The top poster, a low-res copy of Irises. A label on the back was printed in Chinese characters. One bit of translation:
Van Goe
A second stack featured a soup can.
Warhol
Tischler said, “Their spelling improved. So what, these were junk art dealers?”
Reed said, “Something like that.”
“Hate that, ruining art. I paint. Used to make a living at it in Chile. Commercial. You respect art, you don’t tacky it up.”
Milo said, “Hold that thought.” He walked through the opening on the left side of the partition.
No Clear call for what seemed like a long time.
Guillermo Tischler said, “You okay?”
Milo reappeared. “You can go now, my friend. Thanks.”
“I don’t get to hear the punch line?”
“Thanks for your time. A man of your skills, I’m sure you can find your way out.”
“Really?” said Tischler. Sighing, he picked up his toolbox and left.
When the sounds of his footsteps died, Milo turned to Reed, Coolidge, and me. “I won’t say ready because you can’t be.”
CHAPTER
55
Equally cavernous space on the other side of the partition.
This lighting different, miserly, courtesy of a single track running down the center.
Warmer bulbs, though. Calculated focus.
The objects of illumination: two easels. Heavy-duty, solid oak professional artist models, both positioned along the room’s central spine, separated by twenty feet of open flooring.
The word “curation” has become a well-abused cliché. But it applied here.
An exhibit.
Perched on the nearer easel was a painting cased in glimmering gold leaf.
Hand-carved frame festooned with miniature gargoyle heads.
I knew the dimensions. But still, The Museum of Desire was surprisingly small.
Vivid colors unsuggested by Suzanne Hirto’s muddy file photo spoke to recent restoration.
Beautifully, horribly done.
The painting the product of a gifted hand but failing to rise above cartoon.
Because the intention had been nothing but shock value.
The four of us stared, stunned into silence. I was still staring as Milo and Reed and Coolidge moved on to the second easel.
Coolidge gasped. Reed’s hand shot to his mouth.
Milo stood there. I caught up.
An even smaller painting, maybe ten inches square.
Similar hues, similar style.
A tag affixed to the easel. Loopy handwriting in fountain pen.
Fate of a Harlot
Antonio Domenico Carascelli
c. 1512
Cherry-sized lumps began coursing up and down Milo’s jawline. The muscular tic that afflicts him when he fights internal combustion.
I braced myself and looked at the painting.
Black background, chiaroscuro lighting directing the eyes toward a triad of images.
Three gleaming silver salvers on a table draped in whiskey-colored velvet.
In the left-hand tray, a severed hand. On the right, a foot.
Filling the center tray was a woman’s head, dark ringlets streaming over a fluted edge. Eyes wide open but vacant. Mouth formed in a final oval. The skin, chalky gray accented in mauve and sea green and in strategic spots, red.
Marc Coolidge said, “Oh, God.” His eyes trailed to the far end of the room.
Something in a corner the track lighting neglected. Barely visible in the sooty gloom.
The four of us got closer. Details materialized.
Six-foot white rectangle.
A deep freeze.
Again, Milo held us back and walked toward it. Lifting the lid, he peered inside and stumbled back involuntarily.
Reed, unused to seeing his boss off balance, managed a single croaked word. “Her.”
Milo said, “Blue hair,” and began lowering the lid.
His hand slipped.
It slammed.
CHAPTER
56
There’d be no trial in the matter of what the bloggers, the rumormongers, the conspiracy theorists, and the media, playing catch-up, had labeled The Stretch-Limo Massacre.
No quick resolution out of the public eye, the department doing its best to control leaks.
Impossible task. Gratifying the bloggers, the rumormongers…
* * *
—
Luminol tests of the gallery building revealed oceans of blood from several human sources, most of it upstairs throughout the loft. But evidence of mop-up was also found in the rear anteroom leading to the staircase, and those samples traced to Marcella McGann and Stephen Vollmann.
The charnel house would take time to sort out, and the DOJ lab could’ve been convinced to prioritize. But Milo’s bosses had decided on a go-slow strategy, hoping the internet noise would die down and they could stop fielding annoying questions.
As Alicia had said, the Clearwater house revealed nothing but art storage. The same combination of cheap poster art and centuries-old paintings yet to be cataloged.
The paintings were transferred to a temperature-controlled vault at the crime lab. Milo suggested Suzanne Hirto be brought in. His bosses felt otherwise and hired an art history professor from the U. who arrived with a squadron of eager graduate students. When their expertise was found lacking, the prof brought in Suzanne Hirto.
It took a while but the team managed to divide the trove into two categories. Nearly three hundred paintings ranging from Renaissance to impressionist were believed to have been looted by the Nazis, fifty-nine of them labeled with the business card of Heinz Gurschoebel.
That leaked out quickly, eliciting a hailstorm of demand letters from the legal departments of museums around the world, organizations claiming virtue, and lawyers representing Holocaust survivors.
A smaller grouping—thirty-four oils on panel—had been set aside in the smallest Conrock bedroom. A collection of grotesque, pornographic, often sadistic genre scenes, not dissimilar to the two paintings displayed in the loft.
Those, Hirto was willing to certify, likely came from Hermann Göring’s collection of grotesquerie, a claim later supported by twenty-year-old correspondence unearthed in the Conrock house indicating that Stefan Sigmund Kierstead was a grand-nephew of Gurschoebel’s wife and she’d willed him the lot.