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Neal and Peter were going over a current case, which now seemed to have been shut down permanently—as in, the presumed perpetrator had died suddenly. The recently deceased individual had been a stodgy, long-in-the-tooth curator of a well-known museum in the city. The FBI had been following a tip that the old guy was selling paintings on the black market that had been tucked away in archival storage and probably forgotten by everyone except the keeper of the museum’s antiquated records. The Bureau was in the process of collecting prosecutable evidence when they were informed that the man had died in his bed in his uptown brownstone. He had a documented history of a temperamental ticker, so the cause of death was deemed a myocardial infarction by his personal physician, and an autopsy was never performed. His much younger wife went the cremation route, and now the FBI’s best suspect was inurned in a crypt at a local cemetery.
“The wife did it,” Neal said with certainty.
“Aren’t you making a snap assumption?” Peter said to his CI.
“Not really,” Neal shrugged. “In any ‘who done it,’ don’t the authorities always put the spouse at the head of the line in their investigations? That couple was a pretty mismatched pair.”
Peter wasn’t convinced. “I’ll grant you that the wife was much younger than her husband, but May-December marriages can be the real deal. In this case, the wife seemed inconsolable, and she appears to have loved her partner deeply.”
“Ah, Peter—haven’t you learned by now that appearances can be quite deceiving?” Neal grinned.
“That’s certainly true when it comes to you,” Peter agreed. “You could pass yourself off as a choir boy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, if the spirit moved you.”
“Let’s get back to the wife,” Neal insisted. “I’ll bet the new widow is going to be moving up in the world and changing her life style because she had a huge life insurance policy on her old honey, and maybe a newer, younger honey to spend it on waiting in the wings.”
“You sound very jaded, Neal,” a handler snarked.
“Face facts, Buddy. The motives behind all crimes really boil down to either personal gain or hatred,” Neal said knowingly.
“We didn’t see any signs of discord in their marriage while we had them under surveillance,” Peter objected. “In fact, they looked very deeply devoted, like two people comfortably in love.”
Neal forged ahead with his opinion. “Love and hate are really just flip sides of the same coin, Peter. The lure of personal gain plus another love interest could have been the triggers for this lady, turning l’amour into hatred,” he said wisely. “Look into what she was doing in her spare time. Maybe take a peek at her personal trainer or her hairdresser to see if it’s some virile young stud.”
Peter wasn’t convinced. “The old man died of a coronary, Neal. He died peacefully in his bed. He wasn’t shot, strangled, or bludgeoned to death. So how did his grieving widow manage to give him a heart attack?”
“Maybe she was seeing someone who had access to certain drugs that would put the old guy’s lights out permanently and make it look like natural causes,” the con man theorized.
“I think you just want to force all the pieces of the puzzle into place to come up with the picture you want to see,” Peter groused. “As usual, you insist on being right.”
~~~~~~~~~
Down the road, much to a handler’s annoyance, his CI had been on to something. The art thief’s wife not only came into $500,000 on an old life insurance policy, but also an additional cool million on another just put into effect within the last year. Deep delving into her private life revealed an ongoing sexual relationship with her husband’s personal physician. This was a professional man with the means and opportunity to inject the old man with something fatal like the paralytic drug, succinylcholine, or even an overdose of a more readily available substance like insulin. Of course, the FBI would never know the truth because the deceased was now nothing but ashes and they couldn’t prove a thing.
“See, I was right. All criminals do what they do for the very common reasons of personal gain or hate,” Neal reminded Peter.
“I don’t think you can make a blanket statement like that, Buddy,” Peter mused thoughtfully. “That wasn’t true in your case.”
“Yes, it was,” Neal argued. “I allegedly did what I did for money, pure and simple.”
“Don’t try to sell me that bill of goods, Neal. You’re no common criminal.”
“I guess I should take that as a compliment,” a young criminal grinned.
“You can take it any way you like, but I think you did what you did for much more complicated reasons,” Peter said very seriously. “You wanted to be noticed and have others be in awe of your talents and your resourcefulness. You were going for ‘impressive,’ as much as you were going after money. You desperately wanted validation for your ingenuity. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re overthinking me, Peter,” Neal scoffed. “I’m not that complex. What you see is what you get.”
It was on the tip of Peter’s tongue to add the words, young, cocky, impetuous, needy and adrift, but he didn’t want to rub salt into Neal’s old wounds. Nonetheless, that was Peter’s gut feeling about Neal’s past motivations. Instead, he tried for an end run.
“Neal, I really hope you know that I value you for completely different reasons, and I don’t see you as just a reformed felon working off his sentence. You’re both unique and special, and although you’re sometimes a pain in the neck, you’re my pain in the neck and definitely worth the discomfort. We wouldn’t be doing this if you weren’t.”
Neal slid a sidelong glance at his handler and forced a bland expression onto his handsome face. He didn’t dare respond to Peter’s hypothesis, maybe because it hit too close to the truth. But Neal was determined that a handler could never know his weak spots because that would be giving him too much power. But then, maybe Peter Burke already had that kind of clairvoyant access and hidden knowledge, and that was truly unnerving. It made a con man’s current criminal endeavor even more dangerous than any past caper.