Work Text:
Benoit Blanc stands in front of a newly emptied picture frame, turning over a thought in his head and a coin in his hand.
Though he considers himself a great appreciator of the arts in its many forms, he rarely finds himself visiting small galleries like this one. As the so-called “Last of the Gentleman Sleuths,’ his time is both expensive and in short supply, which leaves him with little time for absorbing bastions of culture. Indeed, it took a strangely accomplished act of thievery to lure him here, into this very museum.
He raises a hand and shakes back the sleeve on his left arm, checking his watch for the time. It is early in the day yet, but be his already buzzing with tightly restrained energy. He is ready and raring to go, eager to stick his hands in the pot and beginning sorting out of the puzzle at hand, but it would be rude to start an investigation without one Miss Marta Cabrera by his side.
Up until very recently, their partnership had been a rather informal affair. Benoit Blanc had not been in the market for a partner — indeed, it is almost better for his brand, image, and reputation if he works alone — but he must admit that he has grown rather fond of Marta’s company. She is kind and clever and intent upon doing right by other people, and all of those traits are invaluable in their line of work. Her only tiny failing is, perhaps her inability to lie without needing to immediately rush towards the nearest bathroom to vacate the contents of her stomach, however, Benoit is more than capable of lying on both of their behalves. Little white lies are enormously useful for gathering information, if a tad morally questionable. He doesn’t particularly mind operating in a slightly morally grey area if circumstances call for it, but it is nice to know that he can count on Marta to keep both of their feet firmly planted to the floor.
His restless fingers guide the quarter onto his thumbnail, and after a momentary pause, he idly flicks it into the air, watching the silver coin spin in midair as it first rises and then falls in a single, fluid motion.
A basic illustration of the inevitability of cause and effect.
The seemingly inevitable effect, however, is interrupted by a small hand reaching past him — snatching the coin out of midair before Benoit even has a chance to catch it himself.
“Lose something?” Marta asks as she draws even with Benoit’s shoulder, dry amusement running wild beneath the question.
“You, Miss Cabrera, are late,” Benoit Blanc responds. Despite the gruffness of the observation, his eyes sparkle when Marta presents the stolen coin to him on her open palm. The corners of his lips twitch upward in an almost imperceptible smile as he reclaims his property and tucks it into the breast pocket of his suit coat.
Marta wrinkles her nose and averts her eyes, looking away from the investigator and towards the empty space on the wall. “You didn’t tell me which room you were in.”
Just out of the corner of her eye, she glimpses Benoit’s widening smile.
“Did I not?” His accent lingers on the pronoun, guiding the words into a dance with a dip, a spin, and a sly wink.
Marta meets the question with a smile of her own. “No.”
“Next time, I’ll be sure to make it entirely clear.” His grin fades away as he inhales, reorienting his mind and his body towards the problem at hand. “Now then, shall we get to it?”
Marta nods, and without waiting for any further information, Benoit launches into the brief.
“Last night, at approximately 10:30pm in the evening, two men disguised as delivery drivers were granted access to the closed museum by the night watchman. Once they were inside the building, they subdued and bound the guard, locked him rather unceremoniously in the basement, and proceeded to remove two extremely valuable paintings from their frames. On their way back out again, they deleted all of the security footage using the computer at the front desk. Due to a lapse in payments to their security company, none of the footage has been allowed to be transferred to off-site servers in months, so most unfortunately, that was the only available copy. The board of directors does not have confidence in the police’s ability to solve this case, so we have been brought on to provide the investigation with a sense of direction.”
Marta nods slowly, lips parting slightly as she grinds a thought against the point of a single tooth with the probing tip of her tongue. “How is it that a group of people in charge of maintaining a collection of masterpieces just forgets to pay their bills?” The very idea is entirely incomprehensible. Though she only recently came into possession of a small fortune and the estate that came alongside it, she cannot imagine allowing herself to fall victim to that kind of complacency. She is all too aware of how close Ransom came to getting away with murder on those very grounds.
“The original owner of the collection and this home — one Miss Arabella Smith — passed away in 1852, leaving behind both a fund consisting of her money and assets and a set of instructions that stipulate that the contents of the collection must not be altered in any way whatsoever. For a decent while, her immediate family managed the museum, but sometime in the middle of the last century, both the funds and the museum’s general oversight and management were transferred to a board of trustees. The current head of the board — Henry Nielson — told the police in an interview early this morning that the amount of money available in the trust has dipped perilously close to zero, and as such, they are currently low on funds.”
“Have they not requested donations?”
“They have, but apparently they have not made very much headway, and it appears that a former member of that very board participated in a great deal of money laundering in order to pay off his gambling debts.”
“Sounds like an unfortunate situation to be in.”
“Indeed.”
Marta takes a step forward, squinting as she peers at the small sliver of canvas peeking out from beneath the edge of the empty frame. She doesn’t know much about art thievery, but to her, it seems hasty, sloppy, and unprofessional to remove a painting in this way. It must impact the value to lose the edges like that, and surely it can’t take all that much longer to take the frame off of the wall and properly dismount the painting.
She takes another small shuffle forward, and near her feet, something beeps.
On instinct, she flinches, jumping away from the wall and holding her empty hands in the air, palms facing out in a gesture of innocence, proving that she has not touched anything.
Behind her, Benoit Blanc releases a tiny chuckle. A couple careful steps carry him towards the small device set into the floor, and he nudges it with the sole of his shoe. “Basic motion detectors. Primarily, they’re meant to prevent visitors from getting too cozy with the art. According to several members of the staff, you would not believe the number of people who constantly try to touch things that do not belong to them.”
Marta winces in sympathy and lowers her hands.
