A Perfect Eye
A
PERFECT
EYE
Stephanie Kane
COLD HARD PRESS
Denver, Colorado
Seeds of Doubt
Colorado Authors League Award Winner
“Kane deserves to join the ranks of the big-time legal-thriller eagles.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Kane’s background as a defense attorney informs the legal thriller backbone of the story, but the exploration of childhood sins, whether monstrous or incidental, gives Seeds of Doubt its emotional heft.”
– The Baltimore Sun
“Deftly written.”
– Chicago Sun
“One of the outstanding mysteries of the year.”
– The Cleveland Plain-Dealer
Extreme Indifference
Colorado Book Award Winner
Colorado Authors League Award Winner
“Sturdy intrigue in and out of court with an especially sharp eye for the riptides of power running just beneath the legal quiddities.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“Fast-moving and intriguing. Kane knows both her protagonist and the legal terrain well.”
– San Francisco Chronicle
“A tight, well-written thriller with an ending that caught me completely off-balance.”
– The Cleveland Plain-Dealer
“A fast-paced satisfying ride. The novel’s climax is heart-stopping, and its conclusion just right.”
– The Denver Post
“Stephanie Kane writes legal thrillers that are on a par with John Grisham and Scott Turow.”
– The Midwest Book Review
Blind Spot
“The protagonist of Kane’s debut legal thriller has the makings of becoming the law profession’s answer to Kinsey Milhone.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Riveting stuff. Kane reads like Jane Austen. The truth she finds in the end is both stunning and, in retrospect, entirely obvious.”
– The American Bar Association Journal
“An addictive book that compels the reader to stay up every night pushing toward the conclusion, no matter how late the hour.”
– The Bloomsbury Review
“A gripping psycho-legal thriller of the first order, combining the better elements of Lisa Scottoline and James Patterson.”
—www.rebeccareads.com
“An intriguing look into the mind of a criminal psychopath.” – Vincent Bugliosi,
New York Times best-selling author of Helter Skelter
Quiet Time
“Stephanie Kane does it again. Quiet Time keeps your mind thinking and your heart racing – What a great read!”
– Rikki Klieman, Court TV
“Life’s greatest dramas play out in family life. The end is riveting and a surprise—but that’s what Kane is all about.”
– The Denver Post
“Stephanie Kane is a terrific storyteller who knows how to grab the attention of the audience and keeps it.”
– The Midwest Book Review
A PERFECT EYE
© 2019 by Stephanie Kane. All rights reserved.
First Edition
First Printing, 2019
Cold Hard Press
Denver, CO
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Cold Hard Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Book interior design by Susan Brooks
Cover design by Marcel Venter
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Number: 2019901391
ISBN Print: 978-1-7336715-0-7
ISBN: Digital: 978-1-7336715-1-4
Printed in the United States of America
For John
It began on a Saturday morning walk when she was five, right after her mom died. Like musical chairs, he suddenly stopped. Tell me what you see, Lily. A house with a fence. What else? A truck. What color? Red. They walked another two blocks.What did you see before? They retraced their steps. What do you see now? Paw prints in the grass, and a place where the dog had sat waiting for its master. Each time she saw more: a shiny tab from a soda can in the gutter; traces of pink on the sidewalk from hopscotch, scoured by rain. Next week he tested her again. What’s different from before? The dog has a chew-bone. What else? A new hopscotch game! Details, please… When she was ten, he took her to a museum. Your eye’s like perfect pitch, he said. You’re lucky you were born with it.
Chapter One
Lily looped her apple-green lanyard around her neck and pushed through the revolving door at the entrance to the Denver Art Museum. On this May morning, the Kurtz Building’s titanium panels gleamed and its steel prow evoked a spaceship on a pit stop in the middle of downtown. Welcome to Starship Galactica.
“Sorry I couldn’t grab coffee for us,” she told the guard inside the door. The stuff across the plaza was better than the cafeteria’s.
He winked. “No problem, Ms. Sparks.”
The Conservator of Paintings could not be late for the docent training tour—not when the subject was a masterpiece by Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte.
She crossed to the main building and stopped at the European & American gallery’s threshold. The thrill of gazing at Fields of the Gennevilliers Plain, No. Seven never got old. The last in Caillebotte’s acclaimed series of landscapes painted near his retreat north of Paris, it had been lost for more than a century. Now its wind-swept grasses and wildflowers, its massing clouds, and the man in the brimmed hat hurrying home from the field drew countless visitors and graced the museum’s T-shirts, mousepads and coffee cups. But to her, Seven was more than an attraction that sold merchandise.
Gris-clair, the light cloud canopy under which Caillebotte painted, intensified the painting’s tone. His vermillion and chrome yellow had caught more than the pastoral beauty of poppies and grass; their very radiance hinted at hubris. In a canvas less than two feet square, he’d captured the drama of poplars standing watch in midground and the man’s urgency to reach the red roofs in the distance. Would he beat the storm? Seven reminded her that nature was fickle and Eden an illusion. That in the blink of an eye, what she thought she knew could vanish and all she held dear could be lost.
