Gauguin Connection, The Read Free

someone ordered the stock-take to be postponed in that specific warehouse.”
    “And the only person with the authority to do so would be someone much higher up the chain of command.” I added.
    “Exactly. It’s been a very long time since the last check. That means we can only hope that these are the only weapons that were taken.” His answer tapered off as if he regretted sharing this much information.
    “I assume that you also don’t know if they were taken all at once or systematically over time.” I accepted Manny’s squinted eyes as an affirmative, albeit angry, answer. I turned to Phillip. “This man does not trust me. And yet both of you want me to get involved in this case in a manner that has not been clearly stated to me.”
    “Maybe she’s right.” Manny turned his torso away from me toward Phillip. I was hard pushed to not laugh at the unconscious, yet blatant, display of dislike. “Maybe she should not be involved. This is after all hugely sensitive information that requires a high level of security clearance.”
    “Who else are you going to ask?” A coldness sharpened Phillip’s question.
    Unfortunately, I was familiar with that tone. Phillip didn’t know he used it when he ran out of patience and was about to lay down the law. A law that was expected to be followed unchallenged. One I usually challenged.
    “Well—”
    “There is no one else, Manny,” interrupted Phillip. “You came to me as a last resort. Don’t think for one minute that I feel flattered that you are here. You are desperate and you have nowhere else to go. You came here because you know that I can be trusted, right?”
    Manny nodded, his lips sucked in, totally disappearing from his face.
    “If you trust me, you should trust my judgement. I say Genevieve is the only person for this job and that should be enough for you.”
    A loaded silence hung in the conference room. It was only through years of training and experience that I knew to wait patiently for the outcome. I used this time to evaluate Manny’s body language and read his internal struggle as clearly as if it were written on a billboard. I knew even before Manny spoke that he was going to accept my help. It was in his body language. Logic also dictated that this was his best option. Yet his visible discomfort with me was reason enough for him to hesitate. Fair enough.
    “Fine,” he said with an inelegant sigh. “Tell her the rest.”
    The quick appearance of Phillip’s tongue between his lips made me smile. My boss was pleased with himself for winning this round. He turned to me and frowned at my anomalous friendliness. “What?”
    “I’m just thinking—”
    “Never mind, I don’t want to know.” Most times when he asked he got annoyed with my answers. “Back to the case.”
    “I haven’t agreed to be part of this.” I still felt shaken from the photo and my episode. If this case was going to bring back involuntary behaviours that hadn’t been part of my life for more years than I cared to remember, I wasn’t interested.
    “Not you too. Just listen to the rest and then you can make a decision. The two of you are worse than dealing with spoiled trust-fund babies. There wasn’t much of an investigation into the murder, since the murderer was in the morgue with his victim. One detective, though, was curious about what the Russian was looking for when he was searching the victim and decided to go through the girl’s belongings with a fine-tooth comb.”
    “Why would a comb help?”
    “Genevieve,” Phillip answered in the slow voice he used when he was trying to stay patient with my inexhaustible questions, “it is just a manner of speaking. He searched her belongings very thoroughly.”
    “He found something,” I stated. The excited lift in Phillip’s voice had been my cue. Why couldn’t people just get to the point? The need people had for a dramatic build-up was a source of great frustration to me.
    “A strip from a canvas was