"That painting is a ghost," she said. "Why me?"
"Because the last person who looked for it is dead," Voss replied. "His name was Marco Tannhauser. He was my best researcher. Three days ago, he was found in the Willamette River with his tongue cut out and a king's crown drawn on his forehead in permanent marker."
"Exposed and then un-exposed," Kristy said. "What do you want?"
A folder slid under her apartment door. No footsteps, no shadow. Just the soft whisper of paper on wood. Kristy Gabres -Part 1-
She almost ignored it. Almost.
Beneath that, an address. A warehouse in the industrial district. And a time: midnight tomorrow.
The rain over Portland wasn't the kind that cleansed. It was the kind that seeped—into coat seams, into old brick, into the cracks of a person's resolve. Kristy Gabres watched it streak down her apartment window, turning the city lights into bleeding gold smears. Inside, her living room was a museum of what she used to be: a framed press pass from the Oregon Herald , a dusty trophy for Investigative Journalism, and a single photograph of her late father, Frank Gabres, a beat cop who'd taught her that the truth was worth a bloody nose. "That painting is a ghost," she said
Kristy Gabres looked at her father's photograph on the shelf. "You always said trouble finds the curious," she whispered. Then she grabbed her jacket, her old Nikon, and a lockpicking kit she hadn't touched since the Herald fired her.
Kristy's hand tightened on the phone. Not because of the gore—she'd seen worse. But because of the crown. That was a signature. A message. Someone was playing a very old, very cruel game.
Kristy leaned against the windowsill. She knew the piece. Seventeenth-century Flemish, a grotesque masterpiece of a king eating a feast he couldn't see, surrounded by laughing courtiers. It had vanished from a private vault in Brussels in 1999 and resurfaced once—on the black market, then gone again. He was my best researcher
Outside, the rain had stopped. But the fog was rolling in, thick as a secret.
Her phone buzzed. A blocked number.
"Marco left a file," Voss continued. "Encrypted. He said if anything happened to him, it should go to the journalist who wasn't afraid to burn her life down for a story. That's you, Miss Gabres."
"They don't want the painting. They want what's painted underneath. The real treasure is the lie. - M.T."
At thirty-four, Kristy had the lean, coiled look of a woman who’d stopped running but hadn’t forgotten how. Her auburn hair was pulled into a messy knot, and the shadows under her gray eyes weren't from lack of sleep—they were from lack of answers. Six months ago, she’d broken the story of the century: a sitting city councilor taking bribes from a development cartel. But a single source had recanted under pressure, the councilor had sued for libel, and the Herald had thrown Kristy under the news van to settle. Now she worked freelance, taking odd jobs for true-crime podcasts and writing obituaries for a suburban weekly.
