Still As Death (17 page)

She and Ian spent much of Saturday and Sunday fielding phone calls from friends who had heard about the murder and wanted to make sure Sweeney was okay. Toby, who seemed almost disappointed he’d left before the fireworks, stopped by on Saturday afternoon and ended up staying for dinner. Watching him and Ian chattering happily away over the pasta carbonara Sweeney had made, she felt oddly jealous. It wasn’t that she didn’t want them to be friends. In fact, it made her life a whole hell of a lot easier that they liked each other, but their chumminess made her feel … trapped somehow.

“You seem really upset,” Toby said when she walked him down to his car. His curly dark hair was even curlier than usual in the humid air, and his glasses kept slipping down his nose. She watched him push them up for the twentieth time that night and smiled. Toby pushing his glasses back up was a visual snapshot she carried with her when he wasn’t around. “Was it finding her? Or did you know her?”

“I didn’t really know her,” Sweeney said. “And I didn’t really find her. Jeanne did.”

“But you were there.”

“Yeah. But that’s not it. I’m just kind of at loose ends. The show’s done. I should start the research for the book, but this has kind of thrown me.”

“And you still haven’t decided if you’re going to London.”

“I still haven’t decided if I’m going to London.” She leaned on the passenger side door of his Honda. “What do you think I should do?”

“I think you shouldn’t ask someone who loves you as much as I do for objective advice about a relationship that’s going to put an ocean between us.”

“Really. Come on. I want your opinion.”

“My opinion is that Ian is a great guy and that he’s sickeningly in love with you. But neither of those things really matters. What
do you
think?” He went around to the driver’s side and opened the door, blowing her a kiss over the top of the car. “Sorry. Thanks for dinner. And be good. I worry about you when you’re at loose ends.”

She waved and watched him go. She wasn’t sure what he meant by it, but she realized he was right. It was when she didn’t have anything to do that she usually got into trouble.

After brunch on Sunday, Ian announced that he had to go to the office for a couple of hours and Sweeney decided to go for a walk. She needed some time to think, and walking was the way she did it best. It was still hot, so she put on a tank top and shorts and flip-flops and
started out, crisscrossing her way through the neighborhoods around Davis Square.

It wasn’t as though she’d been friends with Olga, she told herself, so she ought not to fool herself into thinking that that was why she was so … disquieted. She had known Olga for a lot of years, she supposed, but she hadn’t really
known
her. Sweeney had always tried to smile and be pleasant, but Olga hadn’t seemed particularly interested in even a nodding acquaintance. But then she must have been fairly terrified of getting to know anyone, having gotten out of the Soviet Union at a time when Jews were persecuted and had to live in fear. Sweeney forgot now who’d told her that Olga had been a refusenik, one of the Soviet Jews who had applied for a visa to emigrate, been refused, and then been subject to suspicion by the government. No wonder she’d been so unpleasant sometimes.

There was a kind of monumental injustice to the fact that someone who had probably never owned much of anything in her life had been killed in the course of an art robbery.

It was the robbery, Sweeney decided, that was giving her pause. It seemed too much of a coincidence that she had only just discovered that Karen Philips had been in the museum at the time of the robbery and that there should then be another one. But as Quinn had reminded her, sometimes coincidences were just coincidences.

She walked on, thinking about Ian. Toby was right. It didn’t really matter what he thought about Ian. It only mattered what she thought. She knew she cared about Ian, was attracted to him, though less so in the last few weeks, she reflected, then wondered why that was. He had been so good to her, and he made her feel … prized. She wasn’t sure why that was the word that came to her mind, but it was. And he wanted her to go to London with him. So what was she going to do?

What would Quinn say if she were to ask him what she should do? Suddenly, his opinion on the matter seemed very important. But she couldn’t very well call him up and ask him, could she? Perhaps if it just came up in conversation. She shook her head, trying to clear
it. What was she thinking, asking Quinn for advice on her love life? He would think she was crazy.

