Art and Arsenic (Veronica Margreve Mysteries Book 2) (4 page)

6

The next morning was Saturday. Bitty woke me up with a loud aria, walking around the bed. The little furry diva wanted her breakfast and was annoyed at me for sleeping in.

I had stayed up late the night before. First, after coming home from the party, I sent a quick e-mail to my friend Krista. Krista was Canadian. We met when we were both living in Seattle, working for a big tech company, where we got hired within a week of each other and shared a small office for a couple of years.  She would go with me to see obscure, funny or not-so-much films at the Seattle International Film Festival; backpacked with me through the heat and humidity of Vietnam in August; and provided moral support trying times. She's moved on to working for several start-ups, riding the waves to their IPOs and doing pretty well. She now lived in Boston – for the hockey, I suspected, as much as anything else.
Among other things, she was quite a wine connoisseur: she had an interest in wines and could remember the taste of seemingly any wine she's ever tried, and what those around her had thought of it. So, having lucked into getting a couple of sips of the Domaine Leflaive Chevalier-Montrachet, I wrote to her in as much detail as I could about it, its smell (“nose”) and taste, as I knew she'd be interested.

After that, I spent several hours lurking in the shadowy corners of hacker internet forums, reading braggy posts about the Bitcoin exchange take-downs. I decide that the vast majority of them were empty boasts, common among kids wanting to be taken more seriously than their skills and accomplishments merited.

Having finally woken up on a drizzly Saturday morning, I served her feline highness her food, and brewed myself tea (Lapsang Suchong that I got from Savrika Tea the previous day) and was drinking it and browsing the internet in my sweats when the door bell rang. Bitty perked up her ears and even stopped making loud eating noises for a moment. I looked at the clock: 9:17 am.

I wasn’t expecting anyone. It might be boy- or girl- scouts – they came by sometimes, but I thought it was too early in the day for them to start making the rounds of the neighborhood.

I went to the door and through the glass saw a stocky man in a raincoat on the other side of it.

“Who is it?”

“Detective Johnson, Kirkland Police Department.” He held up his badge.

I certainly didn’t expect that.

“Could you please put it closer against the glass, so that I can see it?” He did, and I studied it – it looked legit. I opened the door, and a blast of cold air hit me. I looked at the rain coming down and shivered.

“What is it, Detective?”

He stood on a step below mine, and so I could see the top of his balding head – he was a redhead, in his mid-forties. He had ears sticking out, and a look of concentration on his face.

“Are you Veronica Margreve?”

“Yes, that’s me. Is there a problem?”

“Do you work with Fred Nordqvist?”

“Yes, he is a client of my firm.”

“What does your firm do?”

“Computer security consulting.”

The man pulled out a rolled-up clear plastic cover containing a document out of the inside of his raincoat, and showed it to me face up.

“Is this your report?”

I looked at the paper inside the cover – yes, this was the beginning of a printed copy of my report.

I nodded. “At least the front page is.”

“At least the front page?” He repeated with suspicion in his voice.

“Yes, that’s all I can see from here.”

“When did you give this to Mr. Nordqvist?”

“I sent it to him via e-mail yesterday, around lunch-time. He must have printed it out.”

“So this paper copy wasn’t yours?”

“No.” If Fred had read the report and wanted to file charges against Linda, would a detective from Kirkland be standing on my doorstep first thing on a Saturday morning? “Detective, what is going on? Is something wrong at the Nordqvist Fine Art gallery?”

He rolled up the printout and put it back inside his raincoat.

“So you haven’t been to gallery yesterday?”

“I have. I came in to check that my attack mitigations were working as expected, and I read the server logs. If you’ve read the report,” – I nodded towards his pocket, – “you know the situation. And then I was also at the opening night party.”

“Why did you come to the gallery, if you e-mailed him the report?”

“I wanted to check on the server-side traffic.”

Detective Johnson got out a notepad and was making notes. We were still standing on the porch. He didn’t ask to come in, and I didn’t invite him. I was getting cold, and annoyed at his not telling me what caused this visit.

“What time did you arrive at the gallery yesterday?”

“Around 11:30. I stayed for about 15 minutes.”

“Did Fred Nordqvist ask you to lunch?”

“Lunch?” The question surprised me. “No. He and Pauline and Alex were busy with preparing for the reception. I left as soon as I could, so as not to be underfoot while they were setting up for the opening.”

“Did you see Mr. Nordqvist eat his lunch?” From his line of questioning, it seemed that there was something important about Friday mid-day. I thought back but couldn’t imagine what it might have been. If it was some problem with Fred or the gallery—then I would assume it wasn’t too serious, as everything appeared well later in the day yesterday, at the opening party.

“I saw a sandwich wrapped in plastic on the desk in his office. I assumed it was his lunch. I didn’t see him eat it.” Johnson made another note.

