Chapter Forty

CHAPTER FORTY

A figure moved out of the shadows and Helen swung her gun to cover it.

“Hey, now, you wouldn’t really shoot a pregnant woman, would you?”

Naomi Ndiaye moved to stand over Martin’s body. She was wearing a Burberry trench coat slung over her shoulders. Her fitted T-shirt hugged a generous bump.

“Should you really have flown in your condition?” Natalie asked.

Naomi shrugged. “It’s not usually a problem until you’re past the second trimester. I know I look huge, but that’s a third baby for you.” She lifted her hands where we could see them. “I’m going to reach into the pocket of my coat, and you aren’t going to shoot me, Helen,” she said, giving Helen a long stare.

Helen nodded and Naomi’s hand slipped into her pocket. She came out with a bottle of something green. She twisted off the cap and for an instant I thought of gasoline or napalm or any one of a hundred nasty things she could have brought with her. But then she drank from it, a deep gulp, and gave a huge belch.

“Damn, that feels better. Ginger ale,” she explained, showing the label. “For the nausea.”

“Still?” Mary Alice asked.

Naomi made a face. “Hyperemesis gravidarum.”

Natalie nodded. “Princess Kate gets that, poor thing.”

“I get sick as a dog with each one of these babies. I’m usually done with it after the first trimester, but traveling can bring it back on,” Naomi added with a significant look at each of us.

“Well, we didn’t invite you,” I pointed out.

“No,” she said, nudging Martin’s foot with her sneaker. “I was following him.” She glanced at Helen. “I know you’re good with that, but it makes me a little nervous to have it pointed my way. Maybe you could just lower your hand and I promise not to make any sudden movements.”

Helen considered a moment. “Let Natalie pat you down.”

Naomi shook her head. “I think not. I have flown across the Atlantic, but that’s as much as I’m going to jeopardize this baby. I’m not carrying a weapon because I have no intention of getting into a fight. I’ve only had dry toast for the last twelve hours and I’m barely keeping that down. I haven’t slept since yesterday, and I think my pregnancy hemorrhoids are flaring, so the last thing I’m in the mood for is being groped by anybody. No offense, Natalie,” she added.

“None taken,” Natalie assured her.

“You poor thing,” Mary Alice said. “Would you like something to eat? Maybe you could manage an egg?”

Naomi shuddered. “Thank you, no. I intend to get this sorted and get the hell out of Dodge.” She looked at the gun in Helen’s hand. “I’m Provenance, not Exhibitions,” she reminded her. “You might be sixty, but you’re properly field trained and you have been killing people since before I was born. If I had to put odds on a fight right now, I’d say you beat me, ten to four.”

“Why only ten to four?” Helen asked.

“Because the only way we’re fighting is if you start something, and then I’m going to defend this baby until I’ve got nothing left, and I’m a biter,” Naomi told her coolly.

Helen thought a minute, then lowered her arm.

“Thank you,” Naomi said dryly. She looked around the circle. “I’m inferring this is your handiwork,” she said, pointing to the hole in Martin’s forehead.

Helen nodded. Naomi bent, one hand under her belly, and took a good look at the wound. Blood still oozed, moving slowly over his open eye, puddling in the crease of his nose. “A little to the left, but not bad at all. He looks surprised.”

“He was,” I assured her.

She reached out a hand and closed his eyes. Then she straightened, taking another deep swig of ginger ale. “Dumbass,” she said, shaking her head. She took a phone from her pocket and punched in a number. “I need a cleaning crew.” She gave the address of Benscombe Hall. “Make it fast and quiet. In the garden.” She paused and looked around. “Anybody else we need to take care of tidying up?”

“Bodyguards scattered around the property,” I told her. “Pieces of a few folks in the kitchen, but they’re probably burned up by now. And Vance Gilchrist is by the greenhouse.”

She raised her brows but didn’t reply to me. She related the information to the voice on the other end, then hung up without saying good-bye. “Twenty to thirty minutes.” She looked around. “I may have gone to Cambridge, but I am from Atlanta and this cold is about in my bones. Let’s go inside.”

She headed towards the garden shed and the rest of us looked around. Naomi had seamlessly taken charge, and we might have overpowered her—she wasn’t exactly fighting fit, and as a member of the Provenance department, her training was much less comprehensive than ours. The bottom line was, we could take her if we chose.

But we didn’t choose. Instead, we followed her into the garden shed, where we were joined by Minka and Akiko, who helped us pile up some mulch bags for Naomi to sit on. I didn’t bother to look around for Taverner. He’d have done what we asked and slipped away when the getting was good. I just hoped he’d stuck around long enough to see the end.

When we’d gotten comfortable, Naomi started to talk.

“First, I presume that you are responsible for terminating Vance Gilchrist, Thierry Carapaz, and their bodyguards,” she began.

“And Günther Paar,” I added.

She narrowed her eyes. “That was determined to be natural causes. He choked on an apple during a heart attack.”

“I shoved a piece of apple down his windpipe after Mary Alice and I slathered him in a mud wrap made with nicotine.”

Naomi’s mouth opened, then closed. And then she burst out laughing. “That is impressive, ladies. Some real old-school shit.” She sipped again from her ginger ale. “Alright, that’s another notch in the body count. Did you have help?”

“No,” I said smoothly.

She looked around the table, but nobody else was willing to give Taverner up either. She nodded. “Okay, y’all are lying to my face, but I get it. You’re protecting somebody. That’s fine, but I can’t protect you if you don’t tell me the truth.”

