St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder by authors_sort Page B

opened the trunk. Zach was a lot of things, but she doubted that old-fashioned was one of them. Old-fashioned men were in a hurry to prove how strong they were. And the electronics he worked with so casually were as slick as any she’d seen. Part of her itched to get her hands on his computer. Most of her itched to get her hands on him.
    With a muttered curse, she opened the trunk.
    Zach saw a beaten-up leather portfolio and six rectangular packages of varying sizes. “What’s that?” he asked, touching the portfolio.
    “Family stuff—fading photos and old letters, legal documents, water rights, ranch boundaries, lease-lands, and whatever else somebody thought was worth keeping for the next generation. I went through them already. None of them has anything to do with the paintings.”
    “Okay. I’ll put the portfolio on the bottom of my research list.”
    Right now he wanted to see the paintings that someone wanted bad enough to threaten Jill with death.
    And maybe, just maybe, kill her great-aunt.
    The timing of the death after the painting had been sent out for appraisal was a coincidence, to say the least. The missing, then destroyed, painting was another coincidence.
    He didn’t trust coincidences.
    “Modesty inherited the trunk from her sister,” Jill said, setting the tray aside. “My grandmother. She was a wannabe artist who was Thomas Dunstan’s on-again, off-again lover.”
    Zach went still. Thomas Dunstan. No wonder some mystery man was trying to get his hands on those paintings.
    “I know the name,” Zach said neutrally, eyeing the rectangles stacked neatly in the big trunk. “Fine painter. Erratic output. I’ll bet he’s pretty pricey now.”
    “So I hear. There were thirteen paintings in this trunk. Twelve, now. The dude who trashed my car ripped one of the paintings to ribbons. Just a small one, but…” Her clear eyes hardened. “It was a piece of beauty, of history, and now it’s just scraps shoved into my belly bag.”
    Zach made a mental note to check out the bag when he went back to the truck. Garland Frost would whelp a litter of green lizards if a Dunstan had been destroyed.
    “Twelve paintings.” He whistled softly. “If they’re Dunstans and can be documented, they’re probably worth enough to pay taxes for the next century.”
    She paused in the unwrapping of the paintings. “Really?”
    “Yeah. At a minimum.”
    “I know as much about the market for Western art as I do about finding, um, so-called industrial art in old junkyards,” she said.
    He grinned despite the adrenaline humming in his blood.
    Twelve new Dunstans. Sweet God .
    If they’re real .
    “I loved these paintings as a child,” Jill said, pulling out a fat, carefully wrapped rectangle. “I used to sneak up into the attic, where Modesty had them hidden, and look at them. That stopped when Modesty caught me. She smacked me but good.”
    “And you sneaked back anyway.”
    She shook her head. “Mother told me Modesty would throw us out if she caught me in the attic again. I was a kid, but I’d learned how precious shelter was when we ran away from New Eden. I never saw the paintings again until my great-aunt was dead.”
    “Did Modesty say the paintings were valuable?”
    “All she said about them was to stay away and never mention them again. To anyone.”
    Zach really wanted to peel off the wrapping and have a look at what Jill was holding, but made himself wait. One of many things he’d learned from Frost was patience.
    Of a predatory kind.
    “What do you think now that you’ve seen them?” Zach asked. “Valuable or trash?”
    “I look at things as an artist, not as a merchant.”
    Ah, finally, he thought.
    There was information about Jill in the files from St. Kilda, but he preferred to compare facts on file with what she willingly told him.He’d been real curious about some of those facts, given that one of Jill’s three college majors was fine art.
    Some of the best counterfeiters were