“Speaking of carcass, what’s up, McKinney?”

Mike warned me that Pat had appeared in the doorway, and I spun around.

“Now I’d like to talk to you alone, Alex. Why don’t you wait down the hall, Mike?”

“Battaglia gave me strict orders that she’s to have police protection around the clock, Pat. No can do.” Mike sat behind the desk in my chair and lifted his feet up on my desktop, one at a time, making the statement that he was not about to move. “We got some breaking developments on Caxton you might want to know about.”

“Take a walk, Chapman. C’mon.”

Mike checked with me before he slowly removed his legs, then stood up and started for the exit. “Be sure to give my best to your wife and kids, Pat.”

The intercom buzzed and I could hear Laura calling my name.

“Yes?”

“There’s a gentleman downstairs who wants to talk to you. His name is Frank Wrenley. Can he come up?”

I exchanged glances with Chapman, who had stopped in the doorway, and he nodded at me in response. “Keep him down there for ten minutes while I make a few calls. Maybe he can clear up some of this business about his relationship with Marina Sette. I’d like to find out exactly where she is right now.”

I told Laura to have security hold him there until Mike could go to the lobby to escort him in. “This isn’t a very good time to talk, Pat. Might as well go ahead with your ten o’clock meeting. I can’t make it anyway.”

29

“I just woke up the housekeeper in Santa Fe. She doesn’t expect Ms. Sette back there for another week. Laid on a heavy Spanish accent, says I must have misunderstood her when I called on Sunday. I’m telling you, Alex, I swear that woman told me Sette had just flown back home the other day. This is Mercer’s life, for chrissakes. It’s not anything I would have made a mistake about. Today when I press her about where I can get in touch with Sette, all I get is that the housekeeper doesn’t know. ‘ La Señora ’ is traveling.” Mike was fuming.

“All right, relax. Let’s just make a plan.”

“You know why I like it better when I’m working on something where everybody’s poor? ’Cause the friggin’ perps can’t go too far. One guy’s maybe got a mother in Queens, next one chills out at his brother’s place in the Bronx, another sleeps on the rooftop. None of this Airborne Express crap that the rich can pull. That mope I locked up for the triple homicide in the Polo Grounds projects two weeks ago? Gave me more trouble than any of ’em. His sister told me he lived in a mobile home. In New York City? No way-we don’t have ’ em here. Took me days to figure out she meant the A train. He just moved his plastic bag of worldly goods into the subway and rode from one end of the system to the other and then back, night after night. It should happen to these people. What if it actually was Marina Sette who left the message for you and Mercer to meet her?”

“Then she either has something to do with the killings or she’s on the run because she’s truly terrified of something or someone.”

“When are you gonna get results on all the subpoenas for telephone records?” His impatience was palpable.

“I call every day, and every day they tell me that the volume is tremendous and I’ll have what I need as soon as possible. The only ones back were in yesterday’s mail. Omar Sheffield’s phone calls made while he was in jail. I had Maxine and one of the other paralegals go through them to check for calls to Denise Caxton. Not a one.”

“How can that be?”

“I checked with the warden. You’ll love this one. There’s a foolproof way for inmates to place untraceable calls now. They buy those prepaid telephone cards and then use the cards to make the calls from prison pay phones. All you’re left with is a record of a call to the company that issued the card, but no link at all to the number actually dialed. Max says Omar’s phone-privilege time slots-you know, the half hour each day he had access to the booth-show lots of activity in the period that would fit with the dates after Deni started to get letters from him, but all the outgoing ones he made just reflect the number of the calling card company in Brooklyn.”

“Damn. And no word on when you’ll have the incoming calls to the Caxton house or the galleries?”

“That takes longer. I’d guess we’re at least a week away from that stuff.”

“Let me go downstairs and get Wrenley. After he tells us why he’s here, I’ll move it to talk about Marina Sette, okay?”

I walked to my desk to find my file notes on the antiques dealer and review them. Laura stuck her head in the doorway and asked if she could borrow an emery board. I pointed to my handbag, which I had left on the leather armchair in front of the desk. “Just fish around in there. I know I’ve got a few on the bottom.”

“Would you mind if I take the day off tomorrow?” she asked tentatively.

I guessed that was the real reason she had come into the room in the first place. “As long as you can get someone to cover the phones. They’ve been wild since this started. And help Mike with the subpoenas he needs you to type up this morning.” We were short staffed because of the normal summer vacation schedule, but the pace of the investigation didn’t correspond with the seasonal slowdown. “Any luck in finding Rod Squires?”

“Rose says he’s on a sailboat off the coast of Maine. If he contacts Paul, she’ll flip him over to you.”

For the moment, Frank Wrenley’s unexpected appearance gave me a reprieve from McKinney’s plan to boot me off the case.

Mike came back into my office with Wrenley and I rose to shake his hand across the desk. This time he was head-to-toe in slate gray, a slight contrast to his jet black hair and almost a match for the cloud-filled sky that hugged the city with its humidity.

“Why don’t you have a seat and tell us what brings you down here?”

Wrenley turned to sit and I saw my bag in his way. “Just put it on the floor. Sorry.”

He lifted it and sat it down next to the row of file cabinets. “Must have your whole arsenal in there, Miss Cooper.”

Chapman laughed. “She would if we’d let her. Temper like hers, Mr. Wrenley, Cooper couldn’t get a permit to carry a pointed pencil.”

Wrenley looked directly at me. “I wasn’t sure who to talk to about this, but perhaps you ought to know. And you might be able to help me, too.”

It was getting harder and harder to find anyone to talk to us who didn’t want something in return. “What is it?”

“Last evening I found out that Lowell Caxton is going to be closing his gallery.”

He stopped speaking and both Mike and I waited for him to continue.

“I mean, this week. Abruptly. Doesn’t that surprise you?”

“Elephants flying? Monkeys tap-dancing? Those things might surprise me. The people in this case, the pals you’ve been running with who’ve been scamming each other and the public for most of their adult lives? Very little they do could surprise me at this point.”

Wrenley ignored Chapman and talked to me. “Caxton’s had one of the most substantial businesses in this city for longer than I can remember. It would be one thing for him to announce a closing and wind down his affairs over the next few months. But to pull a few moving vans up to the front of the building and start loading them like a gypsy in the middle of the night, well, it’s more than a bit odd.”

“Last night?” I asked. “Who told you about it?”

“Bryan Daughtry called me. He still has a lot of contacts who work in the Fuller Building.”

Wrenley’s statement reminded me that before Daughtry went to jail on the tax case, his original gallery had been on Fifty-seventh Street, several floors below Caxton’s suite.

“What else did he say?”

“One of the custodians, a fellow who runs the freight elevator, figured he could make a few dollars by passing the information to Daughtry. It worked. Bryan went right up there and gave the guy a hundred bucks. Saw what was going on himself. Paintings and sculptures being loaded onto a truck at eleven last night, complete with a cadre of security guards. But Caxton’s employees wouldn’t spill the beans. Not a word about where they were taking the stuff, or why. I’m sure he paid them well enough to ensure their loyalty.”