The Canvas Thief Read online

  “Smart girl,” Roland agreed.

  Despite the frantic pace, the next two hours seemed to drag. Maya, who usually thrived on ferocious deadlines, found her attention straying to her watch. Like an itch deep below her skin, unreachable, the desire to go home grew in proportion to her attempts to ignore it.

  At seven she saved the changes to the TarkenHoff report cover and switched off her computer. Shrugging on her faded-to-comfortable leather aviator’s jacket, she scooped up her purse and headed for Roland’s office.

  “The newest version of the cover is saved as ‘Bambi.’”

  “Thank you, Maya. You’re a lifesaver.” Roland opened the file and whistled at what he saw. “And a magician.”

  She grinned. “Flattery will get you nowhere. I still want my green chile stew.”

  “Mercenary.” Roland pouted. “You headed home?”

  “Yeah.”

  Roland cocked his head. “Something wrong?”

  A tiny shiver ran up her spine. She had an urge to wrap her arms around herself and shiver, but instead she dragged her left hand through her black hair.

  “Nothing, I guess. I can’t concentrate. I feel dizzy.” She fumbled with the stubborn zipper on her jacket. With a couple of persistent jerks, it relented and ran up the metal teeth, closing the jacket. “Maybe it’s the flu.”

  “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

  Maya laughed. “Don’t you have to have sex to get pregnant?” Ever since her breakup with Daniel, six months before, Maya’s love life had consisted of little more than the occasional Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon–inspired wet dream featuring Chow Yun-Fat.

  After securing Roland’s promise that “Yes, Eric will whip up a batch of his mouth-watering green chile stew, just for you,” Maya headed out into the night.

  The moon had risen halfway up the eastern horizon, its edges softened by the heavy clouds. Moonlight radiated outward, casting a bright ring several times the diameter of the moon. Snow sky, or so Maya’s mother would say.

  Maya shivered. Normally the prospect of snow warmed her. Though not as arid as other parts of New Mexico, snow wasn’t common winter weather in Santa Fe. Tonight, however, the cold burned though her leather jacket, attacking her core. As soon as she started the car, she cranked up the heat. Cursing herself for forgetting her gloves that morning, she pulled the jacket’s sleeves down over her chilly hands and drove home. Like the strobe light of doom, the rhythmic pulse of emergency vehicles signaled the approach to her street. And if the fire truck and ambulance weren’t enough, her neighborhood was also playing host to several police cars.

  As she approached her house, the apparent epicenter of the chaos, one of the police officers peeled away from the others and waved her to a stop. No doubt for the pleasing “deer in the headlights” expression it generated, he leveled his flashlight at her eyes.

  “Are you…” He paused to scan a notepad, moving the flashlight from her eyes. “Maya Stephenson?”

  “I’m Maya,” she said, lifting her hand to shield her eyes from the return of the flashlight’s glare. “What’s going on?”

  The cop composed his face into the neutral expression of someone accustomed to giving bad news. “Why don’t you park your vehicle and meet me by my car?” He gestured toward the cop car that was currently parked in her narrow driveway.

  The cop, who introduced himself as Officer Bernard London, was only a few inches taller than Maya’s five-six. She studied him, finding something familiar. His features were pleasant and the fit of his uniform suggested prolonged doughnut abstinence.

  “Don’t you work out at the Rio Grande Gym?” Maya asked.

  “Yeah. We have a free gym at the station, but Rio Grande has better equipment. My wife hates the place. Calls it a meat market.”

  “Your wife’s a smart woman.” Maya had met her ex-louse, Daniel, at Rio Grande.

  He smiled. “I don’t know. She married a cop.” Returning to the matter at hand, he said, “Ms. Stephenson, there’s been an…incident.

  “At approximately six-thirty,” he began, reading from his notepad, “a call was placed to 911. Your neighbor, a Ms. Kalman, reported that she had surprised an intruder in your home. She—” he glanced toward the ambulance where Ms. Kalman sat, an oxygen mask on her face “—was armed with a shotgun and she attempted to apprehend the suspect.”

