Checkmate_The Bowers Files

by Steven James

  It took Ms. Sharma less than a minute to find the artwork with the inscription.

  Just as Tessa had said, it was a painting of a skull that appeared to be sitting on a small shelf.

  “So, this is a wood panel painted with oil.” Ms. Sharma sounded proud of the piece. “It was painted in grisaille, that is, shades of gray, to make the skull look like a three-dimensional object.”

  The shading and the way the artist had rendered light really did make the skull appear three-dimensional. I didn’t know the first thing about the history of art or the techniques used to make paintings appear 3-D, but the effect seemed remarkable for a painting from 1480.

  There was no signature, no indication of who the artist might have been, and when I asked Ms. Sharma about it, she told us that his identity was unknown. “It’s from a fifteenth-century Flemish master. That’s all we know. The piece was donated to the museum from a private collection in 1978.”

  Skulls always trouble me somewhat. It might be easier to deal with them if they didn’t look like they were smiling. It’s almost as if they’re laughing at us, almost as if they know a joke that we, the living, don’t want to know the punch line to. And in this case the punch line wasn’t very funny, but was summed up in the Latin phrase that appeared beneath the skull:

  Cur homo mortalis caput extruis at morieris en vertex talis sit modo calvus eris.

  A plaque stored next to the painting included the official translation of the inscription, and it was remarkably close to Tessa’s. It read, WHY DO YOU, MORTAL BEING, RAISE YOUR HEAD? YOU WILL DIE, TOO, AND WILL BE AS BALD AS THIS SKULL.

  Nice work, Raven.

  “Such paintings are known as vanitas,” Ms. Sharma explained, “from a verse in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity.’”

  “May I pick it up?” I asked.

  “Um . . .” Her hesitation made it clear she wasn’t excited about the idea. “Yes. But please, please be careful.”

  I gently picked it up, and when I flipped it over Ms. Sharma gasped.

  A phone number was written in black marker on the back of the painting’s wood panel: 783-4745.

  “Who . . . who would have done that?” Ms. Sharma said, aghast that someone had damaged the piece.

  Ralph pulled out his cell and tapped in the number.

  I answered the stunned curator, “We’re going to do all we can to find out.”

  My friend spoke for a moment on the phone, introducing himself as a federal agent, then shook his head and hung up. “Doesn’t sound like the woman with that phone number has any idea about a painting. I’ll have Voss’s guys follow up.”

  “We’re going to need to process this at the Lab,” I told Ms. Sharma. “Ralph?”

  “I’ll get a team over here.”

  It’s not about the number. It’s about something else.

  The spellings.

  The codes.

  While he stepped away to make the call, I set down the painting and went online on my phone to pull up the site that allows you to translate phone numbers into words. I plugged in the numbers but didn’t recognize any of the words that they brought up. Some contained the words “Sue,” “dish,” or “fish” but nothing recognizable beyond that.

  Lacey could run them.

  Did he write it on here while it was on display?

  “Is this painting protected by glass when it’s being exhibited?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  Okay, so he marked it up while it was back here.

  But how did he access this room?

  I studied the ceiling, the walls. No visible security cameras.

  “Are there any surveillance cameras in here?” I asked Ms. Sharma.

  She shook her head. “No. Maybe we should have more, we just never thought that . . .” She was staring at the painting, her face blanched. “But there is one near where this piece is displayed while it’s on the floor. Maybe that’ll help?”

  “Maybe.”

  So, if someone were to come in here, what route would he have taken?

  I left the room. The hallway passed two doors on the way back to the lobby.

  Trying the first, I found that it was a small bathroom with no windows, no way to slip into or out of the building.

  The second doorway led to the employee break room.

  Ralph returned. “Some of the local ERT guys are on their way over. I’ll have the Lab get started on handwriting analysis too, see if it matches those numbers written in the book we found at Cole’s place.”

  “Good.” It would be tough to match such a short sample, but it was worth a shot.

  Our team had reviewed the museum’s video footage and nothing indicated that any of the patrons who visited the building on the day the weaponry was stolen had taken it.

  Yet it was gone.

  An employee?

  A volunteer?

  July 5th . . .

  “Is there another entrance to the building?” I asked Ms. Sharma.

  She shook her head. “Nothing besides emergency-exit doors—but alarms go off if those are opened.”

  This just doesn’t make sense.

  “What time did you realize the weaponry had been stolen?”

  “It wasn’t until the end of the day, when we were doing a final walk-through to make sure no guests were still in the building. I need to contact our board of directors. You don’t think there might be more pieces that have been vitiated?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Needless to say, that did not encourage her.

  Someone got those weapons out of this building and someone wrote that phone number on the back of the painting.

  “Do you get tour groups through here?” Ralph asked.

  “Sure. All the time.”

  “What about on the day the items were stolen?”

