White Heat (28 page)

“If I tell you I’ll have to kiss you.”

She lifted her mouth for his brief kiss. “Some mysterious person here does your
laundry?”

“She’s not mysterious.” He stroked her breast, loving the softness of her skin, and the responsiveness of her nipple at the lightest touch. “Her name’s Natasha.”

“Hmm. Exotic. Is she pretty?” Emily teased, stroking his chest.

“I’ve always been attracted to women who don’t shave their legs or moustaches.”

“I’ll rush out and buy Rogaine immediately.”

She closed her eyes, falling into a light doze in his arms. Max reached over and picked up the sketch Daniel had done of her. He’d stuck it in his pocket at the villa, and forgotten all about it. Until he’d found it in an envelope attached to the laundry he’d picked up after the briefing.

Christ. He was struck anew at how lovely she was, even in one dimension. And his father had captured her brilliantly with the swift stroke of his pen. In the studio, Max hadn’t looked any further than the symmetry of Emily’s face on the page. He’d observed nothing more than the beauty of her big, long-lashed eyes and at the slight sexy bow of her mouth. His observation of the sketch had been ridiculously shortsighted.

This sketch revealed exactly who Emily was on the
inside.
With clean simple lines, the artist had captured her resolution in the curve of her jaw. He’d unveiled the empathy and compassion in those big brown eyes. He’d drawn her mouth with just the beginning of a smile, showing her wry humor and her joy for living. He’d shown her pigheadedness by the pugnacious jut of her chin. Compassion and acceptance shone from a face filled with character. It was obvious she’d looked at the artist and seen a man. Not the brilliant artist his father was purported to be, but a man who’d made mistakes. A man who was human, and fallible. And she’d loved him anyway. How the hell had he missed all this?

It was unfortunate that his father had used this amazing sketch as a piece of scrap paper, and doodled around the edges of it. Perhaps he could have it cut down and—

He sat up so quickly he woke Emily.

She blinked, still half asleep. “What happened?”

“Take a look at this.”

“Oh, Max,” she said, pleased as she propped herself up on her elbow. “You kept it.”

“Look at the words. Tell me what you see?”

“Um . . . OILY MAGI HAIL INFANCY? What am I missing? What does that mean?” She tilted his hand so she could see the sheet of paper better in the light from the bedside table. “HANG JUTTED SMELT?! Hmm,” she murmured thoughtfully, nibbling her lip. “A DAMAGE IF NO HOT RIOT. Max, I’m sorry. But none of these word groups makes
any
sense at all. Look at this one. FETCHING HONOR TRIMS.”

He got off the bed and walked over to pull on his clothes.

“Why are you getting dressed?” Emily asked, puzzled.

He grabbed a notepad and pen from the desk, and came back to sit on the bed. “I think these are anagrams.”

“You do? Of what?”

“I’m not sure. But I believe Daniel knew something before he died.”

“What connects Daniel, you, Brill, Elaine Ludwig, and Tillman?”

“The paintings. Fine, I get that. But oh, my God, Max. You don’t think your
father
was somehow involved in the
bombings?
It seems really far—fetched.”

He got up again and went to the armoire, removed the file folder Norcroft had given him the day they visited Tillman’s home. “Let’s see if any of these paintings match his anagrams.”

“You start. I have to get dressed if I’m going to be able to concentrate.” She got up and pulled on jeans and a plum colored wide-necked T-shirt that fell sexily off one shoulder. Barefoot, she padded back to the bed, sitting in the middle with her legs drawn up and her chin on her bent knees.

“I’m not good at puzzles, but I’ll give it a shot. I need a piece of paper and a pen, too.”

Max handed her what he was working with, and went back to get another pad and pen from the desk. They both worked silently for several minutes.

“Hand me the file— Thanks.” He flipped it open, and started going through the sheets of closely typed papers, scanning the lists. “What does PENITENT MARY MAGDALENE mean to you?”

“Titian painted it in 1565 . . .You know, don’t you?”

“Know what?”

“Know that Richard Tillman hired Daniel to copy that painting for his collection.”

“That’s what it says on this manifest. Yes. But that’s not the whole story, is it?”

