And yet, Isaac Nachman’s eyes were alight.

He’d had Esme open the case on a small table next to the sweeping expanse of stairs, and he’d been riveted to the painting since first sight.

“My dear, my dear.” He almost hummed the words, his excitement was running so high. “My dear Miss Esme. This is a rare day for the Nachman family, a rare day.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Nachman,” Esme agreed. She was very relaxed, which was more than Johnny could say about himself. The place creeped him out. A Cape buffalo was eyeing him from across the room, its black glass eyes seeming to stare straight at him. Four stuffed cheetahs stalked across the wall opposite the staircase. A pride of lions silently roared and motionlessly stalked unseen prey in a room across the way-a whole pride, taxidermied for posterity and somebody’s overwhelming ego.

The rich could be too rich.

And without a doubt, they could be damned strange. He couldn’t believe Esme’s partner had expected her to come up here into the middle of freaking nowhere, to this huge, empty mansion full of dead animals, to cut a deal with this eccentric old geezer all by herself.

He wouldn’t have wanted to do it alone, and he was carrying a.45.

So was she, and he didn’t doubt that her partner knew it, and truth be told, she could probably take Isaac Nachman and the guard at the gate with one hand tied behind her back.

But still.

“She’s been missing from our home for a long, long time,” the old man crooned. “It’s time for her to join her sisters.”

Okay, now he was officially creeped out.

“I know she’s happy to be home, Mr. Nachman.”

He slanted Esme a very askance glance. Geezus.

“If only we had the Monet, Miss Esme,” Nachman mused. “I remember the Monet from when I was a child in Berlin.”

“My father is working on the Monet, Mr. Nachman.”

“Yes, yes. Burt will find it. Burt never fails. He and Bainbridge never fail.”

Johnny kept his mouth shut. His lips were super-glued. He had nothing to add here.

“No, sir, Mr. Nachman. My father never fails.”

He looked at her again, his gaze narrowed. She was watching the old man, the way his hand hovered over the painting, a few centimeters from the surface, like he was channeling the woman in Woman in Blue-and she believed what she’d just said. Her dad never failed. Burt Alden, the guy whose motto was “We Snoop 4 U.”

“He has a gift,” Isaac Nachman said.

“Yes, sir. He does.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the old man continued. “We had hired so many people over the years. Had our own people on the hunt, and then, like a miracle, we found your father. He has outdone them all.”

“A gift,” she agreed, and Johnny had to wonder, really, just how much of a Burt Alden celebration this was going to turn out to be, and he had to wonder who this “we” was that old Nachman was talking about. There was no “we” that he could see. The mansion was as quiet as a tomb, except for the creaking of the timbers, and the sound of the wind sloughing past the windows.

The wind was new. There hadn’t been any wind when he and Esme had walked up to the massive front door.

If thunder started to roll, and lightning to flash, if it started to rain, he was grabbing Esme and getting the hell out. He wasn’t going to do the whole “dark and stormy night” thing in this freaking weird place.

“And yet…” Nachman said.

And yet Burt Alden was a verifiable screwup. Geezus. Franklin Bleak was going to deep-six him in the river, if Burt didn’t pay off his gambling debt. Whatever gift he had for finding art that had been missing for more than half a century, it sure as hell didn’t extend to finding a horse in the fifth.

“And yet…” Esme repeated.

“One must be sure, Miss Esme,” Nachman said.

“One must be sure,” Esme again repeated what the old man had said.

Maxing out on the creeping out, Johnny thought, releasing a long breath. He glanced back over at the Cape buffalo. Yeah, that thing wanted to eat his lunch.

“Shall we, my dear? Mr. Ramos, you may await us here.” Nachman started walking toward the room with the pride of stuffed lions loping over an artfully designed patch of sub-Saharan Africa.

“Of course.” Esme picked up the painting and started after him.

Johnny stopped her with a touch of his hand on her arm.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Mr. Nachman and I are going to authenticate the painting.”

“Yes… yes, my dear.” The old man had stopped and was looking over his shoulder at her, a very odd and discomfiting smile playing about his lips. “Authenticate to my satisfaction.”

Bullshit.

“We’ll all go together,” Johnny said.

“There won’t be room.” Isaac Nachman shook his head. “There won’t be room, I tell you. Not in the closet.”

Closet?

“We’ll make room,” he said. Fifty goddamn thousand square feet of house and this guy was taking her into a goddamn closet?

Esme gave him a look that clearly said she had it covered, but he didn’t care. The look he gave her back said he had it covered-his way or the highway.

She rolled her eyes and turned back to Isaac Nachman. “Mr. Ramos has been with me for a number of months now, but is still relatively new to the art-recovery business, Mr. Nachman, and he would, no doubt, benefit from being present at the authentication.”

No fucking doubt.

“My…my dear, I must… well, you know.”

“I will vouch for him, Mr. Nachman, personally, upon my utmost honor. His association with our family goes back many, many years, and his security credentials are impeccable, acknowledged and accepted by my father.”

His security credentials were vouchsafed by a helluva lot more reliable and exacting sources than Burt Alden.

“Well, my dear, if your father… well, then, I must, I suppose, accommodate, then… if Mr. Ramos must,” the man said, clearly flustered, which only reinforced Johnny’s position. If there were anything worse than being stuck in a closet with an old geezer wearing a silk bathrobe, it would be being stuck in a closet with a flustered old geezer wearing a silk bathrobe.

What in the hell did the old guy think he was going to get away with? Grabbing her ass? Worse?

Well, it wasn’t going to happen. Not on his shift. And for the record, in his book, Burt Alden was still a bum.

With a decidedly pinched and vapid expression of duress on his face, Isaac Nachman led the way through the lion room, shuffling along in his slippers. Esme followed him, and Johnny followed Esme, bringing up the rear.

The house was amazing, even with so many stuffed animals everywhere. It was all log walls and giant stone fireplaces, and expensive wood paneling with incredibly thick rugs carpeting the floors. But the place didn’t make sense, and it took him passing through a couple more rooms to figure out why.

There was no art. None. Nada. Nothing. Not on the walls, not on the tables, not anything anywhere. No exquisite paintings, no vases, no intricately carved tribal masks, no sculpture, no wall hangings, no tapestries. Only stuffed animals, a bunch of which, on closer inspection, looked a little flea-bitten, like they’d been hunted down and killed a long, long time ago.

Minute after minute passed, with the three of them still walking, heading toward the back of the house, room after room, until Johnny began to wonder how in the world people lived in a place this big. Fifty thousand square feet was unmanageable.

After a couple more turns into beautiful wood-paneled hallways, they took a short flight of stairs down to a lower level with recessed lighting, always with Isaac Nachman in the lead and Esme carrying the painting, until they came to an elevator.

Johnny didn’t mind the ride down even though it seemed to last a helluva long time for being part of a house. He had no problems with elevators. But when the door opened, he did have a problem.