3 The Braque Connection (23 page)

“He has another safe, Vinnie,” I said softly.

“How did you know?” Concern compressed Phillip’s lips.

“Your body language changes slightly when you walk past the wooden cabinet to the left of your desk. When someone else comes close to the cabinet, the change is more visible. I never thought you were protective of the crystal glasses and expensive alcohol in there.”

“Jesus, Doc. You’re scary.” Manny’s eyes were large. “You see too much.”

“Sometimes I don’t see enough. If there is someone in Rousseau & Rousseau supplying Kubanov with information, why had I not caught onto that before?” My self-disgust was interrupted when Francine gave me her laptop and pointed at the screen.

“I don’t need to be as good as you to see you’re unhappy, Doc. What’s up?”

I breathed deeply, not looking forward to the next few minutes. “I asked Francine to focus on an in-depth look into the finances of Rousseau & Rousseau employees. She found something that confirmed my earlier suspicions.”

“You had suspicions and you didn’t tell us?” Manny sat up. “You and your bloody dislike for speculation. Who is it? Who sold us out to Kubanov?”

I held out the laptop to Manny, but Phillip grabbed it first. He scanned the screen with an intensity not often seen until he realised what he was looking at. His face lost all colour, his hands gripping the laptop tighter than I thought wise. Manny shifted closer and squinted at the screen. I saw the exact moment he came to the same conclusion as Phillip. “That bloody bitch.”

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Describing the atmosphere in the large conference room as tense would have been a gross understatement. And it had nothing to do with the paintings surrounding us. Vinnie and Francine had decided to not be part of this meeting. Francine was looking for information on Tall Freddy and Vinnie had said he needed to know more about 3D-printed guns.

Colin had insisted on sitting in on this meeting. Being tortured at the hands of Kubanov was a strong reason to confront the person handing him on a silver plate to Kubanov. I had wanted to stay behind, avoiding the impending conflict, but Phillip had insisted. My expertise would be useful as Phillip and Manny interrogated.

Sitting next to Colin, I did not feel comfortable being in such close proximity to this confrontation. Watching interviews on my monitors was safe. This wasn’t. My thoughts were interrupted as Angelique walked into the conference room, carrying a tray filled with coffee and cookies. I glared at the coffee.

“Why don’t you sit down for a moment, Angelique?” Phillip asked, his professional persona back in place. After Colin, he was the best at masking his emotions and thoughts.

“Sir? I thought I would make coffee for everyone else as well. They’re working really hard.”

“That’s true, but we need your help.” Phillip gestured to the chair opposite him and Manny. Colin and I were sitting a few seats away from them, the better for me to observe.

Angelique sat down, wariness written in every movement. “What can I do, sir?”

“You can tell me why.” Anger briefly coloured Phillip’s face before he suppressed it.

“Why what, sir?” Repetitive swallowing and her arms folded tightly, hiding her hands indicated Angelique’s feeling of discomfort and possibly guilt. I suspected she already knew her secret was no longer that.

“Why you felt justified in betraying me and everything Rousseau & Rousseau stands for.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, sir.” She did. It was visible in the flash of recognition in her eyes and the quick intake of breath.

“You know exactly what Mr Rousseau is talking about, Angelique.” Manny was using his law enforcement tone. It was strong, confident and intimidating in its push for compliance. “Answer his question.”

It was almost amusing to watch her hold on to her pretence of ignorance a few seconds more. The
masseter
muscles in her jaw tightened, she looked at Manny with dislike before she turned her gaze on me. It was a look of such staggering hatred that I flinched before I could control my reaction. I hadn’t been prepared for that. Her look softened marginally as she turned to Phillip.

“It was bad enough when you hired her.” She nodded towards me, her last word heavy with animosity. “But when you brought in these lowlife riffraff, I knew you had lost your way. At least with her, I could avoid her. She never talked to me and when she did, she treated me as if I was beneath her, but she never did anything evil.”

Her words were coming faster, her tone belligerent. “These people are evil. When you showed your support for their activities, I could no longer be loyal to you. You became a hypocrite. You gave up all those high ethics and morals you preach to us. Working with these people.”

