The Last Masterpiece (John Standard Book 5)

Book summary

In "The Last Masterpiece," John Standard is thrust into a perilous art heist in Zihuatanejo after an art dealer is murdered. Entrusted with a lost Rafael painting worth $350 million, Standard faces dangerous foes, including a billionaire and his henchman, in a high-stakes battle for survival.

Excerpt from The Last Masterpiece (John Standard Book 5)

The mid-afternoon sun hung over Zihuatanejo Bay like a heat lamp. It sent the temperature into the low nineties and drowsy tourists into the boozy comfort of bars and restaurants or the welcome shade of beach umbrellas and thatch-roofed cabanas. Sailboats and catamarans anchored in the bay baked under the unrelenting sun while bobbing on the gentle swells lazily working their way in from the ocean.

Jet skis and banana boats cut white wakes through the bay’s blue water. Parasails towed by speed boats floated overhead, fearless tourists hanging from harnesses like smoked hams.

Comandante Alejandro Vega of the Policía Judicial del Estado Guerrero watched it all from the deck of the private pool of a new luxury hotel built high on a hill with a view toward the Pacific Ocean. White-washed apartments, homes, and condos on the west side of the bay stood out like chalk against the dull-gray hills. To his right were the beaches of la Madera and El Centro. Below was the hotel district and Playa la Ropa. On the south side of the bay was Playa las Gatas with its palapa restaurants and white sands.

Vega looked at it through tired eyes that had seen it all before. It was early December, and another tourist season with its beer, tequila, and limes was just starting to get its buzz on. In the next four or five months, he would see a rotating cast of visitors here for a couple of weeks to escape the ice, rain, snow, and winter temperatures of the States and Canada. They would mingle with the more familiar ex-pats who came and went as they pleased, most arriving before Thanksgiving and staying until April.

Vega used his fingers to crush out the last of his cigarette and put the butt in his pants pocket. He swept the ashes off the front of his uniform and hiked up pants weighted down with a gun that he had never drawn in anger but felt naked without. He sighed, wiped his face with a handkerchief, and went back to the reason he was there: the body of a man floating face down in the water.

The man’s legs were together, and his arms stretched out as if frozen in a swan dive gone bad. The smell of chlorine mixed with the iron-laced odor of blood, enough of which had oozed out of the three bullet holes in the naked man’s back to turn the water in the long, narrow pool a cotton-candy pink. A gentle breeze off the bay made the dead man’s long hair wave back and forth like kelp in a tide pool.

“Who found him?” Vega asked, turning to one of his sergeants. He was slender with a thin mustache stuck on a face too serious for someone that young.

“Novia,” the sergeant pointed to the far end of the pool where pastel curtains waved in the breeze and a wide set of stairs led up from the pool. “She’s in the bedroom.”

“Witnesses?”

“None so far.”

“¿Nombre?”

“Not all of it. I believe the girl is hired help. Prostituta. She doesn’t seem to know much other than his name. She called him Raj. The manager is on his way. He has the registration information. He can also open the room safe. That should tell us more.”

Vega walked back to the far end of the pool to look out at the bay again. He had seen the same scene every day for twenty years, but from a slightly different angle. His own house was a quarter mile to the south and further up the hill. When he and his wife built the place, most of the slopes on the east side of the bay were nothing but scrub trees, dirt, and vermin. Now, it was rapidly filling up with condos and private homes like his. Lately, three high-end hotels had opened. So far, this was the only one with a dead body in a private pool.

As the local comandante, he had made it his life’s work to keep the violence and mayhem that plagued most of the State of Guerrero away from the comercio turístico on which Zihuatanejo relied. He didn’t fight crime. He sparred with it. A few left jabs, but no knockouts. He was happy to keep the scum in the pond by convincing the drug lords that the beaches, restaurants, and bars frequented by visitors were no place for drug dealers. The message was simple, even for them: Tourists aren’t going to buy your drugs and the locals can’t if they don’t have jobs.

It had worked, for the most part, but it remained a fragile although personally lucrative alliance that could shatter at any moment.

Now, the body in the pool gave him an uneasy feeling that everything he’d worked so hard to avoid was about to crumble along with his hopes of quietly spending his last days on the job. The man’s death was not the result of some domestic dispute or suicide. This was Mexico. A drug deal gone bad was always an option. It just didn’t feel that way.