  “Ms. Kalman did that?” Maya stared openmouthed at her neighbor.

  “Yes. But the intruder escaped. As she was leaving your house, Ms. Kalman reports hearing a pop coming from the room the intruder had just vacated. Returning, she found that a small fire had started. She immediately called 911.”

  “What room? Where did the fire start?” Maya asked, suddenly aware that she already knew the answer to her question.

  “I believe it’s your art studio. I’ll take you in, if you feel up to it.”

  “Yes, please.”

  As they walked through the front doorway, Officer London said, “The arson inspector found a small incendiary device, set on a timer. Fortunately it seems to have malfunctioned.”

  Maya coughed; though not overpowering, the acrid smell of burned something was strong. “Fortunately?” She and Officer London stopped in the doorway to her studio.

  He pointed to the far corner of the studio. The floor gleamed a little too brightly for saltillo tile. Sad and gaunt, looking like Wile E. Coyote after an encounter with an Acme explosive device, her large easel was black and smoking, the painting it held nothing more than a smoldering wooden frame.

  “The fire never got going very strong. The easel and painting are a loss, but the fire hadn’t spread when the fire department showed up. They put it out with an extinguisher.”

  The sight of the ruined painting wrenched something in her gut. A bizarre grief seized her, and she choked back a sob.

  It’s just a painting, girl. Get a grip.

  “Ms. Stephenson?” Maya felt the light touch of his hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m okay. Really. It’s just that…” I feel like something’s been torn out of me. “It’s just so creepy. Somebody in my house…”

  He gave her a minute before speaking again. “Ms. Stephenson, I have to ask. Do you have any enemies? Anyone who would want to…?”

  “No!” Maya gulped. “Why do you ask?”

  “This kind of vandalism usually isn’t random. According to Ms. Kalman’s description, and the MO, the perpetrator might be a pro.”

  “I have to get out of here,” Maya said and she turned for her living room. Once there, she walked over to the aquarium. Delilah, her Oscar, was hunkered down at the bottom of the tank, sulking. Maya crouched before the tank.

  “You think you’ve had a bad day,” she muttered to the fish. “Your house isn’t full of strangers and it doesn’t smell like bad barbecue.” Delilah, who was oddly intelligent for a fish, shot Maya an accusing look, twitched her finny tail and slid behind a rock.

  Maya spent the next hour talking to various members of law enforcement, first Officer London, then a police detective, and finally the arson investigator. Their questions were all the same: Did she have any enemies? An ex-boyfriend with a grudge?

  Maya’s answer, consistently, was no.

  Although she did initiate the breakup, Daniel Bernal, Maya’s ex-fiancé, had little reason to carry a grudge. After all, he’d been the one who’d thought sex on his desk with his secretary was acceptable behavior. The jerk didn’t even have the decency to find a less clichéd way to cheat on her.

  Blaming his wandering anatomy on Maya, he said that her refusal to set a wedding date had driven him to cheat. Daniel’s self-absorption was why he’d never stoop to anything as low as breaking and entering.

  “No,” Maya said, just as puzzled as the arson investigator. “There’s no one.”

  When, at long last, she had answered everyone’s questions, and been assured that “Yes, Ms. Kalman will be all right,” the last of the strangers left her house.

  She locked the
front door, although the action felt futile. Besides a splatter of buckshot in the plaster around the door, the door was undamaged.

  “Whoever did this was a pro.”

  A professional thief in her house. Why? Maya turned the idea over in her head, struggling for an explanation. Why me? She was getting a good reputation as a commercial artist, but none of her work was high dollar, nothing worth stealing.

  A sudden anxiety knotted her stomach and she rushed toward the studio. The smattering of drawings, scattered across the floor and a few pocked by shotgun fire, hadn’t been moved. Maya crouched by the drawings and gathered them into a loose stack. Adam. All the drawings were of Adam Sayres, the police detective from her unpublished comic books. Adam grinned at her from the topmost drawing; his violet eyes, inspired by a viewing of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, sparkled with good cheer. She stood and moved to the large set of drawers where she kept her best work. The drawer—Adam’s drawer—was half open. She slipped the damaged artwork into the drawer and closed it, then opened the drawer above it.

