'Anyway, here's the set-up. Asshole liked art, in a big fucking way. Pictures all over. He must have kept some of those New York salerooms going single-handed. Modern, but not shit, y'know? I mean I know nuthin' about art but even I could see that some of these artists had real talent. Lot of Scottish stuff, from Glasgow, which I liked of course. Asshole probably thought Glasgow was a double-glazing company. Lot of South American stuff too. I guess that he did know. Frida Kahlo. Diego Rivera. You name it. Asshole had it in a frame with a little light on. I mean, very particular. Like he couldn't just hammer a fucking nail in the wall. These pictures were positioned like he was a fucking surveyor. Story goes he once beat up his kid's nanny when she accidentally brushed against one of these canvases. And when I say beat up, I mean beat up. Apparently, he used one of those Romitron cosh things -- you know, kind of a plastic ball and chain? -- on her fucking hands. Damn near crippled her. No one touches those paintings except asshole himself.'
From headquarters on North-west Second Avenue it was only a couple of minutes' drive east to Kate's Williams Island apartment home. At least it was her home until the divorce came through. Howard, her husband, and a partner with one of Miami's smartest law firms, had paid almost $900,000 for the place. Her own lawyers had told her there was a chance she might get to keep the apartment as part of the settlement. But she was thinking that it hardly seemed fair he shouldn't get half. Besides, it wasn't as if she actually wanted to stay there in view of all the secretaries in his office that Howard had been balling there when, as on this occasion, Kate found herself working late.
'This information must have got out to someone in one of the other cartels,' Bowen continued, with one eye on Kate. 'Someone who wanted asshole dead. Take your pick. Hell, there's enough of them. Anyhow, whoever it was, they were real clever. Set it up while asshole was back in Bogota. The Delray place was well guarded on the highway side. Cameras, sensors, the whole protection package. But light on the ocean side. Like the stupid schmuck had never heard of boats. Anyway, CCGD Seven reports seeing some kind of high performance sports boat anchored a couple of miles up the coast, off the municipal beach, the night before asshole got hit. Sam Brockman figures they must have put a diver into the water who crawled ashore at the Suarez place under cover of darkness. There was only the one guard on the beach front. The guard says he saw nothing. Kate?'
Kent Bowen wanted her attention and approval most of all. She was one of the Miami Bureau's brightest agents, not to mention one of its great beauties and he had a thing about her. She snapped her attention back to Bowen and his interminable story.
'Here's the clever part,' he said. 'Guy gets in the house. A real pro. He selects his picture -- no idea what it was -- takes it off the wall and flattens out about 250 grams of C5 plastic onto the back of the canvas. Then he tapes a simple tilt detonator onto the inside of the stretcher. Just a ball bearing inside a test tube, two needles, a little battery and a blasting cap. And that's his bomb. Beautiful. A really neat job. He leaves the picture hanging slightly crooked and then skedaddles out of there. He's long gone by the time asshole returns from Colombia.' Bowen shook his head as if still amazed at the assassin's ingenuity. 'As usual the sniffer dogs go in first, but they can't get the scent of any explosives because the picture's about five feet up the wall. The asshole walks into the room and sees the picture hanging squint as Quasimodo's dick. And being the obsessive he is, right away he's over there to straighten it.'
Bowen sat back in his chair, grinning sadistically, to savor the climax of his story.
'The ball bearing rolls along the test tube, touches both points of the needles, completes the circuit, and karaboom! blows the guy's head clean off his fucking shoulders.'
Kate caught Bowen's eye and smiled thinly as he and the rest of the guys in the room laughed some more at that.
'The crime scenes investigation unit spent forty-five minutes looking for Bolivar's head. They were beginning to think one of those Colombians must have taken it for a fucking souvenir when they found it floating in the goddamn aquarium. The blast had carried it right across the room, like a basketball.' Bowen pretended to make a basket. 'Field goal, two points.'
He cackled some more, wiped a tear from his eye and thinking of another wisecrack, said:
'Now that's what I call a really mind-blowing picture.'
