The Codex Read Free Page A

moving job, and it must have taken a day at least, maybe two.
    A machine sat inside the bedroom. Barnaby recognized it as a foam-in-place machine, of the kind you see at UPS. In another room, he found a shrink-wrapping machine for doing the really big stuff. He found stacks of lumber, rolls of felt, metal strapping tape, bolts and wing nuts, and a couple of skill saws. Couple of thousand dollars’ worth of abandoned equipment. They hadn’t bothered taking anything else; in the living room they’d left a ten-thousand-dollar television, along with a VCR, DVD, and two computers. He thought of his own crappy TV and VCR and the payments he was still making, while his wife and her new boyfriend were no doubt watching porno flicks on them every night.
    He carefully stepped over a videotape cassette lying on the floor. Fenton said, “Lay you three to five the guy’s dead,
two to five
it’s an insurance scam.”
    “You take all the fun out of life, Fenton.”
    Someone must have seen the activity up here. The house, sitting on its mountaintop, was visible to all of Santa Fe . If he himself had bothered to look out the window of his double-wide in the valley two weeks ago he might have seen the robbery, the house ablaze all night long, the truck headlights winding down the hill. Again, he marveled at the moxie of the robbers. What made them so sure of pulling it off? It was too casual by half.
    He glanced at his watch. He didn’t have much time before the crime-scene van arrived.
    He moved swiftly and methodically through the rooms, looking but taking no notes. Notes, he had learned, always came back to bite you. Every room had been hit. The job had gone to completion. In one room a bunch of boxes had been unpacked and paper lay scattered on the floor. He picked up a piece; some kind of bill of lading, dated a month ago, for twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of French pots and pans, German and Japanese knives. Was the guy starting a restaurant?
    In the bedroom, in the back of a walk-in closet, he found a huge steel door, partway open.
    “
Fort
Knox
,” said Fenton.
    Barnaby nodded. With a house full of million-dollar paintings, it kind of made him wonder what was so valuable that it had to go into a vault.
    Without touching the door he slipped inside. The vault was empty save some scattered trash on the floor and a bunch of wooden map cases. Slipping out his handkerchief, he used it to open a drawer. The velvet bore indentations where objects had once nested. He slid it shut and turned to the door itself, giving the lock a quick examination. There were no signs of a forced entry. None of the locked cases he’d seen in the rooms had been forced, either.
    “The perps had all the codes and keys,” said Fenton.
    Barnaby nodded. This was no robbery.
    He went outside and made a quick circle of the gardens. They looked neglected. Weeds were coming up. Nothing had been tended to. The grass hadn’t been cut in a couple of weeks. The whole place had a seedy air about it. The neglect, it seemed to him, stretched back even more than the two weeks since the so-called robbery. It looked like the place had been going downhill for a month or two.
    If insurance was involved, so were the sons. Maybe.
     
    3
     
    He found them standing in the shade of the piñon tree, arms crossed, silent and glum. As Barnaby approached, the guy in the suit asked, “Did you find anything?”
    “Like what?”
    The man scowled. “Do you have any idea what’s been stolen here? We’re talking hundreds of millions. Good God, how could anyone expect to get away with this? Some of these are world-famous works of art. There’s a Filippo Lippi worth forty million dollars alone. They’re probably on their way to the Middle East or Japan . You’ve got to call the FBI, contact Interpol, shut down the airports—”
    He paused to draw in air.
    “Lieutenant Barnaby has some questions,” said Fenton, taking up the role he played so well, his voice curiously