“She’s lying,” I said, surprising myself. I didn’t want to take part in this conflict, but all eyes were on me now, Angelique’s filled with hatred. “Her tone, her hands, face, every part of her body pointed to deceit as she was talking about Phillip being a hypocrite. She was telling the truth about disliking me and the others.”

“Dislike?” Angelique spat out the word. “I don’t dislike you, Doctor Lenard. I despise you and everything you represent.”

“And what do I represent?” I asked, genuinely curious. People sharing beliefs such as Angelique’s often formed factions against anything and anyone not fitting into their definition of normal. I had faced plenty of disapproval in my life. Her vitriol wasn’t new to me nor was it affecting me.

The
levator labii superioris
muscles raised Angelique’s top lip. Disgust. “People like you infect society with your mental deviance. You come into our lives and insist we accept you because you are ever so special, because you think your sickness makes you deserving of tolerance.”

We all jumped when Phillip slammed his hands down on the table. “Enough!”

“No, Phillip,” I said. “Let her talk. She’s telling me much more than just the words.”

Phillip looked at me as if I were a stranger. His anger was robbing him of rationality. Laypeople often referred to it as looking through the haze of rage. I knew his anger was based on offence taken on my behalf. I waited until he saw that I was not hurt or offended. His professional mask fell back into place and he nodded.

“What is her highness telling you, Doc?”

I tilted my head to the side, looking past Angelique’s vitriol. “She dislikes me, but not as much as she’s pretending. I believe that she is uncomfortable around me, purely because she doesn’t understand me, how I think or function. Most people don’t. No, she’s using this to conceal a different motivation.”

“One much less noble than saving society from weird people.” Manny pulled printouts from the file in front of him. He sounded bored. “Money, the age-old root of all evil. We have the evidence right here. Your financial history shows that you’ve been having difficulties. Your bank account is in a sorry state. But you were smart. You got your husband to open an account not connected to any of your other individual or combined accounts. Oh, don’t look so surprised. We know everything about your life now. We know that in the last ten months your husband’s new bank account filled up with a few handsome payments.”

“Was fifty thousand Euro really worth selling your integrity, Angelique?” Phillip asked.

For a moment the Angelique I had first met showed herself. The woman with high ethics and moral values, reliable to a fault. That moment didn’t last long. Her lips stretched into a sneer. “You don’t understand. You never will. He did.”

“Who did?” Phillip asked softly.

“He understood what it was like struggling to pay a mortgage with an unemployed husband.”

“I didn’t know your husband lost his job,” Phillip said.

“Of course not. You were too interested in Doctor Lenard and her scum to take notice. He did. He knew how I felt about these people working here and helped me understand that it was okay to feel like it. That these people are not okay.”

“When did Kubanov first contact you?”

“About ten months ago.” Her immediate answer confirmed that Kubanov had been the one contacting her. I took note of the fact she had recognised his name. She didn’t even realise what she had revealed. “He is a gentleman. In the last few months his voice has become even softer. He spoke to me in a tender whisper. Not like some other people.”

Manny dismissed her pointed glare. I didn’t pay attention to it. Something else had caught my attention. I chose my words carefully.

“As a deception expert, I know that lying over the phone is considerably easier than in person. We don’t give away as much with the tone of our voices as we do with our body language. Maybe he was only creating the image of being a gentleman, making his voice soft like you said.”

“You are not as smart as you think, Doctor Lenard.” She lifted her chin to look at me down the length of her nose. “He didn’t just speak to me on the phone. He’s been visiting me. Quite a handsome man too. Not many men would look good without any hair. It really suits his kind character.”

For the next twenty minutes Phillip and Manny continued to question Angelique. After a few answers, it became clear in her body language that she was not going to reveal much more. As it was, she had given me a lot of information even if I didn’t know how to interpret it. Not yet.

“I quit!” Angelique stood up, her body rigid. “I will not be treated like this. I quit.”

“No, Angelique.” Phillip used the quiet tone he reserved for grim news. “You are fired and you will be arrested.”

“Arrested?” Her voice was high.

Manny snorted. “You really think you can commit and admit to industrial espionage, data theft, and even worse, working for an international criminal and not be prosecuted for it?”

