Lyndon Crebbs suddenly became very serious and looked much more like himself, which meant even more suspicious.
“I’ve got a whole lot to tell you,” he said.
Chapter 97
IT WAS REALLY STILL night, but the sun was already up. The pretty American girl named Anna took a careful sip from the last of her margarita. She didn’t usually drink this late, but they had decided to do
“crazy things” while they were traveling and “break all the rules.”
She looked up at Eric and moved closer to him. Sometimes it felt like she could never get close enough.
The hip club was throbbing with music, but it was almost possible to talk in the upstairs bar. Not that anything sensible ever got said at this time of day, not in bars like this one.
“One more, then, eh?”
The guy who had bought their drinks was panting against her neck again. He was cute, but still…
She pressed herself against Eric, away from the other man.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”
“Go on,” Eric whispered in her ear. “Just one more. We’re all having fun.”
Anna gulped and said, “Okay, then. To fun!”
The other guy ordered her another margarita.
Anna looked at her watch. It was late.
“Whereabouts in the States are you from?” the guy asked as he handed her the drink. The salt around the rim rained down on her fingers.
“Tucson, Arizona,” Eric said. He was always so polite to everyone.
“Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some California grass…,” the guy’s pretty girlfriend sang, waving her glass.
“There’s nothing but desert there, am I correct?”
“Not quite,” Eric said.
Anna tugged at his shirtsleeve, even though she knew he didn’t like it when she did that.
“I want to go back to the hotel now,” she said. “Please, Eric.”
“Have you been traveling long?” the girl asked, sucking on the straw in her empty glass.
“Two and a half weeks,” Eric said. “We really like Scandinavia. It’s totally awesome!”
“Yeah, isn’t it?” the girl said.
She moved closer to Eric and kicked off one of her sandals. Anna watched her toes climb up Eric’s sneaker.
“You know what they say about men with big feet?” she said, looking up at Eric from behind her hair.
Eric smiled in that way that made his eyes twinkle.
Anna blinked. What the hell were they doing? Flirting with each other?
While she was standing here, right next to them?
“Eric,” she said, “I really am tired. And we’re going to Tivoli tomorrow…”
Eric gave a shrill laugh, as if she’d said something really childish. The girl laughed along with him.
“I think this feels like a magical evening,” the girl said. “I’d really like a souvenir of tonight, wouldn’t you, Anna?”
She draped herself against her boyfriend and kissed him softly on the lips. The guy buying the margaritas gave a slightly forced laugh.
“This could get expensive,” he said. It was almost as if he was reading a script.
“There can’t be any shops open at this time of day,” Eric said. The guy stiffened. “Hell!” he said. “You’re right! So let’s get a bottle of champagne!”
He signaled to the bartender again.
The girl tilted her head and smiled at Eric.
“I’d really like to drink it with the two of you,” she said, “in your hotel room.”
Anna felt herself tense up, but Eric raised his glass in a toast. He had drunk too much, and nothing could stop him when that happened. She’d known that before she married him. He pulled her tight to him.
“Come on,” he whispered right in her ear, his breath hitting her eardrum.
“We wanted to meet new people on our trip, didn’t we? These two are great.”
Anna felt like she wanted to cry.
Eric was quite right.
She really had to stop being such a deadhead. They should go back to the hotel and party.
Chapter 98
LYNDON PUT TWO MORE bottles of beer on the table. Jacob grabbed one of them.
“I didn’t think my sources would have much to say about Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph, but I was wrong,” he said, sitting down heavily at the table.
“Are they really twins?” Jacob asked, opening the bottle. The time difference was helping him feel a little high. He didn’t mind.
“Oh yeah, they really are. Born fifteen minutes apart. Why do you ask that?”
Jacob thought back to the video from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, how the couple had held on to each other, her hand sneaking inside the waistband of his trousers.
“Don’t know,” he said, taking a deep swig of beer.
“The really interesting thing happened when the twins were thirteen.”
Lyndon raised his bottle and drank, and Jacob could see his hand trembling. How ill was he exactly? He looked bad, which upset Jacob. He didn’t have a lot of friends like Lyndon.
“Their parents, Helen and Simon Rudolph, were murdered in their bed eleven years ago.”
Jacob blinked.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Let me guess. They were naked and their throats had been cut?”
The FBI agent chuckled. “Precisely. The bedroom evidently looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood everywhere.”
“Who did it?”
Lyndon Crebbs shook his head.
“The case was never solved. The father was an art dealer. There was talk that he was transporting more than just Renaissance paintings in the containers he shipped between South America and the U.S., but nothing was ever proved.”
The ingenuity of the drug cartels knew no limits. Cocaine and Renaissance art?
“What happened to the kids?”
“Some relative looked after them. My contact thought it was a cousin of the mother’s, but he didn’t have a name.”
Jacob drank some more.
“Sounds like they were pretty well-off,” Jacob said.
“You’re not wrong there,” Lyndon said. “Their home was evidently some sort of manor house, slightly smaller than the Pentagon. It’s empty these days, owned by some bankruptcy agency.”
“Is it far from here?”
“Not really. Just east of Santa Barbara. Why? You thinking of going there?”
“Possibly. Did you get anything on the boyfriend, William Hamilton?”
Lyndon snorted.
“He was hardly in Rome last Christmas. He’s never even had a passport. He’s never been out of the