A dozen docent trainees—“provisionals” in museum-speak—were being addressed by Dr. Gina Wheelock, Curator of Paintings, in her stilettos and a slinky black sheath. Curators and conservators were the museum’s top non-administrative dogs, and she and Gina technically occupied the same status. But to Gina a painting was less important than psychoanalyzing the artist, and now she was laying it on as thick as Caillebotte’s impasto.
“…so fortunate that The Kurtz Foundation donated this iconic treasure. Here we sense none of the alienation of Caillebotte’s blue-grey cityscapes, the tortured perspectives of his iron bridges and rainy Paris streets—”
“The guys with umbrellas and top hats?” said a voice from the back.
Gina blinked rapidly. The interruption came from Nick, the only male provisional who was under sixty—and cute. She quickly regained her train of thought. “Yes, those paintings were earlier. Throughout his career Caillebotte was misunderstood. Now back to Seven…”
Lily’s assistant Amy, whose copper tresses were braided in a crown and cascaded down like a girl in a pre-Raphaelite portrait, stood with senior docent Dave, a retired chemist as barrel-chested as a Dutch burgher. Dave whispered something and Am
y stifled a giggle. Armed with their own green lanyards and printed Talking with Visitors Points, some of the provisionals were already looking at their watches and yawning while Gina droned on.
“…so-called lost years in Petit-Gennevilliers …”
Gina’s hair was short and spiky, with edgy dark roots and platinum strands frosted and moussed like snakes—psychoanalyze that. She stood less than a foot from the painting, her blue-red nails digging into her bony forearms. Lily had to talk to her about that; Seven deserved better than to be breathed or coughed on. Gina leaned forward, her face now inches from the canvas.
“…scudding clouds and fertile fields. Don’t you wish you could enter Caillebotte’s paradise and inhale its scents?”
Gina sneezed.
Shit.
Lily stepped forward and stopped at a respectful eighteen inches from Seven.
“I see Ms. Sparks decided to join us.” Gina looked pointedly at her white-gold watch, then from Lily’s Converse sneakers to her distressed jeans and ballcap cocked just so.
As for being late—not that it was any of Gina’s business—that morning she’d taken her cat to the vet and had the puncture wounds to prove it. But the provisionals and Seven were what mattered. She smoothly picked up from her fuming colleague.
“Dr. Wheelock is quite right that Seven is Edenic. What makes it so is Caillebotte’s touch.” Dave shot her a thumb’s up, and Amy shook her head. That’s not in the Talking Points. Visitors were filtering in. Attracted by the crowd, some headed forSeven. “How did he create those cloud formations?”
“Color?” a retired librarian said.
“What else?” She waited. “Imagine Caillebotte standing next to you, painting those clouds. You think he was satisfied with them?”
The yawning had stopped. The trainees weren’t just listening; they were looking. The librarian peered closer at the painting. Her face broke into a delighted smile. “The impasto’s thicker there.”
“Yes! Instead of scraping off the pigment, Caillebotte kept adding more layers.” The trainees moved closer, but not too close. Lily looked from face to face. Now they were starting to see. She pointed to the vertical line bisecting the field. “How did he create this furrow?”
“He scored it with his palette knife,” Nick said.
“Good. What does the depth of that scoring tell you?”
“Caillebotte was angry?” the librarian offered.
“Maybe.” Gina was giving her that stony glare; this definitely wasn’t in the Talking Points. But the trainees had to forge their own relationships with Seven, to feel it.
“He was frustrated with his inability to capture the scene?” Nick said.
“Exactly! Now for some fun….” An intern scurried up to Amy and whispered in her ear. Was something going on in the lab? Amy waved to get her attention, but she ignored her. “As for the scent of those fields, don’t inhale too deeply. One of the marvels of modern Paris was its sewage system. It pumped its waste downstream. Caillebotte’s Eden was actually a field of s—”
“Swamp gas?” Nick said with a sly wink.
He really was cute. Amy was making her way through the pack with a determined look on her face.
“Who’s the guy with the hat?” someone asked.
Caillebotte’s scurrying man.
“A thresher?” the librarian guessed.
Nick shook his head. “No scythe or sack.”
The librarian squinted. “What kind of hat is that anyway?”
Amy clasped Lily firmly by the elbow. “So sorry for this tiny interruption,” she announced, “but Ms. Sparks will rejoin you momentarily.” Led by a seething Gina and still debating the hat, the trainees moved to a Monet and the visitors dispersed.
Lily followed Amy to the elevator. “What’s so important?”
Amy pushed the button to go up. “An FBI agent’s looking for you.”
