“I hope that’s for me,” her father said, but his gaze never left the man who was speaking to the group in rapid Russian.
Kat didn’t know whether to feel annoyed or impressed by his casual tone—as if this were a standing date, and he’d been expecting her all along.
She handed him his coffee, watched him wrap cold hands around the warm cup. “No gloves?” she asked.
He smiled and sipped. “Not on my day off.”
Thieves aren’t supposed to want too much—which is ironic, but true. Never live anyplace you can’t walk away from. Never own anything you can’t leave behind. These were the laws of Kat’s life—of Kat’s world. As she watched her father sip hot coffee and sneak smiles at her over the top of the cup, she knew that, strictly speaking, no thief is ever supposed to love anything as much as she loved him.
“Hi, Daddy.”
Nearby, church bells started to ring. Pigeons scattered. And her father glanced at her from the corner of his eye and said, “I know the Colgan School is good, honey, but Paris seems an awfully long way to come for a field trip.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’s fall break.” Kat didn’t want to know why lying to her father was far easier than telling her headmaster the truth. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
Another sip. Another smile. But this time he didn’t meet her eyes. “You wanted to see if the rumors were true,” he said, and Kat felt her face burn in the cold wind. “So, who told?” her father asked. “Uncle Eddie? Hale?” He shook his head and spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m gonna kill that kid.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Like Barcelona wasn’t his fault?”
“Yeah, well . . .” Kat heard herself repeating Hale’s words: “We all agreed that that monkey seemed perfectly well trained at the time.”
Her father scoffed.
“Dad—”
“Sweetheart, would you believe me if I said I didn’t pull any jobs in Italy last week?” The bells stopped, and the guide resumed his lecture. Kat’s father glanced around the square and lowered his voice. “If I said I had an airtight alibi?”
“You have an alibi?” Kat asked. “You swear?”
Her father’s eyes glowed. “On a Gutenberg Bible.”
“You can prove it?”
“Well,” he hesitated. “It’s a little more complicated than . . .” But then he trailed off and the crowd shifted, revealing a newsstand—headlines calling out in black and white: Nouveaux Pistes Dans le Vol de Galerie: La Police Dit Que les Arrestations Sont en Vue.
“Dad,” Kat said slowly, “you don’t happen to know anything about that gallery that was robbed last week, do you?” His smile was part pride, part mischief, and yet he didn’t face her. He didn’t say a single word. “So you didn’t do a big job in Italy last week because on the night in question you were doing a little job in Paris?”
He blew on the steaming coffee, then whispered, “I told you it was a good alibi.” He took a small sip. “Of course the work wasn’t quite up to my usual standards—you know my best assistant left me recently?” He shook his head and drew an exaggerated breath. “Good help is so hard to find.”
One of the Russian ladies hissed, warning them to be quiet, and Kat started to feel claustrophobic. She wanted someplace private. She wanted someplace she could yell. Then suddenly Kat found herself wondering . . .
“Dad, if the job was last week, why are you still in Paris?”
As he paused mid-sip, Kat couldn’t help but think that the thief had been caught, busted. The father, on the other hand, just seemed proud of his little girl.
“Sweetie, let’s just say possession is nine tenths of the law, so right now I’m not as guilty as I might like to be.”
“Dad . . .” She stared up at her father, not quite sure she wanted to know the answer to her next question: “Where’d you stash them?”
“It,” he corrected, “is someplace safe.”
“Someplace lonely?”
“No.” Her father chuckled. “Unfortunately, at the moment, it has plenty of friends.”
He continued to smile, but something about the way his eyes kept darting around the square made Kat worry.
“Then maybe you should leave it there,” Kat suggested.
He rocked on his heels, but didn’t meet her gaze. “Now what would be the fun in that?” He smiled wider, and Kat could have sworn she saw one of the Russian women swoon a little at the sight. A pair of teenage girls were whispering and giggling in their direction, but as far as Kat could tell, there was only one woman on the square who dared to openly stare. Perhaps she was too beautiful—too self-assured—to care who saw her looking. And yet this gorgeous, dark-haired woman’s unwavering eyes made Kat feel strange.
“Watching women checking out my dad is creepy, you know?”
“Sweetheart”—her father’s voice was steady—“sometimes it can’t be helped.”
He was teasing, Kat thought. Wasn’t he? But as they started to follow the tour group to the steps of a nearby church, Kat still felt the staring, as if someone were watching her every move.
Kat pulled a tiny camera from her purse and scanned the crowd. A man sat beneath an umbrella at a sidewalk café, not eating. She zoomed in on two men who lingered on a bench at the corner of the square, and recognized the plain clothes, bad shoes, and haggard look of a surveillance team five days into a job. And finally, Kat studied the woman standing at the edge of the square, staring at her father, who had barely met Kat’s eyes since she’d found him.