The Investigator Asked For My Files Before She Believed My Eyes

"One person suspects," I said. "He's the person who pays me."

Leila stayed outside the gate.

"Then meet me where your boss can't watch you speak. After your shift. Bring copies of records you have a right to possess."

We met at a plain coffee shop off Magnolia. She bought tea. I bought a $4 coffee and did not drink it.

"Start with what you touched," she said.

I told her about the wax, the painted number, and the shoulder damage.

She listened without helping my story along.

Leila Haddad was forty-one, Lebanese American, and an investigator assigned to a county art-crime team. Her dark hair was tied back. A thin white thread hung from her coat cuff.

I watched that thread because her stillness made me nervous.

"You said the maps matched," she said. "How well?"

"Enough to worry me. Not enough for me to swear to ownership."

Her pen stopped.

"That's a useful answer."

I showed her the museum scan, then the new one. I had brought my agreement and the old museum work order too.

"You kept these yourself?"

"The raw files, yes. I charge for treatment and finished pieces. Diagnostic records stay mine under clause seven. The museum agreement lets me retain condition data."

"Mr. Kells signed this?"

"Every renewal. He wanted the delivery dates changed. I wanted the file clause left in."

She read it twice.

"Keeping a file and proving when it was made are different things."

"My archive costs $14 a month. The service keeps upload receipts and earlier versions. You can ask them for their records."

"We will, through the proper process."

I turned my empty cup handle toward the door.

"You still don't believe me."

"I believe you're worried. I need evidence that can survive someone who gets paid to doubt you."

She called the museum with me sitting there. Its registrar confirmed my old job. Then Leila asked about records I had never seen: theft reports, shelf photographs, the mark under the base.

She did not tell me the answers.

"What happens tomorrow?" I asked.

"We check the shipment. We ask for cooperation where that's enough, and court orders where it isn't. Don't search his office. Don't take his mail. Don't promise anyone we can protect them from everything."

"I repair rubber helmets. I don't have that kind of reach."

"People with good intentions surprise me. Usually badly."

At the door she glanced at my hand.

Clay had dried beside my thumbnail.

"Did you work in the museum itself?"

"Only that summer. Mostly I make small animals between glue jobs."

"What sort?"

"Ones that don't require a buyer's deposit."

She almost smiled.

Outside, a bus sighed at the curb. The evening line of cars barely moved along Magnolia.

"Were you always this careful?" she asked.

"I once bought a lot of marble before the final contract cleared."

"I meant with objects."

"With objects, yes. They can't tell me where it hurts."

The next morning, an insurance surveyor arrived at the warehouse. Our carrier already required shipment checks above certain values. Leila had contacted its fraud desk; the carrier had asked for an urgent look at our declared materials.

The surveyor, Mara Chen, wore steel-toed shoes beneath loose gray trousers.

"I'm holding outbound coverage pending review," she told the shipping manager.

That was not a police seizure. It was enough to make the freight company refuse the crate that morning.

Magnus summoned me before lunch.

His office smelled of lemon oil. A framed school thank-you letter stood behind a paperweight shaped like a pear.

"You raised a materials question outside our business."

"The object didn't match the form."

"You could have asked me."

"I did."

He pushed two pages across the desk.

The first ended my contract Friday. The second required me to surrender all scans, photographs, and restoration notes, then erase my copies.

"Your final invoices will clear after you sign."

He owed me $7,904 for two hundred eight approved hours. Rent was due in nine days.

"Those hours were already accepted."

"And my property must be returned."

I laid my copy of clause seven beside his new page.

He did not pick it up.

"You really think a pile of pictures will make you important?"

"I think the dates might matter."

His mouth tightened.

"Finish only the work assigned. Stay away from shipping."

I left the new agreement unsigned.

At my bench, I wrote down the meeting while I still remembered his words. I sent Leila a copy of the demand from my own phone.

Her reply was short.

Preserve what you lawfully hold. Don't argue with him about the investigation.

I put my clay fox in my coat pocket. For the first time in six years, I did not trust leaving it there.

Then the shop printer started.

A final work order slid into its tray. It showed a giant sleeping elephant, a fiberglass prop tall enough to stand inside.

Across the inspection box, someone had typed: PROP 614. EXTERIOR REPAIR ONLY. INTERNAL EXAMINATION WAIVED BY PATRON.