She found herself wondering where he was. Probably at the museum, going over the crime scene. She assumed that if the security cameras had picked up anything, they would already be making arrests. Remembering what she’d read about the 1979 robbery, Sweeney decided it had to be connected. In order to kill Olga, the thiefs had to be pretty cold-blooded. This wasn’t some amateur who’d decided to take the chest and see what he could get for it. This was someone who was willing to kill for it. That was interesting. She wondered if Quinn had thought of that, though she supposed the thief might have been surprised by Olga and killed her even though he hadn’t meant to. Certainly the fact that the theft had been aborted backed up that theory.

The problem, Sweeney told herself, was that she needed something to focus her mind on. What about the collar? She’d never been able to find it for the exhibit. Tad had said that there wasn’t time to launch a search for it, and Sweeney knew that now there was even less incentive. But if the collar was really missing from the museum, then someone had to have taken it, and it had to have something to do with Karen Philips. It had to have something to do with the robberies. The latest one proved Quinn wrong. Sometimes coincidences were more than just coincidences.

“WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Quinn said, “is how they managed to get the stopper out of the building without it being recorded on any of the surveillance cameras. How is that possible?”

He tried to keep the anger out of his voice, but he knew he hadn’t been very successful. As a cop, he believed in security. He believed that you put security procedures in place to discourage crime and that when discouraging it didn’t work, your procedures ought to help you catch your thief.

Rick Torrance, the head of the security company that had designed all of the university museums’ security systems, glanced at George Fellows, the Hapner director of security, and gave a little shrug.

“I’m right there with you, Detective Quinn,” he said. “You won’t find any argument from me. What happened in this case is what happens in a lot of cases. The museum chose public access over security.”

George Fellows stepped in, eager not to let Torrance’s statement about “the museum” include him.

“I should tell you that the decision to display the canopic chest in a temporary cabinet without the proper surveillance or alarming was made in direct opposition to my recommendations. The only
reason I signed off was that they assured me it would be for one night only.”

Quinn said, “I guess it’s kind of like what my old man told me about getting a girl pregnant. It only takes one night.”

Torrance laughed out loud and Fellows allowed himself a small smile.

“I just don’t understand how this happened,” Quinn said. “We’ve looked through hours and hours of tape and there’s nothing I can use.”

It was true. He and Ellie had gone through all of the tapes and hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. People entered and left the museum, but there was no way of knowing if one of them had killed Olga Levitch. And more important, no one dropped anything into the garbage can where they’d found the stopper. It had already been gone over for forensic evidence and hadn’t yielded anything, even fingerprints. One of the technicians told Quinn that the thief had probably worn gloves.

“If you wanted to steal something from this museum, how would you do it?” Torrance asked Quinn.

“I don’t know. I suppose I’d break in through a window or something and hope I could get out before the police arrived.”

Rick Torrance smiled and sat back in his chair, obviously pleased with Quinn’s answer. “That’s actually the last thing you’d want to do,” he said. “By the time you were two inches inside that window, I’d know you were there. I’d even be able to take my time coming to get you.” He reached for the plan of the museum sitting on the table at headquarters and spread it out in front of them.

“I’m famous for what we in the museum security world call overdesigning,” he said. “There isn’t a work of art or an entrance or an exit that isn’t covered in some way. All of the windows in the museum have contact alarms as well as glass-breaking detection devices. If they’re opened or the glass is broken, a silent alarm alerts the security guard on duty and calls the police. If the intruder somehow makes it beyond the window, his movement will be picked up by the
motion sensors on the floor in the gallery. Again a silent alarm is sent to the security guard on duty and the police. If he should somehow make it beyond the motion sensors, he would certainly trip the alarms connected to the actual works themselves. All hung paintings are wired, all artifacts displayed behind glazing are in alarmed cabinets. In short, unless there was a monumental breakdown of the entire security system—an almost impossible eventuality—you’d never do it.

“No, what you’d want to do, what I’d want to do, is try to take the thing when the museum was open and occupied.”

Quinn was about to jump in and ask a question when Fellows said, “Mr. Quinn, the work of creating a museum security system is all about balance. How do we balance the protection of the museum’s assets with the desire of museum staff to keep the collections accessible to the public? There’s an added goal with academic institutions, of course, which is to make the collections available for educational purposes. Our students need to be able to get close enough to the works to study them but not close enough to endanger them. Do you understand?” Quinn nodded.

