Under the VARNISH

Chapter 5: The Detective

Detective Adaeze Okafor came to the studio on a Thursday, unannounced, the way people come when they’ve already decided the element of surprise is worth more to them than courtesy.

She was younger than Elena expected — mid-forties, maybe, with the unhurried posture of someone who’d learned a long time ago that most people talk more when you don’t fill the silence for them. She stood in the doorway for a moment before she said anything, taking in the room the way Elena imagined she took in most rooms: not looking for anything specific, just cataloguing what was there in case she needed it later.

“Elena Voss?”

“That’s me.”

“Adaeze Okafor. I’m with the department’s art crimes unit.” She held up identification Elena didn’t really look at, because she was already reading the woman’s face instead, an old habit she couldn’t turn off even when it wasn’t paint in front of her. “You have a few minutes?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“You always have a choice,” Okafor said, stepping inside without waiting to be asked. “You just might not like the other doors as much as this one.”

Elena thought, with some discomfort, of Marcus saying almost exactly that about Julian a week ago — a door left open a crack, easier to walk through than to slam shut. She wondered if everyone in this whole situation had learned to talk the same way, or if she was simply starting to hear the pattern everywhere now, the way you notice a word once and then can’t stop hearing it in every conversation for a month.Okafor didn’t sit. She walked the room slowly, past the worktable, past the shelf of solvents, and stopped in front of the landscape Elena had finished restoring two weeks ago — clean now, dry, waiting for a client who Elena increasingly suspected would never come to collect it.

“Nice work,” Okafor said, nodding at the piece. “Whoever did the original is talented.”

“It’s a copy,” Elena said, before she’d decided whether she meant to say it.

“I know.” Okafor turned around. “That’s actually why I’m here. I’ve been tracking a series of them — good copies, sold quietly, mostly to collectors who don’t like publicity even when they’ve been cheated. Six pieces in two years that I know about. Probably more I don’t.” She let that sit a moment. “Your name came up because a man named Marcus Webb has been seen at your studio regularly over the past month. Marcus Webb doesn’t officially exist, Ms. Voss. Not past about age nineteen, anyway. No tax records, no lease, no insurance license despite what he apparently told you he does for a living.”

Elena kept her face very still, the way she’d trained it to stay still over a canvas she suspected but couldn’t yet prove was lying to her. “And you think I’ve been part of this.”

“I think,” Okafor said, choosing the words with obvious care, “that you’re either the person who’s been helping him move these pieces, or you’re the person he’s been using without telling her what she’s actually part of. I’ve seen both versions before. I’d like to believe it’s the second one. That depends a lot on what you

tell me in the next five minutes.”

There it was — the choice Elena had been avoiding making out loud for a week, finally arriving with a badge and a patient, unhurried voice, exactly the way Marcus had warned her it would.

She thought about Julian’s call. About Sabine Cole’s careful, scripted sentences. About Marcus sitting across from her, damp-haired, saying I was going to stop in the exact cadence of a man who’d said it before and hadn’t meant it the last time either — except this time, when she’d looked for the tell, she hadn’t found one.

She thought about the second door Priya had warned her about, and the third one that cost nothing and gave nothing back, and understood, watching Detective Okafor wait her out with the patience of someone who did this for a living, that there was no version of this conversation where she got to keep standing in the doorway between all three.

“I found a second forgery in his bag,” Elena said finally. “Ten days ago. It matches a piece reported stolen from a collector named Damon Reyes.”

Something shifted, very slightly, in Okafor’s expression — not surprise, exactly, more like the specific satisfaction of a hypothesis confirmed. She took out a notebook, unhurried, and clicked a pen.

“Good,” she said. “Now tell me about the phone call.”

Elena’s stomach dropped. “How do you know about the phone call?”

“Because four hours after it happened,” Okafor said, “Sabine Cole called three other names on my list with the exact same offer she made you. Which tells me Julian Webb is moving faster than he usually does. Which means, Ms.

Voss, that whatever timeline you thought you had to figure this out — you don’t have it anymore.”

Elena poured two cups of coffee neither of them would finish and sat down across from Okafor at the same table where, ten days ago, she’d sat across from Marcus with a stolen painting in her lap. She was starting to think the table had opinions about her life choices at this point.

“Walk me through the timeline,” Okafor said. “From the beginning. Don’t edit for how it makes you look.”

So Elena did. The landscape, the “no questions,” the three weeks that had felt like something and turned out to be something else entirely — or maybe both at once, which was the part she still hadn’t worked out how to say out loud. The second painting in the bag. The shower running down the hall while she sat frozen with tissue paper in her lap. The call from a voice that sounded exactly like Marcus’s and wasn’t..

Okafor wrote almost none of it down, which unsettled Elena more than if she’d been filling pages. She just listened, occasionally asking a short question — what exact words did he use, what time was this, did he ever mention where he grew up — the kind of questions that felt less like an interview and more like someone quietly checking her own map against Elena’s.

“Julian and Marcus,” Okafor said finally, closing the notebook without having written more than a page. “Twins. Did he tell you which one’s older?”

“No.”

“Marcus is. By eleven minutes. Grew up telling people he was the responsible one, the one who kept their father out of trouble instead of getting into it himself. I’ve read the file on this family twice. There’s a version of Marcus Webb that’s exactly what he told you — a man who inherited a talent he never asked for and spent his whole adult life trying to be smaller than it, quieter than it, less of a problem than his brother.” She paused. “There’s also a version where that’s just the story he tells people right before he needs them to trust him.”

“Which one do you believe?”

“I don’t get paid to believe things,” Okafor said. “I get paid to build a case that doesn’t depend on believing things. That’s the difference between you and me right now, Ms. Voss — you’re trying to figure out who Marcus actually is. I don’t need to know who he actually is. I just need to know what he’s actually done, and what he’s about to do next, and whether you’re going to be standing next to him when it happens.”

Elena turned her coffee cup a slow quarter-turn on the table, not drinking it, just needing something to do with her hands. “Julian said something on the phone. He told me to check the varnish on the second painting more closely — said I’d find it was the better piece.”

“Did you?”

“I haven’t looked yet.”

“Look,” Okafor said, standing, sliding a card across the table with a number written on the back in pen, not printed. “Tonight, if you can. And call me before you call anyone else about what you find — including him.” She nodded toward the door, meaning Marcus, meaning the studio, meaning the last month of Elena’s life in one small gesture. “You’ve got good instincts, Ms. Voss. Everyone I’ve talked to says so. Julian’s counting on the fact that you’ll use them on the paintings and forget to use them on the people. Don’t make that mistake twice in one lifetime.”

She was gone before Elena could ask what she meant by twice — before Elena could decide whether Okafor had read her file too, the old one, the one with Daniel’s name in it, or whether some things about a person were simply legible to anyone who knew how to look.

Elena sat alone in the studio for a long time after the door closed, the two paintings — hers and its twin, the real and the almost-real — standing side by side on the worktable where she’d left them, waiting for her to finally do the one thing she was actually good at.