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Some Like It Hawk(69)

By:Donna Andrews


I walked back down the hall. None of the paintings contained a policeman. They were all landscapes. Landscapes or seascapes. Some of them had tiny figures, but they appeared to be peasants waving scythes, or sailors pulling oars. Some of the paintings looked vaguely familiar, so I suspected they were expensive reproductions of works by well-known landscape painters.

“Very odd,” Caroline said. “Look more closely to see if any of the landscapes have policemen in them.”

Looking closely took a while. I’d peered at every tiny little human figure in half a dozen paintings before enlightenment dawned. I straightened up.

“This,” I announced. “Is a Turner. I remember it from art appreciation class. I didn’t quite sleep through the whole lecture on eighteenth-century English painters.”

“Does it have a policeman in it?” Caroline asked. She scurried over and began peering at the Turner.

“No, it’s a landscape,” I said. “Turner was noted for his landscapes.”

“If he doesn’t paint policemen, I don’t care what he’s noted for,” she said. “Find me a policeman.”

“Noted for his landscapes,” I repeated. “So was Constable. John Constable, Turner’s fellow landscape artist.”

Caroline straightened up and frowned at me.

“Come to think of it, Ekaterina probably did say constable,” she said. “She learned her English from the BBC before she moved here. Uses a lot of Anglicisms. I just thought this was another of them. So which one is the Constable?”

“Damned if I know,” I said. “All those eighteenth-century British landscapes look alike to me. And none of them seemed to have signed their work. Ekaterina must be an unusually literate maid.”

“She’s working her way through grad school,” Caroline said. “I suppose we’ll have to check under all the paintings.”

“You take the left side,” I said. “I’ll take the right.”

It took another ten minutes and another rush to hide, this time in the ice/vending room.

“In the unlikely event that we ever burgle the Inn again,” I said, as I fumbled at yet another spot on the baseboard, “let’s ask Ekaterina for a better dead drop.”

“This was a better dead drop than her first idea,” Caroline said. “She wanted to leave the key card inside a rat.”

“A rat? Like a dead rat?”

“Freeze-dried, actually,” Caroline said, with a grimace. Rats, apparently, were one of the few inhabitants of the animal kingdom that hadn’t won her heart. “Standard CIA issue, according to her. Her father and his handler used to exchange messages that way all the time.”

“What do you do with it once you’ve put the message in it?” I asked.

“Leave it on a street corner, I suppose.” Caroline shrugged. “The idea is that no one but the intended recipient would pick up a dead rat.”

“Wouldn’t that make the spies rather conspicuous, then?” I suggested. “Going around picking up dead rats all the time. ‘Oh, look, Boris! That man over there is picking up the dead rat! Must be another CIA operative!’”

“It’s no stranger than the exploding cigar story,” Caroline said. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. Ekaterina believes it. The only way I could talk her out of the idea was to point out that neither of us happened to have a dead rat available for freeze-drying, and as an animal lover I could never condone killing one on purpose. Aha! This must be it!”

She waved the key card in triumph.

We returned to room 212. There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. I grabbed Caroline’s arm as she was about to use the key card.

“What if he’s here?” I pointed at the sign.

“I asked Ekaterina to do that.” She gently shook off my hand and reached to insert the card in the reader. “I thought it would be better if we could see the room just as he left it.”

I had a sudden, vivid image of Denton’s body sprawled on the floor of the room in the same awkward pose in which we’d found Colleen Brown.

“Let me go first,” I said.

Maybe Caroline had the same vision, because she made no protest as I took the key card out of her hand.

I stepped up to the door and knocked.

“Mr. Denton?” I kept both voice and knock low, designed to be heard inside the room, not up and down the hall by any fellow guests who happened to be in their rooms. I knocked a second time, then, after listening at the door for a few more moments, I dipped the key card in the slot, opened the door, and stepped inside the room.





Chapter 26