Zack turned back to the man’s photo. No doubt, this was the more likely candidate for the killer. Like they always say, you hear hoofs, you don’t look for zebras. Then again, it was the zebras that had always kept Zack up at night, not the horses. When he’d first studied the Gardner heist during his training at Quantico, it hadn’t been the paintings that had caused him to lose sleep—the Vermeer, the Rembrandts. It had been those two other stolen items, the ones that didn’t make any sense. The Chinese gu. The bronze eagle from Napoleon’s flag. The gu, maybe that could be written off; it was really old and an easy grab, sitting right there on a shelf just inches from the Vermeer. But taking the eagle, that was work: The thieves had first tried to unscrew the entire flag from its frame, leaving half the screws undone. Then they had climbed halfway up the wall to unscrew the finial. It hadn’t been easy, and it hadn’t been quick. Why bother with it? You’ve got a Vermeer worth a hundred million, easy, and you stick around for a worthless bronze eagle?

“So, this Nick Patterson,” Zack said. “He walks after nine years, heads to the Encore, and kills a small-time fence?”

“Tortures him first,” Marsh said. Then he shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they had some beef going back to before he got locked up. Or maybe he got wind that Jimmy the Lip was moving something valuable, came here to get a piece of it? How much was that reward again? Ten million? That’s worth a couple of fingernails.”

Zack didn’t say anything. It seemed weak to him, that Patterson would have come here to question and kill a low-level fence. Jimmy the Lip was a middleman. He didn’t steal things, he didn’t hold on to things, he just moved them. A guy like Jimmy, you either sold to him, or you bought from him. You didn’t kill him.

Still, it was possible—if Jimmy really did know something about the Gardner paintings, $10 million was a good incentive to try and get that information from him. There were plenty of people who would do some pretty horrible things for $10 million. Maybe Nick Patterson was one of them.

“You think whoever did this got what he was looking for?”

Zack shrugged.

“One thing is sure. Whoever came here last night knows a hell of a lot more than we do.”

Marsh looked at him.

“How do you figure?”

Zack pointed to the dead man’s hand.

“He only took two nails.”

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten