The Tempest (27 page)

Hunter stepped forward and shot her twice, in the arm and then in the leg. For a moment, Elena kept coming, no longer holding the gun. Then she went down to a knee. And Hunter heard Elena groan and fall to the side.

Hunter waited, her legs trembling with adrenaline. She could hear her own heart beating now, hear herself panting. She watched, not wanting to kill her; not wanting to lose what Elena Rodgers could give her. She stepped sideways, preparing for Elena to stand up. But then she saw the side of her face: Elena lying there like a store dummy, her eyes closed, no longer moving. Barely breathing. What had happened? Hunter moved closer and kneeled down, holding the gun to her face, felt her pulse. Elena was alive but no longer conscious. She went in the windbreaker pockets and found her phone, her wallet. Felt the syringe. She lifted her Glock .22 from the dirt and stuck it in her holster.

Hunter stood and looked out at the country. Turning, searching for a reference point. Her breath was shaky, her heart thumping. She began to walk down the gravel lane, her right arm stinging a little where she'd been cut by Elena's nails. She reached the road and tried her phone. This time, it worked. She pressed 911, taking several long breaths of the wet air. The trooper had been right. It
was
a nice evening. Hunter didn't think she'd ever felt so grateful to be alive as she did right then. She walked back to check on Elena, knowing what she'd find.

I
T WAS
9:43
when Luke received the first call from Henry Moore. He hadn't heard from Hunter since she'd gone into the house with Kepler, he said. That was 8:15.

“I just thought you might have heard something.”

“Nothing,” Luke said. “Has someone gone by the house?”

“A trooper stopped by, found that it was locked up, no one home, no lights on. Anyway, just let me know if you hear anything.”

Half an hour later, Moore called again. He'd just gotten the call about the traffic stop.

“Another woman was in the car with her,” he said. “Any idea who that might be?”

“No,” Luke said. “Unless it was her. Elena Rodgers. The partner.”

Luke knew that they were both thinking the same thing: Hunter shouldn't have gone up there alone. But it didn't do any good now to state the obvious.

“Call if you hear anything,” Moore said.

“I will.”

“And please, say a prayer.”

“Yes,” Luke replied. “I already have.”

H
UNTER STOO
D ON
the two-­lane country road, listening to the crickets. Then, to fill the time, she began to walk in the direction she knew they'd be coming from. It wasn't long before she heard sirens, then saw the glow of revolving blue and red lights, dipping into a valley and over a crest. Hunter was in the center of the road waving her arms when they arrived.

The first responder was the same state trooper who'd stopped her earlier. Trooper Cavanaugh.

His eyes looked startled as he came toward her with a bowlegged urgency. Hunter saw why: the right sleeve of her jacket was torn off and her arm was streaked with blood.

“You okay?” he said.

“Fine. It's not as bad as it looks,” Hunter said. Mostly she felt numb.

They stood beside the patrol car, Cavanaugh shifting his weight from one hip to the other as Hunter explained what had happened. He said nothing, absorbing her story. Afterward, they drove up the road to Linda Elena Fiorille. In the distance, the flashing lights of backup patrol cars moved silently over the hillsides.

Elena hadn't moved. She wasn't going to, not of her own volition. Hunter knew that. She had hit her twice. The arm wound wasn't serious. But she must've hit the femoral artery in her left leg. She'd probably bled out in ten minutes, maybe while Hunter was doing the 911 call.

Hunter hadn't intended it to end this way. Not in a million years. She'd wanted Elena Rodgers to tell them the whole story: what she'd done to Joe Sanders, where they'd find Nicholas Champlain, all about her obsession with Walter Kepler, if that's what it was. Hunter had wanted to see her in a courtroom, accused of pushing Susan Champlain over the bluff-­edge. She'd wanted to see her sitting at the defense table, her stubborn face gone slack, as an attorney tried to defend her. She'd wanted to watch her in a prison jumpsuit at the sentencing when the judge gave her life without parole and the guards steered her away in leg shackles.

But none of that was going to happen.

Hunter was standing out there an hour and a half later when Henry Moore arrived in his unmarked MSP car. The EMS had bandaged her right arm by then and were gone. But the coroner was still waiting, as were half a dozen deputies, who were doing nothing but casting long shadows in the cooling air as police techs finished photographing the scene.