  All the drawings in the Benjamin drawer seemed to be there, including the special one, the redheaded thief in the diner. As Maya studied the drawing she felt the familiar twinge of pride in her creation. Maya had first started drawing Benjamin and Adam when she was seven. At the time she didn’t know any real-life redheads and had given Benjamin slate-gray eyes, rather than the usual green, hazel or blue. Later, when she had known better, she kept the dark eye color, thinking it suited his role as the villain.

  Seeing Benjamin’s drawing in its place, unharmed, gave her an odd sense of relief. Too weary to deal with her strange feelings, she shut the drawer and staggered off to bed.

  Chapter Three

  Maya stared at the illustration, her gaze meeting the demon’s amber eyes, which, lit by the late-morning light, picked up a sly twinkle. She had painted him exactly as she’d seen him. He leaned against a lamppost, the Plaza as a backdrop, a Santa Fe Reporter open before him. She had done the initial work in watercolor and then scanned it into the computer and enhanced it, bringing out the luminosity of his blue skin and silver in his white hair.

  As usual, no one besides Maya seemed to see the demon in their midst.

  She had done other paintings of the strange beings she saw, but this was her favorite, and it hung, framed and matted by the studio’s door. “Well, that’s the last of it,” she said to the painting as she shoved the final paper towel into a plastic bag and closed it with a twist tie. In addition to used paper towels, the bag also contained chunks of plaster that had been knocked from the wall thanks to Ms. Kalman’s Dirty Harry imitation. The wall needed plastering, but Maya didn’t have the energy left to deal with repair.

  Heaving the bag over her shoulder, she headed out the side door toward the alley trash bins.

  When the perpetually watchful Ms. Kalman peered out her window, Maya gave a cheerful wave. The gesture earned her a faint nod, but then, Ms. Kalman had never been terribly congenial.

  Back in the house, she wandered into the living room, where Delilah demanded lunch by slapping her tail on the surface of the water. Maya shook a red canister over her open palm. A few broken orange pellets fell out onto her hand. She dropped the remains of Delilah’s favorite brand of food onto the water’s surface. Delilah gulped down the pellet crumbs and stared at Maya with fierce, unblinking eyes. “Right. Pet store. I’m going, right now,” Maya said to her pet, who was already swimming toward her sulk rock.

  With an expansive yawn, Maya collected her purse and headed for the front door. Somehow, despite, or maybe because of everything that had happened yesterday, Maya had managed to get a couple of hours of sleep. Most of those two hours were spent in a recurring dream where Adam Sayres pursued a battered and bloodied Benjamin Black through a dark cityscape.

  Cold air washed over her as she opened the front door and squinted in the glare of brilliant blue sky and patchy remnants of snow. She locked her door, trying to avoid thinking how someone had easily gotten past the lock. I really should get a security system.

  A pro. A pro could get around a security system.

  “Ms. Stephenson? Maya Stephenson?” a male voice said behind her. Maya yelped and dropped her keys. Heart pounding, she spun and found herself gaping at a dark-haired man who stood at the base of her steps.

  “You startled me.” Trying to appear unperturbed, she bent and retrieved her keys, giving her doorknob a little jiggle. “Yes. I’m Maya.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said stiffly. He wore black slacks, a pale gray sweater and a black leather jacket. “My name is Adam Richards. ATF.” He reached a hand, clad in a slim leather glove, into his jacket and pulled out a badge.

  Maya paused, considered the badge, sighed and moved down to the last step. By standing on the final step, she gained a little height and felt a little less vulnerable. She studied the badge and the picture. Like any of the parade of badges she had seen recently, the photo was poor quality, but his face tweaked something in her memory, though she couldn’t figure out what.

  “ATF? Alcohol, tobacco and…?

  “Firearms.”

  “Um, yeah. What do you want with me?” Maya raised her hand, shading her eyes from the morning sun. The ATF agent’s hair, though short, had a definite wave to it, a few stray black curls falling down his forehead. Mirrored black sunglasses hid his eyes.