“Protect us?” Mary Alice asked.

Naomi’s expression was cool. “There is an entire organization sniffing after a nice fat bonus for each of your heads. And since I’m in charge now, I’m the one who can call it off. So yes—I am here to protect you.”

“Why?” Helen demanded.

Naomi pointed outside to where Martin’s body was cooling in the garden. “Because you got rid of that little shit-heel and saved me the trouble.”

Natalie’s eyes went wide. “You were after Martin?”

“For two, almost three years now, I’ve been watching him. He ingratiated himself with the board, taking on extra work, making sure he always saved the day. It was a little too perfect. It got on my tits,” she said. “So I started paying attention.”

Mary Alice spoke up. “How did you manage to keep tabs on him?”

Naomi smiled. “Every quarter when the board met for me to brief them, Martin was there too. I installed a keystroke logger on his computer and spyware on his phone. Ten minutes’ work and I was able to see everything he did, every search, every email, every nasty little move he was planning. I know his level on Angry Birds, I know his bank account is way higher than his pay grade, and I know he had a case of athlete’s foot that his doctor was concerned about because it took so long to clear up.”

“Nasty,” Natalie muttered.

Naomi grinned. “I won’t tell you about his fanfic. It’s pretty out there.”

“So you were able to see everything he did,” I said slowly. “Including setting us up.” I held her stare, but she didn’t back down.

“Yes, I was. And I knew I had no way to prove it. Anything I showed the board, he could turn around and say I had installed on his devices in order to frame him for whatever I was doing. Besides, you think they were going to listen to me? They were in this up to their hairy eyebrows.” She took one last gulp of ginger ale and slowly exhaled a low burp. “This baby is killing me by inches.”

Minka spoke up. “You need more ginger.” She pulled a tin of ginger chews from her pocket and passed it over. Naomi took one and started to suck.

“I am nice to you as long as you are nice to my friends,” Minka said sternly.

“Minka, sit down. Your Ukrainian is showing,” I told her.

Naomi looked up. “Ukrainian?” She rattled off a few phrases and Minka brightened, answering her in a chirpy voice I’d never heard her use before.

“You speak Ukrainian?” Helen asked.

Naomi shrugged. “I speak seventeen languages. Most for work. Ukrainian was just for fun.”

“Your Duolingo score must be the absolute shit,” Natalie said.

Naomi smiled. “So yes, to answer your thinly veiled accusation, Billie, I watched while Martin set you up and the board issued the termination order. I considered sending a warning, but in the end, I chose not to. The board thought four old broads—their words, not mine—wouldn’t be a match for Brad Fogerty, so they only sent one assassin on the cruise. They assumed you’d never see him coming. But I thought they were wrong. You have experience and instinct. You knew to keep your eyes open and you saved yourselves. I was betting you would.”

“You wagered with their lives,” Akiko put in suddenly.

Naomi didn’t bat an eye. “I took a calculated risk. We do that in this line of work.” She went on. “When they realized you made it off the boat, the board was divided. Paar was inclined to let it go. He had been the most reluctant to issue the termination order in the first place. But Gilchrist and Carapaz pressured him and he agreed to let the order ride. They thought you might turn to a friend for answers, so they were already onto Sweeney.”

“They tapped his phone and sent Nielssen to finish the job in case he buggered it to hell,” I guessed.

“Exactly. And when that failed, they assumed you left New Orleans, but they couldn’t get a line on where you were. It drove Gilchrist nuts. Carapaz decided he would just hole up in Paris and double his bodyguards. Paar never thought you’d be ballsy enough to come out to find them, so he went on with his spa trip. I guess he thought wrong,” she said, saluting us. “Paar was a creature of habit. I’m not surprised you found him, but Carapaz must have been trickier. How did you manage that?”

We took her through the process and she looked impressed. “And you grabbed the dossier off the bed without knowing what it was?”

I shrugged. “Maybe subconsciously I recognized it as Museum business. I don’t know. It was instinct to take it. And when I read it, I saw the code in the margin and realized it had been compiled by Martin.”

“Of course, Martin didn’t realize Billie was onto him when he left her the message about Tollemache’s,” Mary Alice put in.

“He thought he was being subtle,” I said with a smile.

“And he needed some way to get you to figure out the painting was at Tollemache’s to draw you into Vance’s trap,” Naomi said, putting the pieces together.

I filled in the rest. “We didn’t know where the plot started, but we knew at that point that Vance and Martin were sharing information. And that any plan to take them out would only work if we could turn the tables and get them here.”

“So you strolled into Tollemache’s bold as balls and offered yourself up,” Naomi said, giving me an approving look. “You’ve got brass ones.”

I shrugged. “The goal for them was the four of us. I figured I was safe until we were all together. Vance has been holding a grudge against me for forty years. Making me watch him kill my friends would be a nifty little bonus for him.”

Naomi sucked harder at the ginger chew and rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if this is the best thing I’ve ever had or the worst.”

“I say the same about tequila,” Minka said.

“You did a good job of making Paar’s death seem natural,” Naomi went on. “Carapaz and Gilchrist had a debate over how to handle it. Carapaz figured he would just wait you out. He argued that you didn’t have the resources to conduct a series of hits, especially against them. Gilchrist was more cautious. When you took out Carapaz, he decided the best defense would be a good offense.”

“And the Anguissola went up for auction to draw us out,” Helen put in.

“It did the trick,” Naomi said, smiling again. “And someday I’d like the whole story of exactly how it went down. But I hear noises in the garden. The cleanup crew is here.”