This got a laugh from the closest lab rat on the floor, who was carefully bagging what looked to be a yellow casino chip that had rolled under the foot of the bed. Zack stepped over the smocked man’s leg as he moved next to Marsh. Close enough to the body, now, that he could see the waxy sheen growing in patches across the man’s skin, and the blisters already forming in the outer epidermis. Based on this, and the general stiffness apparent in the man’s limbs—even the arm strapped to the chair—Zack put the time of death somewhere before midnight, but later than 11:00 p.m., between six and seven hours ago. He knew from the case call that the body had been discovered around 3:00 a.m. by hotel security, who had been checking doors on a different matter and had found the broken lock outside. Surprising, that the ME hadn’t arrived yet—but then again, it wasn’t even six in the morning, that hazy hour between night and day shifts. From the look on Marsh’s face, no doubt the detective was at the tail end of a long night, which meant he’d likely be even more unpleasant than usual.

“I’m not here looking for Picassos, Detective. And I highly doubt Jimmy the Lip here would have been able to tell a Picasso from a C. M. Coolidge.”

Marsh raised a wary eyebrow.

“Dogs playing poker,” Zack explained. “Prints were real popular in the suburbs in the 1970s.”

“Yeah, thanks for the art history lesson, Lindsy, but I couldn’t give two shits about how well you know your painters. I’m more curious about how you know our rapidly bloating friend. And, for that matter, what you’re doing here in the first place.”

It was about as cordial a welcome as Zack had ever received from the rough-and-tumble state detective. They’d worked together twice before—though “worked together” was a very liberal description. Four years ago, a month after Zack had taken over the Art Crimes desk of the FBI’s Boston field office, he’d consulted on a murder-robbery at a resort on the Cape, involving an antique Cartier watch that had been lifted from a private collection a week before. The minute he’d entered the crime scene, Marsh had been on top of him, shouting about chains of command and jurisdiction. It wasn’t just the usual back and forth between state law enforcement and the feds; Marsh had a real disdain for the Art Crimes desk. He saw Zack as a book-smart dilettante who’d spent more time at some elite university studying paintings than in the streets with the dirtbags who stole things and killed people, and thought that he had no business sticking his nose into real police work.