Under Lock and Key
highlight_author
K.D. Richards
highlight_reads
16.0K
highlight_chapters
26
The man who broke her heart…Must now be her protector. Maggie Scott has worked hard to become an assistant curator at the Larimer Museum. But following the theft of a rare, priceless jewel and the murder of her fellow employee and friend, Maggie is suspected of complicity. Only investigator Kevin Lombard believes in her innocence. But thanks to their shared history, he's hardly objective. In fact, this may be the second chance he never thought possible. First, though, he must prove Maggie's innocence…and protect the woman he never forgot from whoever is out to get her.
Chapter One
Maggie Scott looked around the dimly lit museum gallery, exhausted but content. She’d done it. The donors’ open house for the Viperé ruby exhibit had been a rousing success. The classical music that had played softly in the background during the night was silent now, but the air of sophistication and sense of reverence still filled the room. Soft spotlights lit the priceless paintings on the wall while a brighter beam shone down on what was literally the crown jewel of the exhibit. The Viperé ruby glowed under the light like a blood red sun.
Maggie stood in front of the glass case with the almost empty bottle of champagne she’d procured from the caterers before they’d left and a flute. She poured what little was left in the bottle into the flute and toasted herself.
“Congratulations to me.” She downed half the liquid in the glass. Her eyes passed over the gallery space with a mixture of awe, satisfaction and pride. The night had been the culmination of a year’s worth of labor. A decade of work if she counted undergraduate and graduate school and the handful of jobs she’d held at other museums before joining the Larimer Museum as an assistant curator three years earlier. It had taken a massive amount of work to ensure the success of the display and the open house for the donors and board members, who got a first look at the highly anticipated exhibit. As one of two assistant curators up for a possible promotion to curator and with the director of the British museum who’d loaned the Viperé ruby to the relatively small Larimer Museum watching her, she was under a great deal of pressure from a great many people. But the night had been an unmitigated success, so said her boss, and she was hopeful that she was now a shoo-in for the promotion.
Maggie stepped closer to the jewel, reaching out with her free hand and almost grazing the glass. The spotlight hit the ruby, creating a rainbow of glittering light around her. She raised the champagne flute to her lips and spoke, “To the Viperé ruby and all the other pieces of art that have inspired, challenged and united humanity in ways words cannot express.”
She finished the champagne and stood for a moment, taking in the energy and vitality that emanated from the works around her.
Maggie was abruptly yanked from her reverie by the sound of a soft thud. She and Carl Downy were the only two people who were still in the building. Carl was the retired cop who provided security at night for the museum. Mostly, that meant he walked the three floors of the renovated and repurposed Victorian building that was itself a work of art between naps during his nine-hour shift.
A surge of unease traveled through her. She gripped the empty champagne bottle tightly and called out, “Carl, is that you?”
A moment passed without a response.
Unease was replaced with concern. Carl was getting on in years. He could have fallen or had a medical emergency of some type.
Maggie stepped into the even more dimly lit hallway connecting the rooms, the galleries as her boss liked to call them, on the main floor. The thud had sounded as if it had come from the front of the museum, but all she saw was pitch black in that direction. She knew the nooks and crannies of the museum as well as she knew her own house. Normally, she loved wandering through the space, leisurely taking in the pieces. Even though she’d seen each of them dozens of times, she always found herself noticing something new, some aspect or feature of the pieces she’d overlooked. That was one of the reasons she loved art. It was always teaching, always changing, even when it stayed the same.
But she didn’t love it at the moment. The museum was eerily still and quiet.
Suddenly, a dark-clad figure stepped out of the shadows. He wore a mask, but she could tell he was a male. That was all she had time to process before the figure charged at her.
Her heartbeat thundered, and a voice in her head told her to run, but her feet felt melted to the floor. The bottle and champagne flute slid from her hands, shattering against the polished wood planks.
The intruder slammed her back into the wall, knocking the breath out of her. Before she had time to recover, he backhanded her across the face with a beefy gloved hand.
Pain exploded on the side of her face.
She slid along the wall, instinct forcing her to try to get away even as her conscious brain still struggled to process what was happening. But her assailant grabbed her arm, stopping her escape.
Her vision was blurred by the blow to her face, and the mask the intruder wore covered all but his dark brown eyes. Still, she was aware of her assailant raising his hand a second time, his fist clenched.
Her limbs felt like they were stuck in molasses, but she tried to raise her arm to deflect the blow.
Too slowly, as it turned out.
The intruder hit her on the side of her head, the impact causing excruciating pain before darkness descended and her world faded to black.
