ELARA
Heal your hand quickly. Otherwise you won't even be able to sign the divorce papers.
The words hung in the air long after the door clicked shut behind him.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
I lowered my hand. Blinked until the room came back into focus, the cream walls, the dove-gray duvet, the stack of Whitmore files still spread across the desk.
The files. The Italian police report. The photographs. The stolen idol from Puglia, reported missing in 1978—the same year Marcus Whitmore had acquired a suspiciously similar piece from that gallery in Geneva.
If I could read that date of that NEWSPAPAER—if I could prove that the photograph had been taken before 1978.
The Italian police report was in the third folder from the left. I remembered that much. I reached for it w