Even though she wasn’t sure if her secret had anything to do with the bombings, she
had
to tell Max, Emily knew. Promise or no promise, it was past time. “Daniel had Guillain-Barré syndrome,” she told him. “I don’t know if you know anything about the illness. It’s an inflammatory disorder in which one’s body’s immune system attacks the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord. And although it’s rare, in his case, parts of the brain itself were attacked. He had severe weakness and numbness in his legs, but managed to hide it for years.”

“With your help.”

“Yes. With my help,” she wasn’t ashamed that she’d helped a friend. “He was devastated that he could no longer do what he loved more than anything. You have to realize, Max, that your father was a proud man—okay—to be honest, he was vain as hell. But with just cause. He was a brilliant artist, and his inability to paint crushed his spirit, as well as his ego.

“He couldn’t bear anyone knowing that he could no longer even hold a brush. He refused to go out, wouldn’t even see his friends. Ironically his low profile just added to his mystique.”

“You did his work for him for how long?”

“For the past six years or so. He taught me everything I know, it was the least I could do. I’m not sorry. I promised Daniel that I would never tell a living soul. But I don’t think when he made me promise that he meant I had to withhold the information from
you.

“So it was me, not Daniel who did the painting seven years ago. By the time the final sale went through, and Tillman got the provenance papers, et cetera from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and then had it delivered to Daniel, he could barely hold his brush.”

“Christ, Emily. And it never occurred to mention this to me?”

It had occurred to her. Several times. “I didn’t find it relevant,” she admitted honestly.

Max’s lips tightened, and his eyes were flinty with annoyance. “Well apparently it is. Because it says right here in Tillman’s paperwork that the Penitent Mary Magdalene was donated to the church in Australia. The same church that was bombed two weeks ago.”

She put a hand to her throat. “God.”

“How about this for fucking coincidence? OILY MAGI HAIL INFANCY?
The Holy Family.
That was the charred remains of the painting at La Mezquita.”

“Your father was commissioned by Richard Tillman to do that. But I did it.”

“Yeah. I figured. So it wasn’t
Daniel’s
work involved in the bombings. It was your painting that were—are. Yours and Brill’s— Who else?” Max rubbed the back of his neck. “I think Daniel knew something was going on, and tried to leave clues in the form of these anagrams.”

Emily chewed her lower lip. “I agree. But who was he leaving
them for?”

“Whoever would want this drawing. You?”

“Maybe. Probably. It was one of the last things he drew. And it certainly caught my attention that he didn’t use his usual methods. Wrong paper, wrong medium.” Her heart clenched. “Whoever is responsible for the bombings somehow knew he knew, and killed him before he could tell anyone.”

“Without a doubt.” Max narrowed his eyes as he scanned the sketch, turning it this way and that to read the words written around the edges. “Can you tell me what paintings these other anagrams identify?”

Emily looked at the letters, trying—and failing to rearrange the letters to put the nonsensical words into titles. Lifting her eyes from the pad she’d been scribbling on for almost five minutes, she slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry, Max. There are thousands upon thousands of paintings out there and Tillman’s collection is private, so no complete list of his holdings exists.”

“So there’s no way to tell if the manifest Norcroft gave us is accurate or even complete?”

“After being in his home, it’s clear Tillman didn’t favor a particular artist. He collected everything from Renaissance, masters to Allesso Baldovenetti and Andy Warhol. And those are only the ones I know about.”

Max cursed, then grabbed the phone off the bedside table. “Send a runner. ASAP.” He slammed the receiver down.

“Runner?” Emily asked.

“To get this to our geek-squad. They’ll probably have these unscrambled in under five minutes.”

“Handy.”

“Definitely,” he said, his jaw tight. “In a matter of minutes, three paintings have been linked to three bombings. I think we’ll find dozens more in here.” He tapped his finger on the file.

“Tillman commissioned hundreds of paintings, and donated the originals to possibly a hundred different religious groups. We need to know which ones. Fast.”

There was a brief knock at the door. Max got up with the file folder and his father’s sketch of Emily. “Stay put. We’re not done.”

Max handed the file to the runner and closed the door, turning around just in time to see Emily trying to get off the bed.

“Max?” Her voice was weak, and she wasn’t kidding around. What the hell? She held out her hand, then her eyes rolled back. She crumpled to the floor before he could reach her.

“Emily?
Emily!”

