The Tempest (29 page)

“Still sorting through last night,” she said. “I didn't expect to wake to this.”

On Luke's desk, she saw, was a color printout of Rembrandt's painting
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.

“Sermon topic,” he explained. “Not this Sunday, but next, once the painting has gone back on public view.”

“Appropriate.”

“Yes,” Luke said. There was a sadness in his eyes, she thought. She wondered if he'd been thinking much about Susan Champlain today.

“What do
you
think?” she said, nodding at the news coverage.

“About that? I keep wondering when, or
if
, the real story will come out.”

“If
is what I'm wondering.”

“Won't ­people want to know that: where the painting's been, how it came back?”

“They will,” she said. “I just have a feeling there'll be a lot of stories told about it. The truth may be among them, but it might get lost in the mix. Maybe by design. Particularly since the government may have played a role in this.” She added, “It's fertile ground for conspiracy theories.”

“But won't the media want to go after the so-­called real story?”

“I don't know,” Hunter said. “They don't do that so much anymore. Do they?”

Luke shrugged.

“Or, they might see it as a carefully crafted publicity stunt and not want to get involved.”

Hunter glanced at her watch, then out the window. It was twenty-­five minutes before the “end of day” in Philadelphia.

“I think you were right about
Half Past Three
,” she said. “I think Kepler
was
planning to meet Elena Fiorille this afternoon. Before the end of the day.”

“In Philadelphia.”

“Yeah. It's possible he may still try to keep his appointment.”

“You think?”

“No,” she said. “Not anymore.” Hank Moore
had
managed to withhold Elena Fiorille's name from the news today, as she had requested. So it was possible, but not likely, that Walter Kepler thought she was still alive; that he would show up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as they'd planned, expecting to rendezvous with her. The Pennsylvania State Police had sent an undercover man in with a description to watch for him. To be ready to detain Walter Kepler for questioning about Elena Fiorille, if he happened to walk into Gallery 172 on the first floor of the museum. The home of Chagall's painting
Half Past Three
.

But it didn't happen. She waited with Luke until well after the “end of day” and there was no phone call. She told him at length about what had happened the night before as they waited; about Elena Fiorille and Walter Kepler and the peculiar partnership they must have forged over the past several years. Then Hunter got up to go home and feed Winston, feeling better than she had all day.

She was driving along the harbor when her phone finally did ring. It wasn't Moore, with news about Kepler. It was
Unknown Caller
. She pulled over and took it anyway, sensing who it might be.

“Hunter,” she said.

She heard the splintery breathing, in and out, several times.

“Huun
-­ter,” he said, sounding like a character from a horror movie.

“Sheriff?”

The breathing stopped.

Hunter waited. Then she said, “Tuck in your shirt!”

It was the sheriff who hung up first.

G
IVEN
THE OPPORTUNITY
to prove himself, Gerry Tanner could become a force of nature. He filed his report on Scott Randall four days later, on Monday morning, setting the stage for Dave Crowe and Helen Bradbury to go to the Justice Department. The report was addressed to Henry Moore and State Police commander Justin Hamilton, although he'd left a copy on Hunter's desk.

Tanner had learned of several alleged building code violations at a property in central Virginia owned by an 87-­year-­old woman named Beverly Peters. For more than a year, Peters had been in an assisted living facility fifty miles away, suffering from Alzheimer's disease. It was her son, Scotty, who'd occasionally stayed at the house, often arriving late at night, neighbors said.

Peters's house sat on a large, sloping property with several stands of beech and maple trees providing privacy. But the neighbors saw things; at least two of them harbored suspicions about “the son,” as they called him. One, an elderly woman named Betsy Stiles, said she thought that Scotty might be “trafficking in stolen property”; she also expressed concerns over the “unauthorized alterations” he'd made to the basement and back of the house. She pointed Tanner to an adjoining landowner, Mrs. Wilson, who claimed she'd seen “the son” several times “unloading merchandise after dark from a truck.” Her guess was that he was a drug dealer, although it might've been anything. “He could be transporting bodies for all I know.”

Crowe and Bradbury came into the Public Safety Complex the next day to visit Hunter, Bradbury wearing the same muumuu-­style dress she'd worn when Hunter had called on her at the old house near Easton.

“Calvin Walters enjoyed meeting you,” she said. “He said you're working on Eddie Charles now?”

“We're talking about it,” she said.