“Where did you go after leaving the gallery?”

“To the waterfront, and then to eat.”

“Where was that?”

“At Savrika Tea. I had some tea, read my book, ate a pastry.”

“What tea did you order?”

“Tudor Rose.” Another scribble in his notebook. I got the distinct impression that he was going to double-check my movements later. “What is going on, Detective?”

He looked up from his writing. At that moment, I felt something furry next to my leg. Bitty opened the front door and was sticking her head cautiously out the door.

I picked her up, petted her and put her back into the house. “Please stay in, Bitty.” I closed the door to the house. She watched us through the glass on the side of it.

Detective Johnson looked at my black cat and his face softened a little.

“What a nice kitten! So pretty.” People often thought that Bitty was a kitten, because she was so small – probably due to starving on the streets before being picked up by the Seattle Humane Society shelter.

“She’s adorable, isn’t she? She’s an adult.” I looked back through the glass in the door and waved at her. “Do you have cats?”

“A big orange one”. He smiled, then glanced at his notebook again and frowned. “What time did you come for the party, and how late did you stay?”

“I came around 4 or 5 – I changed my clothes in the back. I left around 7 pm.”

He blinked up at me.

“Why did you change your clothes there?”

“I didn’t plan to come home in the middle of the day, and I brought my dressy stuff to change into for the opening with me.”

“What did you do after leaving the gallery?”

“I went home. I needed to feed my cat. She is very particular about her meals.” My little furry princess definitely insisted on food served in a timely manner.

“And you didn’t return to the gallery later on?”

“No. Did something happen at the gallery?”

He looked at me for a long moment and sighed.

“Fred Nordqvist was found dead this morning in his office at the gallery.”

By now, I expected to hear some bad news about the gallery, but I thought, from the earlier questions, that it would be related to their website or computer system – or from something occurring at the gallery around lunch-time.  I certainly did not anticipate Fred dying some time in the night.

“What happened?”

“It appears he had a very bad reaction to something he ingested.” Detective Johnson said very carefully and kept his eyes on my face as he said it. I felt myself making a grimace as I imagined the scene – Fred, lying in the middle of the gallery, in a pile of greenish vomit… I shivered again.

“He died in his office at the back of the gallery, around 9:30 pm last night. The office manager coming in this morning found him. The desk lamp was on and your report was open on his desk. He was probably reading it shortly before he died.”

“I see.” I wrapped my arms around myself to try to keep from shaking. I felt the need to sit down. “Would you like to come in?” I said to the detective.

7

Inside, in the kitchen, I offered him some tea, and when he refused, poured some more for myself. We were sitting around the kitchen table, and Bitty was sitting in “her” box on the floor and looking up at us. The
box had originally housed a shipment of some widget that I had ordered from Amazon. After I had unloaded the box in the kitchen, she jumped in and curled up in it, making a nest. The size of the box was such that she just fit in it, and the foam on the bottom and the sides made it soft and warm to sit in. So the box stayed in the kitchen for about six months now, and this was where she spent a lot of her time when I was eating or cooking.  She could be in the middle of everything happening in the kitchen that way and have a clear view of the table, and I was thankful that she wasn't traipsing on the kitchen counters or other high surfaces.

Now she was looking intently at the detective, who cleared his throat.

“How well did you know Fred Nordqvist?”

I shrugged.

“I met him for the first time Thursday, when I took the consulting job. The gallery website was under a DoS attack” – Detective Johnson’s eyebrows went up, so I added – “basically, flooded with traffic to make it inaccessible to anyone. He called us, practically begging to come in immediately and fix it. So I went over to his gallery, to debug. I identified the signature and the source of the attack traffic and put in some defenses. He invited me to come to Friday’s show opening. Yesterday I wrote my report, went back in to check on the state of the webserver from the logs, e-mailed him the report, and then came to the party later.”

“You found the source of the traffic?” He was taking this down in his notebook.

“Yes, my report describes it.” I took a sip of my tea. “It was coming from an IP for Ravenswood Gallery in Kirkland. In fact, yesterday I walked around Kirkland and came into the gallery and talked to Linda Raven, who is the owner of Ravenswood.”

He stopped writing and looked at me unblinkingly.

“When was this?”
“Around 2 pm, I think. I left Savrika Tea and saw the gallery at the corner. I’m sure the sales records at Savrika can give you an estimate of when I was there.”

“So you went to the Ravenswood Gallery?”

“Yes. And I saw the attack tool running on Linda’s monitor.” I gave a brief summary of my talk with Linda and her shutting off the tool. 

Johnson was scribbling things swiftly on his notepad. I sipped my tea. When he finished writing, he asked:

“Do you know of anyone else holding a grudge against Mr.  Nordqvist? Or any other motive for wanting to be rid of him?”

