“How did he do that?” Brown asked.
“He threw a green sheet over it, and the wizard composited a still image of the Crimson Teardrop display over that,” Nick said. “What the guards saw was an empty room and the Crimson Teardrop safely on display.”
“That’s brilliant,” Clarissa said. “The wizard is a genius.”
“He’s a complete screwup,” Brown said. “You’re forgetting that we’re out here and the thief is in there with the diamond, ergo the plan didn’t work.”
“But he came close to pulling it off,” Clarissa said. “You’ve got to give him credit for that.”
Nick nodded in agreement. “A guy this smart has probably been at this awhile. The FBI might have some idea who he is, assuming the thief isn’t kind enough to tell us. Speaking of which, I’d say it’s time that we met our guest. Can you raise the curtain, please, Ms. Hart?”
Clarissa walked to a painting on the wall and moved it aside to reveal a hidden keypad.
Nick looked at the guards. “You two stand aside and keep your weapons in your holsters. We don’t want any accidents.”
Nick set down his coffee cup and drew his own weapon. He and Brown stood in firing stance and faced the steel door. Clarissa typed a code into the keypad. The steel door rose with a heavy groan to reveal two men in green bodysuits sitting glumly on the floor, their hands on their heads. The green sheet was in a clump at the base of the pedestal. The Crimson Teardrop shimmered untouched in its glass case.
“SFPD,” Brown said. “You’re under arrest.”
“You took your damn time,” Chair Man said. “I thought we were going to suffocate in here.”
“Cuff ’em and read ’em their rights, Ed,” Nick said, and tossed Brown his set of cuffs.
Clarissa stared at Nick with unabashed admiration. He was like a real-life Columbo, only much younger and without the glass eye.
“Are you single, Inspector?” she asked.
“Sadly, yes,” he said.
“On the contrary,” she said, slipping her card into his back pocket and giving it a pat.
The Crown Vic siren wailed as the car sped down Van Ness Avenue. Fog was spreading out from the bay and over the city, and the Vic’s headlights fought through the thickening mist. Brown drove, and Nick sat beside him with the green gym bag on his lap. Chair Man and Couch Man were handcuffed in the backseat.
“Did you have to blather on and on for so long?” Couch Man asked.
“I was selling the con,” Nick said.
The elaborate crime had gone down exactly like he’d laid it out to Clarissa, except that he’d been the wizard behind the camera trickery in the fake phone-company truck. And he’d left out that he’d intercepted the alarm signal from the Kibbee before it could reach the police department.
“You were showing off,” Brown said. “You couldn’t resist telling her just how brilliant you think you are.”
“It was all part of the act. You can turn the siren off. People are trying to sleep.”
“What’s the point of driving a police car if you don’t use the siren?”
“I have to hand it to you,” Chair Man said to Nick. “Intentionally getting caught is the way to go. It really cuts down on the stress.”
“I told you so,” Nick said, opening the bag and taking out the Crimson Teardrop to admire it. “It’s much easier to let the security system beat you than to try to beat it.”
“It would have been even less stressful if I didn’t have to wear something that showed everybody my junk,” Couch Man said, tossing his handcuffs onto the floor.
“Don’t be so self-conscious,” Chair Man said, removing his green hood and running his hand through his sweat-soaked red hair. “You don’t have anything everybody hasn’t seen before.”
“Easy for you to say,” Couch Man replied, “you’re hung like Godzilla’s horse.”
“Thanks,” Chair Man said. “Spread the word to all the hot girls you know.”
“Godzilla didn’t ride a horse,” Brown said.
Couch Man pulled off his green hood. “Well, if he did, the horse would be hung huge.”
Nick dropped the diamond back into the bag and zipped it up. He wondered how long it would take before anybody spotted the fake they’d left at the Kibbee. He peeled off his mustache, which itched like poison ivy, and tossed it out the window. The fake nose was next to go.
“C’mon, turn off the siren. There’s no sense drawing attention to ourselves,” Nick said.
Brown did as he was told. “You’re no fun, Nick.”
“How can you say that?” Nick said. “You got to be a cop.”
“The dumb cop,” Brown said.
“It’s better than being the ugly fat one,” Nick said.
“You’d think so,” Brown said. “But you still got the girl’s number.”
“He always does,” Couch Man said with admiration.
Nick was too distracted to be flattered. He’d glanced at the street ahead and saw something in the fog, just beyond the next traffic light, that he wasn’t expecting: a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission water crew was digging up the street. He could see a backhoe, a few workers wearing reflective suits and hard hats, and a big pile of dirt in the intersection blocking one of the two southbound lanes.
“What’s wrong?” Brown asked.
“There wasn’t any scheduled street maintenance on the books for tonight,” Nick said. “I checked this morning.”
“Maybe there was a power outage or a burst pipe,” Brown said. “Things happen.”
“All the lights in the neighborhood are on and I don’t see any water on the street,” Nick said. “Make a U-turn at the intersection.”
“And go back the way we came?” Chair Man said. “That’s not a good idea.”
“You’re being paranoid,” Brown said.
“Just do it,” Nick said, sitting up straight. He had a bad feeling.
