He skipped dinner. The Tchaikovsky Concerto blossomed.
Just after 8:00 p.m., the phone buzzed. A woman’s voice, firm and no nonsense. “Rayquan McMillian? Alicia Childress here. I’m downstairs and I’m coming up.” Minutes later a stout woman in her late fifties or early sixties was shaking his hand. Her curly gray hair was trimmed very close to her skull, and she wore khakis and a loose sweater. Without asking, she moved past him into the suite, pulled out her laptop, cleared a space on the dining-room table, talking the whole time.
She was done with pleasantries. “So let me make this clear,” she said without preamble. “I’m focusing on three factors, and I’m going to drill into all of them: access, forensics, and motive.”
He and Nicole sat down across from her. Ray removed Nicole’s cup of cold half-drunk coffee from the table, laid it on the sideboard behind him. Where it had rested on the glass top, a half-moon glared up like a giant ghostly fingernail.
“So my first job, Rayquan,” Alicia said, “is to determine who had access to the violin—I’m going to start by going over your story, every inch.”
“Ray,” Ray said.
“What?”
“Ray,” he said. “Please call me Ray. Nobody calls me Rayquan.”
“Ray it is, then,” she said. “I’m still going to go over your story,” she told him, “and then I’m going to go over yours,” she said to Nicole. “You both had the most access, obviously.”
“Pilar Jiménez,” Nicole said.
“I keep telling everybody, it was either my family or the Marks family,” Ray said. “It had to be one of them.”
“I’ve heard this, and I’ll get to them in a minute.”
Ray twined his fingers with Nicole’s. He felt more confident: this woman really was a bulldog. No time to chat and be friendly; Alicia was on a mission and he was not about to stand in her way. “Anything you need.”
“Second, forensics. The FBI and the art squad have already shared everything with me, and I’m in the process of reviewing it. It’s unfortunate that you didn’t discover the theft until after the crime scene was tainted.”
“You’re assuming the crime scene is the hotel room?” Ray said.
“I am, but you’re right. Since you didn’t lock the case, it could have been stolen elsewhere—the airport, the airplane, plus the evening before, when you were wandering around the city. Pilar Jiménez is our primary person of interest, of course. But keep in mind that no matter where the violin was stolen, we still have a tainted crime scene.”
“What about the ransom note?” Ray put in. “Are you tracking down the Bitcoin account?”
Alicia’s brown eyes were carefully blank. “Yes, we’re all working on tracking down the account.”
“What about the letter itself?” Ray asked.
“Waiting to hear back from the lab for fingerprints or any other DNA. But, honestly, I wouldn’t hold out much hope for that. Whoever planned this did it very carefully, and I doubt he left his fingerprints or a saliva sample on the paper.”
“What about tracking down the ink and the paper?” Nicole said.
Alicia didn’t look away. “Already did. It’s from an HP OfficeJet 5258, using standard HP black ink. HP has sold fourteen thousand of the printers over the last year. The lab is still analyzing the paper, but I’ll tell you right now that it’s from a cheap ream that you can pick up in any office supply store in the country. The physical note itself is a dead end.”
“The shoe,” Ray said. “The shoe is the key. It’s got to be a clue. Did you find out Dante Marks’s shoe size? I’ll bet you it’s a ten and a half.”
“He wears a size nine,” Alicia told him. “And in the meantime there were three hundred purchases of men’s size ten and a half Chucks in the tristate area over the past month. And another two hundred online across the US. We’re tracking down every one we can, but it’s a monumental job.”
“Oh,” Ray said.
“The third factor I’m focusing on is motive,” she went on, holding his gaze. “Who would want it? Is it for some black market collector? Is it for the insurance money?” She eyed Ray, sizing him up.
He stared right back. “The people with the biggest motive are my family,” he said. “They have the most to gain.” He didn’t want to explain again about the deal he’d made with them—how his lawyer had begged him not to. How he’d thought it was his only option. “And if it isn’t them, it’s those crazy Markses. It has to be.”