Fic: The Blacklist : No Rest for the Wicked
A/N Last night's fake out where for a minute they made it seem like it might have been Kate's apartment reminded me that I had written this.
No Rest for the Wicked
Raymond set his hat and the empty cardboard box down on the coffee table.
He went first for what was hidden in plain sight.
There were nine paintings of the same subject hanging on the wall in a three by three grid. They made for a rather arresting display.
A few could be immediately eliminated. They were the first attempts and weren't even completed.
It took him only a minute to pick out the two that were all but identical. Then it was a matter of deciding which was the original and which the facsimile.
The two were truly identical but for the extra signature - the letter 'A' hidden in the water under one of the lily pads. Well, that and that one was painted a hundred years ago by a man named Claude and the other slightly more recently by a woman called Annie.
He didn't know what to do with it. He had no interest in keeping it. He had no interest in selling it. Send it back to the museum that forty years later still hadn't even realized it was missing?
He was a monster. He wasn't a savage. He didn't know what to do with it, but he couldn't just leave it.
Taking the Monet off the wall, for now, he put it in the empty cardboard box.
Moving about the room, he tapped on the walls listening for hollow areas.
Getting a hit, he broke through the plaster and dry wall.
Raymond sighed. Kate was a modern woman. She knew how to mobile bank, she had electronic off shore accounts, but she was still old school at heart.
He wouldn't leave the masterpiece, but he would have left the cash … if it didn't have the potential to cause too many questions if recovered here.
His knees creaked as he bent down to pick up all the banded bundles of twenties.
He rolled up the area rug to check for a trap door or loose floorboards. He found none.
Opening the hall closet, leaving everything on the rack, moving methodically from left to right, he checked the pockets of the coats. He was making quick work of it ...
Until he came to a particular one.
One hundred percent vicuna.
He had never felt anything so soft.
She had told him to put it on his Christmas list and if he was a good boy …
He hadn't been a very good boy.
Pulling it off the rack and putting it over his arm, he brought the coat and his cardboard box with him to the next room.
Looking around the kitchen, it wouldn't seem like Kate was much for cooking. The refrigerator had little in it beyond a few now spoiled take out containers.
He emptied the canister labeled sugar. The one labeled flour had nothing in it. It looked like it never had.
He opened a few of the drawers and cupboards, but his heart wasn't in it.
In the spare bedroom, he found two boxes full of assorted not new cell phones. Those would be very useful. Acquiring untraceable phones in large quantities was a problem - one Mr. Kaplan had always taken care of.
He didn't take them.
He didn't pause before entering her bedroom. He made himself just charge ahead.
Her coat still in one hand, his pawing through the already open jewelry box on her dresser was perfunctory at best. It wasn't until he absentmindedly picked up the lid by the figurine atop it and saw the gold leaf detailing and the obsidian eyes of Anubis in his jackal form that he recognized that the box holding her jewelry was worth more than the entire block of brownstones.
He found a drawer full of her signature scarves. Scooping out the few token earrings from the box, he used a scarf to secure the lid to the bottom. He used several more to wrap the intricately carved box before adding it to his highly unworthy container.
He sat on her bed to check the drawers of the night stand. A forensics journal. A spare pair of glasses. A jar of face cream. Nothing noteworthy.
Picking up the face cream, he opened it.
It smelled like Mr. Kaplan. Or rather Mr. Kaplan had smelled of it. Sweet almonds and honeysuckle.
Dipping a finger into the jar, he put a dab on his hand and rubbed it in.
He hadn't been sleeping well of late. That was the only explanation he could think of an hour later when a concerned Dembe found him asleep on Kate's bed still clutching her vicuna coat.
Dembe stood outside the doorway - unwilling to actually enter the room. “We should go, Raymond. All the nearby brownstones are already evacuated. I called the gas company. The fire engines will be here soon.”
Raymond nodded, but once Dembe had retreated he went back to his meandering.
The shoebox in the bedroom closet stood out to him because it was older looking and the label the wrong size for Mr. Kaplan. That was where he found the Polaroids.
A few of the people Raymond didn't recognize - like the guy wearing two of the cone party hats as horns - but most of the people Raymond knew to varying degrees or at least knew of.
The posed shots were what was to be expected - everyone smiling tolerantly for the birthday girl as she made the rounds with her new present.
Dom's wife's smile seemed stilted, but Dom's smile for Katarina went from ear to ear. Dom had adored his only little girl.
It was the candid ones that really captured what was going on.
There was one of Kate seated in a room he knew, on a loveseat he had never seen with her head tilted just so. In the picture you couldn't tell what she was looking at, but from the smile pulling at the corners of her lips, Raymond knew.
Sure enough, when he flipped to the next photo Annie had come to join Kate.
He had started to forget just how beautiful Annie had been. He tried to remember the last time he had seen Kate smile.
In the next, Katarina had captured the ladies' laughter as Sam joined them on the small sofa by laying across them. The same photo caught Dom looming in the background staring. Only Sam would have been given a pass for that kind of behavior.
They all looked so young.
He flipped through some more.
They were photos taken by a child of a child's interests. The little stuffed bunny that would one day be Lizzie's was propped up and posed in several different places and with several different people.
Brimley didn't make the cut, but he was likely there because one of his daughters did.
Several more of Kate and Annie - one with Dom's wife in the background giving them side eye.
Her husband certainly had loftier ambitions, but at the time the bulk of his business was running a protection racket, loan sharking, and making things fall off of trucks - with the occasional murder thrown in. And those were his more savory, could be spoken of in mixed company activities.
