Zack’s FBI training aside, Marsh hadn’t been entirely wrong; Zack’s classmates at Yale, where he’d gotten his PhD in art history, focusing on the European Impressionists, had been equally surprised when he’d applied for the opening in the FBI Art Crimes division. What neither Marsh nor his colleagues at Yale knew was that Zack had grown up around cops. His father and uncle had both walked beats in New Haven, Connecticut, where Zack had grown up. He was also well familiar with the sort of people Marsh put in handcuffs every day; his two favorite cousins had gone from stealing car radios in junior high school to stealing the cars themselves after their father, the beat cop, had died young of a heart attack, leaving the family struggling on a police officer’s pension. Both were in jail now, but Zack had remained close to them, visiting them at the medium-security lockup they called home in Western Mass.

But it certainly hadn’t helped matters with Marsh when one of Zack’s informants had quickly solved the case, pinning the Cartier theft on a local mobster. Nor did Zack and Marsh’s relationship improve a year later, when Zack had solved a shoot-out robbery at an auction house in Marlborough, back-tracing the steps of one of the thieves, and eventually leading Marsh and his colleagues to the case’s unsavory conclusion—the two hapless art thieves bleeding to death all over a Renoir.

Now, another year gone by, they were together again, flint and steel on the sixth floor of the Encore Boston Harbor. Zack had a feeling he wouldn’t be mending his relationship with the ornery homicide detective anytime soon.

“Jimmy O’Leary,” Zack said, nodding at the dead man in the chair. “He’s a midlevel fence. Loosely connected with the Dominel family in Southie, but pretty much an independent businessman. Usually moves low-level product. Silver candlesticks stolen from someone’s estate. A painting grabbed off a wall in some university dining hall. Once he tried to sell a Tiffany chandelier that fell off the back of a truck when they were renovating the old Four Seasons in the Back Bay.”

“Jimmy the Lip,” Marsh said. “Charming. You’ve got nice friends, Lindsy.”

“More of an acquaintance. Hadn’t heard from him in years. Then a couple of days ago, his name came up. Seems he had something to fence. Something that was way out of his usual league. He was asking around because his usual buyers couldn’t handle something like that. Not even close. Some of the people he asked reached out to my office.”

Marsh looked at him.

“They reached out to the FBI?”

“Because of the sizable reward.”

Marsh’s angry demeanor seemed to fade a bit, as he became genuinely interested.

“How sizable?”

“Ten million. Immunity from prosecution. That sizable.”

Marsh whistled, and a couple of the nearby CSI rats looked up.