  “I’d have to check.”

  “You don’t know a guy named Lombardi by any chance?” he said. “Does history tours of the city? Guido Lombardi?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know that name. Should I?”

  I turned to Ralph. “Find him.”

  “On it.” A moment later I heard him talking with the police dispatcher.

  No, it can’t be Guido. That would be too easy. Things never turn out to be that easy.

  If the offender wasn’t one of the museum guests and it wasn’t one of the staff then it had to be . . .

  The video that the team looked at only covered operational hours.

  I asked Ms. Sharma, “What about beforehand? Before the doors opened? Were there any shipments that day? Deliveries? Moving things to or from storage?”

  “I’m not sure, but that is when it would happen. We don’t allow any deliveries during business hours. We don’t want it to disrupt the experience of our guests.”

  While Ralph spoke with dispatch, I entered the employee break room to have a look around.

  A couple of vending machines—one for snacks, the other for soda—and a small table surrounded by three chairs. A counter. Sink. Microwave. A coffeemaker that needed cleaning. Federal health safety codes and employment-policy statements were posted prominently on the walls beside flyers announcing upcoming functions and events at the museum’s two branches.

  No security cameras, which, taking into consideration privacy concerns for staff, was not that much of a surprise.

  We were on the first floor, but there was an elevator at the end of a short hallway. It was conveniently located to take deliveries up from the storage room to the museum’s other levels.

  “I’d like a list of all your volunteers and employees,” I said to Ms. Sharma. “Anyone who might use this room.”

  “I really don’t think this could have been done by any one of our staff.”


  “Well, we’re going to need to eliminate that possibility. Do your board members have access to these rooms?”

  “Well, yes, but they are our board members.”

  “I’ll need their names as well. You have a volunteer working the front desk today—why is that? Why a volunteer?”

  “We try to invite as much participation from our community partners and volunteers as we can. Do you really think other pieces might be damaged?”

  “We’ll have to check to make sure.”

  I closed my eyes and pictured the layout of the building, the parking lot outside, the location of the security cameras, the footage I’d seen the other day of people entering and leaving the facility. “I’d like to see the footage of the employees arriving before the museum opened that day.”

  Ralph came into the room. “Lombardi never showed up at the Chamber of Commerce. I need to take off to help coordinate the search for him.”

  “I’m going to stay here and check out the surveillance video prior to when the doors opened for the public, see if there’s anything there that’ll help us out.”

  “We’re gonna need another car.”

  “Yes,” I said, “we are.”

  “Alright, look, I’ll have someone pick me up and I’ll get the paperwork started to requisition the Field Office to get me a vehicle. You keep the rental. I’ll locate Guido. As soon as we find him, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Right.”

  I went to Ms. Sharma’s office to pull up the surveillance-camera footage from before the museum opened on July 23rd, the day the artifacts disappeared.

  34

  It took me about fifteen minutes to find what I was looking for.

  But it wasn’t an employee entering the premises that caught my attention.

  Instead, it was a delivery man from a vending machine company. He arrived ten minutes before the doors officially opened and was allowed in by one of the staff members. He left again only a few minutes later, pushing a hand truck with the same number of crates of soda as he’d pushed in.

  So, he hadn’t actually delivered any, just rolled them in and then rolled them back out.

  The dolly was tall enough so that he could have hidden the arrows and the tomahawk along one side of it. With the elevator he could have accessed that floor and without any guests here yet to see him or cameras to catch him, he could have gotten the weapons down to the break room.

  The museum’s software for analyzing video wasn’t very good so I sent the file to my phone. When I zoomed in I was able to make out four initials on the side of the delivery van: NVDS.

  A quick online search brought up the name of the company: National Vending Distribution Services.

  Their regional shipping center was located about halfway between here and Matthews, North Carolina. The map app on my phone told me it would be a fourteen-minute drive with current traffic conditions.

  Perfect.

  It’s usually best to show up unannounced for these kinds of discussions so I decided not to call ahead.

  Before leaving, I used my laptop to pull up the video we’d gotten of the exterior of the NCAVC of the man who’d been driving the semi that delivered the lawnmower that blew up.

  We had no visuals in either case of the man’s face, and, while I couldn’t be certain enough to confirm it was the same man, his height and build did appear to be consistent for a possible match.

  There are some people who are invisible in a workplace—like the maid from a few years ago who took care of my room at a hotel in Miami. On the first day of the conference she wasn’t wearing a name tag and the detective I was working with on the case asked her what her name was, then later thanked her by name. She stared at him, bewildered, and you could tell she’d rarely had anyone do that, remember her name like that.

  That incident stuck with me.

  I was the one who was supposed to notice things and she’d slipped right past me, just like so many people have over the years. Custodians, same deal. Migrant workers. Cabdrivers. Homeless people. Delivery men. They pass namelessly through so many people’s lives.

