Read Online The Plague of Thieves Affair by Marcia Muller - Free Book Online

may. No woman is immune to a genuine compliment.”
    Her response was likewise encouraging. So was the faint flush of color that tinted her cheeks. He warned himself to continue to proceed with caution—and then made the mistake of disobeying the warning by saying without weighing the words in advance, “No woman is more deserving. I’ve many more to pay you, though perhaps in more intimate surroundings.”
    Abruptly the gleam in her eyes vanished. “Is the prospect of intimacy why you’re grinning like the Cheshire cat?”
    Quincannon hadn’t realized that he was. He abolished the grin and hid his perplexity by fluffing his whiskers. Just that quickly her demeanor had shifted from mildly (very mildly) flirtatious to coolly businesslike. Women and their mercurial moods! If ever a man were to devise a mathematical equation that satisfactorily explained them, he would be hailed as a genius greater than Archimedes or Sir Isaac Newton.
    He repressed a sigh and asked how her day had gone.
    â€œReasonably well. Marcel Carreaux and Andrew Rayburn were here to finalize arrangements.”
    â€œWho? Oh … the security job for that traveling exhibit at the Rayburn Gallery. Handbags Across the Years or some such.”
    â€œReticules Through the Ages.”
    â€œA handsome fee, as I recall, for what is bound to be a dull and uneventful undertaking. Any Barbary Coast or East Bay scruff caught snaffling handbags, even ones bristling with gems, would be the butt of jokes by his fellows for the rest of his days.”
    â€œBe that as it may, our clients consider the security necessary. And you needn’t worry about having to attend.”
    â€œFor which I’m grateful. Your day was much better than mine, I must say.”
    â€œOh? Things didn’t go as planned at the brewery?”
    â€œNo. I’ve spent the day in the company of louts and knaves, one of them a corpse.”
    â€œCorpse? Whose?”
    â€œCaleb Lansing, the man responsible for the murder of the brewmaster and theft of his steam beer formula. One of the men, I should say. Lansing himself was murdered this morning under bizarre circumstances.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    Quincannon crossed to sit at his desk, where he proceeded to clean the bowl of his briar with a penknife while he gave Sabina a somewhat encapsulated account of what had taken place at the brewery. Her eyes widened as he spoke, and when he was done she said, “I don’t see how Lansing’s death could have been murder and not suicide. He died alone behind two locked doors, one of which you say you had under surveillance.”
    â€œFour good reasons, all of which escaped everyone’s notice except mine. First, he had no weapon when I braced him in the fermenting room. A pistol the size and shape of a LeMat would have made a conspicuous bulge in his clothing. And if he had been armed, he surely would have drawn down on me instead of running like a frightened rabbit.”
    â€œHe could have smuggled it into the utility room earlier and stashed it somewhere, couldn’t he?”
    â€œPlanning to take his own life when he had enough money hidden in his rooms to flee the city? And to do it there in the brewery, rather than in the privacy of his rooms? No, Caleb Lansing was murdered, and for the same reason Otto Ackermann was.”
    â€œThe other reasons you’re so certain?”
    â€œSecond is the location of the fatal wound. Lansing was shot on the left side of the chest, just above the rib cage—an awkward, nearly impossible angle for a self-inflicted wound. Most gunshot suicides choose the head or chest as their target, for the obvious reason.”
    â€œYes, that’s true.”
    â€œThird, there were no powder burns on his shirt or vest. He was shot from a distance of at least two feet, an outright physical impossibility if his were the finger on the trigger. And fourth, he made no effort to