The thought surfaced suddenly. The Cycladic figure. The one I'd been cross-referencing before everything went sideways. The female idol reported missing from Puglia in 1978, the same year Marcus Whitmore had acquired a suspiciously similar piece from Geneva.
I'd been so focused on the provenance chain—the dealer in Geneva, the auction records, the gap between 1972 and 1978 where the object seemed to simply vanish—that I'd missed something.
In the original Italian police report, the stolen idol had been photographed from multiple angles. Front, back, both sides, detail shots of the folded arms and the stylized face. Standard documentation for a reported theft. But there had been something else in those photographs. Something in the background.
A newspaper. And if I could read that date,