KEVIN LOMBARD’S PHONE RANG, dragging him out of a dreamless sleep at just after one in the morning.
“Lombard.”
“Kevin, hey, sorry to wake you.” The voice of his new boss, Tess Stenning, flowed over the phone line. “We have a problem. An assault and theft at the Larimer Museum, one of our newer clients. Since you are West Investigation’s new director of corporate and institutional accounts, that makes it your problem.”
Kevin groaned. He’d only been on the job for three weeks, but Tess was right, his division, his problem. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t overseen the installation of the security system at the Larimer. He’d looked over the file, as he’d done with all of the security plans that West Security and Investigations’ new West Coast office had installed in the six months since they’d been open, so he had an idea of what the gallery security looked like.
West Security and Investigations was one of the premier security and private investigation firms on the East Coast. Run primarily by brothers Ryan and Shawn West, with a little help from their two older brothers, James and Brandon, West Security and Investigations had recently opened a West Coast office in Los Angeles, headed up by Tess Stenning, a long-time West operative and damn good private investigator. If he’d been asked a year ago whether he would ever consider joining a private investigations firm, even one with as sterling a reputation as West Security and Investigations, he’d have laughed.
But staying in Idyllwild had become untenable. A friend of a friend had recommended he reach out to Tess, and after a series of interviews with her and Ryan West, he’d been offered the job. Moving to Los Angeles had been an adjustment, but he was settling in.
He searched his memory for the details of the museum’s security. Despite West Security and Investigations’ recommendation that the museum update its entire security system, the gallery’s board of directors had only approved the security specifications for the Viperé ruby. Shortsighted, he’d noted when he’d read the file, and now he had the feeling that he was about to be proven right.
Tess gave him the sparse details that she’d gotten from her contact on the police force. Someone had broken into the museum, attacked a curator and a guard and made off with the ruby. He ended the call and dragged himself into the bathroom for a quick shower. Ten years on the police force had conditioned him to getting late night—or early morning, as it were—phone calls. The shower helped wake him, and he set his coffee machine to brew while he quickly dressed then pulled up the museum’s file on his West-issued tablet. A little more than thirty minutes after he’d gotten the call from Tess, he was headed out.
He arrived at the Larimer Museum twenty minutes later, thankful that most of Los Angeles was still asleep or out partying and not on the roads. He showed his ID to the police officer manning the door and was waved in. Officers milled about in the lobby, but he caught sight of Tess down a short hall toward the back of the Victorian building, talking to a small man in a rumpled suit and haphazardly knotted blue tie. The man waved his hands in obvious distress while it looked like Tess tried to console him.
Kevin made his way toward the pair. In the room twenty feet from where they stood, a police technician worked gathering evidence from the break-in.
“This is going to ruin us. The Larimer Museum will be ruined, and I’ll never get another job as curator again.” The man wiped the back of his hand over his brow.
Tess gave Kevin a nod. “Mr. Gustev, this is my colleague Kevin Lombard. Kevin, Robert Gustev, managing director and head curator of the Larimer Museum.”
Gustev ignored Kevin’s outstretched hand. He pointed his index figure at Tess. “This is your fault.”
“West Investigations is going to do its best to identify the perpetrators and retrieve the ruby.”
Gustev swiped his hand over his brow again. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
The man looked on the verge of being sick.
“Mr. Gustev—” Tess started.
“You were supposed to protect the ruby.”
“If you recall, we did make several recommendations for upgrading the museum’s security, which you and the Larimer’s board of directors rejected,” Tess said pointedly.
Gustev’s face reddened, his jowls shaking in anger.
“Mr. Gustev,” Kevin said before the curator had a chance to respond to Tess. “We are going to do everything we can to recover the ruby. It would help if you took Tess and I through everything that happened up until the time the intruder assaulted you.”
“Me? No, it wasn’t me that the thief attacked.”
Kevin frowned. On the phone, Tess had said the guard and the curator had been attacked.
“It was my assistant curator who confronted the thief.” Gustev frowned. “She’s speaking with the police detective in her office right now.”
“Oh, well, why don’t you tell us what you know, and we’ll speak to her once the police have finished.”
Gustev ran them through a detailed description of the party that had taken place earlier that night. Kevin pressed the man on whether anything out of the ordinary happened at the party or in the days before, but Gustev swore that nothing of note had occurred.
The curator waved a hand at Tess. “I have to call the board members.” He turned and hurried off down the hall, ascending a rear staircase.
Tess’s eyes stayed trained on the retreating man’s back until he disappeared on the second-floor landing. She let out a labored sigh. “This is going to turn into a you-know-what show if we don’t get a handle on it fast.”