Brown started to make a U-turn in the intersection. And that’s when Nick looked out the passenger window and saw the headlights of a speeding Muni bus cutting through the fog like a freight train emerging from a dark tunnel. The bus T-boned their car, sending it rolling over and over and over before it finally came to rest wheels up on the sidewalk.
Nick was conscious but dazed, hanging upside down, belted into his seat, as the passenger-side airbag pressed against his face deflated with a hiss. The airbag, and the padding around his waist that he’d used to create his fake belly, had insulated him from injury. He heard the moans and groans of the other three men, which was good. It meant they were alive. His subconscious Scotty did an instantaneous full diagnostic and reported to his conscious mind, his inner Captain Kirk, that aye, they’d taken a beating, but all systems were functioning.
I can get you impulse power, Captain, but the warp drives are down. It will take me at least two days to repair ’em.
Make it two minutes, Scotty.
You’re asking for the impossible!
That’s what we’re paid to do, Mister.
He closed his eyes, shook his head, and willed himself to focus. He opened his eyes again. Through the shattered windshield he could make out the SFPUC workers running toward the car, and he could see that they were carrying guns. So much for them being SFPUC workers.
Nick heard a crunch of glass shards under someone’s shoes. He turned his head and looked out the open passenger window. He could see whoever it was only from the waist down. The guy was wearing jeans and black Nikes, walking slowly and deliberately toward the car and holding a Glock casually at his side.
Nick’s first thought was that another crew was ripping them off. There was a whole class of predators who specialized in hijacking scores made by crooks more ingenious and industrious than they were. It was one of the risks of the profession, especially when several parties had their eye on the same high-profile prize. Let the best man get there first, then take it from him.
His second thought was more of a wish. He hoped who
ever it was wouldn’t put a bullet in his head before walking away with the Crimson Teardrop. But if the guy was smart, he would shoot him, because Nick vowed in that moment to follow the bastard to the ends of the earth and steal the jewel back in the most personally humiliating and financially devastating swindle he could devise.
The guy stopped at Nick’s window, aimed his gun inside, and then crouched down to look at him.
“You’re under arrest,” FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare said.
Kate hated the Federal Building on Mission and Seventh, which was designed not only to be environmentally friendly but also to promote healthy living among the people who worked in it. The main elevators stopped only on every third floor, ensuring that everyone had to walk up or down a flight or two of stairs every day. The only elevator that went to each floor was strictly reserved for deliveries and the disabled, so whenever a case brought Kate to San Francisco, she’d fake a debilitating limp. Sometimes she even brought a cane.
“Gunshot wound,” she’d say when given a dubious look on the elevator by an agent in a wheelchair. “Tulsa, ’06.”
Or “IED, Kandahar. Damn shrapnel.”
From this day forward, she hoped that the San Francisco Federal Building would take on special meaning for her. The sight of it would always remind her of the day she finally nailed Nick Fox. And not, as she feared now, of the forty-five minutes and counting she’d spent in the twelfth-floor women’s bathroom, her stomach cramped with anxiety.
She’d taken an inordinate amount of time with her hair this morning, brushing it out and letting it fall to her shoulders, studying herself in the mirror. Everyone said she had her mother’s hair. Deep chestnut, thick, and straight as a pin. Easy to manage unless it was confronted by humidity, and then it was a disaster. The brushed-out hair wasn’t right, she decided. Too much of it. Too Saturday night. She tried wrapping it into a French braid and hated it. Too formal. So she pulled her hair into a ponytail, just like always.
She’d started out with makeup too. And it looked pretty good until she threw up. So now she was standing at the sink in her gray Ann Taylor pantsuit and white blouse, her face freshly scrubbed, her sleeves pushed up, her hands resting on the counter.
“Jeez Louise, get a grip!” she said to herself in the mirror. “This is supposed to be your finest hour. This is what you’ve worked for: to put him away. So do it. Finish the job.” She popped open the third button of her blouse, applied fresh lipstick, and gave her lashes a swipe of mascara. “Eat your heart out, Nick Fox,” she whispered to the mirror. “It’ll be decades before you get up close and personal with a woman. Only one of many life experiences you can kiss goodbye.”
Okay, so she felt a little stupid talking to herself like that, but she was getting into a frame of mind, right? She’d gotten rid of her breakfast burrito, and now she was going to walk into that interrogation room, and she’d own it. Nick Fox was a beaten man, and she’d remind him with every look, with every gesture, with every inflection of her voice, that she was the one who’d beaten him. She wouldn’t let herself be manipulated by his charm. Nothing would distract her from her goal. It wasn’t enough to get a conviction. There were millions of dollars in cash, jewelry, and art that he’d swindled and stolen that had never been recovered. He knew where it all was and she’d make him give it up. Without cleavage. She closed the third button of her blouse. She didn’t need to use even a hint of her sexuality to crack him. That would be cheating. Not to mention, she wasn’t down with the whole seduction thing. Truth is, it had been a while since she’d used her feminine charms. Maybe never.
She sucked in her stomach and stood military straight. She was ready to go. She had her mission. Time to go accomplish it.
