Moving Target by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online Page A

each time she looked at the pages, her sense of possessiveness toward them increased. In some indefinable way, they were hers. The thought of sharing them with anyone made her uneasy. Or maybe it was just that she couldn’t forget her grandmother’s warning.
    Even at nearly one hundred, Norman Warrick was still a man.
    “Seven o’clock?” Serena asked.
    “Mr. Warrick will be expecting you and the sheets.”
    Click.
    Serena looked at the dead phone, shrugged, and picked up the shuttle again. She didn’t have to leave for half an hour. Forty-five minutes if she pushed it.
    She would push it. She always did.

Chapter 6
PALM SPRINGS
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
    E rik looked at his twenty-six-inch flat-screen monitor as intently as he would a manuscript for appraisal. He wouldn’t buy pages over the Internet, but he sure didn’t mind previewing them that way. It saved a lot on airline tickets or special-delivery services.
    For more detailed research and comparison, he preferred using his extensive CD-ROM library of entire manuscripts or collections. Viewing by CD-ROM wasn’t as good as thumbing through a manuscript in person, but it was a hell of a lot more convenient. In any case, most of the manuscripts that interested him were locked away and simply not brought out for viewing by anyone, for any reason. As a way of protecting the precious manuscripts, it was very effective. It was real good at frustrating scholars, too.
    Fortunately, the pages he was looking over right now were being put before the public quite cheerfully. They were for sale to the highest bidder. His favorite auction site to search was the Bodleian Market, named after England’s world-famous Bodleian Library, with its breathtaking collection of illuminated manuscripts. He keyed in his usual request: palimpsests; fourteenth- or fifteenth-century-style illumination; sheets or whole manuscripts; new listings for this month only.
    Because of the short time frame for the listings, and the narrowness of the request, he didn’t expect much. He checked often enough that there were usually only a handful of new entries.
    This time there were six, but the only one that interested him was posted by Reginald Smythe, a small-scale trader who had once been a curator of manuscripts at a minor museum and then an estate chaser with his own agenda. Erik had never met Reggie personally but knew him by reputation.
    The man was perfect for Erik’s purposes. Erik wanted the pages that slipped beneath other people’s radar, the pages that said they were one thing on the surface but really were something else underneath. Palimpsests, in a word, vellum sheets on which the original text had been scraped off and a new one painted or penned on top.
    He clicked on the photo button. Instantly a picture appeared on his screen. One of the side benefits of consulting for Rarities Unlimited was the uplink to Rarities’s satellite-supported computer system. Light speed beat the hell out of even the most recent commercial Internet offerings.
    When he saw the picture, adrenaline kicked in in a tingling rush. Then he frowned. The miniature wasn’t up to the standards he had come to expect of the Spanish Forger, a man whose illicit work had become quite valuable in its own right. Instead of the near lyric style of a late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century forger imitating the Romanesque style of the early fifteenth century, the drawing appeared almost clumsy. Almost, but not quite. It was certainly close enough to fool most people. It could possibly be genuine; even the best artists had bad periods.
    Thoughtfully Erik checked the leaf’s availability. No bids yet. The leaf could be inspected at Reggie’s shop in Los Angeles or at the International Antiquarian Book Celebration.
    With a grimace that said he really didn’t want to attend the world’s biggest antiquarian rummage sale, Erik moved on to the category called “Provenance.” The first of the leaf’s three most recent