Max knelt at her side and pressed two fingers to the pulse under her jaw. Thready and uneven. The bluish tinge around her mouth wasn’t exactly encouraging. He reached up and grabbed the house phone with one hand, then jabbed the speaker button and pressed zero.

“Emily, honey?” he asked, hardly hearing the desperation in his tone. Nothing. His heart thumped hard against his rib cage as he leaned down and tried to gauge her condition by the strength of her breath against his cheek. Respiration shallow and strained. Christ. She was fine—fucking better than fine—not three minutes ago.

“Operator.”

“Aries. Get a medic and crash cart in here now!”

Her skin felt like ice against the furnace heat of his own body. He was far enough away from the bed that he couldn’t reach the covers. He considered picking her up and carrying her the few feet to the bed, but was scared to move her.

Shit! He rubbed a hand down the soft, but chilled skin of her arm. Felt the heat near her shoulder, and turned her limp body to see what the hot patch was on her upper arm. Faint redness, slightly swollen, about the size of his palm with a couple of small bloody dots in the center. She’d been scratching it earlier, he remembered. Spider bite? Mosquito? The cause of her distress or fucking nothing to do with it?

He had never, in all the years he’d been a T-FLAC operative, been more afraid than he was right now. Where the fucking hell was the crash cart and a goddamned doctor? “How—”

“ETA one minute.” The woman’s voice was calm and efficient, while Max’s rising panic had a stranglehold on his heart. Holding Emily against his chest, he wrapped his arms around her, trying to cover as much of her with his own body as he could to keep her warm.

“I’ll stay on the phone with you until they get there, okay?”

He was no longer listening to the operator. He had enough medical field training to know that, whatever the cause, Emily was in serious trouble. She was breathing, so CPR wouldn’t help. She was cold, but not shivering. Unconscious. Unresponsive. Breathing labored. Pulse erratic.

“Fuck!” he said between clenched teeth, feeling both terrified and useless as he kept half his attention fixed on the door to the room, in anticipation of the medical team ever fucking showing up, and half on the woman lying limp and unresponsive in his arms. What would make a perfectly healthy twenty-seven-year-old woman drop like a stone?

Preexisting condition? Maybe. His brain immediately went from natural causes to something far more likely to be found in his line of work. But
poison?
Less likely since she’d been with him for the past half dozen hours, and except for the chocolate cake Norcroft had served at Chez Tillman, they’d shared every meal. Could be something topical …

Heart attack. Jesus. An induced heart attack. “Stay with me, sweetheart. Just hang on,” he whispered into her still damp hair. It smelled of roses and promises. The door burst open and three men wearing white coats rushed in. Two guided a gurney while the third pulled a red cart and an IV pole. “Step aside, Aries.”

Reluctantly, Max rose to his feet as one member of the medical team started an IV drip while Emily was still on the floor.

“Get this shirt off. Did she fall?” The doctor, crouched beside her. Max whipped her T-shirt over her head and tossed it aside. The medic moved the stethoscope’s floating diaphragm over every inch of Emily’s chest. Her bare chest now. Christ. She’d care, damn it. Max yanked the blanket off the gurney and covered her as best he could while they worked.

The doctor didn’t glance up. “Seizure?” he demanded.

“She was fine one minute, like this the next.”

The doctor rose, motioning the orderlies to put Emily on the gurney. They carefully lifted her, blanket and all, and secured her to the gurney. “Let’s get her down to ICU right away. I don’t like the look of this.”

Not exactly comforting words, Max thought sickly. “Check her left arm,” he said, following them out of the room, and down the hallway at a fast clip. They weren’t running, but they were covering a lot of ground. The doctor on one side, Max on the other. They weren’t moving fast enough for Max. He took Emily’s limp hand, threading his fingers with hers, needing the physical contact.

“Look at her left shoulder there,” Max told the doctor. “I don’t know if that has anything to do with this, but it looks like some kind of insect bite.”

Keeping up with the orderlies, the doctor peered at her bare shoulder and upper arm. “The swollen area? Hard to tell in this light, and while we’re in motion. But it does looks like some kind of bite.” He felt for Emily’s pulse, and frowned. “If we were in the middle of a jungle somewhere I’d say venomous snake, maybe a poison spider or even an ant. But
here.
. .“ He shook his head.