“I can believe it just fine, actually.” As a nurse, she has witnessed a great deal of thoughtless entitlement firsthand. “Do those alarms get recorded anywhere? Like a record of when people were near the art and which alarm they set off?”
Bemused curiosity trespasses upon Benoit’s brow. “I do not know.”
“It could tell use whether or not the thieves knew what they intended to take, or if it was just an impulsive grab. Plus, if they’ve been here before last night, to scope out the scene, their names should be on a record somewhere. I’m sure the museum keeps employment records, and maybe a guest log and a record of credit cards people used to purchase tickets…” She trails off, lost in her racing thoughts. Though she and Benoit might not have access to the most obvious source of information on these thieves — the security footage — that doesn’t mean that their aren’t other helpful sources of information available to them. Cases are just as often founded upon circumstantial evidence as concrete evidence, and they are not prosecutors. They only need to pinpoint the most likely suspects, not sentence them or prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Clever,” Benoit says as he digs around in his pockets, obviously looking for something. Eventually, he is hand resurfaces with a thin leather wallet perched between his fingers. He tosses it at Marta with gentle, nonchalant ease, and she catches it with both hands.
“There’s a security clearance badge in there in case anyone decides to give you grief. Would you like to chase down your suspicious records while I talk to our security officer turned hostage to see if he has any insight on the motion detectors?”
Marta nods in reply, and without another word, the pair veers off in opposite directions and temporarily parts ways.
The police have decided to detain the security guard in a small restoration office on the second floor. As Benoit Blanc approaches the door, the officer on duty offers him a nod of greeting and acknowledgement. Though there are many members of law enforcement who are resentful of the presence of outsiders during an investigation, the men assigned to this particular case have at least chosen to behave cordially. Art thefts in general lie somewhat beyond the scope of typical police work, nonetheless thefts of this magnitude and high visibility, and no doubt, these officers have realized that they need all the help they can get.
Or, at least, they’ve agreed to keep largely to themselves, and that’s good enough for him.
If neither group manages to solve this case within the first forty-eight hours, it is possible that it may never be solved. That is an unacceptable outcome, and one that will tarnish all of their records.
Cause and effect.
The door hinges squeak slightly as Benoit turns the knob and eases it open.
Based on the information that has filtered down to him so far this morning, Benoit has yet to pin down the security guard’s motives, intentions, and character, however, he knows that the police have yet to eliminate the young man as a person of interest and possible colluder. As such, Benoit continues to regard him with a certain amount of cautious suspicion, even though he has his doubts about the fellow’s involvement. He was hired too recently, he is too detached from the usual histories and patterns present in criminality, he is still too visibly shaken in the wake of being held at gunpoint, bound, and imprisoned to have been consciously involved in any part of the plan.
As Benoit crosses the room, pulls out a chair, and takes a seat at the cluttered table, the security guard regards him nervously. The office is full to the brim with art restoration supplies, and indeed, it is a small miracle that there is room for both of men to exist within its walls. There are paints, brushes, and containers of other, less easily identifiable liquids strewn about on every available surface. Papers lie on the floor in crumbled heaps. An apron is thrown haphazardly over a mirror. Several photographs of the restorer who works in this space line the desk, both with his friends and his family and with the bright red sports car that he presumably drives. Benoit glances at the man a few times, memorizing his face. If they have not decided upon a concrete suspect by the end of the day, then he and Marta will have to track him down tomorrow when he comes into work.
Perhaps the most notable thing in the room, however, is a half-restored painting is perched on an easel against the opposite wall, and its subject — a rather dejected looking lamb — regards the room through one freshly revealed eye and one eye that is still buried beneath layers upon layers of aged and weathered glaze. Insofar as watchful entities go, it is equally as effective as the partially disabled security cameras and twice as unsettling. The security guard has the great fortune of being seated with his back to the dreadful thing, but from his current position, Benoit Blanc has no choice but to be constantly aware of it. It lurks over the man’s shoulder, just barely out of focus, but its haunted gaze still cuts like a dagger to the heart.
Benoit does not particularly care for it nor the dreadful shiver that it sends down his spine, but he does his absolute best to ignore it.
“Good afternoon, Eddie,” Benoit says with the same detached, pleasant amusement with which he treats most of his witnesses and suspects. In his early days, he learned that people find the manner both comforting and authoritative, and it swiftly became a habit.
The security guard, Eddie, sweeps his eyes over Benoit with a visible degree of nervousness. “You a fed?”
“I’m a private investigator. The museum hired me to hasten the investigation into last night’s events.”
Eddie wets his lips and nods once. “Makes sense, I guess.”
“Now, Eddie, I know you’re new here. Do you mind telling me about both how long you’ve been working here and how you came to find this position?”
Benoit does his best to remain attentive to the conversation, but the painting continues to gnaw at his resolve, drawing his eyes away every so often and clouding the edges of his vision. He can’t help but notice a bit of peeling at the corner of the canvas, and he idly wonders if that is a side-effect of the restoration process. He makes a mental note to research the art of painting restoration the next time he has a decent day off. Like many of the people in this profession, Benoit enjoys immersing himself in a wide variety of fields, activities, and areas of study. One never knows what piece of expertise might prove vital to solving a case. During one investigation, uncovering a trail of evidence relied entirely upon establishing a suspect’s extended family tree, an idea that spawned from a several weeks long dive into the phenomenon of online genealogy.
“Yeah, so,“ Eddie starts, straightening in his chair and scratching the bridge of his nose with a fingernail recently gone ragged from frantically trying to undo his bonds, “I moved to the area a couple months ago with my boyfriend so that he could, you know, care for his mom. She’s sick, see, and while I was poking around the internet and the papers for a job, this night guard position opened it. They didn’t require any kind of experience or anything, so I thought I’d apply, and they hired me. I didn’t ever think there would be any kind of incident, though. It feels like more of a movie thing than an actual real-life thing.”
