The Heist Read Free

track its transponder. Not that it would have mattered. The helicopter wasn’t actually part of the tour company’s fleet. It had just been painted to appear as if it was.
    Kate sped straight from the hospital back to the room she’d booked at Circus Circus, the least expensive hotel on the Strip. She approached her door quietly, one hand on her holstered gun. She slipped her key card into the lock and slowly eased open the door,hoping Nick Fox had been arrogant enough to pull the same stunt twice, hoping to catch him in the act.
    No such luck. The room was empty and smelled like a freshly chlorinated swimming pool. She sat down on the edge of the bed and sighed. Not her best day. And she knew she’d catch a lot of crap for letting Nick get away instead of finding an excuse to shoot him. She certainly had plenty of them, the latest one being the picture of “Dr. Eunice Huffnagle” that she’d managed to snatch off the wall before anyone noticed it.
    Kate stared glumly at her reflection in the mirror and started to take off her Kevlar vest. And that’s when she noticed it. She didn’t believe it at first, and had to look over her shoulder to confirm it, but there it was: a Toblerone bar on her pillow.

SIX MONTHS LATER …
    When the average person accumulates more stuff than he can fit into his house, he’ll haul everything to a rented cinder-block storage unit, stick a cheap padlock on the roll-up door, and immediately start buying more junk. If you’re someone as old and rich as Roland Larsen Kibbee, you build a museum for it all, carve your name in marble out front, and charge admission so everybody can admire your stuff and, by extension, you.
    Not only does opening a museum free up some room in your mansion, it has the added benefit of being a great status symbol, one that’s hard to top even in an age when billionaires are launching rockets into space. Roland’s collection of paintings, sculptures, and jewelry was acquired with the fortune he’d earned snatching up distressed California farms, kicking the owners off their properties, and harvesting their crops using the cheapest laborpossible, thus becoming one of the state’s largest employers of illegal immigrants and a pillar of Mexico’s economy.
    Of course he didn’t build his museum in Mexico. He established the Roland Larsen Kibbee Art Collection in San Francisco, in a massive Pacific Heights mansion, modeled after a French château.
    Roland’s business practices clashed with the liberal ideals of his twenty-six-year-old curator Clarissa Hart, but her master’s degree in fine arts wasn’t getting her any work, she had $97,000 in student loans to pay off, and if she had to live another day with her parents, she’d smother them in their sleep. So she swallowed her ideals and took the paycheck each month from Roland. And while the Kibbee wasn’t the Guggenheim or the Getty, and the artwork, most of it nudes, made Clarissa feel like she was a hostess at the Playboy Mansion, she took solace in the fact that she was still a museum curator.
    The collection of paintings and objets d’art was displayed in hallways and intimate salons to make the visitors feel as if they were guests in Roland’s home, though the eighty-five-year-old agribusiness magnate had never lived there. He lived in Palm Beach, Florida, with a twenty-two-year-old stripper named LaRhonda who was waiting for him to die. After he breathed his last agonizing breath she hoped to get her hands on the Crimson Teardrop, a rare two-carat red diamond that was his latest acquisition.
    The Teardrop was also the Kibbee’s best shot at wide recognition, and in anticipation of the Crimson Teardrop’s opening-night display, the marble floors were being polished, the paneling was being restained, and the leather couches and armchairs were being replaced with new models. Clarissa was playing tour guide to SFPD Inspector Norman Peterson, who’d shown up to talk withher about traffic control