“On it.” McAdams waited. When his phone kicked in, he said, “Mr. Merritt, this is Detective McAdams from Greenbury . . . I know. I am sorry to bother you, but your gallery man, Victor Gerrard, is still missing and we’re still working two murder cases . . . I’d just like to ask you a few questions about Victor Gerrard. Does he speak Russian by any chance? . . . he does. Is he Russian? . . . okay, okay . . . so he was born in East Berlin? So he speaks German as well? Okay. His first name Victor—is spelled with a ‘k’? It is spelled with a ‘k’ . . . no, that’s all for now, thank—” The kid looked at the phone. “He hung up on me.”

“Rude little man,” Rina said. “Although he did give me a free book.”

“Speaking of books,” Decker said, “what’s going on with the codebook? Do you have Mordechai Gold’s cell number?”

“Affirmative on that one as well.”

“Ring him up.”

“Right-o.” A few moments later, McAdams left a message. “I could call his office number.”

“I don’t want to leave a message on a public machine.” Decker tapped the wheel.

Tyler said, “Penny for your thoughts, Loo.”

“Just trying to summarize things in my mind.”

“Go on,” Oliver said.

“First of all, what we know. Lance Terry stole a statue from a cemetery. Angeline Moreau sold it and decided that this was a business with a decent return since no investment capital was required. They did it together for a while but eventually Terry got nervous and stopped stealing—or so he says. But we’ll take it on face value for the moment. Angeline wasn’t ready to give up her life of crime. So she found another partner—John Latham.

“We know that Latham and Angeline hooked up but we don’t know how they met. Maybe at a party, maybe they met through a common fence, or maybe she began to see his name on the date stamp in every book that she razored and made a logical connection that he was also doing funny stuff. However they met, they began thieving together, storing their take in a bin that was mutually rented: both of them had keys.”

He paused.

“So that’s Latham and Angeline. Now we have Gerrard to consider. We don’t know if he’s connected, but we do know that Viktor with a ‘k’ is missing and we know that three names were deleted from Merritt’s client list—one American who sets up traveling exhibitions between top museums, one rich Russian, and one Finnish art dealer. It’s possible that Gerrard deleted the names, but we don’t know why.”

“So actually you do know a lot,” Rina said.