Page 70
She returned to the car and hopped in the front seat. They dropped Mr. Lambert off at the hotel in Copper Creek, making sure he had everything he needed. The place had a dining room, and Bryce left additional cash with the front desk so his dad could have meals there if he wished. But he gave strict orders to not allow him to use the money for alcohol. Then he offered the front desk clerk a hefty tip for his troubles.
They headed back to Theo’s motel to see if there were any new leads in the investigation.
Bryce glanced at Kira. “Thanks for helping with my father. I don’t know what you said, but I’m glad you were able to get him to leave.”
“I told him the truth. In angry Russian. But he got the message.”
He chuckled. “I’m sure he thought you were going to kill him just by looking at him. You can be fierce when you want to be.”
She shook her head. “And maybe someday your father will see you for who you really are, not through his own selfish lens.”
Kira pulled out her phone to review the pictures she’d taken of the journal pages. A new email message notification popped up from SSA Turner.
She opened her inbox and read the contents. It contained the pictures from Bryce’s hidden camera.
She flipped through each face like she was playing a game of Clue. The sheikh in the auction room. The elderly lady in the secret auction room. A couple in the hallway.
“Wait. Who’s this?” She zoomed in on the picture.
Bryce didn’t take his eyes off the road. “Describe who you’re asking about.”
“The photo shows two people emerging from a back room, close to the bathrooms. The man is Vince Palmer, the gallery attendant. He has his arm around a woman in an intimate gesture. She looks familiar.”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I couldn’t place her, but I remember seeing her.”
She zoomed in on the woman’s face. “I think that’s Natalia, Sophia’s maid.”
She held up the phone, and he took a quick glance. “Ah, I should have recognized her after she busted me snooping. But she appears different all dressed up. Elegant. Like she belongs there.”
“Maybe she’s seeing Vince.”
“It looks like the man has a bandage on his hand.” She zoomed in on him. “He does have gauze wrapped around his palm.”
Kira remembered the gallery attendant, but it looked like he’d ditched the thick glasses. She’d pegged his age at around forty, although his thin face and dark eyes made him appear older than he probably was.
“Could he have been one of the men who attacked us?” Kira asked.
Bryce tapped the steering wheel as in thought. “When you first met this Vince guy at the gallery, what did he sound like?”
“He was very dry, with a monotone voice, but it was kind of nasally. No accent that I can remember.”
“The guy that climbed out of the Dominiks’ window and then got the jump on me after Derek was murdered was a thin but strong man. And he had an irritatingly nasal voice with a distinct Russian accent.”
She texted Everly to check on the gallery attendant. “Vince is in the perfect position to hide in the shadows and keep an eye on the statue. It’s possible the Society had the man pose as an attendant at the gallery to keep watch.”
“It makes sense. And he was there when the guard was murdered.”
So . . . had they just figured out who murdered the security guard? She remembered Ivan’s comment about the ACS having an assassin.
Bryce adjusted the rearview mirror. “If we agree with that theory, this means the gallery attendant—Vince—might be responsible for killing both the security guard and Derek. Maybe even Theo. I mean, we saw Vince at the art auction.”
“I’ll send our theories to Turner,” Kira said. “We’re onto something. I can feel it. We just need some hard evidence to tie it all together.”
They stopped for some burgers, and Kira got back to work when they hit the road again. She sipped her half lemonade, half unsweetened iced tea. No sweet tea for this Russian-born woman. She’d never get used to that Southern tradition.
She pulled up the photos she’d taken of the maps from the journals. There were four hand-drawn pages. “I’m assuming these are of places he searched for the treasure. The first page has two mountains and then a valley. Some rocks or boulders maybe. And I think the circles represent towns in the area.” She pulled up a map of the area, squinting to make sense of what she was seeing. It wasn’t clear at first glance. It would probably be helpful to print the pages and study them side by side to match the geography against a real map. Each sheet looked similar, but laid out side by side, they might form a more cohesive picture of a specific section of the mountains.
“Did your grandfather write in code?” She studied the X marks the man had drawn in various spots along the maps. “I can’t tell if the X’s are where he tried and failed or if he found something in those spots.”
