Jane's apartment was in the building opposite Sarah's, and Kurt's eyebrows rose as he stepped from the SUV onto familiar turf. It was far from the most expensive neighborhood in the city, but it was more upscale than he had expected a curator with relatively few years of experience to be able to afford. It was pricey even for Sarah, and she numbered several pro athletes among the clients of her physical therapy business.
Jane's apartment was on the twelfth floor. According to their intel, she was single and lived alone, so Kurt was surprised when the door swung open a few seconds after they'd announced themselves. He was even more stunned to see his sister in the entryway. "Sarah? What the hell are you doing here?"
"I'd ask you the same thing, but you yelled 'search warrant' loud enough to wake the dead," Sarah responded sarcastically.
Kurt's jaw clenched. "Sarah—"
"I saw on the news a little while ago that there was a robbery at the museum where Jane works," Sarah bit out. "I tried calling her to see how she was doing, but she didn't answer her phone, and when I checked with her assistant at the museum, she said Jane had left. So I came by to see if she was here."
"Wait a minute." Kurt struggled to catch up with this unexpected turn of events. "Jane Kruger is the friend you've been trying to set me up with?" Sarah had been trying to convince him to agree to a date with her for months, but he'd always said thanks but no thanks. His sister had many talents, but he suspected her matchmaking abilities would be even further down the list than her cooking skills.
His frown deepened as another possibility occurred to him. Had their meeting last night not been the coincidence he'd assumed? Could Jane have been targeting him all this time—and using his family in an attempt to get close to him?
"For all the good it did me," Sarah muttered. "She was as stubborn about not wanting to meet you as you were her. She has a strict no-dating-cops policy."
"There's a shock," Kurt said dryly, although his frown did lessen infinitesimally. If Jane were targeting him, it didn't make sense that she had rebuffed his sister's no doubt myriad attempts to engineer a meeting between them.
Sarah glared at her brother. "Not because she's a criminal, you jackass. But Jane's never been interested in dating anyone she couldn't get serious about, which would mean coming clean about her past. She's always said that she would just be setting herself up for heartbreak by getting involved with a cop, because all they would see when they learned the truth was a criminal. I told her she was wrong in your case, that you would be an exception to that rule." She blew out a breath. "I guess I was the one who was wrong."
"This has nothing to do with Jane's past," Kurt said stiffly, stung by the accusation. "We have . . . other evidence that Jane is involved in the theft, and we're following up on it. That's all."
"Oh yeah?" Sarah challenged. "What evidence?"
"We can't comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation," Zapata said smoothly. "How did you get in here anyway?"
"With a key," Sarah stated the obvious in such a dry tone that Zapata flushed. "Which I've had for nearly the entire time I've known Jane. I take care of Rembrandt when she's traveling. Her cat," she said, nodding toward the gray tabby watching them with unblinking yellow eyes from his perch by the window. "Jane gave me the key even knowing that my brother was a cop, and I'm in and out of here all the time. Kind of blows your whole super-secret-thief theory out of the water, doesn't it?"
"Maybe," Kurt allowed, even as his hopes of getting a quick resolution to this case faded. Only an idiot would stash hot artwork where someone could stumble upon it, and Jane was nobody's fool. "We're still going to have to take a look around, though."
"Fine." Sarah took a seat on the sofa and crossed her arms. "Be my guest."
Kurt opened his mouth to tell Sarah that she needed to go, but the look she shot him convinced him that discretion was the better part of valor in this case. Apparently Zapata thought so as well. "Come on, Reade, let's leave the living room to Kurt so these two can talk. We'll check the rooms in the back."
Thanks a lot, Zapata, Kurt thought as she and Reade beat a hasty retreat. He could feel Sarah's eyes on him as he started his search. "So, uh . . . how long have you known Jane, sis?" She'd tried to set him up with various friends so often that he had paid no mind when she began mentioning Jane.
"We met at yoga class a little over a year ago," Sarah said tightly. "We got to talking on our way home the first time, and when we realized we lived so close, we started going together. And before I knew it, we were doing as many things as possible together."
"Wow. You two really hit it off," Kurt observed lightly.
Sarah nodded. "Jane is—well, I won't say she's like the sister I never had, but she's the closest thing to one I've had since Taylor."
Kurt felt his heart wrench at the tears shimmering in Sarah's eyes as she glanced up at him. He'd spent so many years grappling with his own emotions over Taylor's loss, hellbent on getting justice for her, that he sometimes forgot just how much her absence still affected his sister as well. "I'm sorry," he said sincerely. "I might not have been interested in a romantic relationship with Jane, but I'm sorry I didn't at least make the effort to meet her."
"I'm sorry too." Sarah huffed out a sad sigh. "I'm sorry I didn't press the issue more when I realized something was wrong. I feel like we might not be here now if I could just have gotten her to open up to me—or convinced you to reach out to her." She ran a frustrated hand through her hair. "I know you thought this was all a matchmaking attempt on my part, and I don't deny that I think you two would be a really good fit, but I'm telling you, Kurt—something is seriously wrong with Jane. You have to help her."
"I'm trying," Kurt retorted. "I've been a cop long enough to recognize when someone is in trouble, Sarah, but she won't open up to me any more than she would you." He'd been hoping he would get a call from the agent guarding Jane since he left the NYO, but no dice. "I just—I don't know what else I can do."
"Let me talk to her," Sarah suggested. "She knows and trusts me. I've been urging her to confide in you ever since I realized there was something more going on with her than just her brother being kidnapped, and there were times I thought she really might. I don't believe for a moment that she's done anything wrong, but maybe now I can finally convince her to tell you what's going on."
