The Icon Thief Read Online Free

her neck. “It’s okay. He’s with me.”
    The grin lingering on his face, the patrolman stood aside, allowing Powell to ascend the ramp to the boardwalk. As they approached the section that had been cordoned off, he turned to Wolfe. “Thanks. But this had better be important. I’m being deposed tomorrow, and I’m knackered enough as it is—”
    “It takes a day to adjust for every hour of time change,” Wolfe said. “You still have a day or two to go. Or is it nerves?”
    “Something like that.” Powell did not mention that when the phone at the hotel rang, he had been standing before his bathroom mirror, rehearsing the deposition that he was scheduled to give the following morning.
    “Trust me, you’ll be glad you came,” Wolfe said. She was young, cute, and Mormon, a recent Quantico graduate, so new to the job that her pistol and package of bullets were still locked in a safe in her supervisor’s office. In the days since his arrival, Powell had come to know her well, and she struck him as competent and tough, if exhaustingly straitlaced.
    He looked down the boardwalk, which extended for two miles along the beach. It was an hour before dusk. From where he stood, he could see into the covered pavilions where old Russian men were playing backgammon in the dying light. To his left stretched a row of restaurants and clubs, their outdoor tables facing the ocean. Without surprise, he recognized the patio of the Club Marat.
    A few steps ahead, yellow barrier tape had been strung on sawhorses, blocking off an area of the boardwalktwenty feet square. A crowd of onlookers had gathered around the uniforms who were guarding the scene. The golf carts used by boardwalk police were parked nearby.
    Powell followed Wolfe to the sawhorses. “Any sign of our man from overseas?”
    “Not yet. I’ve been watching the club all day. I haven’t seen anyone we don’t know.” She lifted the tape, allowing Powell to duck inside. “Kandinsky and I were parked across the street when we noticed the crowd. When we saw what was going on, I figured you ought to see it.”
    Powell nodded absently as they neared the heart of the scene. A section of the boardwalk had been torn up, leaving a hole the size of a coffin lid. Standing around the opening were more uniforms and a hefty figure in plain clothes. Judging from his blue nitrate gloves and territorial air, Powell guessed that he was the detective who had caught the case.
    Kneeling by the opening, Powell looked with detachment at what had been revealed. With the planks gone, the boardwalk’s concrete supports had been exposed, along with the sand that came up nearly to the rim of the hole. As he regarded what was underneath, he understood why Wolfe had wanted him to see it, although he sensed that it would be nothing but a distraction.
    A woman’s headless body lay beneath the boardwalk, partly buried by drifts of sand. She was mummified. Dry heat had hardened her skin into something with the consistency of dehydrated beef, the flesh shriveled into a leathery toughness. Except for her panties and bra, once white but now a dirty yellow, she was naked. Her limbs, shrunken to the bone, seemed as fragile as a bat’s folded wings.
    Lowering his eyes, Powell felt another flicker ofinterest. The woman’s hands were missing as well. Her arms were crossed over her chest, a pair of bloodless stumps where the hands should have been. The head had been removed at the jawline, leaving only the truncated cylinder of her neck, like a stout branch that had been pruned away. “Who found her?”
    “A maintenance crew,” Wolfe said. “One of the long boards was warping. When they pulled it up, this is what they saw.” Turning aside, she led Powell to a spot several steps away. “Now do you see why I called?”
    “I do,” Powell said. He took a moment to clarify the situation in his own mind. Removal of the head and hands, while far from conclusive, was typical of
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killings. “You