Moore gave her a quick hug and then stood beside her, looking at Elena's body.

“When she woke this morning, I'll bet she never thought her day would end like this,” he said. It was a typical Henry Moore observation, hard and ironic, without a trace of humor.

“I wish I knew
what
she'd been thinking,” Hunter said.

He waited a moment, then said, “No, you don't.”

Hunter gave her statement to the investigating officer. Her unmarked police car stayed behind, impounded as evidence. She rode back to Tidewater County with Moore.

The fog came in drifting patches through Delaware and down into Maryland. It was a long drive home and Moore didn't say much. But Hunter understood the inflections of his silence. He listened as she told him about Kepler, and about the kidnap. And as she told him that she was sorry. “I shouldn't have gone in there alone,” she said. “I know it wasn't smart. I'm very lucky.”

Moore said nothing at first, his eyes scanning the road.

Then he said, “You once told me that you didn't really work for the state police, you worked for the homicide victims.”

“Yeah. I know,” she said.

Moore went silent again.

“I probably shouldn't have said that.”

She'd thought he was going to say something like,
Just to be clear, for the future: You do work for the state police
. But he didn't. He said, “I like that you think that way. But I don't like the chance you took. I'm just glad you're okay.”

That was all he had to say, in both senses of the phrase, for a long time. They were nearly back to Tidewater County before he spoke again. By then, Hunter had retreated into her own thoughts, trying to make sense of what Kepler had told her about Scott Randall.
The screenplay.
The hidey-­hole.
The funny part was that she kind of liked Kepler. Even if he'd set her up to be killed. She'd need to make sense of that, too.

As they came back into more familiar scenery, Hunter got an idea. A way of intercepting and confronting Walter Kepler. What if the e-­mail message from erbela was real? What if Kepler was planning to meet Elena in front of Chagall's painting
Half Past Three
at the end of the day tomorrow?

They were ten minutes from home when Hunter decided to share her idea with Moore.

“Could we find a way not to release any information about what happened to Elena Fiorille tonight?” she asked him. “I mean, at least not before the end of day tomorrow.”

“Out of our hands,” Moore said. Most of the tension was gone between them by now. He was into his own thoughts, too. “Local media's probably gotten it already.”

“I know. But can we keep her
name
out of it? For twenty-­four hours.”

He looked at her, and let her tell him why. It was a chance, maybe, to head off Walter Kepler. Not a great one. But a chance.

N
O
RMALLY,
K
EPLER FELT
comfortable driving at night, alone with the muted glow of the dashboard—­bound for familiar places, the world at a safe distance but still within view. But there was nothing normal about tonight, of course. There was too much open space right now, it seemed, too much uncertainty.

Weber called twice: when he crossed the border into Massachusetts. And then, again, as he arrived in the city. There was no news from Elena, though. And by the time Kepler reached his condo on the Delaware coast, he'd begun to sense that she hadn't made it. It was one of the two possible outcomes he'd prepared for and, really, the one he had expected.

Kepler parked in the garage. He walked up the steps. It was 12:43 when he sat at his desk in the Italian Room and gazed out at the Atlantic Ocean. He would watch the miracle unfold from here in the morning. And then he would be gone, with Elena or without.

Either way, it would be a sad parting. Particularly so if he had to say two goodbyes—­to the life he'd lived and to the life he'd imagined, with Elena . . . Elena, who had such strong feelings for art but not for ­people. Sort of like him, although her feelings were of a different variety. Kepler had thought at first that her complicated passion for art maybe reflected a world view. But it didn't; that was as far as it went, really.

He already knew what Weber would tell him:
It's probably better this way.

Yes. Probably he was right.

L
UKE AND
S
NEAKERS
watched lightning illuminate the Bay, Luke thinking about unanswered prayers, which he'd decided he was going to talk about on Sunday, a piece in the puzzle of faith.

The door squeaked behind him and Charlotte was standing there, holding up his phone. The last time he'd gone in to get a beer—­was it his fourth, or fifth?—­he must've left it on the counter.

Charlotte handed it to him, making a face at the beer can. She thought he'd been drinking too much lately, but wasn't comfortable telling him. She stood aside as Luke answered.