The door opened and Agent in Charge Carl Jessup walked in. Jessup was her boss, up from Los Angeles just for the occasion. Jessup was a lean and sinewy Kentuckian in his fifties with a craggy face that looked like a crumpled road map, each line a rough road taken, or a detour that went nowhere, or a wrong turn that had sent him over a cliff. And from the looks of it, he’d been over a lot of cliffs.
“This is the women’s room,” Kate said. “You can’t come in here.”
“I infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and lived with them for three years,” he said. “I think I can walk through a door marked ‘Women’ and come out unscathed.”
“It’s a question of decency and respect for a woman’s privacy.”
“You hit Nick Fox with a bus.”
“He was fleeing,” she said.
“He wasn’t being chased,” Jessup said.
“He and another member of his crew had guns and therefore presented a credible threat to the safety and lives of others.”
“The guns weren’t loaded,” he said. “There wasn’t a single bullet in their possession.”
“We didn’t know that at the time,” she said.
“Sounds to me like you’re rehearsing your defense for a board of inquiry. Do I look like a board of inquiry?”
“Yes, in that they are typically made up entirely of men over the age of forty, even though nineteen percent of FBI special agents are women. But the board rarely convenes in women’s bathrooms, so I’d have to go with no.”
“Let me repeat myself. You hit Nick Fox with a bus!”
“I got a lot of flack from you and everybody else for letting him get away in Vegas, remember?”
“And that made you so angry, you wanted to hit him with a bus,” Jessup said. “So you did.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Just so we’re clear, you and I.”
“We’re clear,” she said.
He nodded, satisfied. “How did it feel?”
“Great,” she said, breaking into a smile. “Unbelievably great.”
“I’d leave that part out when you meet with all those men on the board of inquiry,” Jessup said. “But don’t worry, I’ll handle them. It took five long years of dogged pursuit and investigation, but you got your man. That’s what the FBI is all about. Now put him away and claw back what he stole.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sometime today would be nice.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Got some butterflies in your stomach?”
“Butterflies are awfully girlie for a woman who carries a Glock, don’t you think?”
“Okay. African killer bees.”
“That’s more like it.”
“Don’t sweat it, O’Hare. I’ve stared into the eye of the porcelain god a few times after a big arrest. You’re feeling the adrenaline, that’s all.” He looked around the room and frowned. “It smells nice, and there aren’t any urinals, but other than that, this isn’t any different than a men’s room.”
“What were you expecting?”
“A bowl of mints, maybe a tea service.”
She turned and looked at him. “You spent three years undercover as a white supremacist?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“How did you live with yourself?”
“I became an alcoholic,” Jessup said, and left the room.
She gave herself another once-over, unbuttoned the third button of her blouse, and followed Jessup.
Nick Fox wore a white T-shirt and polyester slacks and sat at a gunmetal gray table. He was in a lopsided chair, his hands cuffed behind his back and the chain around his ankles locked into a steel eyelet on the floor. He faced the mirror that hid the agents watching him in the next room, but of course he knew that they were there. It was like he was starring in a play and the stage lights were so bright in his eyes that he couldn’t see the audience in the darkness.
Kate came in carrying a fat, dog-eared file, her crisp white shirt unbuttoned enough to show cleavage. He knew the show of cleavage wasn’t normal for her, and he appreciated the effort. He would have appreciated it even more if she’d popped a fourth button.
He smiled and Kate was almost blinded by the wattage. How does he do that? she wondered. She should have worn sunglasses, she th
ought, like those poker players on TV.
She sat down at the table, placed the file in front of her, opened it, and examined one of the pages. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I was taken to an ER last night and I don’t have medical insurance. It’s going to cost me a fortune. Those crooks charge fifty dollars for a tongue depressor.”
“Was your tongue depressed?”
“Thankfully, no. It’s very well adjusted.”
“Because it gets a lot of exercise. You’ve got to be a fast talker in your line of work.”
“I’m a professional hand model.”
“You’re a con man and thief, wanted on three continents,” she said. “That’s how I knew you’d be at the Kibbee. It was the first time in decades that anyone knew exactly where to find the Crimson Teardrop and a rare window of opportunity to steal it. You couldn’t resist. I was at the auction house in Santa Barbara, waiting for you to make your move before the diamond sold, but you didn’t show.”
“Sorry to have disappointed you,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re here now, that’s what counts. And unless you can make a deal with me today, you’ll be spending the rest of your life in prison.”
He cocked his head, bewildered. “I don’t see why.”
“Well, for starters, we have you for impersonating a police officer, wiretapping, and possession of stolen property,” she said. “And that’s not even counting the outstanding charges on your last swindle.”
“What swindle?”
“You bilked six men in Las Vegas out of a million dollars each for organ transplants that they didn’t get.”
“Really? There are people who’ve accused me of that?”
She shifted in her seat. She didn’t know whether he’d guessed, or knew for a fact, that not one of the six men had ID’d his photo, or admitted to paying him a dime, or pressed any charges. They didn’t want to confess to trying to buy their way to the top of the organ transplant lists and they didn’t want him caught to contradict their story. So they claimed they’d come for face-lifts and had only seen a nurse. Each man gave a conflicting description of her.