Kate and Annie's hijinks had always been slightly more highbrow.
After Kate had been unjustly dismissed from her residency program, Annie, not keen on the long absences that were the hallmark of a doctor-in-training and certainly not one to appreciate hard work or sacrifice, had discouraged Kate from reapplying elsewhere.
Unable to resist the lure of what was quick and easy, Annie had wanted Kate to work for Dom.
That at least Kate had recognized as a bad idea and refused.
Back then, there wasn't really a call for the kind of work Mr. Kaplan did for Raymond. It was a simpler time. Forensics weren't what they were now.
Instead, Kate had gotten work doing a different kind of cleaning. Annie with her useless art degree and Kate with the delicate hands of a could-have-been surgeon had pooled their talents and went into art restoration - which because Annie was not only needy, but greedy, quickly deteriorated into art theft.
Which wasn't to say that Kate was an innocent before Annie got her hooks into her. She had after all paid for medical school by robbing banks … but the first bodies Mr. Kaplan had ever had to dispose of were products of Annie's temper.
Dom was all about volume and mass production while Kate and Annie were more artisan but they were the ones Dom's wife looked down on.
It was really Kate and Annie's lifestyle that she didn't approve of.
Dom was by no means progressive but he was surprisingly accepting of Kate and of Kate and Annie. Or more accurately, in the beginning he hadn't made the kind of trouble for them that he could have and eventually he was accepting.
Raymond kept flipping.
The next photo was of Dom's two boys with their mother hovering nearby. She never let them out of her sight when Kate or Annie were around - fearful that what they were might be contagious. Or so Katarina had once told him.
Dom's wife had had them both with her in the car when she hit a patch of ice at the intersection of 18th and Potomac. After that she had them both with her in Glenwood Cemetery.
There was a picture of Katarina, clearly by its closeness and off centeredness taken by herself.
And one of the birthday cake - the candles making the image too blurry to actually count their number.
After the cake, Katarina's interest in the camera waned or so it seemed to Raymond because she began to appear more frequently in the photos.
Sam and Katarina. They were standing back to back to see who was taller - the chair Katarina was standing on gave her the edge.
Oh how Lizzie would treasure that one photo of her two parents.
Putting that one into his pocket, he told himself he was taking it to give to Lizzie but he knew he never could. It would just bring up more questions.
The last one was of Dom with all of his girls.
Dom's girls.
It was how they - Kate included - were collectively known - though Raymond was sure no one ever called Kate that to her face.
Charlie's Angels they were not.
Kate never really worked for Dom per se, but her connection to Annie brought her into his orbit enough that he had certainly wanted her to. Kate had preferred to keep Kaplan Enterprises as an independent operation, but that hadn't kept Dom from dumping his troubles at her door from time to time.
Not quite family, not one of his crew - still, Dom had made it known that Kate was off limits.
Having reached the last of the photos, Raymond flipped back to the first.
Returning to the closet he found an old handbag of Kate's. Kate didn't smoke, but she kept a simple, discreet DIY arson kit with her at all times. Removing the cellophane from the pack of Benson & Hedges, Raymond took one out and lit it.
Exhaling, he began flipping through the photos a second time. He used the tip of the stale cigarette to remove Annie's face out of the photos one by one.
There were two more paintings in the bedroom, but they were Annie originals. Raymond had no interest in preserving them for posterity.
Leaving the still lit cigarette on the bed, he closed the door behind him.
Picking up the cardboard box and coat, he returned to the kitchen. He turned on the gas for the oven. He deactivated the auto turn off safety feature before getting rid of the pilot light.
After retrieving his hat from the living room, he closed the door behind him.
He had dillydallied longer than he realized. As he came out carrying his cardboard box with Kate's coat over his arm, one of the fire fighters had some choice words for him.
“What part of people and pets only - leave your valuables behind did you not understand?”
Raymond was directed to move along before he could finish mumbling his few indistinct words of apology.
As soon as he was past the yellow tape, a dejected looking Dembe took the cardboard box from him and started for the car. He neither reached for nor commented on the coat.
Raymond saw one of Mr. Kaplan's neighbors struggling to quiet her squalling baby while at the same time keep a reign on her toddler. She had been in too much of a hurry to get her children out of the house when Dembe had knocked with his warning - she hadn't grabbed a coat of her own.
Raymond draped the vicuna coat over her shoulders.
She thanked him and then commented. “I'm sure it's a false alarm. I don't smell anything. I think I'm going to sneak back in and grab the stroller.”
Tickling the baby under the chin, Raymond advised against it. “Best to wait for the all clear.”
Leaving her, he went to join Dembe at the car.
Dembe was still trying to fit the box in the trunk with all the others. “How many more of them are we going to do today, Raymond?”
Looking away, Raymond didn't answer. Off hand, he could think of at least two more of Kate's hidey holes.
Getting into the car, he gave Dembe the next address. They were only a few houses down when Raymond saw a sign and told Dembe to stop.
“Over there.”
Dembe followed Raymond's gaze to the sign across the little park outside Mr. Kaplan's brownstone.
Donations now being accepted for our annual rummage sale
By the time they returned to the car, the brownstone was a raging inferno.
Finis
A/N Part of a series of connected stories. The idea occurred to me that for Raymond to have asked Mr. Kaplan to keep Liz safe as a baby, it would make sense that Kate had some sort of connection and access to Katarina - and therefore Liz - that Raymond didn't.
The other main take away to this being that Raymond is getting rid of all of Mr. Kaplan's old stuff … so when Mr. Kaplan returns for the sequel she's going to need new old stuff.