“Are you aware of any of the circumstances surrounding the position becoming available?”
Eddie shakes his head. “It felt rude to ask, if I’m honest. Figured it wasn’t cursed or anything and that the guy had just moved on. As far as I know, I never met him.”
The tips of Benoit’s fingers gently tap the surface of the table, which is coated with a slightly sticky layer of partially-dried oil paint. He had hoped to get more information out of the kid before circling around to the most pressing question at hand — something that he could pass on to Marta while she digs through her piles of papers — but this guard does not seem to be as in-the-know as he had originally believed.
“One last thing for now, Eddie. Those motion detectors that beep whenever someone gets too close to the art, does that information get stored anywhere?”
Almost surprisingly, given the notable dearth of security footage, Eddie nods.
Benoit Blanc arches a single eyebrow. “And where does it go?”
“It reports straight to the main computer at the security desk, in a folder with a bunch of letters and numbers in the title. Can never remember what it’s called exactly, but you can’t miss it. That folder’s locked with a code, though.”
“Who sets that code?”
“I do.”
“So any possible intruders would have been unlikely to delete it?” Benoit begin to feel a distinct sense of anticipatory excitement buzzing beneath the surface of his skin, though he keeps it locked tightly behind the mast of professional curiosity.
“Suppose so, yeah.”
Benoit extracts a tiny notebook and a pen from the inside pocket of his suit coat and slides them across the dirty and mottled surface of the table. “Do you mind writing that down for me?”
On the other side of the building, Marta Cabrera roots through the varied contents of a disorganized filing cabinet in the main office. Tayshia Robinson, the museum’s curator — a middle-aged woman with greying hair and a rather distinguished-looking pair of glasses — stands slightly behind her with her hands clasped tensely in front of her body.
“Have you noticed any suspicious activity around the museum lately?” Even as she asks the question, Marta feels self-conscious and a little bit silly. Despite Benoit’s insistence that she is well-suited for this line of work, Marta still feels like a little kid playing dress-up, clomping about in an over-sized jacket and her father’s shoes. Nothing about these conversations feels natural yet, and she has begun to wonder if they ever will.
“The security guard — Ed — he’s new, but other than that, I haven’t seen anything change, really.” There is a breathy, almost self-conscious flurry of laughter before she composes herself and adds, “Honestly, it’s hard to notice suspicious activity in a place like this. People pay to stare at valuable objects, after all, and it’s hard to distinguish innocent interest from possibly devious intentions.”
Marta nods as she extracts a folder from one of the over-crowded drawers. It contains the archived applications of everyone who has ever applied for a job at the museum, and as she flips through the pages, keeping an eye out for suspicious names or interesting histories, she asks, “Who held the position before you hired Ed?”
“A man named David. He worked here for about five years, but he turned in his resignation out of the blue a little over a month ago. He said he got offered a better opportunity elsewhere and that he couldn’t turn it down.”
“Did he say where he was going?” Marta asks, pausing to glance back over her shoulder at the curator, who purses her lips and shakes her head.
“I didn’t think to ask, if I’m honest. There was a lot going on at the time, so idle small talk was not high on my list of priorities.”
Marta returns to her page-flipping, and when she spots an application with ‘David Frost’ in the header, she tugs it free and sets the rest of the folder aside.
At a glance, it appears to be a perfectly normal application for a job like this — a series of odd jobs, none of them held for very long and a high school education completed somewhere on the other side of the country — but the timing of the man’s exist is too suspicious to be overlooked, and she would like to try to call him if the number listed on his application is still in service.
“Have you seen any ex-employees in the museum lately? Maybe someone visiting their old haunts?”
Tayshia shakes her head. “The woman who founded the museum gave strict instructions that nothing could ever be added or subtracted from her collection, so with the exception of art students and a few enthusiasts, we do not get many repeat visitors. Without temporary and rotating exhibits to draw people in and no new additions to share, this theft is already the most press and attention the museum has received in the past several decades.”
“My partner, Mr. Blanc, mentioned that the museum has been having money problems; do you think that the lack of repeat attendance might contribute to that? “
The curator shrugs. “It certainly plays a role. I’m not sure if you’ve been made aware, but we have had larger difficulties, as well. A former member of the board of trustees was suspected of laundering money from the trust.”
“Is he in jail?” Marta holds the job application delicately between the forefinger and thumb of both hands, as if it might suddenly bite her or catch fire.
“No,” the older woman replies. “He skipped town as soon as he was accused. No one’s head from him since. There’s a report on file with the local police, and they mentioned something about potentially securing a warrant for his arrest, but for all intents and purposes, it would seem that he’s simply vanished. I have the last picture of him, actually. He’s just there, in the front row,” she says, pointing at a group photo on the wall.
He’s rather unremarkable looking, but that's not really a clue.
Marta’s eyes drop towards her hands as she thinks. At once, there seems to be at both too many viable suspects and too few — too much information and far, far too little.
She shakes her head to clear it and then gestures at the phone on the woman’s desk. “Do you mind if I borrow this?”
Benoit Blanc sits in the cushioned chair at the security desk, idly fidgeting as he waits for the computer’s many monitors to boot up and spring to life. He doesn’t care for computers, really. Sure, he appreciates the many things that they’re capable of accomplishing — the monitoring and shortcuts that make his job that little bit easier — but he avoids using them if he can help it. Keyboards and mice and LCD screens lack the general mystique that investigations ought to have — the crinkling, aging paper, pen impressions, and clattering typewriters of a bygone era. Normally, he gets the police department to handle this kind of task on his behalf, but in this particular case, time is of the essence, and he doesn’t have time to wait around while someone else combs through the illusionary world of 1’s and 0’s.