Crowe explained that they were talking with a local Virginia prosecutor, gathering evidence to justify a probable-­cause entry to the Peters's home. They wanted Hunter to bolster their case by providing a statement about what Kepler had told her.

Hunter shook her head, declining for several reasons. She didn't particularly want to get involved in a stolen art case or, more to the point, a Dave Crowe investigation. Her parameters were homicide, and Tidewater County. But, more important, she didn't think her testimony would be necessary. She also didn't believe it was a good idea bringing Walter Kepler into the mix, when the outcome seemed assured without him. What Randall had done didn't involve Kepler—­at least not in ways that were visible.

“I can leave an anonymous tip,” Hunter offered, seeing the frustration that was furrowing Crowe's forehead. “Anyone can do that, right?”

She shifted her gaze to Helen Bradbury, who secretly smiled her agreement.

“Or any two,” Bradbury said.

“Or three,” Hunter added.

I
T WENT QUICKLY
from there. Four days later, the story had become national news, although nothing on the order of the Rembrandt story, which was still playing out daily in anticipation of the painting's public unveiling on Sunday.

Local police, working with federal investigators, had executed a search warrant and raided Beverly Peters's home in central Virginia the day before. In a fortified, temperature-­ and humidity-­controlled basement room, they discovered eight stolen paintings, hung on the walls of a private art gallery. Included were lost paintings by Pablo Picasso and Lucien Freud, along with works by five lesser-­known artists. The value of the stolen art was given as in the “tens of millions” of dollars, according to news accounts (none of which gave attribution for the figure).

Less than five minutes after the raid, Justice Department agents showed up at Scott Randall's office on Fourth Street in Northwest D.C., to question and then arrest him.

Crowe called Hunter at work to give her the news on Friday, his voice hopped up as if he had instigated the whole thing. This was one “hidey-­hole,” he told her; he suspected there was another, probably larger one, out West, at his retirement property in Wyoming.

“I'm glad you figured all this out,” Hunter said.

“I am, too.”

Crowe was acting officious again, and a little smug. He offered to tell her the whole thing over dinner on Saturday. Hunter turned him down, wanting to focus on her own case. She
wasn't
just working for the victims now, she was also working for the victims' families: in this instance, the brother, sister, and parents of Susan Champlain and the daughter of Eddie Charles. They would keep her busy for a while.

“There were some interesting papers, too, in a desk,” Crowe told her, when she thought the call was ending. “Including an old screenplay.”

Hunter felt her pulse tick up. “Screenplay? What do you mean? Something
he
wrote?”

“Evidently, yeah.”

“Huh.”

“It's called
The Tempest
.”

“Huh,” Hunter said again. “I'd like to have a look at some point.”

“I could probably slip you a copy.”

“Okay—­who knows, there might be some clues there,” she said.

“To your case or to ours?”

She could see him smiling at her, sitting in his office on Fourth Street downtown, while Hunter watched the sun going down in the Chesapeake Bay.

“Either one.”

“I'll slip you a copy,” he said, “once it's been processed.”

“Please.”

The night of Scott Randall's arrest, Amy Hunter went out on a long run to Widow's Point, pushing herself up the winding incline to the bluff. Coming back, she ran three wind sprints on the open stretch of blacktop beside the harbor and then cooled down in twilight along the marina road, sweating pleasantly, watching the restaurant lights on the water, the stars brightening above the farmland. She was looking forward to going home and fixing dinner, spending the night with Winston.

She stopped in the shadows past the Johnson Seafood company, hearing the familiar sound of wind high in the trees, sweeping very slowly back and forth in waves; the sound that she associated now with this summer: with Susan Champlain's death and with Elena Rodgers's deceptions. With the evil that had seemed to quietly infiltrate Tidewater County, a sound that had come to feel like the ghosts of her own past, breathing in the night. She listened now and didn't hear any of that, though. It was just wind again, rustling the leaves on a late-­summer evening.

 

Chapter Forty

Sunday

R
embrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee was projected on side screens in the old sanctuary at Tidewater Methodist Church. The air was dusty and the wooden church creaked eccentrically with strong winds from over the Bay.

In Boston, Luke told the congregation, Rembrandt's
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
was going back on public display this afternoon for six weeks before it was removed for a year of conservation. ­People had begun lining up overnight to get in, according to the news reports.

Luke wasn't going to talk about the painting this morning, though; he was going to talk about its subject and its message.

