront Stratton with the information, and turn myself in.”

I looked up at Ellie with a resigned expression, as one of the cops patted me down. She looked back at me with a blank stare. Why, Ned? The policemen dragged me to my knees, hands behind my back.

“Radio it in,” Lawson barked to a young plainclothesman. “The FBI, too. Tell ’em we just apprehended Ned Kelly.”

I was taken to a patrol car, pushed inside, the door slammed shut. I took one last look over my shoulder at Ellie. She didn’t wave. Nothing.

Less than fifteen minutes later I was at the holding cells in the Palm Beach police station. I was stripped, searched, photographed, and tossed into one of the cells. The place was really buzzing. Cops craned their necks for a look.

They didn’t charge me with anything right away. I guess the police were waiting to sort things out. I knew they had no direct evidence linking me with anything – other than the guy who killed my brother in Boston.

They were actually taking it easy on me. The Palm Beach cops were pretty good guys, and I eventually made a phone call up to Boston, looking for my father. My mother answered. He wasn’t home. “Listen, Mom, you have to tell him to come clean. My life is in the balance.” She hesitated a little, then started to cry. “Just ask him, Mom. He knows I’m innocent.”

Then I sat back and waited – for whatever was going to happen next.

In that cell, it all started to sink in. Mickey and Bobby, Barney and Dee. The horrible way they had died. I thought of Tess, poor Tess. So many victims. All killed by Gachet? Who the hell was he? There I was in jail – and he was out there, free.

It just didn’t seem right somehow.

Part Five. ART’S BOOMING

Chapter 78

THEY FED ME a meal. They gave me blankets and a sheet. I sat down on the cot and passed a lonely night in a cell. I figured this would be the first of many. There was a lot of noise down the hall – the clang of cell doors, someone throwing up.

It wasn’t until the next morning that somebody finally came for me. A heavyset black cop from the day before. With two others.

“Free to go, I guess?” I said with a fatalistic smile.

“Oh, yeah, right,” he chuckled. “They’re waiting for you up in the spa. Don’t forget your robe.”

They took me upstairs to a small interview room. Just a table and three chairs, a mirror on the wall that I figured was two-way. I waited alone for about ten minutes. The nerves were starting to go. Finally the door opened and two cops stepped in.

One was the tall white-haired detective who was there when I surrendered at Stratton’s. Lawson. Palm Beach PD. The other was a short, barrel-chested guy in a blue shirt and tan suit. He flicked me his card as if I were supposed to be impressed by the initials.

Special Agent in Charge George Moretti. FBI.

Ellie’s boss.

“So, Mr. Kelly,” Lawson said, squeezing into a wooden chair across from me. “What are we going to do with you?”

“What am I being charged with?” I asked.

He spoke in a slow, relaxed drawl. “What do you think we should charge you with? You left us about the whole criminal statutes book to choose from. The murder of Tess McAuliffe? Or your friends?” He consulted a sheet. “Michael Kelly, Robert O’ Reilly, Barnabas Flint. Diane Lynch?”

“I didn’t do any of that…”

“Okay, plan B, then,” Lawson said. “Burglary. Interstate traffic of stolen goods, resisting arrest… The death of one Earl Anson, up in Brockton…”

“He killed my brother,” I shot back. “And he was trying to kill me. What would you have done?”

“Me, I wouldn’t have gotten into this mess in the first place, Mr. Kelly,” the cop replied. ”And just for the record, it was your prints off that knife, not his…”

“You’re in a shitload of trouble,” the FBI man said, pulling up a chair. “You got two things that can save your ass. One, where are the paintings? Two, how was Tess McAuliffe connected to any of this?”

“I don’t have the paintings,” I said. “And Tess wasn’t connected. I met her on the beach.”

“Oh, she was connected,” the FBI man said, and nodded knowingly, leaning close, “and, son, you don’t come straight with us now, your whole life as you knew it is going to be a memory from this point on. You know what it’s like in a federal prison, Ned. No beaches there, son, no pools to tend.”

“I am being straight with you,” I interrupted. “You see a lawyer here? Did I ask for one? Yes, I got involved to steal those paintings. I set off alarms around Palm Beach. Check. You got reports of several break-ins around town prior to the theft that night, didn’t you? I can give you the addresses. And I didn’t kill my friends. I think you know that by now. I got a call from Dee that the art wasn’t there. That someone had set them up. Someone named Dr. Gachet. She told me to meet them back at the house in Lake Worth, and by the time I got there they were dead. So I freaked. I fled. Maybe that was wrong. I’d just seen my lifelong friends carried out in bags. What the hell would anyone do?”

The FBI man blinked. He sort of narrowed his eyes at me, like, Enough of the yuks, kid. You don’t even know the trouble I could cause you.

“Besides,” I said, turning to Lawson, “you’re not even asking the right questions.”