Her temples started to pound. The elevator pinged. Instead of getting on, she let the door close. “What does he want?”
“He didn’t say.” Amy’s eyes narrowed. “But he knows you, and the intern said he’s awfully good-looking.”
Oh God, not him.
“What’s his name?”
The elevator pinged again. Amy held the door, forcing her to get in.
“Paul Riley.”
Chapter Two
The conservation lab was unnaturally quiet. A faint familiar scent—spicy, cloves?—wafted over solvents and varnish. As Lily walked past the Objects Conservator and her assistant, and the cubicles filled with interns and staff, necks craned. Paul had that effect on women.
Clean-shaven, short black hair in “Fed” style to match his impeccably tailored suit with its snowy pocket square and an athletic physique showing no trace of fat, he stood waiting in her office with his back to her. He reached up and slowly rubbed the back of his neck. Did he ever do that before?
“What do you want?” she said.
He turned with a start. Before his mask slipped back in place, she saw something different in his eyes. “Is that any way to greet an old colleague?”
Amy was listening in the doorway. Dave had followed her in and was getting an earful too. She had to cut this short.
“It’s been a long time, Paul.” Ten years, three months and how many days?
The clove was stronger now, his natural scent. The Armani tie wasn’t one she’d given him, but the lushness of the silk reminded her that he’d given her something far more precious: her introduction to paintings, and through his eyes the gift of seeing them. Now he was looking at her intently.
“You cut it,” he said.
“What?”
“Your hair.”
Their last time together flashed through her head. In bed at her condo, her cheek against the heat of his chest, caressing those tight curls just starting to gray, him running his fingers through her hair. His cell phone vibrating, him staring at the number before going into the bathroom to pick up.... She looked at his left hand now. Still no ring.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she said. “Why are you here?”
“I never thought you’d do it.”
“Cut my hair?”
His gesture encompassed her office, with its cramped walls of treatises and binders and a wheeled ladder to reach the top shelf, to the floor-to-ceiling foot-wide window offering a sliver of view to the west. It stopped at her desk, with its lamp, tissue box, computer, pad and pens neatly aligned. “Everything in its place, just like when you were a lawyer.”
“Thanks. There’s a painting I’m about to clean—”
He glanced at Amy and Dave. “Can we speak privately?”
“No.”
He rubbed his neck again. Tired, or did he need to do something with his hands?
“Okay,” he said. “George Kurtz is dead.”
Amy gasped.
“You’re kidding!” Dave said.
“He was murdered last night at home.”
“What?” Lily said.
She’d met the museum’s benefactor and chairman of the board just once, at the gala two years earlier when Seven was unveiled. Their encounter was brief. Despite his age, Kurtz’s attention was flattering. You like champagne? he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he signaled the waiter for another glass. There was something predatory about him. His avian stare—so at odds with his dignified demeanor and tuxedo—said he was attracted. He took her hand. His fingers were cold and clammy, his buffed nails sharp. His stare turned insulting. Or perhaps something more? When she still didn’t respond, he’d looked past her for a more interesting conquest. Kurtz’s death would throw the museum and the art world into turmoil, but why was Paul—
Dave jumped in again. “Did they steal his paintings?”
Paul didn’t answer. But that explained his presence—sort of. He’d started as a federal prosecutor in D.C., then joined the FBI as one of the first agents assigned to its elite Art Theft Team. Stints at Homeland Security and the Counterterror
ism and Forensic Science Research Unit followed; he was climbing the ladder fast. She’d seen an article about him consulting on the looting of artifacts from Syria and Iraq. But the FBI had other art experts.
“And Denver’s such a hick town they had to call in the Feds,” she said.
“Something like that.”
“And you thought, give old Lily a call.”
His smile was almost as insulting as Kurtz’s. “There’s a press conference this afternoon. For the five o’clock news.”
“I’ll bet.”
She turned, pushing past Amy and Dave, and forcing him to follow her out. After her office, the lab was an island of sanity, with its gleaming walls and paneled ceiling and pleated ventilation ducts, the high-intensity lamps on wheeled stands, the rack of neatly hanging lab coats she never wore. The Objects Conservator and her assistant were quietly working on a ceramic statuette in the adjoining room. Her own new project, cleaning a trustee’s Degas of a young ballerina, rested on the quilted tarp on the heat vacuum table in the center of the floor.
“A Degas?” He was playing to the crowd. “Not like that Schiele in our Brandt case. Right, Lily?”
Seated Female Nude with Raised Right Arm III, the Egon Schiele watercolor of an emaciated girl with her legs spread, flashed in her head. With it came a fury as bright and sharp as the scalpel in her tool drawer. Forgetting her audience, she wheeled on Paul. “You think you can waltz in here and pick up—”
He stepped back. “This has nothing to do with us. Just come with me to the crime scene.”