The Chase by Janet Evanovich, Lee Goldberg

crisply pressed brown slacks that were so stiff and wrinkle-free, they looked almost metallic. He was in his late fifties and very slim, with gray hair meticulously parted on the right.
    He sat down across from Kate, set his Walmart bag on the floor beside the table, and regarded the food on the table as if it were a dismembered corpse. “I hope you ordered all of that so we’d look like two shoppers meeting for a bite.”
    “I thought we’d eat it, too.”
    “Let’s not go overboard,” he said, looking around. “Nobody is paying any attention to us.”
    “I’m a stickler for maintaining my cover,” Kate said, picking out French fries and laying them out in rows across a slice of pizza.
    “How did it go in Florida?” Bolton asked.
    “Without a hitch. There’s a reason Nick is on our Ten Most Wanted list. We also made a big discovery. The rooster wasn’t the only stolen art treasure in Carter Grove’s collection. He’s got a secret room filled with them.”
    “Forget about the other stuff.”
    “You don’t understand, sir. These aren’t little knickknacks. We’re talking Rembrandts, Picassos, you name it. If we arrest Carter and get him to talk, we could close the files on dozens of the world’s most famous unsolved thefts.”
    “Are you familiar with the concept of fruit of the poisonous tree?”
    “It’s a metaphor used for evidence that’s thrown out of court because it was obtained illegally.”
    “Then you know that we can’t prove Carter Grove has stolen art without revealing how we obtained that knowledge. Therefore, we have no grounds for a search warrant or for an arrest.”
    “So we’ll find another way, a con of some kind. He’s exactly the kind of crook you teamed me up with Nick to catch.” She broke off pieces of the pretzel and placed them between the rows of fries on her pizza.
    “Carter is a former White House chief of staff and runs asecurity company that is a military contractor. If we arrest him and expose his crimes, it will create a massive scandal with serious geopolitical ramifications. That is exactly what we are trying to avoid here.”
    “Is that our new job description, saving the government from embarrassment? Because if it is, sir, I’m out. You can find someone else to babysit Nick Fox. I’m in this strictly to nail bad guys.”
    Bolton looked around the empty food court and then set his eyes on her. “So am I. But Carter is not a typical crook. If we move against him, it will generate a lot of scrutiny. We have to carefully consider all of the possible ramifications of our actions before we do anything, or we could all go down with him. I will think about it. Right now, though, we have far more pressing matters with the Chinese to deal with.”
    “That’s as good as done,” Kate said. “If you leave a door unlocked for us at the Smithsonian, turn off the alarm, and ask the guards to look the other way, we’ll swap the real rooster for the fake one and then we can start thinking about going after Carter.”
    “Making the switch is not going to be that easy.”
    “I know that, but surely you can smooth the way for us a bit. We’re doing the Smithsonian a favor here.” She folded the slice of pizza down the middle, trapping her new toppings inside, and took a bite.
    “That’s disturbing,” Bolton said, watching her eat.
    “I call it the Fast Food Combo.”
    “It’s even more disturbing that you’ve given it a name.”
    “About the change in plans …”
    “Stanley Fu arrived two days early from Shanghai, and some overly helpful functionary at the Smithsonian already gave him the rooster.”
    A piece of pretzel spilled out of the folded pizza onto Kate’s shirt. “You just found this out?”
    “Obviously not, but Jessup and I felt that attempting to contact you in Palm Beach would have jeopardized your operation down there. Fu is one of China’s
bao fa hu
, ‘the explosive rich.’ He’s only thirty-five, and he’s already made a