  “I have some questions about the break-in.”

  Maya opened her mouth, starting a question and then stopped. Her gaze panned down his face, the straight, perfect line of his nose, over his strong but boyish chin and along the sweep of his jaw, and then back to his lips, his lower lip in particular, with its slight pout.

  “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

  “I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

  Maya thought she detected a slight pause before the word “met.”

  “According to Santa Fe P.D., nothing was taken. Is that correct?”

  “No. I mean, yes. That’s correct. Nothing was taken.” She could feel his eyes on her, even through the sunglasses. The sensation was not entirely unpleasant. I want to see his eyes.

  “And you’re positive. Nothing was taken?”

  A little spark of irritation shot through her. “Yes. I’m sure. What is this about? Why would the ATF be interested in a break-in?”

  Her sharp tone seemed to melt his stiff demeanor; his posture softened. He lifted a gloved hand and pushed the sunglasses up and onto his head. The edges of his mouth turned upward breaking into a dazzling smile.

  Maya gulped, dumbstruck. Violet-blue eyes, Elizabeth Taylor eyes. Like a slow computer, her brain processed his eye color, then his features, and after several long seconds of calculation, spit out the answer to where she had seen him before.

  He was the spitting image of Adam Sayres, her Adam Sayres, hero of her comics. No, it couldn’t be. She rubbed her eyes, willing them to communicate properly with her brain.

  “Ms. Stephenson? Are you all right?”

  She looked at the man again, still seeing Adam Sayres’s doppelganger. “Y-yes. I’m fine.” It was just a coincidence, or the trick of a tired mind. What else could it be?

  “There’s a coffee house less than a mile from here—”

  “Margot’s?”

  “Yes.” He turned the full force of his smile on her and something in her stomach fluttered. “Maybe we could go there and talk. I’ll explain everything.”

  Maya tried to look nonchalant and twirled her key chain around her finger. The keys almost flew off her finger and she had to grab for them awkwardly. “Why Margot’s? Why not just ask me here, now?”

  His smile widened, and although the expression seemed at home on his face, there weren’t even hints of smile lines around his eyes and mouth. How old is he? Judging by his job, he must have been in his mid-twenties, at least, but his skin was smooth as a teenage boy’s.

  “Question the witness in a neutral location, where she doesn’t feel too comfortabl
e or alternately, too uncomfortable.”

  Maya smiled back, finding his honesty refreshing. “All right. I’ll meet you there in five minutes,” she said, making it clear she could drive herself. The badge looked real, but for all she knew, he had ordered it from an online security company and printed the photo ID on an ordinary printer.

  “Please feel free to call the regional office and confirm who I am. I understand why you would be suspicious.”

  “I will,” Maya said, and then she swept past him, down the walkway and out her gate. A nondescript midsize white car, hidden from the house by her wall, with government license plates, sat at the curb. If he’s impersonating a fed, he’s put a lot of effort into it.

  An unpleasant realization, cold and slimy in her stomach, hit her as she drove to Margot’s. Why would the feds be interested in a simple burglary? Maya turned into the Blue Mesa strip mall and found a spot directly in front of Margot’s.

  Stuffed between a title loan business and veterinarian’s office, Margot’s had nothing resembling ambience—tan linoleum floors and white walls covered by an assortment of art for sale by local artists, most of it amateurish.

  But the cinnamon rolls were divine.

  Agent Richards had beaten her there and sat in a corner, watching the door, looking as though he’d been there some time. A skinny, twentysomething waitress with lank brown hair stood before him, a broad smile on her face. She set a cup of coffee down and said something, obviously looking for an excuse to hang around. Agent Richards’s smile looked polite but a little forced.

  Maya exchanged good mornings with the waitress, sat down and placed her order—tea and a cinnamon roll.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” Agent Richards said, his smile warm.

  Maya nodded, her gaze dropping to the table. Baby-faced or not, the man oozed masculinity. Worse still was the impossibly perfect match of his flesh-and-blood face to the character she had drawn for years. His resemblance made her feel shy and embarrassed. She wished her tea and roll would arrive. She needed a prop, something else to focus on.