I was at the Riverside Art Museum in downtown Riverside, California, a renovated brick warehouse with tall industrial windows and polished concrete floors that smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and old paper. The morning light poured in through those windows, casting long geometric shadows across the marble-finished lobby and the echoing galleries. School groups murmured by with their chaperones.
A security guard in a navy blazer stood near the gift shop, half watching the room, half watching his phone.
Somewhere, a docent was explaining brushstrokes to a cluster of retirees. I stood in front of a Turner landscape, admiring the way he captured light on water, when I felt the lightest pressure against my palm.
A small rectangle of paper. I blinked, glanced down, and saw a folded note in my hand.
Act normal.
Smile. Leave when I leave. I looked up slowly.
The woman beside me was maybe fifty, with neat gray-streaked hair pulled back, pearl earrings, and a tailored navy blazer over a cream blouse.
She held the museum brochure as if she were simply reading about the exhibit. Her face was relaxed, pleasant, the kind of face that blended easily into museum crowds in any city in America.
She smiled at the painting as if we were discussing brushwork. “That man is following you,” she whispered, lips barely moving.
“The one in the gray suit near the Roman sculptures.
Don’t look directly.”
My heart began a slow, heavy thud against my ribs. I am sixty-three years old. I’ve raised three children, buried a husband, and run a small bookkeeping business out of my home in Cedar Falls, Oregon, for thirty years.
I’ve survived recessions, medical bills, and the kind of grief that leaves you gasping in a quiet kitchen at two in the morning.
Nothing prepares you for a moment like this, no matter how many crime novels you’ve read. I swallowed, nodded faintly as if agreeing about Turner’s use of light, and turned my head just slightly, as though I were considering the next gallery.
That’s when I saw him. A man in a gray suit, standing beside a Roman marble bust, pretending to study the sculpture.
He was tall, mid-forties, with an angular jaw and cold blue eyes that flicked toward me every few seconds.
He wore a watch that probably cost more than my first car. The blood drained from my face. I recognized that jawline.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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