Zach looked out the cabin’s open door, across the sloping bench of land the ranch sat on to the dry canyons and low ridges that ran all the way to the north rim of the Grand Canyon ten miles distant. The ranch was beautiful in the way of the arid West, the kind of spare, demanding beauty that most people couldn’t see.
Jill could. Her eyes and her voice told Zach that she loved the land. She was hoping the paintings would allow her to keep the ranch.
“Art is a funny business,” he said. “Getting funnier every day.”
“From what I’ve gathered online, there’s huge money in the art market.”
“And no way to value a painting but its last auction price,” he said. “Or the second-to-last price-that’s the one two people were willing to pay.”
“What do you mean?”
“Art is like everything else. It’s worth what someone’s willing to pay for it. Period. In order to make people pay more, much more, auctioneers and experts churn out a lot of blue smoke. The painting being flogged doesn’t change from one decade to the next. Only the volume and quality of blue smoke varies. And the price of the art.”
“You think my paintings are worthless?” she asked.
“I haven’t seen them, have I?”
She smiled slowly. “Thought you’d never ask.”
SEPTEMBER 14
1:50 P.M.
Score had barely ushered a rich new client out of his office before Amy strode in, all but slamming the door behind her. The green tips of her hair quivered with anger.
“The next time you tell me ASAP,” she said, “take my calls.”
He grabbed his temper before he decked her. He needed Amy’s head right where it was, on her shoulders. He’d always had a temper, but lately it was on a hair trigger.
’Roids.
No. I do steroids, they don’t do me. It’s this damn Breck case that’s jerking me off.
“The bug on subject Breck has moved about three miles northeast from its initial site,” she said.
“What’s three miles away?”
“According to the map you gave me, a lot of nothing. It’s Nowhere, Arizona.”
Modesty’s taunting words came back to Score.
This house was built by pioneers, people who lived alone and protected themselves. They built hidey-holes that even the Paiutes couldn’t find.
“Anything on the phone bug?” he asked.
“No more than I already gave you. The subject must be away from her sat phone.”
Score looked at his schedule, swore under his breath, and wished he knew what the Breck girl was up to.
He didn’t want to leave Hollywood right now.
And he couldn’t afford to boot the Breck case. That particular client was too important.
“Tell me if you get anything on the phone bug,” Score said, “or if it leaves the ranch boundaries. And there’s a bonus if you get anything solid out of the phone.”
“Define solid.”
“I’ll know when you tell me.”
SEPTEMBER 14
1:58 P.M.
Without a word, Jill unwrapped more paintings and leaned them against the wall.
Zach was equally silent.
The paintings were riveting.
Holy hell. Frost would get hard looking at just one of them. Twelve is staggering.
The canvases ranged from eight-by-twelve to thirty-four-by-forty inches. Just canvas and stretchers, no frames. If they were Dunstans, they were worth the kind of money even smart people killed for.
“Modesty lived alone? No one else?” Zach finally managed.
“Not after my mom died and I left.”
“Alone, and she hid these. That’s crazy,” he muttered.
“The wind out here can make you a little crazy sometimes.”
He looked at the incredible paintings. “This is way past a little.”
“Modesty didn’t have time or patience for art. She was too busy surviving.”
With that, Jill unwrapped the last two paintings and placed them against the wall.
“Holy, holy hell,” Zach said on a long gust of breath. If these are half as good as they look…
Almost reverently he lifted one of the canvases at random and took it into the sunlight to study. The first impression was of fine brushwork and careful technique.
And that mind-blowing, indefinable something called greatness.
The painting showed the first tentacles of the modern West overtaking the Wild West. Tucked away against the base of a dry, rocky ridge, green bloomed, and with it a gas station that must have been startlingly new when the painting was made. Despite the intrusion of the new into the old-or perhaps because of it-the painting echoed with space and isolation and time. He turned the canvas over. indian springs.
He picked up another painting at random. This one was a flawlessly executed Western landscape, basin and range country falling away from a lonely ridge. Below the ridge stood a cabin so small as to be insignificant against the sweep of the land. A human figure, a woman in a long red skirt and white blouse, carried a bucket of water from a spring.
The figure was suggested as much as drawn, a few brushstrokes added to the starkly beautiful land, brushstrokes that whispered of the human cost of pioneering the lonely, dry inter-mountain West.
“That’s one fine painting,” Zach said after a few minutes. “Of course, my opinion isn’t worth much more on the open market than yours.”
“I was trained in fine art. Western genre painting was never mentioned.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Europe, modernism, minimalism, or nothing at all. Except Georgia O’Keeffe, maybe, if you cornered a professor and peeled off thin strips of skin until he or she begged for mercy.”
“Sounds like you took my courses,” Jill said.
“My education was more informal, but the teacher was first class.” And a real son of a bitch along with it. Zach tilted the canvas so that sunlight raked over it from all angles, then flipped it over expertly to look at the back. “No signature. Again.”
“None of them are signed.”
He traded the canvas for another. A landscape again, just as technically brilliant and dynamic as the others, humming with time and space and distance, the thrill and exhilaration of testing yourself against an unknown, untamed land. Masculine long before Hemingway made a cult of it, and the hallmark of classic Western art.
This time a few spare brushstrokes evoked a woman with her pale skirt whipping in the wind, her back to the artist as she looked out over the empty land and endless sky. Again, the figure was very small in the context of the painting, yet without the woman the canvas would have been far less powerful. In a subtle way, she was the focus that made the picture transcend simple representation of a landscape.
Zach checked the back of the painting. A title had been painted in block letters on the canvas stretcher bar. enduring strength.
“Amen,” he said softly.
Jill looked over his arm. “That’s one of my favorites. The artist caught the heady isolation of this land perfectly.”
“Are they all this good?” Zach asked, scanning the paintings against the far wall.
“I don’t know what an expert would say, but I think so. They might not be to everybody’s taste, but nothing is.”
“There’s taste and then there’s insight.”