Kevin’s stomach turned over because she was right. “I’m not sure we can avoid that, but I’ll do my best to get to the bottom of things as quickly as possible.” He turned to look at the activity taking place in the room to the right of where they stood.
Glass sparkled on top of a podium covered with a black velvet blanket. A numbered yellow cone marked the shards as evidence. A crime scene tech made her way around the room, systematically photographing and bagging anything of note.
Tess groaned. “Someone managed to break into the building and steal the Viperé ruby, a ruby the size of your fist and worth more than the gross domestic product of my hometown of Missoula.”
His eyebrow quirked up. “Sounds like a lot.”
“Try two hundred fifty million a lot.”
Kevin gave a low whistle. “That’s a lot.”
Tess cut him a look. “A lot of problems for us. I’m afraid Gustev—” she nodded toward the staircase that the curator had ascended moments earlier “—is going to throw himself out of a window.”
The curator was more than a little bit on edge, but who could blame him. “The thief attacked the assistant curator but left her alive?”
Tess nodded. “The night guard and one of the assistant curators were knocked unconscious by the thief, apparently.”
Kevin frowned. “What was an assistant curator still doing here so late?”
“That I don’t know.” Tess shrugged. “But the museum had a party tonight to kick off the opening of the Viperé ruby exhibit. The board, donors and other muckety mucks, drinking, dancing and, undoubtedly, opening their wallets.”
“Undoubtedly,” he said, turning his attention back to the crime scene technician at work.
Tess shook her head. “The guard was out cold when the EMTs arrived. They took him to the hospital. He’s on the older side, former cop, though, so he’s tough. The curator is in her office. Declined transportation to the hospital.”
“Sounds like she’s pretty tough, too.”
Tess shrugged. “Or stupid. Detective Gill Francois is questioning her now.”
He frowned. He hadn’t had the pleasure of working with Francois yet, but he’d heard of him. The detective was a bulldog.
Tess chuckled. “Don’t do that. Gill’s good people. I’ve already talked to him. He’s agreed to let us tag along on the case, as long as we play nice and keep him in the loop regarding anything we find out.”
He felt one of his eyebrows arch up. “And he’ll do the same?”
Tess rolled her eyes. “You know how it goes. He says he will but...”
“Yeah, but.” He did know how it went. He’d been one of the boys in blue not so long ago.
“Listen, I made sure West Investigations covered its rear regarding our advice to the board of directors of the museum to upgrade the entire system.” Tess waved a hand in the air. “I told them that the security they’d authorized for the Viperé ruby left them open to possible theft, but they didn’t want to spend the money and figured the locked and alarmed case along with the on-site twenty-four-hour security guard was enough.”
“Didn’t want to pony up the money?”
Tess tapped her nose then sighed. “Still, this is going to be a black mark on West Investigations if we don’t figure out what happened here quickly. I know you’ve barely gotten settled in, but do you think you’re up for the job?”
“Absolutely,” he answered without reservation. “The first thing I want to do is get the security recordings and the alarm logs and get the exact time when the case was broken. We’ll also need to figure out what the thief used to break the glass.” He pulled the same type of small notebook he’d used when he was a police detective out of his jacket along with the small pen he kept hooked in the spiral. His tablet was in the computer case that hung from his shoulder, but he preferred the old-fashioned methods. Writing out his notes and thoughts helped him remember things better and think things through. “Of course, shatterproof glass isn’t invincible, but it would have taken a great deal of force and a strong weapon to do it.” He scratched out notes on his thoughts before they got away from him.
Tess cleared her throat. “The alarm went off just after eleven, triggered by the curator after she’d regained consciousness. Getting more specific than that is going to be a problem, at least with regards to the alarm logs.”
Kevin looked up from his notebook. “Why?”
Tess looked more than a little green around the gills.
His stomach turned over, anticipating that whatever she was about to say wasn’t going to be good.
“Because the alarm didn’t go off,” she said.
“The alarm didn’t go off.” Kevin repeated the words back to Tess as if they didn’t make any sense to him. Then again, they didn’t. “How is that possible?”
“That is a very good question.”
He and Tess turned toward the sound of the voice.
A man Kevin would have made as a cop no matter where they’d met descended the back staircase.
Kevin’s gaze moved to the woman coming down the stairs next to him, and his world stopped.
The man and woman halted in front of him and Tess.
“Hello, Kevin.” The words floated from Maggie’s lips on a wisp of a breath.
“Hello, Maggie.”
Maggie Scott. His college girlfriend and, at one point, the woman he’d imagined spending his life with.