“Hello?”

“It's me,” Amy Hunter said.

“Hi,” he said. “
Hi.
Are you all right?”

“I'm all right, I'm on my way back.”

Luke looked at Charlotte and gave her a thumbs-­up.

“We've been worried.”

“I was, too, kinda,” Hunter said.

“What happened?”

“Well. I got into a situation,” she said. “It's over now.”

“You're okay.”

“I'm okay.”

Luke was about to say, “What sort of situation?” But Hunter went ahead and told him:

“I found Kepler. I talked with him. And then Elena Rodgers found me. It's a long story. But the situation's over,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Look, I just wanted to let you know. I'm all right. I'm uh—­” He heard a quiver in her voice. “I think you're right about that Chagall painting, by the way.”

“Really?”

“Between us.”

“Why do you—?”

“I'll call in the morning.” She hung up.

“What happened?” Charlotte asked. Luke was staring at the phone.

“She got into a situation,” he said.

“And—?”

“She got out of it. That's about all I know.”

Charlotte reached for his hand and sat on the chair arm. She lifted up the beer can as if it were a dirty sock and moved it out of the way. “Let's go inside,” she said.

 

Chapter Thirty-nine

T
he first reports about what happened in Boston overnight began to trickle onto the Internet at a few minutes past 9 a.m., as Tweets and blog postings, although most of the early posters took it as a hoax, or, at best, a misunderstanding.

But by a quarter past ten, someone internally at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum had confirmed the story and it was out as a bulletin on the
Boston Globe
website. Several minutes later it was running on AP and CNN. From there, it was interesting to watch the dominoes fall.

Which was what Charlotte was doing. She called Luke at church just after 10:30 to tell him: “Go online.”

Luke did.
MIRACLE IN
B
OSTON?
was the boxed lead by then on CNN, with the subhead,
REMBRANDT MASTERPIECE REPORTEDLY RETURNED.

He read:

Reports are circulating this morning that Rembrandt's famous painting
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
, stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 as part of the biggest art heist in American history, was anonymously returned to the museum overnight.

The Gardner has not officially responded to the story, but a museum source has confirmed to CNN that the painting found hanging on a wall in the museum's second-­floor Dutch Room this morning was in fact the Rembrandt masterpiece.

“It's like a miracle,” said the source. “It's back home, in the original frame, as if it had never left.”

The painting's empty frame, along with those from several other stolen masterworks, has hung empty on the museum's walls for the past 25 years, in accordance with a provision in the will of museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner. Thirteen works were stolen in the brazen late-­night theft on the night of St. Patrick's Day 1990, including three Rembrandts, a Vermeer and a Manet.

Painted in 1633,
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
is considered one of Rembrandt's most dramatic narrative paintings, depicting Jesus calming the sea, a parable of nature versus human frailty, from the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The painting was purchased by Gardner in 1898 and was on display to the public from 1903, when the museum opened, until 1990.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is generally considered among the greatest painters in European art and the most important artist of Holland's “Golden Age.”
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
is his only seascape.

Several reports say the museum's security systems failed overnight, and that a guard discovered the work hanging in the Dutch Room at about 7
A.M
.

“I'm at a loss for words,” said the museum source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, “other than to say it has the appearance of a miracle.”

A
MY
H
UNTER MISSED
all that. After saying goodbye to Henry Moore, she went to her apartment, spent some time visiting with Winston and then crashed at around 4
A.M.
with her phones turned off. Moore had agreed to monitor messages. When she woke, she popped open a Diet Coke and called Luke Bowers. She wanted to tell him her idea about
Half Past Three
.

Luke, as he was prone to do, listened patiently, waiting until she had finished talking before sharing
his
news. “Did you hear about our friend?”

“No. Which friend?”

“Mr. Rembrandt.”

“How do you mean?”

“Go online.”

So Hunter read about it first on the
Washington Post
website. Then clicked on the
New York Times
, BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera, RT, Fox, MSNBC. Rembrandt was the lead everywhere.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, a few times—­recognizing, first, that “son of a bitch” was not something that she ever said; and, second, that she was actually saying it with a small degree of admiration.
Kepler.
He must have made a deal with the museum, to return the painting anonymously, on condition that law enforcement not be notified, and that the story unfold to the public a certain way. Why
wouldn't
they deal with him? If he was offering to return Rembrandt's masterpiece free of charge, he probably had enormous negotiating leverage.

