“Sneezing with a mouthful of paint.”

“No kidding,” Zoe agreed. “So Erik started knocking out ‘undiscovered’ Pollocks… took him about half an hour per painting. Erik’s restoration business allowed him to ‘launder’ the fakes into unscrupulous hands, allowed him deniability about the actual source of the paintings. As Erik had planned, Von Gleick went gaga over the undiscovered Pollocks, praised them, authenticated them, fawned over them. Then, through a series of anonymous tips, Erik notified galleries and collectors who had purchased the paintings and tipped them off to small, hidden inconsistencies that he had deliberately painted into the works.”

“He set up Von Gleick and then pushed him over the cliff,” Thalia said gently. “Then, in some ways, Von Glieck’s suicide was really murder.”

“Erik didn’t care,” Zoe went on as footsteps grew louder in the warehouse beyond. “Harper-Bowles in London and LePen in Paris were emotionally stronger, but their careers were destroyed as well.”

“No big losses for the art world,” Thalia mumbled.

“Whatever,” Zoe said as the footsteps stopped by the door. They heard keys jangling. “Well, I think Erik realized that destroying the critics wasn’t as useful in the long run as putting a ring in their noses. A rumor started—by Erik I am sure—that he had created fakes that implicated a large part of the critical world, and certainly everyone who had previously trashed his work.”

“He’s blackmailing them.”

“Only at the beginning, I think.” Zoe said. “I think it was enough to stop the negative reviews so that his art could be appreciated for what it is.”

A key grated into the dead bolt on the outer side of the door. An instant later, the door opened and the Hulk stepped in, one end of Zoe’s handcuff’s already ratcheted onto his wrist.

TEN

By the time Seth Ridgeway pulled his Volvo to a halt in the driveway of his house in Playa Del Rey, the storm clouds had parted sufficiently to catch the last rays of the setting sun. Ridgeway watched as the fading light struggled feebly to separate gray sea from gray sky. Gripping the Volvo’s wheel tightly, he thought of all the times he and Zoe had stood side by side, arms around each other, enjoying this view. It had been all the reason they needed to buy the house.

It was a little white two-bedroom bungalow that had been constructed in the late 1930s in a California beach interpretation of art deco. Its original owners had built it as a vacation home and had positioned it at the very edge of a steep bluff that rose more than seventy feet above the beach. On a clear day Santa Catalina Island seemed to wait just at the end of the driveway.

Seth turned off the ignition of the Volvo and sat immobile for several minutes, listening to the complaints of the blustery wind as it swept up off the ocean, still angry from the storm. Reluctantly, he turned away from the view of the Pacific and looked at the house, their house … his house now. The sunset had stained the white stucco a nicotine yellow. Long deep shadows from the tall lithe cedars they had planted in front crawled across the lawn and up the sides of the house. One of the panes in the living room’s bay window caught a bright moment of the sun and focused it on his eyes. The scowl on his face intensified as he squinted through the reflection.