“Bobby was hired to rob the museum. But he wasn’t being paid to steal paintings. It was something else they wanted. Bobby had gone over and over it with my dad, because it had never made any sense. The thing they wanted—it was pretty much worthless. So, Bobby, with all that priceless art around him, had taken his own initiative. He’d turned a little B&E for hire that might have gone pretty much unnoticed, maybe a police report growing cobwebs in some filing cabinet somewhere, into the robbery of the century.”

They exited the warehouse, back into the bright morning light. Hailey looked past the woman and saw a car parked at the curb. A Buick, at least ten years old, that needed a good wash and a new set of tires. The woman was heading for the trunk, her keys already in her hands. Hailey knew that she shouldn’t have still been following, that the bodies were now compounding as fast as the bad decisions, but she couldn’t turn away. It wasn’t just the money anymore, it was the criminal equation, the puzzle that kept getting more complex, adding more variables, twisting and turning as the story evolved. It was baffling and irresistible. That was the thing about Hailey and equations—she couldn’t walk away until they were solved.

“Whoever had hired Bobby—my dad called them ‘serious people,’ and he’d only used that term when he’d really meant it, hadn’t been happy about what Bobby had done. They didn’t like the attention. The thing was, they’d also hired Bobby for a second job, another robbery. Something connected to the first. But that second job never happened, because instead Bobby ended up in the trunk of his car.”

The woman smirked at that, because she’d arrived at the trunk of her own car. She put her keys in the lock, then looked at Nick and Hailey.

“No,” she said. “Bobby wasn’t hired to steal those paintings. He was hired to steal something else. Something that’s pretty much worthless, in comparison. So worthless, I didn’t even include it in the deal.”

With that, she yanked open the trunk.

Hailey took a full beat to understand what she was looking at.

“That’s—” she started, but the woman cut her off.

“Yeah. And you can have it. I don’t want anything to do with it anymore.”

Gail shook her head, her curly hair bouncing in the harbor breeze.

“Because everyone involved with that damn thing seems to end up dead.”

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

A little clichéd, Patricia,” the man with the thinning blond hair and the delicate features said, as he made a show of wiping down the wooden bench with a monogrammed handkerchief. “But at least the view is nice.”