But so why had Kepler met with her at all? Why had he told her about Randall and the screenplay? Had he known that Elena Fiorille was going to fail? Or was he simply covering himself, just in case the outcome wasn't as he had planned? What Hunter felt that morning was a new tug of war: a grudging admiration for Kepler and what he had done with the painting, against the knowledge that he had also set her up to be killed. What Kepler had done
did
have a sprinkle of the miraculous, it seemed. But could those two events be somehow separated, the one making the other not count?
Was
Kepler a bad man?

Hunter showered, dressed and finally headed in to work, pumped up with adrenaline and caffeine. It was a typical late-­summer day, the air steamy with heat, already smelling of seafood and suntan oil, the roads through town snarled with summer traffic.

Tanner was standing inside the doorway to Fischer's office when she arrived. The two of them seemed to be talking cordially, something she'd never witnessed before. Hunter did a quick double-­take at first, just to make sure it was actually them. Then she slipped into her office and pushed the door three-­quarters closed.

She was officially on administrative leave now, as she had been after the Psalmist case, an awkward and inconvenient transition period. But there were several phone calls to return, she saw: Dave Crowe. Scott Randall. Nancy Adams. Someone named Thelma Williams.

She Google-­searched a little more about the Rembrandt painting, and stolen art, before calling any of them, wanting to better understand Walter Kepler and his obsessions; more than wanting to catch him, she wanted to understand him.

Tanner interrupted her, his tall, stationary head peering around her door. “Hey!” he said when she noticed him. Then he knocked twice on the door. “You all right?”

“I think so.”

He came in and hugged her, the last thing she'd have imagined Gerry Tanner ever doing, squeezing her hurt arm.

“Guess we were all caught napping,” he said, stepping back, his dark eyes looking at her arm as Hunter held it.

“We were.”

“What
happened
?”

“Well . . .”
So Moore hadn't told him
. Fisch drifted in to listen as Hunter told him about the events of the night before. She didn't get far in her story before her phone rang. Henry Moore was in the conference room; he must've heard her voice.

“Moore's calling,” she said.

H
ENRY
M
OORE WAS
at the end of the conference table, papers spread out, his transistor radio playing softly, a song she recognized as “Moon River.”

“How's your wing?” he said, shutting off the music.

“I'm fine.”

“Pull up a chair.”

Hunter closed the door and took a seat. He nodded at his computer: Fox News was streaming, with the sound off. A self-­portrait of Rembrandt came on the screen, the same one all the cable news networks seemed to be using.

“So?” Moore said. “What the hell's this about?”

Hunter shrugged. “I'm as surprised as everyone, sir.”

He rocked back and to the side, giving her an appraising look. The news from Boston had added a strange filter to everything that'd happened the night before.

“Is this Walter Kepler?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“And we didn't know about it? We didn't see it coming?”

“I
didn't, no.”

“The FBI?”

“I don't think so. Kepler caught us napping, as Gerry just told me. I suspect the FBI's thinking the same thing this morning.”

Moore drew a deep breath.

“Thanks for last night,” she said. He nodded, simultaneously backhanding away the sentiment. He wanted to talk about Kepler.

“The museum must've been complicit in this. Right?”

“I'm assuming,” Hunter said. “Although it'll make a better story, of course, if they don't comment.”

Moore shifted forward in his chair; he smiled with just the right side of his mouth. “My job, meanwhile, is solving homicides.”

“I know.”

“And so . . . I'm sitting here, asking myself: are there two or three homicides we're going to need to address here, or just one?”

“Two or three?”

“Susan Champlain. Joseph Sanders. And now I'm told Susan's husband has gone missing.”

“Oh.”

“Are they all connected?” he said. “Is this all Elena Fiorille?”

Hunter sighed. “Probably,” she said. In effect, Hunter had inadvertently closed all three cases in one night, she recognized, even if two of them hadn't officially been opened yet. But Moore was talking about something else: perception and public opinion; and about how these killings were going to be prosecuted.