“So you are not sure his death was from natural causes?”

“We are looking into all the possible angles right now,” he said, cagily. So something about the way Fred died was, indeed, suspicious.

I thought back.

“Not sure whether there was a grudge per se, but I happened to overhear a somewhat charged conversation on Thursday. And he mentioned to me that he was getting a divorce.”

“That charged conversation you mentioned – what was it?”

I told him what I heard between Alex and Fred.

“What did Alex look like?” I described him. “He is the office manager for Fred’s gallery.”

“Was he the one who discovered the body?”

Johnson nodded. Hmm. So Alex, who I heard arguing with Fred, had found his boss dead less than two days later.

Johnson looked thoughtful. “Anything else unusual? Perhaps something strange at the party itself?”

“Well, there was this special wine that Fred brought out. Domaine Leflaive Chevalier-Montrachet”. Detective Johnson looked at me blankly for a moment, probably confused by the French pronunciation of the long name of the wine, but understood and waved it away when I started to spell it out. I continued, “Apparently from the collection of the uncle of Christopher,  Calvin Willembauer, the one who had the paintings. Fred brought out two bottles, they poured it, a little bit for everybody. It was pleasant, slightly acidic. Everyone drank it, though, so if anything was wrong with it, I’d think someone else would be sick, too.”

He nodded. “Yes, we are checking on the wine.”

I sat in silence for a moment, gathering my thoughts, my hands around my tea cup. Its warmth felt reassuring, in the face of the news I received. I asked:

“There is a security system in the gallery, correct?”

“Yes. We have reviewed the video and the logs. Fred Nordqvist was alone when he died. It was about half an hour after everyone else had left. Before that, he was mingling with guests at the party, and talked to a couple of people in his office. There is nothing that we can see about someone giving him anything suspicious to eat or drink. But it’s definitely possible – lots of people were around him, someone could have slipped something into his drink or even switch his glass, and the camera wouldn’t pick it up because of its location.” He opened his hands. I remembered at the party, Fred surround by people, socializing, going from group to group, trailing laughter…

So, there was a security system – but the footage of it was not continuously monitored (or some guard somewhere might have seen Fred fall dead and dispatched a person to check on the premises). Likely the tape was viewed only when an alarm went off. Nothing unusual in that, plenty of firms had their surveillance set up that way.

“And the tapes weren’t altered in any way?” Through my work in computer security, I knew better than to rely on the evidence of a single digital source, without cross-checking it with other sources.

Johnson looked up at me from his notepad. “No, they weren’t. And the gallery is temperature-controlled, so it was easy to estimate the time of death from how warm the body was when found. That estimate agreed with the 9:30pm time of death that we got from the security tape.”

“And you did go over the tapes for the entire day, correct?” Detective Johnson nodded. “So you knew about his lunch even without needing to ask me?”

He shrugged. “We saw him come in with the sandwich in the morning. We have a video of him eating it in the office later. But he stepped out shortly after you left the gallery. He could have had a quick bite to eat with you, or with someone else. He also went out shortly before the start of the reception, and came back with a cup of coffee.”

“I see. And you looked at the coffee cup?..” I remembered seeing a take-out cup with the familiar green mermaid logo in the trashcan in his office before last night’s party.

Johnson shook his head. “We analyzed the remaining coffee from that cup in the office garbage – nothing suspicious in it. Most likely, it did not cause his death. We also checked the Starbucks nearby – apparently, he was a daily customer, and they didn’t remember anything unusual about him yesterday.”

“Was he alone when he came in yesterday?”

“Either alone or with another man. Barista couldn’t really give us a description of his companion, though – it was a nice day yesterday, and they had a lot of customers. She also wasn’t sure that it wasn’t the day before that he came in with a man.” He opened his hands. “From this description, we’ll probably find that Fred Nordqvist went into Starbucks yesterday in the company of three women and a large dog! Anyways, the garbage from the main gallery area had been taken out after the party. And we found the wine glasses in the dishwasher in the back – the dishwasher has been run, so we couldn’t find any traces of poison in any of them.”

“I see”. I sat, looking at my tea and thinking.

“Is there anything else you remember from your two days at the gallery that might be useful? Or anything related to the website attack, that you haven’t told me yet?”

I shrugged. “No, sorry, that is it for now.”

Detective Johnson looked around, then reached down and petted Bitty.

“Well, thank you.” He rose to leave, and handed me his card. “Please let me know if you recall or find anything else.”

I walked him to the door, Bitty following us, her tail up like a question mark. I watched the detective get into his car at the curb. After I closed the front door behind him, Bitty looked at me and said “Urr??” I bent down and scratched her behind the left ear. Her fur felt soft and silky and comforting.

“I don’t know what’s going on, little one.”