“During an event like the one last night, we are perhaps the most vulnerable,” Fellows said. “During the daytime, the amount of activity in the museum provides a level of security that cannot be underestimated. Almost our best line of defense is the average museumgoer who might notice something strange. It’s like having one hundred guards out there patrolling the floors. And we need them, because during opening hours, we lose many of our protections—motion sensors, for example, and many of the alarms. Last night, we had people in the museum, so most of those alarms were off, but all of the people were clustered on the top floors. The cabinet containing the canopic chest was in a temporary location and the exhibit did not have the appropriate level of security.”

“It was just about the perfect time to steal it,” Torrance said.

“A perfect storm, if you will.” Fellows gave a wry little smile.

“You make it sound like someone knew what he was doing,” Quinn said.

“Oh, yeah. It had to be someone who knows this museum,” Torrance said. “Someone who knew that this event was going on.”

“Could it be an inside job?” Quinn asked.

“Sure, of course it could. Though I’ll tell you, if I had clearance, if I worked at the museum, I would take advantage of that and do it some other time. If you’re already in the museum, if you have security clearance to move around, then everything we’ve said no longer applies. At that point, you want to do it when the museum is empty.”

That made sense to Quinn. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me about the system you’ve got here.”

Torrance handed him a diagram of the museum covered with little x’s and circles. “The museum is equipped with a standard closed-circuit television system. There are twenty cameras throughout the museum, one at every main entrance and one in each gallery. You can see the location of each on the map. The cameras aren’t fixed. Instead they sweep the room at sixty-second intervals. The system here still uses tapes.

“The spot where Olga Levitch was killed is outside the sweep of the camera,” Torrance continued. “There normally isn’t an exhibit there.”

Quinn nodded. They’d heard all of this from Moran and Keane. “What about the passkeys?”

“The passkey system requires staff to wave an electronic card in front of a sensor at the four doors between the galleries and the staff offices in the annex. But those wouldn’t have been used during the opening.”

“You deal with this stuff a lot. If you had to guess,” he asked Torrance, “do you think this is related to the 1979 robbery?”

Torrance laughed out loud, as though Quinn had made a very funny joke. “You’re asking me a big question, Detective Quinn, but I’ll tell you. I’d say it is. There’s something similar about the MO, the feel of the MO. I’ve looked at the files on that investigation pretty completely, and I’m convinced that was a professional job carried
out by someone who had done extensive research or possibly with the benefit of inside information. I think we’ve got the same thing going on here.”

“Thanks,” Quinn said. “That’s what I’m thinking too.”

He thought about Sweeney coming to his house, telling him about the missing jewelry. He doubted there was anything in that, but it was interesting that she’d been thinking about the 1979 theft. What had he told her, that the FBI was probably on top of it? Well, they’d be involved now and he’d make sure they were on top of it.

When they had gone, Quinn turned to Ellie. “So what do you think?”

She seemed nervous, checking his face to make sure he really wanted her opinion, and Quinn felt guilty for a moment. “I agree with the idea that it’s connected to the other theft,” she said. “Or at least the same kind of deal. Professional job with research or inside information. The way I look at it, someone who worked at the museum probably wouldn’t have the skills or the connections to pull off something that big, but if he hooked up with someone who did, well there you go, they’re all set. The professionals can carry it out, sell the stuff. The person providing the information gets paid for that.” She tucked a piece of stray hair behind her ear and hesitated, then said, “There was something like this in Cleveland, except it was a supermarket. One of the employees was selling information about the shift changes, how the cash from the registers got transferred into the vault when the managers took their breaks. We figured out that whoever did it had to have had someone on the inside. I got a job at the supermarket.” She gave him a small grin, meeting his eyes for a second, then looking away. “That sucked, let me tell you. Bagging groceries? Anyway, there was this one guy who came in with all this new stuff and he wanted to take everyone out for drinks. That was him.” He could see the pleasure on her face, thinking of it, and it made him uncomfortable somehow, as though he’d seen her naked by mistake.