When the monitors finally flicker to life, Benoit sits a little bit straighter and his restless fidgeting is suddenly reduced to a foregone afterthought.
It does not take him long to locate the folder in question, and its contents, as promised, are locked behind a passcode. Brimming with poorly restrained eagerness, he slides the notebook back out of his pocket and flips it open to the page upon which Ed had written the code:
HellYeahNationalTreasure3!
As far as passwords go, it’s a damn sight more effective than ‘Password123,’ but it still makes Benoit shake his head with slight disapproval. If he was in charge of setting up security codes for an art museum, he would probably think twice before glorifying a series of movies in which Nicolas Cage robs a large number of museums, archives, and historical sites and defaces a priceless artifact to boot. He does not doubt that it was likely intended as an ironic, enthusiastic tribute, but any detective worth their salt would raise an eyebrow upon making such a discovery.
It does not indicate guilt, in this case, but it is rife with secondhand embarrassment.
Upon striking the enter key, the computer’s hard drive whirs in a flurry of activity, and the center monitor fills with a list of numbers. One column lists times, and the other lists the assigned number of the device that was triggered. At the top of the page, he recognizes Marta’s misstep from less than an hour ago, and as he scrolls down, he spots several incidents of interest during the time of the theft.
Benoit finds the right button in the task bar and hits print.
The chart may not be as exciting as a treasure map, but he does not doubt that following its trail will provide them with at least some answers to the puzzle.
Back in the curator’s office, Marta is on her third — and last — attempt to contact David Frost. Though this number has not been disconnected — which is a good sign, all things considered — the owner of the phone has yet to pick up. On her first attempt, she even left an overly long and distinctly awkward voicemail, just in case he might be the sort of person to screen his calls over the answering machine before accepting them. “Hello, this is Marta Cabrera. My partner and I are currently investigating and theft that, uh, occurred at the Smith Museum late last night. The current stage has informed us that you worked security there up until recently, and if you are available to speak on the matter, please call me back as soon as possible. Thank you.”
All told, the contents of the voicemail was not too shabby, but she still feels like her delivery is somewhat lacking. She gets too caught up in her compassion for how panicked the person on the other side of the line must be, too flustered by the thought that either her intentions might be misconstrued or she might misconstrue theirs. She doesn’t want to make other people uncomfortable, and invariably, that worry leaves her feeling uncomfortable in their stead.
She wants everyone to know that she is willing to speak with the with open ears, heart, and mind, however, she has a terribly difficult time reconciling that desire with the decisive and vague air that she feels like an investigator should have.
Her awkward voicemail, however, is quickly made moot.
On the third ring of the third call, someone picks up.
Martha’s heart leaves her chests and rockets up her esophagus, firmly situating itself in the back of her throat.
She almost forgets to respond to the questioning, “Hello?” that mets her on the other end of the line, and when she finally does, the words spill from her lungs in a frantic rush.
“Hi, is this David Frost?”
There is a weighty pause before the stranger finally says, “It is.”
“I’m Marta Cabrera, a private investigator working with Mr. Benoit Blanc. I was wondering if you had time to answer a few questions?”
“Sure, is this about Jordan Fell?”
Marta blinks once, confused, “Who?
“He’s, um, he’s the guy that got kicked off the board for some white collar crime or something? Went down a couple of days before I quit, but I only met the guy a couple times. Figured I’d get called even though I don’t have much to say.”
“Oh… no.” Marta inhales sharply as she gathers her thoughts. “I’m not sure if you’ve seen the news, but the museum’s collection was robbed last night. A Monet and a Vermeer were stolen.”
A near-breathless curse hisses through the receiver. “Shit.”
Unsure how to respond, Marta patiently awaits further elaboration. She does, however, go ahead and set the application down on the surface of the desk, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles with the soft pads of her fingers. Maybe it is a misguided impulse, but she already believes that he was not involved. Not purposefully, at least. Of course, that does not rule out the possibility that he might have linked confidential information to the wrong people — got drunk at a crowded bar one night, told a significant other about the lapsed security payments, accidentally planted an idea of an easy score in the head of an earnest opportunist — but she is already certain that he is not their man.
David regains his ability to speak a few heartbeats later. “Sorry, I know you shouldn’t curse at somebody who’s just trying to do their job, but damn. I knew the museum had its fair share of problems, but I didn’t think that something like this could happen there. I worked there for years, and it started to feel like home, in its own way. I knew that place like the back of my hands, learned all about the paintings, loved them as much as anything.”
Gently — hesitantly — Marta slips in a vital question, “Do you mind if I ask why you left if you loved it so much?”
She can practically hear his shoulders lifting in a nonchalant shrug. “Jobs that you love don’t always pay well. I have a daughter. Her mother’s no longer in the picture, and I want to be able to give her the kind of life that she deserves. When a buddy of mine told me that I could make twenty percent more if I started working at his company, I couldn’t turn it down in good conscience.” He swallows hard, the sound audible through the phone.
“Can I ask what you’re doing now?”
“Sure. I drive an armored truck. Late nights and early mornings, mostly. It’s funny — all those years as a night shift security gears netted me the job almost immediately, so I’ve really got to thank Arabella and her legacy for that.”
He sounds so pleased, so proud, so profoundly grateful that a small smile situates itself upon Marta’s lips, sneaking past her stress and nervousness and self-doubt. “One more thing, if you don’t mind.”
“Fire away.”
“During your time here, were you aware of any plans to rob the museum? Or do you know of anyone who might have had a viable motive?”
David thinks for a long moment, humming thoughtfully into the receiver. “I don’t think it takes much to rob that museum. You just have to be desperate or greedy or ballsy enough to follow through with it, or all three of those things together.”