“The sea of Galilee,” he said, “as many of you know, is actually a freshwater lake, the largest lake in Israel and one of the most beautiful you'll find anywhere. Charlotte and I had the privilege of visiting there a ­couple years ago. It lies about seven hundred feet below sea level, making it the lowest freshwater lake on earth. On its eastern side . . .” Hunter smiled, knowing that ­people seemed to like his sermons best when he threw in some facts and figures like this. “. . . are the mountains of the Golan Heights, which drop sharply down to the lake. This disparity in height between the mountains and the lake surface causes temperature and pressure changes that often result in violent storms, like the one shown here.” Luke paused and briefly scanned the congregation, seeming to raise his eyebrows to acknowledge Hunter, who was seated in a back row.

“The storm shown here is not a historical event, though, it's a Biblical parable, told in Mark 4 and in Matthew 8. It's a parable about faith and fear—­about how we can sometimes still the storms in our lives through our faith.

“There are fourteen men in the boat, and you can see that each is responding to the situation a little differently. Some are panicking.” He used a laser pointer to encircle four of the figures in the center of the boat. “This one here seems to be sick over the back of the boat. Some are panicking in a practical way—­this man at the front is trying to fix the mainsail even as the waves crash over the bow of the ship.

“But in the back of the boat, where Jesus is seated, there is a great calm. In the parable, in fact, Jesus is described as sleeping through the storm. And his disciples, fearing for their lives, wake him up. Jesus stands and rebukes the wind. He says to the waves ‘Quiet! Be still!' And the wind dies down and the lake becomes calm. But then he says to his disciples, ‘Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?' ”

Luke again scanned the congregation, his eyes stopping for a moment on the fourth pew, where Susan Champlain had often sat on Sundays—­or perhaps Hunter was imagining that.

“The parable is telling us that we need to have faith, even when there are great storms in our lives. It's telling us that there are many things we can't control and many things we aren't supposed to understand. But with faith, we can make ourselves ready for whatever comes. We can recognize what is expected of us and what we need to do. We can't control the storms that come into our lives. But we can control how we respond to them.”

Hunter waited after the ser­vice to talk with Luke. She took a place at the very end of the line, enjoying the feeling of camaraderie that filled this venerable old building as the congregants inched forward to shake Luke Bowers's hand. Hunter didn't often come to church, but she felt uplifted nearly every time she did.

She wanted to tell Luke that she'd enjoyed his sermon. But also to pass on to him what Henry Moore had told her the night before—­that the medical examiner's autopsy report, coming on Tuesday, would show that the DNA found under Susan Champlain's fingernails did in fact belong to Elena Fiorille. The report would also confirm that the foot impressions found on the beach matched Fiorille's.

Evidencewise, it was an open-­shut case now: Elena Fiorille had struggled with Susan Champlain on the bluff and pushed her over. Her necklace had fallen to the sand and she'd gone down to look for it, not successfully. But there was a complicating factor: Nicholas Champlain still hadn't been found. His daughter Carlotta had given several tearful interviews with the Philadelphia media, pleading for anyone with information on his whereabouts to come forward. The fact that Champlain's wife had died days before his own disappearance had cast a small spotlight on Tidewater County. But it wouldn't last, Hunter suspected. Police were already associating Nick Champlain's disappearance with Philadelphia organized crime; with figures like Vincent Rosa, John Luigi, and Dante and Anthony Patello.

Hunter saw peace and patience in Luke's face as he greeted and listened to each of the congregants, his head bowed slightly. She recognized in that look something she yearned for in her own life; something like the calm depicted in that painting, on the back of the boat.

When it was Hunter's turn, Charlotte Bowers suddenly came up behind them and linked her arm with Luke's. She stood there while they talked as if she were the chaperone, pulling her husband closer to her at one point. It was strange: They'd been acting a little different lately, Hunter had noticed, as if something was going on in their personal life. Maybe they were having problems at home.

“So you'll be able to close the case, then, once this autopsy comes through,” Charlotte said.

“It looks like.”

“And Kepler?” Luke said. “He gets away?”

Hunter shrugged. “That we don't know.”

Charlotte glanced at Luke, then at Hunter. “Somehow, I don't think the story's over yet,” she said.

“No, I'm sure it isn't,” Hunter said.

She looked out at the Bay, the three of them standing side by side, Luke in the middle.

“What story ever is?” he asked.