The Flinck Connection (Book 4) (Genevieve Lenard) by Estelle Ryan Page A

room, he had moved his workstation into my viewing room. His reason was his inability to share space with Manny for extended periods. “The videos are up in the team room, but we can watch it here if you want to.”
    “No, I’d rather not have everyone in my space.”
    “Are you okay?” he asked again.
    “There are too many bits of information and I don’t know if it is connected, or what is connected to what, or how it is connected.”
    “We’ll figure this out. We always do.” He squeezed my arm. “Shall we?”
    I gave a single nod and followed him to the team room. Everyone was sitting at the round table, fresh coffee and muffins in the centre. Phillip was also present, Manny telling him that Colin had received a mysterious phone call.
    “And he’s going to tell us about it now, right, Frey?”
    Colin sat down and took a muffin. “The call was from one of my fences. He told me that he had heard of some very hot merchandise on the market. Since he knew I was into high-end art, he thought I might know more about it.”
    “I assume he wants to be the one selling those artworks,” Phillip said.
    “Most definitely, yes. He wants in on the action. We are talking large sums here, not a little sketch selling for a couple of hundred thousand. These works are worth millions on the black market and he wants part of that.” Colin took a bite of the muffin and reached for a mug of coffee. “It was the artwork he mentioned that got my attention.”
    “From the Gardner heist or today’s?” I asked.
    “Today’s heist. It’s always better to sell the art immediately or you’ll have to wait months before moving it.” He gave Manny an insincere smile. “Law enforcement is always slow in getting the word out after an art heist like this. If you can shift the art within twenty-four hours, you’re golden. After that, all kinds of alerts are out and travelling with it might become more complicated. Not impossible, just more complicated.”
    “I would like to know how this fence already knows about this morning’s theft.” Manny paused for a moment, thinking. “You received that phone call four hours after the heist took place, at exactly the same time we were informed about it. How the bleeding hell did he hear about it so fast?”
    “Good question. And no, I’m not going to ask him. It will make him suspicious and right now I need him to be desperate for my business, not questioning my loyalty because I ask too many questions.”
    “Pity. If you don’t value him too much, we can find something to arrest him for and then interview him while he’s in custody.”
    “A ham-handed approach that won’t work, Millard. For this you will need finesse, something you are clearly not familiar with.”
    “The video.” The two words came out a bit louder than I had intended. I had come into the team room for that purpose and didn’t want to listen to another digression.
    “Firstly, a bit of interesting information.” Francine’s idea of interesting information could be of true interest or it could be a theory about some new world order controlling all the governments and manipulating industry. Hoping it was the former, I waited for her to continue. “Our thief was very smart. He cut the whole block’s electricity. Not many people would notice this at five o’clock in the morning. It also disabled quite a few security cameras in the area that had no battery backup. Really shocking how outdated some systems are.”
    “What’s the point of security if it can’t function without electricity?” Vinnie exhaled loudly through his nose. “Amateurs.”
    “This Monnet Museum was quite a bit more prepared.” Francine smiled. “Their cameras have good battery backup that enables recording for twelve hours before it needs to be recharged. It is supposed to immediately upload footage from all the videos to their cloud account, but our clever thief scrambled the wireless systems. Also something unlikely to be noticed