Marta nods, twisting a single finger around the tightly coiled wire of the phone. “Thank you. Is this the best number to reach you in case I need to contact you again? Or if my partner would like to have a few words?”
“I’m a bit easier to reach on my cell. Let me give that to you real quick.”
In want of an available piece of paper, Marta rolls up her sleeve and writes the number on the inside of her forearm with a sharpie that she swiped from the curator’s desk.
After she ends the call, she blows on the ink a couple times to dry it before tugging the sleeve of her sweater back down her arm.
She leaves the no-longer-useful job application on the desk so that it can be appropriately re-filed, and smiles at the curator on her way out the door. She is ready to reconvene with her partner and discuss their respective developments, omitting, of course, the few moments in which she had embarrassed herself.
Benoit Blanc — holding a print-out of the motion detector alarms from last night upon which the relevant times have been aggressively highlighted in order to reduce the metaphorical noise that surrounds them — works his way through the many interlocking rooms of the museum. He has gone through the list twice now. The first time, he had devoted himself to orientating himself within the space and the narrative, marking the locations where motion alarms were triggered with brightly colored numbers fashioned from strips of duct tape on the floor.
One. Two. Three. Four.
There are only four places where alarms were triggered, and thus, there are only four locations of interest.
Two of those locations are in front of the empty frames in which the stolen works once resided, one is in front of a rather large tapestry strung between an unforgiving assortment of bronze rods and bars, and the last is in front of a large picture window — an odd choice, seeing as it is single-paned, intact, and completely impossible to open. He cannot imagine why a motion detector would have been installed there in the first place, since it is not a possible point of entrance, but in this moment, he is incredibly glad that it was.
On his second time tracing the thieves’ path, he lingers in each location, bright blue eyes seeking out possible clues.
He desperately wishes that he could partake in a cigar right about now. He always feels like he thinks a bit better with a bit of smoke in his lungs — but he would never dare to defile a sacred space with the thoughtless side-effects of his own vices.
Though he does not expect any real breakthroughs wherein physical evidence is concerned — police have already swept the place for fingerprints, fiber evidence, and footprints and found nothing except a few nondescript smudges — rather, he’d like to place himself in the mindset of the people who triggered those alarms, to reverse-engineer a suspect from their actions. He is much like a paleontologist reconstructing a dinosaur from a trail of footprints cast in stone, a pile of bones, and a bit of fossilized dung. It is a difficult task, but not an impossible one.
From the very outset, it is blindingly obvious that the thieves were both familiar with the layout of the museum and had a predetermined set of targets. This was not an improvisational crime. If it was, there would have been more alarms tripped, more evidence of a frantic back and forth. This was planned, and Benoit would be willing to bet that at least one of the two men has a personal relationship with the museum.
He wonders if Marta has managed to extract and information from the museum records yet. An impatient part of him itches to send her a quick text — and, indeed, his fingers twitch at his side with the ghost of an impulse — but he refrains from doing so. He does not doubt that she will seek him out as soon as she has any information worth sharing.
She is a practical and sensible person, after all.
He moves from the location of the first stolen painting to the tapestry, standing on top of his taped number. There is a focused intensity burning in his eyes as he studies it, sweeping his eyes from top to bottom, left to right, and back again. He must admit, he does not entirely understand why the thieves would have stopped here, of all places. They clearly knew the place well, and both of the stolen items had been canvas paintings that would have been lucrative hits on the black market. They wanted things that were easy to transport, masterpieces that could be rolled up and hidden away in cardboard poster tubes.
The tapestry, on the other hand, is enormous. There is no clear way to detach it from the crisscrossing network of metal pipes from which it hangs, and anyone who knows what they are doing would have written it off as a lost cause before so much as setting foot within the museum, and tapestries hardly have the brand recognition of famous painters. It would not only be difficult to transport, but impossible to unload without drawing undue attention to whatever dealer they hired to act as their middleman.
This leaves only a handful of explanations available, but Benoit finds himself learning towards one option in particular.
He takes a step forward, peering around the edges of the tapestry, scrutinizing the many places where it is attached to the supports. The motion detector beeps once as he enters its invisible domain, but he disregards the sound. He does not plan to touch the art, nonetheless steal it.
It takes a few minutes for him to locate the signs of activity for which he’s searching, but when he does, he allows himself to break into a satisfied, tight-lipped smile.
There are a series of shallow scratches marking one of the bronzed poles supporting the tapestry, and a small collection of frayed fibers where the fabric has come loose.
One of the thieves had tried to work it free.
One of them behaved impulsively.
One of them had deviated from the plan.
It leads Benoit to believe that only one of the men was familiar with the plan. Only one of them had been the brains and driving motive behind the operation. He and Marta only need to focus their intention on tracking down one primary suspect. The other one will come later, as they were likely hired to be the man’s back-up, lured in by the promise of an easy and lucrative payday, and easily tempted by things that are grand and substantial and expensive-looking.
Shoes tap gently on the hardwood floor behind him, and he turns, bright blue eyes falling upon Marta Cabrera’s warm and familiar face.
She glances down at the number two on the floor before looking back up at him with a question etched upon her brow. “Find anything?”
Benoit beckons her forward with curled fingers, and once she’s flush with the wall, he points at the tell-tale scratch marks on the beams.
“How did you find these?” Marta asks, slightly awed.
“The motion detector records were passcode-protected, so the thieves weren’t able to dispose of the records. There were four separate incidents last night, and this was one of them.”
Marta looks down at the number again, understanding dawning across her face. “The second one?”
Benoit nods once, sharply.
“But they only stole paintings, why would they go near a tapestry like this?”
“It would seem to me,” he says, lingering on the words with a showman’s flair for the dramatic, “That one of them made the plans, and the other went a bit rogue.”
