Tokyo Heist by Diana Renn Page A

painting and handing it over six days from now is, well, problematic.”
    “Wait, why would your brother have hidden the painting separately from the drawings?” I ask Kenji. “Especially if an appraiser said these weren’t even van Goghs?”
    “He planned to seek a second opinion on the appraisal at some point,” Kenji explains. “He had an instinctive feeling that the drawings and the paintings were authentic. He wished to keep the art safe until it could be proven. And since the painting was potentially so much more valuable than the drawings, he thought it best to hide them in separate locations.”
    “He wanted to keep the art safe from whom?” Agent Denny demands.
    “Fumiko. His wife. He feared she would dispose of it. He was having marital problems. He had recently altered his will to leave his collection to Mitsue and me.”
    “He didn’t want his wife to inherit his art? That’s harsh,” I remark.
    “Violet,” my dad murmurs. “Please.”
    “I’m just saying.”
    “Violet is correct,” Kenji says. “It was harsh. But theirs was an unfortunate match. Fumiko and Tomo did not see eye to eye about art. She felt it distracted him from his focus on the company. ‘Gambling,’ she called it. She was always threatening to sell off his collection.”
    “And where is Fumiko Yamada now?” Agent Denny asks.
    “Deceased. She succumbed to pancreatic cancer nine years ago,” Kenji replies.
    “When Kenji and I cleaned and closed up her house, we searched, but there was no sign of the painting. We do not believe it was hidden in their home,” Mitsue adds.
    Would Kenji lie about the painting? To the FBI? To my dad and to Margo? He seems so sincere. Yet there’s a piece that doesn’t fit with him, too. Skye said he hit on her. That means he betrayed his wife in some way. He’s capable of deception.
    While the adults keep talking, I take my sketchbook out of my backpack and draw some of the information I’ve picked up, adding it to other bits I’ve sketched out since Friday.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Yamada, do the two of you have children or relatives who might have an interest in the art?” Agent Chang asks. “Or who might have some insight into the painting?”
    “Mitsue and I were not blessed with children. My only heir is my nephew, Hideki. He was a child when his father hid the painting, though, and has no idea of its whereabouts now.”
    “Fascinating history,” says Margo, “but I still fail to understand what any of it has to do with Julian being attacked and Glenn’s paintings being destroyed.”
    I notice she’s looking at my sketchbook. I turn it to shield my work from her view. Then I look at the panels I’ve just drawn along a timeline, and suddenly a few things jump off the page. Things I never noticed before. It’s like playing the Frame Game, looking for that new angle on something you’ve looked at a million times. A pattern emerges, a sequence or story that almost makes sense. The image I keep staring at is the broken window at my dad’s house. I’d been assuming Skye dashed over there after their fight, but that window could have been broken any time between four, when my dad left for the art show, and nine, when we returned. I stand up so fast I knock my chair over. “I think I know what might have happened!”
    “Violet,” my dad warns.
    “It’s all right. Go ahead, Violet,” says Agent Chang, watching me with interest.
    “Okay. Let’s say Fujikawa sent the two gangsters to find the painting. They broke into the Yamadas’ basement and took the drawings. But they couldn’t find the painting.” All eyes are on me. I look back at my sketched panels to steady myself. “So they followed Skye around. They thought she had some connection to the painting, since she did restoration work on the drawings. Maybe they followed her to my dad’s house one day, thinking she hid the painting there for safekeeping.”
    “In my house? That’s absurd,” my dad says.
    “I’m not