“Please mister, buy this painting so we can buy bread,” three dirty triplets begged. The billionaire mafia boss stared at the canvas, his heart stopping. The woman painted on it was the wife he mourned for years. With shaking hands, he pulled out a black card and whispered, “Take me to her.”

The painting was supposedly seven years old. It was created before Elena’s tragic death, before the inferno on the interstate, before the somber-faced detectives handed me a charred box of her belongings and gently advised that there was no body left worth viewing.

Yet, these fingerprints were fresh. Someone had touched that painting long after I had continue reading …