There’s a pause as he waits for the information to sink in, and once her eyes have cleared slightly, he poses a question of his own, “What did you find?”
“I managed to dig up a phone number and spoke to the security guard that quit several weeks ago. It doesn’t seem like he was involved, but he confirmed that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to rob the museum. He said it really could’ve been anyone, that it wasn’t necessarily an inside job.”
Disappointment creeps in at the edges of Benoit’s expression, but it forces it back. He had hoped for something a bit more helpful than that. “It’s a shame, it would have crafted quite the satisfying narrative if he had done it.”
Marta merely shrugs. She’s not interested in crafting interesting narratives, only in discovering the truth. She wants to do right by other people, always.
“He didn’t even know the thefts happened. He thought I was calling about the money laundering.”
“Don't mind me asking, Marta, but could he have been lying to you?” Benoit asks, brushing his thumb thoughtfully across the knuckle of his pointer finger as he begins to walk, moving towards the next flagged location on his walk.
Marta wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think so.” Though she is often inclined to believe the best of people regardless of whether or not she knows them personally, she is not so naive as to think that everyone has good intentions, especially when she is dealing with someone who exists in such close proximity with a serious crime scene. However, that does not change the fact that she had a good feeling about David.
In front of her, Benoit hums pensively — a short, deep, quiet sound. Though they have only bene working together for a short while, relatively speaking, Marta already knows that that noise means that he thinks she’s probably right. Despite herself, she feels a little flutter of pride directly behind her breastbone. She doesn’t require Benoit’s approval to function, and she is more than willing to stand her ground in an argument should one ever arise, but it’s nice to feel heard and acknowledged. It dispels some of the nervous tension that built up earlier in the day during awkward voicemails and cliché, self-conscious lines of questioning.
“This money launderer —” he says after a lengthy pause, glancing back over his shoulder as they work their way deeper into the museum — “Do we have any information on his current whereabouts?”
Marta flicks her tongue over her lips before replying. “According to the curator, he pretty much disappeared after hearing that other people might have gotten wind of what he was up to. She mentioned that the police might have a warrant on him, but didn’t say much else. I get the feeling that he didn’t spend much time with any of the people here. Even the old security guard said that he only met him once or twice.”
“I imagine he would still know his way around the museum, and that he would have a fairly strong understanding of which pieces might be valuable on the black market.” It’s an observation and not a question, but the pitch of it curves up at the end, presenting an open ending, a foundation for Marta to build upon, and she does.
“He would have also known about the security cameras.”
“Exactly.”
Benoit bypasses the location marked with a jagged, angular number three, choosing to instead move towards the window that so stymied him earlier. He would very much like Marta’s insight on that aspect of the crime. Perhaps she might see something that he hasn’t yet noticed. Her perspective is often different from his, which is one of the many reasons why he thinks that they complement each other well as partners.
Several heartbeats pass in silence before another thought occurs to her, “And Eddie wouldn’t have known what he looked like, since he’s never met him before. He was already gone by the time Eddie was hired. Do you think he would have known about the new security guard?”
Benoit shrugs.
“Probably. He would have only needed to stake the place out once, see who was walking in and out, check the car and the license plate, and know that he didn’t need to cover his face in order to remain unidentified.”
“Or maybe he didn’t care about being recognized. He brought a gun. Maybe he was prepared to shoot anyone who saw him.” It is a bit of a leap, logistically speaking, but at this point, they are brainstorming. This is a puzzle built on hypotheticals. If this man committed that crime, then what does that tell us?
Cause and effect.
One informs the other. The suspect informs the crime, and thus, the crime informs the suspect. Understanding the scene can lead you towards the sort of person who might have staged it. It’s the sort of thing that Marta’s sister loves — decoding puzzles, solving the storylines in her tv shows, figuring out the next event in an ongoing line — and though she doesn’t have the same penchant for those kinds of exercises, she often did the same kind of decoding as a nurse. Medicine has a significant amount of overlap with crime solving. Something new is introduced to a closed system — an infection, a virus, an injury — and you use the resulting fallout to track down the source of the problem.
And both medicine and criminal investigations operate on tight deadlines. Wait too long, and sometimes there’s no recovery.
Benoit pauses in front of the window, directly on top of his taped number four, and Marta comes to a stop by his side. The same puzzlement that had descended upon Benoit’s face quirks her brow and tugs the corners of her mouth down into a small, confused frown. Her eyes flick back and forth over the glass, squinting slightly against the glare of the late afternoon sunlight that bursts above the roof of the neighboring building.
She blinks twice to clear away the haze of her tears as her eyes adjust, and ends up raising a hand to shield her eyes from the invasive rays.
“According to the motion detector reports —“ Benoit starts, taking a step closer towards the window and moving into the shadow cast by the opposite building — “This is the last place the thieves tripped an alarm before leaving.”
Marta, too, moves out of reach of the blinding sun, though she doesn’t yet lower her protective hand. “Does it open?”
Benoit shakes his head. “Believe it or not, that is the first thing I checked. It doesn’t open, there’s no signs of a struggle to force it out of the wall, and according to the map I picked up out front, there has never been anything displayed here. So why on earth would an experienced, focused thief stop here?”
Marta inhales through her nose, clasping her hands behind her back and shifting her weight from sneakered foot to sneakered foot as she considers the situation, trying to think not only about what they can see here and now, but what someone might have been able to see last night, in the middle of a robbery.
It would have been dark. There are only a couple sets of lights that stay on all night, according to the museum curator, mostly over exits and inset into the floor. They are things you need in case of an emergency, but they also would have provided the thieves with both a clear path in and a clear path out.
A double-edged sword, to be sure.