I blocked out her ranting and the two policemen who entered the room. Staring at the painting across from me, I tried to make sense of what she had said. Her dislike of me had not come as a surprise. It had been communicated in her body language from the first day I had entered these offices. I knew the names of all the employees here, but had spoken less than a dozen times to each. As much as Francine wanted to change that, I was not a social person. I saw no sense in wasting time with friends, talking about topics that didn’t enrich one’s knowledge or life. On a sociological level I understood the need humans had for such interaction. I didn’t have that need.

But as I thought about this, I realised that by being unsociable, I had missed out on cues Angelique might have communicated. Subtle or not, I would have picked up on nonverbal cues of intention, had I looked more carefully.

“I know that look.” Colin touched my arm. “This is not your fault, Jenny.”

“I should’ve seen it. I should have noticed the change in her ten months ago.” I turned to him, finding it difficult to maintain a confident posture. “Am I so self-absorbed that I don’t notice the people around me?”

“No, Genevieve,” Phillip said from behind me. I twisted around to see Angelique and the policemen gone. Phillip looked sad. “You see a lot. You see more than most people even realise. You are just much more selective in what you look at and look for.”

“You’re using your polite mediation skills on me now.”

His soft laughter didn’t reach his eyes. “Maybe a little. But you shouldn’t feel responsible for Angelique’s behaviour. It was she who listened to Kubanov, who fell into his trap, took his money and gave away our secrets. Not you. Not me. Angelique. She will pay the price for that.”

“We’ve also been paying that price.” With my left hand I gripped my right elbow in a half-hug. “She gave Kubanov all this information not just about our clients, but personal information about us. About Colin. Oh my God. That must be how Kubanov got all that detailed knowledge of Colin’s visit to Russia. That is how he knew to capture him and torture him.”

“Stop talking such bullshit, missy.” Manny pushed Phillip out the way, his frown severe and his hands on his hips. “I thought that you of all people would be above this self-pity crap. This is not your fault. Phillip is right, it wasn’t your job to see it. Why didn’t I see something? I’m a bloody detective, for shit’s sake. And Phillip worked with Angelique every day. Why didn’t he see it? Stop being such a sissy, buck up and tell me what you think about the crap that old biddy said.”

I stared at Manny, my mouth slightly agape. Never, not once in my life, had anyone told me to
not
take responsibility. I blinked a few times, realising that he was waiting for an answer, not very patiently. An unfamiliar feeling warmed my chest. It took a moment to identify it as a strong fondness.

“Um… the man she was describing is not Kubanov.” I grabbed onto the topic with vigour. Analysis was safe and familiar grounds. “We have all seen Kubanov. He has a full head of hair and is vain enough to maintain that, even colouring it to not show any grey. The times I had heard him speak, there was nothing gentle about his voice and he most definitely didn’t speak in a tender whisper.”

“I agree with Jenny. That man doesn’t have a soft voice.” Colin would know. He had spent six horrid days in Kubanov’s basement.

“Could it be someone acting on his behalf?” Phillip asked.

“That would be speculation.” I shook my head. “All I’m willing to say is that there are two options. Either it is not Kubanov, or it is him, but something about him has changed. It would explain the inconsistencies I’ve observed. And the evidence that he is taking a much more active role now. Instead of delegating as much as he had done in the past, he’s showing involvement at a much earlier level.”

“What do you think changed?” Manny threw his hands up when he saw my expression. “Fine, fine. You don’t want to speculate. Just think about it, will you, Doc?”

Manny waited until I reluctantly nodded before he stormed out the conference room, followed by Phillip. Without speaking, Colin and I got up and walked to my viewing room. Once we were settled in front of the monitors, he sighed heavily. “You know, she was courteous towards me. She never treated me like the riffraff she said we were.”

“Angelique? That venomous hostility was an exaggeration. I’m convinced she didn’t like us and wasn’t very comfortable with us in the office, but that performance she gave was rehearsed.”

“It was really about the money?”

“Everybody has a price.” I slowed down towards the end of my sentence. “Of course you would know this. The people in your world work on a price for everything.”

“It’s hard to believe she was the one who drugged our coffee.”

Colin and I spent the rest of the day working through Hawk’s computer. We found nothing else to strengthen the link between him and Kubanov. Or anything that pointed to Kubanov. I did find a few emails from Hawk’s daughter. Her writing style was rife with teenage hyperbolic statements, but it spoke of an intelligent mind.