Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

prescription painkillers to make sure she never woke up again.”
    Lacey went to the first of three canvases leaning against the wall. “This painting depicts Cross Country Canyon and Three Savoy’s murder. If you look closely, you can see two figures watching the fire. The trail of flames point directly to the man holding what is probably the match used to start the blaze. So does the unnaturally bent tree.”
    Savoy grimaced. “You’ve got a good imagination.”
    “So did the sheriff who wrote up the report on Three’s death,” Ian said.
    “The next painting depicts the murder of Lewis Marten,” Lacey said. “Note the figure running away, literally stepping off the canvas and—”
    “Ms. Quinn,” Savoy interrupted savagely, “I know where this is going. But the artist who painted these died decades before my mother did. These canvases are the result of a sick imagination, not fact.”
    The bedroom door opened, revealing a thin, energetic old man. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.”
    Savoy stared. “Who the hell are you?”
    “David Quinn, now. Back then I was Lewis Marten. You can call me Grandfather, if you like. Gem was my daughter.”

Savoy Ranch
    Three days later
70
    S unlight was a golden glory over the land. There was just enough wind to make the tall grass ripple and shimmer like a second, greener sea. Lacey stood behind her Grandpa Rainbow, oblivious to anything but his painting. Ian stood to one side, watching.
    A Savoy Ranch vehicle pulled up beside Ian’s rented SUV and parked. Rory Turner got out and walked to Ian. Rory looked older than his age, like a man who hadn’t been sleeping well.
    “’Afternoon,” Ian said.
    Lacey heard and walked quickly over to the men. “I hope you’re not planning to talk to him until the light goes.”
    Rory looked from the gray-haired man to the dark-haired young woman who had ripped his life apart and given his wife a wounded, haunted look. I’m not a Savoy. I never was. How can that be? How could Grandmother do that to her family? It can’t be true!
    Yet it was. Sometimes Rory still had a hard time believing it, but each time he dug harder into the recent past or farther into the deeper past, it was easier to believe. Finding the stolen paintings at the ranch house, along with a safe full of the paintings depicting three ways to die had gone a long way toward making everything real.
    “I thought you should know that Ward died a few hours ago,” Rory said. “He never admitted calling you, but…” Rory shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now.”
    Ian didn’t offer any polite social lies about too bad, how sad. He simply nodded.
    Lacey didn’t even do that much.
    “We thought he was going to make it,” Rory said. “Then Savoy told him that Angelique White had pulled out of the merger. He just turned his face to the wall. I’d say it broke his heart, but he didn’t have one, not the kind we’d understand, anyway. He talked to me before he died.” Rory rubbed the back of his hand over his forehead. “You know what a strangler fig is?”
    “No,” Lacey said.
    “It’s a jungle plant that starts out as a seed that lodges in the crotch of a big, thriving tree,” Rory said. “The seed puts out some leaves, sends down a root or two dangling toward the ground. Then, as the years go by, the roots finally reach the earth and the fig really starts growing. It’s a vine, not a tree, so it can’t support itself. It wraps around and around the big tree until it finally strangles its host. It’s a slow death. Years and years and years. Its leaves take the sun the big tree once lived on, the vines wrapped around the trunk get stronger and stronger. When the tree dies and its trunk rots away, the fig vine lives on supported by its own lethal coils. That’s what Morley Forrest was, a strangler fig who got started by cleaning up after Benford the Second and then by blackmailing Sandra Wheaton over the true identity of her daughter’s father. Then he married his son into the family.”
    “Ward wasn’t any angel,” Lacey said.
    Rory shook his head. “No, no he wasn’t. He helped his daddy kill Three. He torched Lewis Marten’s studio, not knowing that the man sleeping inside was one of Marten’s rootless artist friends, not Marten himself. Then the Forrests settled in to take over everything the Savoys owned.”
    “Must have been real interesting when the first painting turned up with a blackmail demand,” Ian said, looking at the