The only other lights would have had to been exterior. If the thieves were disguised as delivery guys, it’s unlikely that they would have been carrying flashlights with them. That would have looked too suspicious. Any other light would have had to come from outside the building — a floodlight, an open window, the steady red light of a security camera.
Marta steps forward, almost pressing her nose against the glass as her eyes scan the eaves of the adjacent building.
There, just at the upper corner of the neighboring building, tucked away beneath the protective shade of a gutter, lurks the watchful eye of a security camera.
Benoit and Marta practically run from the building and across the street. The bark of an irritated policeman securing the museum perimeter reminds them to watch where they’re going, and though they both offer the man their own version of a hasty and sincere apology, neither of them slows down.
The hunt is on.
The fox has been scented on the wind, and the hounds have started to raise a proper ruckus.
The building next door is an old-fashioned English Tea Room, also made out of a converted historic home. It is, perhaps, not a business that necessarily needs to arm itself with a top of the line security system, but if its cameras are both on and working, their vigilance might help identify the thieves and track down the stolen works before they have a chance to fall into private hands and disappear from public view and the reach of the law.
The poor hostess on duty is terribly confused when the pair of harried investigators burst through the door, and Marta ends up wrestling the conversation away from Benoit in a desperate attempt to make the situation and their needs a bit clearer.
A phone call to the tea room’s owner confirms that the security cameras on the property are, indeed, running and that their footage gets routed to a hard driver where it is stored for two weeks before being reviewed. At that time, anything of interest is clipped and stored permanently, and then the rest of the footage is deleted.
Much more effective than the museum’s broke and broken system.
They do, however, find themselves resigned into a pair of worn, vintage armchairs while they wait for the owner to arrive and pull up the footage for them, since she is the only one with access. The entire building smells like chamomile, incense, and Chanel No. 5, and both Marta and Benoit looks distinctly out of place. A large collection of china dolls stares them down from their place on the window sill, passing judgment on the obvious intruders in their midst.
Between the dolls and the partially restored painting that resided in the second-floor office earlier, Benoit feels as though he has spent far too much time being stared at by inanimate objects today. He hopes that their next case — whatever it may be — involves a significantly smaller number of eyes.
He pulls a coin out of his pocket and begins turning it over in his fingers in the same manner in which he had twirled it earlier when he was waiting for Marta to join him. His pent-up energy has to be channeled somewhere before it has a chance to wreck both his calm and his focus.
Next to him, Marta keeps her feet flat on the floor and her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the window and onto the street beyond, patiently keeping watch for the restaurant owner’s arrival. Waiting is difficult, especially since she knows that every passing second could mean that the both the thieves and the stolen paintings are getting further and further out of their reach. Every moment spent at rest feels like wasted time, even though it doesn’t stop her from thinking and theorizing and coming up with new ways to connect the evidential dots that are currently available to them.
Eventually, after what seems like half an age, a well-dressed woman comes through the door. Almost immediately upon seeing her, Marta and Benoit both leap to their feet, holding out their hands in a rushed greeting.
Thankfully, she is not interested in wasting any time, and she almost immediately herds them into a small room on the second floor, full of boxes upon boxes of documents and receipts, and a single desktop computer that is several models out of date.
It does not take long to pull up the appropriate file and to cycle through the previous night’s footage from the camera that faces the road. When the figures in the window comes into focus, Benoit releases a pent-up breath, allowing it to hiss through his teeth.
He recognizes one of the figures.
At his side, Marta also tenses.
However, when they speak, they say different things.
“The money launderer.”
“The in-house art restorer.”
Their eyes meet, and the realization dawns.
Though they both expected to only recognize one person, they recognize both.
They copy the footage to a cheap thumb drive on Marta’s car keys, give the owner their quick and earnest thanks, and hustle back towards the museum.
Benoit Blanc insists on gathering everyone in front of the art restoration office, a process that requires a significant amount of leg work and persuasion on both their parts. It isn’t a particularly wide hallway, since the building was initially designed to be a home, rather than a museum, but when everyone huddles in close, they almost manage to form a presentable assembly. Benoit generally prefers to present his final reveals in libraries when they are available — libraries do, after all, tend to possess a certain flair for showmanship — but he has been backed into a corner both by the design of the building and the circumstances of the prestige.
He coughs once, clearing his throat before he begins to speak.
“I spent most of this morning thinking about cause and effect, and the many ways by which events come to pass. It seems an appropriate theme to reflect upon when one is privileged enough to be stand in a place that has undergone so few, yet so many, changes over the years. Though Miss Arabella Smith mandated that her collection remained unaltered after her death, management of this establishment has shifted over the years. It passed from caretaker to caretaker until finally being looked after by a rotating board of directors, which is still in place today, albeit with different membership.
“Those of you involved in this case are likely aware that the museum has been experiencing other changes as well. The money has all but vanished. Visitor rates have declined. Security has lapsed. A man trusted with the care and keeping of these precious masterpieces went rogue and stole money from the museum’s pockets in order to serve his own ends.
“And despite all that, the art has changed.
“Sure, it has not walked out these doors — not even last night — but it has changed. Even when kept in pristine condition, art fades. Art degrades. In order to retain its proper glory, people are hired to restore it, to touch up the cracks, removed the weathered glaze, reveal the truth that lies beneath the aging surface.
“Last night, all of those changes converged into a single, perfect storm, spawning the birth of this very crime. Two men, both with enormous familiarity with the museum and its collection, chose to put their heads together and form a plan. They carefully selected the pieces they wanted to take based on the ease of transport, how easy they are to keep hidden, to tuck away in plain sight.
“One of these men was an expert in art. The other was only an expert in money, and his eyes got too big. He tried to cut down a tapestry in the center of the museum, leaving behind the scratches of a knife. He struggles, and either chooses to give up and leave it behind or he is told off by his partner for having eyes that were too big for his stomach.
