The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) by Aaron Elkins, Charlotte Elkins Page A

an enormous waffle-and-bacon breakfast at a bakery restaurant on the way to the museum, she told the security man who let her in that she was expecting a visitor in an hour or so, and if he would buzz her, she’d come to the entrance to meet her guest.
    In the meantime, her intention was to sit down with a mug of tea in front of the easel that held the Cassatt and begin thinking about where she wanted to start, but that “really awful new blog” that Jamie had mentioned had been rattling away inside her head, so instead she logged in to the desk computer to find it. It didn’t take long. When she searched for her own name in Google’s blog search engine, the second blog title that came up was The “Art Whisperer .”
    Steel yourself , she thought. The term art whisperer could go either way, but if you put quotation marks around it, the clear implication was that the person so described was a faker, or a poseur, or both. Or maybe worse. From Jamie’s tone when she’d mentioned it, that’s what Alix was expecting: worse.
    She clicked through to the blog itself. The Art World Insider, the well-designed logo read, and then, underneath:
The Continuing Saga of the “Art Whisperer”
By Peter Bakeworthy
PETER BAKEWORTHY IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY AS WELL AS AN ART CONSERVATOR AND RESTORER IN PRIVATE PRACTICE.
One of the conundrums of today’s ingrown world of art conservation is the continued, persistent presence of self-described “art whisperer” Alix London on the scene. Discredited and scandalized again and again, she simply refuses to go away. Most recently, London (also fondly known as the Harbinger of Disaster) has been contracted for some sort of unspecified restoration project by Palm Springs’s L. Morgan Brethwaite Museum of Art, a heretofore well-thought-of institution. Apparently, the Brethwaite people don’t read the art news. If they did, they would know that the celebrated Ms. London has been nothing if not consistent. Everything she touches winds up being a police matter one way or another and leaving behind a trail of human wreckage: prison sentences, ruined reputations, lost fortunes—to say nothing of the horrendous damage she’s inflicted on the works entrusted to her.
Let’s look at a few pertinent facts—
    Shocked and incensed, she stopped reading to search for a few facts—a few answers—of her own: What else did this Art World Insider discuss other than Alix London’s villainy and incompetence? What kind of history did the blog have? Answers: None and none. There was only one entry and this was it.
    For answers to other questions—When had this been published? Who was Peter Bakeworthy?—she left the blog itself and went back to the search engines. The blog, it turned out, had been published February 6— yesterday! As for “Peter Bakeworthy,” in all the world there was no such entity, unless both Google and Bing had missed him; an impossibility for someone who was both an art history professor and a professional conservator. The man didn’t exist.
    Surely he (or she) also had to be the person behind those malevolent book reviews. How could more than one person hate her this much? It had seemed to her before that some of the names of the “reviewers” were contrived as well. Helga McGhee? Please. She’d be amazed if they weren’t all fakes.
    She tabbed back to the blog itself and found that there was no contact address for Mr. “Bakeworthy” or any way to get in touch with him. She returned to her reading.
Let’s look at a couple of pertinent facts:
Fact: London has a cloudy but well-documented association with the infamous Albanian mafia.
Fact: In the last year alone she has managed to be “a person of interest” to the FBI in three (yes, three) major forgery cases.
Now , a charitable person might point out—
    There was a brisk double-rap on the open door behind her. “Alix, do you have a minute?”
    It was Mrs. B; the first time she’d gone out of her way