Kurt hesitated. It went against protocol, and his innate desire to protect his sister, but at this point in the investigation, what could it hurt, really? They'd been working this case for months without generating one credible lead, and time was almost certainly running out. "All right. You can come back to the office with us when we finish our search."
He turned his attention to that now. Jane's apartment was a reflection of his initial impression of her: relaxed, but with an understated elegance that would be lost on the casual viewer. There were several paintings on the walls, but one in particular caught his eye: an oil portrait of a young girl appearing to take her first steps toward her mother's outstretched arms while her proud father looked on. It was set in Central Park with Belvedere Castle as the backdrop. "Gorgeous," he murmured as he moved toward it.
"My favorite too," Sarah agreed. "It's a Jane Kruger original."
Kurt's head whipped around. "Jane painted that?"
"She's incredibly talented." Sarah moved to stand beside him. "I've told her more than once that she should make a career of it, but she always says she's not good enough to make it more than a hobby. I keep telling her she's a better judge of art than that—that's how she afforded this place—but I get the feeling she prefers to work behind the scenes in the art world."
"What do you mean, 'that's how she afforded this place?'" Kurt asked curiously as he tore himself away from Jane's painting and continued his search.
"Jane invested in several paintings of a little-known artist while she was in college, and when he went big, she made a killing off them. I mean, it didn't make her a millionaire or anything, but it was enough for her to afford a generous down payment on this apartment and still have a tidy sum left over. She's had more moderate success with a few other artists since then."
Kurt nodded. That explained a lot—and it would be easy enough to verify. He began methodically searching the living room and kitchen, pushing aside the feeling of disquiet doing his job brought him this time. Somehow this felt like an even more intimate invasion than being inside Jane. At least he didn't have to rifle through her underwear drawer.
Her underwear . . . Kurt sucked in a breath at the memory of Jane standing before him in it. The set she'd worn had been more functional than fancy, but though he'd taken pleasure in stripping it off her, he'd been so focused on the unabashedly sexy woman before him that he'd paid it little mind. The wonder in her eyes as he'd touched her, the little gasps and sighs she'd uttered as he stoked her arousal to fever pitch, and the look on her face as pleasure claimed her for the first time were burned into his brain, and he wondered how long it would be before those memories stopped evoking a desire in him to do it all over again. He'd never felt such an intense connection with a woman in his life.
It was just his luck that she wasn't who'd she'd seemed.
Kurt rode in the backseat with Sarah on the way back to the NYO, but the four of them were largely silent on the drive, each of them lost in their own thoughts. He caught Zapata eyeing him oddly a few times, but he thought nothing of it until she asked Reade to take Sarah on up to SIOC so she could talk to him alone.
"Something you want to share with the class, Weller?" she asked dryly once the other two were well out of earshot.
"About what?" Kurt asked, so caught up in his own worries about the potential awkwardness of the upcoming conversation with Jane that he missed the sardonic gleam in Zapata's eyes.
"Oh, I don't know," Zapata drawled. "Maybe the fact that you're in a relationship with our prime suspect? That seems like a good place to start. And don't bother to deny it," she added when Kurt opened his mouth to do just that, pulling an all-too-familiar piece of notepaper from her pocket and slapping it against his chest. "I found this in Jane's nightstand."
"We're not in a relationship!" Kurt protested as he attempted to smooth the paper out. "It was just last night—" Too late he realized how that sounded.
All humor disappeared from Zapata's face as she stared up at him. "You're telling me you had a one-night stand with Jane last night? After she stole the painting? Oh, this is just great," she muttered as she read the truth in his face. "What the hell were you thinking?
"Well, obviously you weren't," she continued before Kurt could respond. "Not with your northern brain, at least. God, Weller. Do you realize how serious this is? It's bad enough that you screwed a total stranger, but one who's a criminal who's entangled you in her web of lies? This could end your career!"
"I'm well aware of that," Kurt retorted stiffly. "And I am fully prepared to accept the consequences of my actions."
"And I'm determined to make sure that you don't have to," Zapata fired back. "You're not just my boss, you're my friend, and I'm not about to stand by and watch you flush your career down the toilet for some piece of a—"
"Zapata!" Kurt barked.
"Some woman," Zapata amended without missing a beat, "who is at best caught up in a mess of her own making, and at worst a terrorist, and who has insinuated herself into your life for god only knows what purpose. Kurt . . . you do realize that Jane's not an innocent victim here, right?"
"We don't know what she is yet, Zapata," Kurt countered. "I'll admit that at first I thought the same thing, especially when I found out about her relationship with Sarah, but as much as I don't normally believe in coincidences, in this case, that's all it appears to be. You heard Sarah say that Jane had no interest in ever meeting me, and she's assured me that she's going to keep quiet about our . . . date. She's already lied about it, so even if she did change her story now, it would be suspect." He blew out a breath. "I'm not ruling anything out at this point, but if Jane is targeting me, it's hard to see what benefit she's getting out of it."
"It's possible it's coincidence," Zapata allowed. "Or maybe you're giving her the benefit of the doubt is the point. I recognize that there are parallels between your past and hers that are making you sympathize with her, Weller, but she's not you. You don't know what her moral code is like, or if she even has one, and there are still more questions than answers about her past. Until we know more, you can't afford to let your guard down with her."
"I know," Kurt said. "I know," he repeated more firmly when Zapata cast him a doubtful look. "I may not have . . . exercised the best judgment in the past twenty-four hours, but I'm not an idiot, Zapata. I'm going to be much more careful going forward. I'll be okay, I promise."
But even as he said it, he had the sense that life as he knew it had absolutely, irrevocably changed forever.