  And if you’re someone who’s trying to steal something from a museum, that’s what you would want: to pass through unnoticed.

  I sent the footage of the delivery guy to Angela to have Lacey take a closer look.

  “I was just going to call you,” she told me. “The phone number you gave me that was on the back of the painting, well, I had Lacey analyze it, searching for any instances of any phone number mnemonics, and I found one that relates to Charlotte—or at least it might.”

  “What is it?”

  She spelled it out for me: “R-U-D-I-S-I-L. Apparently, there were gold mines in the area and one of them was named that—or at least that’s an alternate spelling of the name. Normally it appears with two ls—I even came across a couple of other spellings as well. In any case, I thought that with the Charlotte connection it might be what we were looking for.”

  “If it’s the name of a gold mine, it very well may be. See what else you can find out about this mine.”

  “Actually, I did,” she replied. “Unfortunately, there’s not much online. I’m guessing that maybe the layout and specific location would appear in old land deeds, local surveying maps—that sort of thing—but we’re talking about information from a century or two ago. I doubt those documents would ever have been scanned in or posted on the Web—if they even exist anymore.”

  “Alright. Well, let me know if you come up with anything.”

  After the call, my thoughts returned to the delivery guy who’d arrived before the museum opened.

  Someone had opened the door for him.

  I replayed the video, paused it when the employee’s face appeared. “Who is that?” I asked Ms. Sharma.

  “Bryan Anders. He works the front desk on Tuesdays.”

  I called Voss at the Charlotte Field Office and asked him to get a couple of agents over here to review the footage from before July 5th when the staff rotated the exhibits. “We’re looking for someone who stared at that painting long enough to memorize the Latin, write it down, or someone who might have taken a picture of it.”

  “Do we have video of that floor?”

  A few minutes ago Ms. Sharma had mentioned to me that we did. “Yes,” I told him. “I’m having the curator draw up a list of the board of directors, staff, and volunteers. I want someone to talk with each of them. Start with Bryan Anders. I’ll have her e-mail them to you. I’m taking off here in a minute.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “The National Vending Distribution Services warehouse. There’s a certain delivery man I’d like to have a word with.”

  35

  Before heading to the car from the Library of Congress, Tessa and Beck stopped to grab some sandwiches for lunch.

  The sign on the window read:

  Bill’s Psychedelic Café

  Your place. Your pace.

  Come. Relax. Enjoy.

  Exist in Bliss.

  As they entered the neo-Bohemian, vegan-friendly restaurant, she thought of her comments about history and how they so easily could have offended Beck.

  She didn’t want to take the chance that she might start ranting against something that he actually did like and decided she needed to be a little more careful next time around.

  So when she saw the guy dressed in surgeon’s scrubs who was adding some sugar to his coffee, she kept her mouth shut.

  But still, it was hard not to be annoyed and, despite herself, she sighed.

  “What is it?” Beck asked her.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t know you very well yet, Tessa Bowers, but I can tell it’s not nothing. Go on. What are you thinking?”

  “It’s just . . .” She’d kept her mom’s last name, so her full name was actua
lly Tessa Bernice Ellis, but she didn’t correct Beck when he naturally thought her last name was Bowers. “What’s the deal with doctors doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Wearing their scrubs in public. Okay, so are they showing off that they’re so busy they can’t spend thirty seconds slipping off their scrubs, but they can sit for half an hour sipping a latte, reading the paper? Do they have any idea how idiotic they look wearing scrubs in public? It would be like me wearing my pajamas in here.”

  “I don’t know that they look all that idio . . .”

  She was staring at him beneath two raised eyebrows.

  “Okay,” he admitted. “They do look idiotic.”

  * * *

  After they had their food, Beck chose a place in the back where no one would be behind him and he could monitor the restaurant and assess any potential threats, just like Patrick would have done.

  Not long after they’d started eating, Tessa caught him looking at her.

  “What is it?” she asked self-consciously.

  “I was just . . .” Beck seemed embarrassed. “That’s a pretty necklace.”

  “Yes. It is.” She held the stone loosely in her hand. “It’s my birthstone. Tourmaline. Patrick gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, most people, when you compliment them about something—maybe, ‘Nice shirt’ or ‘That’s a cool sweater,’ you know, stuff like that—they say ‘Thank you,’ but when I said your necklace was pretty you just said, ‘Yes. It is.’”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s not . . . It’s just not the common response.”

  “Thanking you wouldn’t have made any sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have no control over how the necklace looks and unless I set the gem, it’s not me that you’re complimenting, but the person who actually did the work. Why on earth would I thank you for complimenting something that someone else should get the credit for?”

  “You know, I’ve never really thought about it like that before. I have to say, you have a unique way of seeing the world, Tessa Bowers.”