Kristy's hand tightened on the phone. Not because of the gore—she'd seen worse. But because of the crown. That was a signature. A message. Someone was playing a very old, very cruel game.
"Because the last person who looked for it is dead," Voss replied. "His name was Marco Tannhauser. He was my best researcher. Three days ago, he was found in the Willamette River with his tongue cut out and a king's crown drawn on his forehead in permanent marker." Kristy Gabres -Part 1-
At thirty-four, Kristy had the lean, coiled look of a woman who’d stopped running but hadn’t forgotten how. Her auburn hair was pulled into a messy knot, and the shadows under her gray eyes weren't from lack of sleep—they were from lack of answers. Six months ago, she’d broken the story of the century: a sitting city councilor taking bribes from a development cartel. But a single source had recanted under pressure, the councilor had sued for libel, and the Herald had thrown Kristy under the news van to settle. Now she worked freelance, taking odd jobs for true-crime podcasts and writing obituaries for a suburban weekly. Kristy's hand tightened on the phone
A pause. Then: "I want you to find something that doesn't want to be found. A painting. The Blind King's Supper. " That was a signature
"Exposed and then un-exposed," Kristy said. "What do you want?"
Kristy leaned against the windowsill. She knew the piece. Seventeenth-century Flemish, a grotesque masterpiece of a king eating a feast he couldn't see, surrounded by laughing courtiers. It had vanished from a private vault in Brussels in 1999 and resurfaced once—on the black market, then gone again.
Outside, the rain had stopped. But the fog was rolling in, thick as a secret.