“This was the first wobble in their plan. Everything else has gone smoothly, but this starts to wear and tear on them. They get nervous. They start to wonder if maybe — just maybe — they are being watched. They take one more painting, and then they look out the window in the East Hall.
“There, they see a security camera. Red light blinking in the corner of the neighboring business, and they panic. Their actions have consequences. They become suddenly aware that they’re being watched and recorded, and utterly convinced that the police might be on the way, they scramble to cover their tracks. They delete the security footage, and — most importantly — they don’t leave with the art in hand, just in case they happen to be stopped and searched.
“No — they hide it right here, under the very noses of the people who might be investigating them. Miss Cabrera, do you mind doing the honors?”
Marta takes a step forward and opens the door to the restoration office, stepping inside. Benoit holds it open, and the rapt audience presses forward, each one vying for a view inside the messy, cramped office and the conclusion of this little show.
Benoit Blanc shifts slightly, loosening his tie to fend off the rising temperatures from too many bodies being pressed too closely together. While Marta picks her way across the debris on the floor and towards the painting of the lamb that had so deeply haunted him earlier in the day, Benoit continues to talk, raising his voice ever so slightly as the thought of victory looms ever closer, shining as brightly as the thin sheen of sweat that has surfaced upon his brow.
“Cause and effect, as I said before, means that things tend to follow each other in pairs. One cannot have an action without an equal and opposite reaction. Since one of the thieves had a diverse set of resources available to him — not to mention an office that he does not have to share with any other staff members — did what he thought was most obvious.
“He went up to his office, and disguised the art in the most efficient way possible — by covering it with something else. He assumed that no one would be looking for it here. He assumed that searches of his office would be quick and sloppy. He did not account for the fact that this office was used as an interview space and holding room, that investigators would pull up a chair and come face to face with the peeling corner of his masterwork.”
There is a dramatic pause, and all eyes are on Marta, standing next to the lamb and its many dualities — finished and half-finished, young and old, art and façade.
“Miss Cabrera, if you would.”
Marta slips a single corner beneath the corner of the painting.
The lamb isn’t a piece of art at all. It’s a thin canvas print, digitally printed, something to be trotted out and displayed in front of school groups that pass through the museum to show the many jobs that exist in the space of art preservation.
It tears away with ease, and situated beneath it are the two stolen paintings, placed side by side, their edges ragged from the knives that ripped them from their frames.
There is a gasp, a silence, and then a sigh of relief.
Somewhere, somebody laughs, a sudden, euphoric release of tension.
The head police detective in charge of the officers assigned to this case pulls a radio from his vest and begins to talk to someone on the other end of the line, picking his way back out of the office and through the crowd as he puts out a formal notice that a suspect has been identified.
Marta and Benoit merely meet each other’s eyes and smile, basking in the feeling of a job well done.
A couple days later, news of the mens’ arrests traipses across the many news desks that line the city and finds its way into the mailbox of Cabrera & Blanc, Private Investigators.
Marta and Benoit unfold the paper together, eyes skimming the tight, black and white lines of newsprint while their heads jostle for the limited amount of space that lies between them.
There is a small mention of them on the second page, and when they’re done reading, they cut out the article and add it to the shadowboxes that line the back wall. Doctors line their offices in diplomas and certifications to prove their expertise. For private investigators, business and success are inherently tangled up in the concept of notoriety, and there is no better way for word to spread than for their names to hit print, and Marta and Benoit memorialize each and every occasion. Indeed, space is growing painfully limited, these days. They'll have to start condensing — downsizing the collection and putting some things into storage.
But not quite yet.
Marta has another surprise addition to tack onto the wall.
With the power of the internet, it was not all that difficult to track down a site that provides educational resources for museums and art classes and find the poster of the half-restored lamb painting behind which the two stolen masterpieces had been stashed. Once Marta caught wind of Benoit’s distaste for the lamb’s uneven gaze, and that that very distaste had been the thing that led him to notice the incongruence of the peeling corner, she couldn’t resist the temptation to hang it in their office.
She was sneaky about it, putting it up early one morning before he wandered it, tacking it up on the inside of their door.
When he finally wanders in, he greets her with a cheery, “Good morning, Marta.” It isn’t until the door swings shut behind him and he takes his seat in the chair that he notices the new poster on the wall.
In a split-second of a moment — there and gone in a flash quicker than a blink of an eye — Marta sees him flinch.
It’s almost imperceptible, but she knows that it happened, and the smallest of pleased smiles situates itself upon her lips.
“Something wrong?” she asks cheerfully, leaning forward in her chair and propping her elbow on her desk and her chin on her hand.
Benoit glances over at Marta briefly before adjusting his tie, leaning back in his chair, and propping his feet up on the table.
“I was just thinking that it is terribly fortunate that you never set your heart upon becoming an interior decorator, Miss Cabrera.”
The smile widens into a friendly, joking, familiar grin. “I don’t know. I changed careers once already this year. There’s still time.”
“Oh please,” he scoffs, leaning into the thought as he slides a pile of correspondence into his lap. “I would be lost without you by my side.”
“You survived without me for long enough.”
“And if you would so indulge me, I would prefer to continue to move forwards and make progress, rather than stumble blindly backwards.”
Marta's grin lingers on, even as Benoit looks away from her and focuses on the mail.
“Should we pick our next job then?”
Benoit rips open the letter at the top of the pile and skims its contents, raising a single eyebrow. “How do you feel about taking a trip to the countryside? It would seem that there has been a string of murders surrounding a famous horse breeder. It could very much be up our alley, and they promise to pay well.”
Marta stands, brushing imaginary dust off her lap.
“Let's go. I’ll drive.”