Free By The Howling by Olivia Stowe Page B

that’s her,” he said as Charlotte showed him the photograph Joyce had given her. “Cynthia Black. No, no, of course I didn’t know she really was someone named Susan Purcell. She had a card, yes. But, no, I don’t think I kept it.”
    “Oh those?” he asked nervously as, after she had noticed the wooden art cases propped up beside the back edge of the counter, King was asked where they had come from—and when. “Yes, I did receive those on consignment from Cynthia—from this Purcell woman.”
    “Recently?”
    “When? Why, just this morning.”
    While David and Stan King watched, with David carefully stationing himself where he could move quickly if King made a run for it either out of the front of the shop or into the back rooms, Charlotte opened a case that was familiar to her—one that she had handled before.
    “Do you recognize a genuine Vormeer when you see one, Mr. King?” she asked as she carefully slid the precious landscape oil from the safety of its case. “I’m sure you do—and I don’t doubt you know that this one belongs to the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia.”
    There was little that King could say, and they stood there in a glum little triangle while David Burch called in the town police and they waited for them to arrive.
    After King was in custody, David took Charlotte off to the side.
    “I’m not surprised the Purcell woman has been unloading stolen goods here. The Easton police have seen the car you described as the one the dead woman was in when you saw her on the street in Hopewell. It’s been spotted twice, but they haven’t managed to stop it yet. Both times they said a young woman was driving.”
    “I’d bet it was Susan Purcell,” Charlotte said.
    “I wouldn’t take that bet. But if she’s here—and it appears she is, at least as late as this morning—we’ll nab her eventually. If she’s driving around in the car, she must not know that we have identified it. But there is something we’ve identified.”
    “What?”
    “The victim. Her name was Pamela Smith, and she’s a fraud investigator for the GML Insurance Company. Worked out of New York. They are big on art and life insurance.”
    Bells rang in Charlotte’s brain, but she didn’t quite know why—except for the obvious, which David went straight to.
    “So, it isn’t looking too good for Susan Purcell, is it?”
    “No, a lot of things are coming together,” Charlotte answered. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t seem fully satisfied. But that didn’t matter. Charlotte hadn’t gotten to where she had in the FBI for not being thorough. This case seemed to be coming together, but there were still some i ’s to dot and t ’s to cross.
    “And we’re talking murder here,” David said. “The medical examiner said she was dead before she went into the water. Blunt object trauma he said. Our teams did a thorough search of the area, so whatever was used to kill her was probably brought in by the killer and taken out again.”
    “Here are the keys to the Wells house, where Susan was living,” Charlotte said. “I guess that’s an investigation scene now, and you’d better get a team over there to do a closer search for evidence than I was able to do this morning.”
    “Will do.”
    “Oh, and David . . . ask them to be careful of the Japanese porcelain tea set on the guest bed, would you? That’s mine.”
     
    * * * *
     
    “I felt I needed to talk to you, but I didn’t know how to begin. That’s why I wanted to come with you to Easton today.”
    Charlotte and Brenda had started off sitting in the front window alcove of the tea shop on South Washington Street in the shadow of the looming Tidewater Inn across the street, but they had moved back into the interior when it became obvious that those walking down the bricked sidewalk recognized Brenda. The movie tabloids had already located her, at least generally, on the Eastern Shore, so the local residents were on the lookout for the famous