and then opened them to stare at the empty squares. Why had her grandfather insisted on keeping his collection close at hand instead of safely in a bank vault? She knew his reasons, knew the joy he got from regularly looking at his holdings, but they didn’t outweigh the risk.
And now her worst fears had come to pass.
Joss stared at her. “Those were his big stamps, right? My god, what are we talking about—forty, fifty thousand?”
“Not even close.” Gwen’s lips felt stiff and cold. “The last Blue Mauritius auctioned went for nearly a million dollars.”
HALF AN HOUR LATER, GWEN stretched to ease the iron pincers of tension. She’d gone through every one of the books meticulously, recording what was missing.
It was worse than she’d imagined.
The four most important issues of her grandfather’s collection were gone: four nearly unique single stamps and one block of twenty, in aggregate worth some four and a half million dollars. The inventory books were missing another thirty to forty thousand dollars in more common, lower-value issues.
“Grampa has other investments, right? This is just a part of what he’s got.” Joss didn’t ask but stated it a little desperately, as though saying it would make it so.
Gwen shook her head. “He says he trusts his judgment when it comes to stamps, that he doesn’t know anything else as well.”
“This is it? This is all he has for retirement?”
“Had,” Gwen said aridly. “There’s maybe a million left at this point.”
Joss spun and reached for the phone. “I’m calling the cops.”
“No!” Gwen’s tone of command was so absolute, it stopped her dead. “That’s the one thing we absolutely can’t do right now.”
“What are you talking about? There’s millions of dollars in property missing. We’ve got to do something.”
“But not that,” Gwen emphasized.
“Why not?” Joss glared at her, inches away.
“All an investment dealer like Grampa has is his reputation. He’s still got about twenty-five live accounts right now waiting to be closed out, some of them with millions in holdings. And every one of them has a clause in their contract that if he sells their stamps below current catalog price, he’ll have to make up the difference.”
“So?”
“So, if they hear about the theft and decide they don’t trust him anymore, they may want out immediately. If he has to sell in a rush instead of at the right time, and if buyers know he’s hurting, he’ll definitely have to sell below catalog.” Gwen swallowed. “And there goes the other million.”
Gone. All gone. It made her shiver. They were his pride and joy, part of what made the philately business vibrant to him. The loss was unimaginable.
She leafed through one of the store inventory albums, staring at the empty squares. A fifteen-cent stamp showing Columbus’s landing, worth maybe three thousand dollars. An 1847 Benjamin Franklin stamp worth six. Why bother, she wondered suddenly. The store inventory stamps were chump change compared to the major issues. Gwen chewed on the inside of her lip. Then again, the important stamps would be difficult to unload immediately; there would be questions. The inventory stamps would provide a thief with money in the meantime.
A thief who knew how the world of fine collectibles worked.
“Jerry,” Gwen said aloud.
“Jerry?”
“It couldn’t have been anybody else. The alarms weren’t tampered with, the security company doesn’t have any record of the slightest glitch. It had to be him.” Gwen rose to inspect the safe. “Nobody appears to have messed with this, but then I doubt he was an expert safecracker. Somehow I see Jerry as taking an easier route.” She turned to lean against the bookshelf full of reference catalogs. “Tell me he didn’t cook up some reason to get you to give him the key and combination.”
Joss’s eyes flashed. “Give me a break. I left them right here, safe and sound.”
“Here?” She resisted the urge to rant at Joss’s carelessness. “I told you to keep them safe. Where did you put them?”
“In the desk drawer.” Joss raised her chin. “I locked it.”
A lock any self-respecting toddler could break.
“I didn’t want to lose them. I figured this would be the only place I’d need them so I might as well leave them close by.” She stared at Gwen. “You don’t know it was Jerry.”
It wasn’t Jerry Joss was defending, Gwen knew. Joss didn’t want to think it was Jerry because she didn’t want to think she was at fault for the theft. But she wasn’t at fault. Gwen, in the final analysis, had made the decision to hire him. Gwen had been the one in such a hurry to get out of town that she’d left Joss in charge of the store and the safe.
If anyone was at fault, it was she.
The key and combination lay in the paper-clip compartment of the drawer, Gwen saw, but it didn’t mean a thing if Jerry were as quick as she thought. “Was he ever alone in the shop?”
“Of course not,” Joss snapped. “I was here to open every morning and here to close down and set the alarm at night. Things were always locked up. I checked.”
“Was he ever alone here at all?”
“Never.” Joss paused, then stiffened slightly. “Except…”
“Except when?”
Joss closed her eyes briefly. “Yesterday. Lunch. He offered to buy, but the deli was shorthanded and not delivering. He said he’d pay if I went to get them.” She hesitated. “I was broke.”
“How long were you gone?” It wouldn’t have taken much time, Gwen thought, not if he’d been prepared.
Not if he’d known what he was looking for.
“Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,” Joss told her. “There was a line and they’d missed our order.”
“Convenient.”
“How was I supposed to know?” Joss flared. “We’d hired him. I thought that meant we were supposed to trust him. There’s an explanation,” she muttered, grabbing the phone and punching in a number. She waited and an odd look came over her face.
“What?” Gwen asked.
“Jerry’s cell phone. It’s shut off.” She set down the receiver.
Gwen swallowed. “Why change the number on a cell phone unless you don’t want to be found.” On impulse she turned to her keyboard. It took only a minute to send a quick e-mail out to a stamp dealers’ loop she belonged to, asking if they’d recently acquired the five-cent Ben Franklin or the Columbian landing stamp. If they popped up somewhere, it might give her an indication of where Jerry was fencing them. It
