Delgado actually looked a little relieved. Whoever Ricky was, he was more scared of him than he was of the memory of what he’d done to Lucia. He lowered his hands slightly.

“But that was an accident. Everyone knows that was only an accident.”

I gritted my teeth. “If I hear the word accident one more time . . . there’s a witness that says otherwise.”

Delgado looked confused. “Witness? What witness?”

“A witness who told me exactly how you killed her. How you purposefully spooked Lucia’s horse, then chased after her through the Del Monte Forest and how, when you caught up with her, you pulled her down from her horse and tossed her headfirst into a creek.”

“No.” Delgado’s color had risen in the bright studio lights. His face was now the color of his work-reddened knuckles. “None of that is true.”

“It’s all true,” I said. “I told you, there’s a witness.”

“There isn’t!” he roared, leaping from his chair just as Paul was coming toward him with the handcuffs. “There wasn’t any witness! No one else was there!”

I grinned at him smugly. “Except you, right? That’s how you’re so sure.”

Delgado, realizing he’d just confessed to murder, launched himself from behind the desk. I’d known he was going to make a move—trapped rats always do, eventually. Even tame ones, like Romeo, will attack if they feel threatened enough.

But Delgado’s mistake was that he went for Paul, not for me. Leaping out from behind the desk, he threw a brawny arm around the younger man’s throat and cried, “Stay back! Stay back, or I swear to God I’ll snap his neck.”

Paul was pretty unhappy about this turn of events. “Um, Suze?” he croaked. “I think he means it.”

“Hold still, Paul.” I strode calmly toward them, the rifle raised.

“Wh-what are you doing?” Delgado cried. “I said stay back!”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “He said stay back, Suze.”

“Duck, Paul,” I said, and when I’d closed the distance between us to about a yard, I swung the gun around like a baseball bat, hitting Delgado in the side of the head. He staggered, then slowly went down, though it took a couple more blows to convince him to stay there.

“Goddammit, Suze,” Paul cried as Delgado slumped on top of him, eventually pinning him to the floor beneath his greater weight. “Get him off me. Get him off!”

“I’m trying. Stop being such a baby.” The larger man weighed a ton. Fortunately, he wasn’t dead. I hadn’t wanted to kill him, of course. That’s why I’d tried to avoid striking him in the temple. Jesse had explained to me once that he’d seen more severe brain injuries caused by punches in bar fights than he had by gunshots in the St. Francis ER. A well-placed punch could kill just as surely as a bullet.

“Thank God,” Paul said, scrambling to his feet and adjusting his suit when I’d finally succeeded in rolling Delgado off him. “And who are you calling a baby? I think I’ve got a right to complain. What I am is accessory to kidnapping and attempted murder. Did this guy really kill a girl?”

I nodded. “She was in the first grade at the time.”

“Ew.” He made a face. “And I thought it was only his hideous art that was a crime. Oh, no.” He noticed a stain on his sleeve. “Suze, this is a six-thousand-dollar suit. Who’s going to pay for this?”

“You’re the multimillionaire. Deal with it. Come on, let’s cuff him before he wakes up. I want to look at his computer and see if there’s anything on there I can use to connect him to the murder or any other criminal activities. Do you still carry a gag?”

“Oh, Suze.” He waved his pocket square. “Always.”

“Make use of it. I do not want Mr. Delgado’s screams disturbing the good citizens strolling the downtown Carmel shopping district.”

Paul did as he was told, while I went to work erasing all the footage on the gallery’s security system (which consisted of a set of video cameras—Delgado was obviously a fan of the At Home with Andy show, and his do-it-yourself methods—in two corners of the studio), then searching his computer for incriminating evidence. The desktop wasn’t password protected, leading me to believe there’d be nothing interesting on it.

But after opening a locked drawer at the bottom of the black lacquer desk—easily done with one of the keys I found on a chain inside Delgado’s pocket—I discovered the real computer—a laptop that was not only password protected, but sitting beneath a .44 Magnum handgun. Loaded.

Wow. Lucky for me the drawer had been locked. Not so lucky for Jimmy.

Resting beneath the laptop was a locked cashbox. None of the keys from Delgado’s keychain fit the lock, so Paul and I took turns smashing the cashbox against the cement floor until the thin metal lid finally broke open.

Cashboxes, I’ve found, generally aren’t that well made. Or it could be that the people who construct them never anticipated someone throwing them against a cement floor a bunch of times. Amateurs.

Inside was a surprisingly large amount of money—$50,000 in cash, banded, mostly hundreds and twenties—along with Delgado’s passport, the passport of a man I assumed was his assistant, and a dozen thumb drives. I made the mistake of plugging the thumb drives into the desktop to see what was on them.

I instantly wished I hadn’t.

“Well?” Paul asked. He’d found some bottled beer in a small minifridge in the back office—after first mentioning that it was no wonder Delgado was so overweight: he kept a “buttload” of candy in the cupboards—and was walking around, drinking it, restless as Romeo on his wheel after too many grapes. “What’s old Jimmy been up to in his spare time?”

“Pretty much what I expected.” I switched off the screen, but unfortunately not before Paul happened to stroll behind me and get a good look.

“What the—”

Paul dropped the bottle. It broke, smashing into a hundred pieces. The glass looked like amber, floating in a quickly spreading puddle the color of Lucia’s hair across the ink black floor, toward the body of the man who’d killed her.

veintisiete

Paul didn’t have much to say on the ride back to the hotel. I was driving. I didn’t trust him to do so, not only because of how completely freaked out he was by what had just happened, but because he’d also finished off all the beers in the minifridge and was currently working on a fifth of whiskey he’d found hidden in a back drawer of Delgado’s desk.