Whatever it was it meant more work than he wanted to deal with.

Vega wiped his face again with a handkerchief. “Three months, sergeant, and I’ll be done with this mierda. No more bodies, drug dealers, narcos, or drunks. Just a nice, comfortable, quiet retirement. Sol, cerveza, viaje.”

“Sí, comandante. Lo siento.”

Vega took one more look at the floating body, then sighed. “Alright, get everyone in here and pull him out of the pool. The coroner can take care of the rest. Now, let’s talk to the girlfriend.”

Vega moved slowly along the pool, up the stairs, and through the curtains into the bedroom. The girl sitting on the bed looked to be in her early twenties with short black hair and a welcoming face that was more Spanish than Mexican. Red circles surrounded brown, doe eyes filled with fear and uncertainty about what would happen next. Streaks of dried mascara lined her cheeks. Store-bought tits out of proportion to her slim body spilled over the top of a bikini so small it made Vega wonder why she even bothered with it. He went into the bathroom behind the king-sized bed, took a terry cloth robe off the hook on the back of the door, walked back, and handed it to her. She slipped it on, pulling the front around her as if she were cold.

“¿Cómo te llamas?” Vega asked.

“Chantelle.”

“Jesús, sálvame,” Vega muttered, then pulled a chair over from a small table at the end of the bed and sat down in front of her, elbows on his knees. “Let me tell you how this works. If you lie to me, you’ll spend two or three weeks in a dirty jail cell as either a material witness or in protective custody. Longer if I decide you had something to do with this. You don’t want that. Bad things can happen there to a beautiful woman like yourself. ¿Entender?”

She nodded and wiped tears off her cheek. “Sí.”

“On the other hand, if you tell me the truth and it checks out, then you’ll spend a couple of days in a hotel in Ixtapa. After that, you’re free to go. ¿Entender?”

The girl thought for a few moments, then nodded her head again.

“Good. Now, let’s try this one more time. “¿Cómo te llamas?”

“Blanca Mendes.”

Vega knew most of the hookers in Zihuatanejo. They were mostly independent, working the town’s three show bars, which were a combination of strip club and burdel, instead of walking the streets. They earned a few hundred pesos a night either pole dancing, doing lap dances, or giving the occasional blow job. None of them looked anything like Blanca Mendes.

“Acapulco?” Vega asked.

“Sí,” she said, then explained that she was hired five days earlier through her service. Everything was paid in advance. She got some money upfront then drove her own car to Zihuatanejo. It was parked in the hotel lot. She was supposed to stay for another four days. She found the man who hired her dead in the pool when she returned from shopping in Ixtapa.

“I bought this bikini,” she said, opening the front of the robe. “I thought he might like it.”

Vega guessed she’d spent two thousand pesos for something with a hundred pesos worth of fabric and string.

“Muy bonita,” he said. “And then?”

“I put it on and walked out to the pool. That was when I found him. I screamed and ran outside. A maid came. She went inside, then came back out and called the police.”

“Your … client’s … name was Raj. He have a last name?”

She shook her head. “I just called him Raj.”

“What did he do while you were here?” When she gave him a confused look, he added, “I mean did he do business? Use a computer? Talk on the phone? Have visitors?”

“He talked on the phone a lot. I didn’t understand it. It was a language I didn’t know.”

“Did either of you do drugs while you were here? Cocaine? Heroin? Marijuana?”

She shook her head. “Only champagne and wine, but he never had much. I think he was very religious.” She paused for a moment. “Most of the time anyway.” She gave Vega a sly smile then pointed toward a small rolled up rug in the corner of the room. “He would pray several times a day. He used that rug over there. He always bowed that way.” She pointed toward the east.

Vega slumped back in his chair. Blanca Mendes was only a few years older than his two daughters. Soon they would be off to college in Mexico City or Guadalajara. They would have a future. Blanca would probably never get that chance. Sadly, like most Mexicans, she was too busy worrying about today to think about tomorrow. She made her money with beauty and luck without thinking about what would happen when both ran out. Whatever it was, he was too tired and jaded to judge her or anyone else. Just looking at her told him almost all he wanted to know. It also told him she had nothing to do with the body in the pool.

Blanca Mendes may be a lot of things, but she was no killer, at least not with a gun.