“The other two cases—­if there are two—­aren't ours,” Hunter told him. “Sanders is Virginia, not in our jurisdiction. Nick Champlain, I don't know, it's too early to say.”

Moore kept looking at her. “And you don't think we're going to get pulled in? You don't think they're going to be linked up?”

“I don't know.”

“What bothers me,” he said, “is motive. Did she kill Susan Champlain to help Kepler? Isn't that what you think?”

“Probably.”

“So . . . aren't we going to have to explain Kepler?”

Hunter saw what was bothering him: what would happen if the Susan Champlain case became about Kepler. “Not really,” she said. “Maybe the motive was that Elena Rodgers just didn't like Susan Champlain. We do have some evidence of that.”

“Do we?”

“Claire French at the Humane Society told Pastor Luke that.” Hunter added, “But that case isn't going to need a lot of motive, because we'll have evidence. Beginning with Elena's necklace. And I'm sure they're going to find Elena Fiorille's skin under her fingernails.”

Moore nodded, not quite convinced. “And the other two?”

“Maybe they were personal, too. Maybe Sanders and Champlain were harassing her. I think the physical evidence will prove the cases. And the more evidence there is, the more motive will take care of itself,” Hunter said. “Right?”

Moore slowly gave her his half smile.

“I mean, we don't have to prove a grand conspiracy,” she added. “That's the FBI's domain.”

“I was talking with the captain up there,” Moore said. “He's not anxious to make this more involved than it needs to be. But we still have to tell them why this woman kidnapped you.”

“Because I'd found her out,” Hunter said. “I knew what she'd done to Susan Champlain.”

“Is that our story?”

“That's our story.”

He sighed, but there was a glint in his right eye.

“What was the thing they found on her?” Hunter asked. “Do they know yet?” She felt a rush of adrenaline, recalling the hard tone of Elena Fiorille's voice, ordering her to get to her knees.

“Yeah.” He tugged a sheet of paper closer. “Preliminary says it was a compound called succinylcholine.” Hunter said nothing. “You know what that is?”

“Sure,” she said. “It's an anesthetic. Similar to one of the ingredients used in lethal injections.”

“That's right. It causes paralysis. Very hard to detect on autopsies.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. But the fact that we know about it means we can look for traces in Sanders, too. And Susan Champlain.”

He exhaled thoughtfully, pulling his papers together.

Hunter said, “I just wish I could keep working the case.”

“Well. We'll have to see about that,” he said. “Maybe we can work out something quietly.” He winked.

But then he saw she had something specific in mind and said, “Why? What do you want to do?”

“I'm thinking I'd like Tanner to work on a little side project,” she said. “For you. Involving Scott Randall. It wouldn't take long. Maybe a ­couple of days.”

The corners of his mouth turned down this time. “Go on,” he said. “Tell me about it. I'll listen, anyway.”

T
ANNER AND
F
ISCHER
had together created a preliminary background report on Elena Fiorille, with Fischer writing the summary. A copy was on Hunter's desk when she returned to her office. That must have been what they were discussing so cordially when she first came in.

Hunter closed her door and read through it for the next twenty minutes, absorbing the details of her life story: Linda Elena Fiorille had been raised in South Philadelphia by working-­class parents, the fourth of four children and the only girl. Her father had been a hardware store owner who'd also worked for the Bruno crime family. When Elena was fourteen, he went away to prison for a year on racketeering and bookmaking charges. Elena was in trouble frequently as a girl, for drug and alcohol possession, and for theft and assault. The assault charge came after she beat up another girl in high school so bad that the girl spent a night in the hospital. Elena had shown a talent for painting and sculpture in high school, but it was evidently an “undisciplined and ultimately unrealized” talent, Sonny Fischer wrote in his summary.

Fiorille had been arrested four times as an adult: for aggravated assault, drug possession, attempted murder, and petty larceny. All of the charges but one were dropped. In 2002, she was convicted of misdemeanor marijuana possession. Someone who knew Elena in the 1990s and early 2000s told Tanner that she never lost her love of art; that she'd spend days sometimes in the galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, alone with the paintings. She'd also taken college art classes, he recalled; she talked about becoming an artist herself, but never pursued it.