Read Online 2 The Dante Connection by Estelle Ryan - Free Book Online Page A

between their looks and their age? No, no. You aren’t that vain. Then why the secret? I don’t mind people knowing how old I am.”
    “Identity theft.”
    It didn’t take long for me to comprehend. “Aha. The more information people have on you, the easier it would be for them to impersonate you, steal your credit details and take over your life. Oh my goodness, should I stop telling people how old I am?”
    Colin laughed. He shook his head. “I’ve missed this.”
    “What?” I was still fretting about the danger I had put myself into by telling people my age.
    “Laughing.” His quiet admission pulled me out of my train of thought. What I saw on his face made my chest hurt. I wanted to say something. Do something. Maybe touch him like normal people did. None of this came naturally to me. It was achingly difficult for me to be a friend.
    “I don’t know what to say.” Distress tightened my throat and my words came out strangled.
    “You don’t have to say anything, Jenny. Just be you. That’s what I need right now.” He cleared his throat, unconsciously announcing a change in the mood, in the subject. “Why don’t I drive you home and you can tell me about the cases on the way?”
    “I have my own car.”
    “And you have secure parking here. I’ll drop you off tomorrow morning. Why put any more environmentally destructive gasses in the air?”
    Before I knew it we were in a heated debate about global warming and the credence to the many varying theories surrounding it. I put the files in the side pocket of my computer bag. They barely fit. Colin took the heavy bag from me and carried it to his car. The argument gained momentum until we were halfway to my apartment and I realised that he had used this as a distraction to get his way.
    I gave him five minutes of silent anger until I relented and told him everything that I had learned about the burglary cases. We were still discussing this when he guided me past my front door to the neighbouring door. A flash of annoyance returned, but I banked it. For now I needed some information from Francine.

 
    Chapter FIVE
     
     
     
    “So? What do you think?”
    I ignored Colin’s question and walked deeper into his apartment. The more I saw, the more confused I became. I stopped in front of one of the walls in astonishment. Footsteps sounded over the wooden floors and stopped next to me.
    “Did you do all of this?” I asked, waving my hand around the flat.
    “The interior decorating? Some of it, yes. The art? That’s another story.” He reached to the wall filled with masks and took an Inca funerary mask. “These masks I actually did pay for, just like you. Do you think that we bought our masks from the same guy in Peru?”
    “I always wondered how you knew what it was when you first saw it in my flat.”
    “On the first day we met,” he said. He had broken into my apartment and I still remember him studying my apartment as if it was an interesting piece of art. He replaced the mask that was an almost exact replica of the one hanging in my apartment. “Tell me what you think.”
    I turned my back on the mask-filled wall to face the rest of the open-space living area. I didn’t know what to think. I most definitely didn’t know what to say. Colin’s apartment was similar to mine in layout. Admittedly, I had never been in this apartment, even though I had been living next door for six years.
    The same as in my apartment, Colin’s was divided into two sections. The first was a cavernous room that in my apartment hosted a living area and reading area opposite each other on each side of the front door. Colin had his living area on the opposite side and didn’t have bookshelves lining the walls and forming a semi room-divider. There he had filled the walls with paintings, masterpieces if I were not mistaken. Whether they were authentic, legally obtained or forged I had no way of ascertaining. Colin was, after all, a master forger and art thief.
    Deeper