Lady Justice and the Pharaoh's Curse

by Robert Thornhill

  The last thing he remembered was lifting his head and staring into the obsidian eyes of the Anubis.

  “Rough night, Partner,” Ox asked as we pulled out of the precinct garage.

  It had actually been two rough nights since our visit to the King Tut exhibit. The Professor’s treatise on the curse of the pharaohs had stirred up memories of our ordeal on Maui. I had laid awake in the early hours of the morning vividly remembering when Maggie and I awoke from our drug-induced slumber on the floor of the frigid burial cave.

  For the second day in a row I had overslept and barely had time to wolf down a bowl of Wheaties and a cup of coffee. It hadn’t helped my disposition when I encountered Bernice out in the hall, slipping from Dad’s apartment back to her own wearing nothing but a lace thong and her Queen Nefertiti earrings.

  “I’ve had better. How’s the exercise program going?”

  “Lost two pounds,” he replied proudly.

  I really couldn’t tell but I wasn’t about to say so.

  “Great start. Keep up the good work.”

  About that time, the radio crackled, “Car 54, what’s your 20?”

  Ox keyed the mike, “Heading south on Main. Just passed Linwood.”

  “Proceed to the 3900 block on Kenwood. A Mr. Franken will meet you. He says that one of his tenants is dead. Check it out.”

  “Copy that.”

  We took a right off 39th Street onto Kenwood and saw an older gentleman waving to us from the curb.

  “I’m Officer Williams and this is Officer Wilson,” I said. “How can we help you?”

  “It’s my tenant, Bernie Maloof,” Franken said, wringing his hands. “We usually have coffee together every morning but when he didn’t come down yesterday and then today, I got worried. That’s his truck over there,” he said, pointing to an old clunker, “so I figured he was home. I went up to check on him. I knocked. When no one answered, I used my pass key and peeked in. I saw him on the floor and knew he was dead. That’s when I called 911.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Ox said.

  Mr. Franken led us to a second floor apartment and unlocked the door.

  “We’ll take it from here,” Ox said. “You can wait out here in case we have any questions.”

  The guy was dead all right --- at least two days based on the odor and decomposition.

  “Jesus!” Ox said. “Take a look at that arm.”

  The man’s forearm was swollen to almost twice its normal size. Two red puncture wounds were plainly visible.

  “Looks like the guy got munched on,” Ox observed. “Maybe Brown Recluse Spiders. I hear they’re nasty little bastards.”

  I picked up a cell phone from the floor. “He dialed 911 but never pressed ‘send.’ Whatever hit him, hit him hard and fast.”

  Something about the guy looked familiar, but I just couldn’t place it.

  We took a quick look around the apartment. There was no forced entry and there was no sign of a struggle. The TV and VCR were still there and his wallet was still in his pants.

  “Nothing suspicious,” Ox said. “Let’s call for a meat wagon. We’d better seal the place until we get an actual cause of death. If it’s spiders, Mr. Franken will want to bomb the place for sure.”

  An hour later, the body had been removed. We were about to lock up when I spotted a name tag on the kitchen counter. It said, “Bernard Maloof. Union Station volunteer.”

  Then it hit me.

  “I know this guy! He was one of the volunteers at the King Tut exhibit. He was the one that handed out the little speaker gizmos and told us how to use them.”

  “Wow,” Ox replied. “What are the chances? By the way, how about that theft at the exhibit? Crazy stuff!”

  That took me by surprise.

  “Theft? What theft?”

  “It’s been in the Kansas City Star. I’m surprised you didn’t see it. Somebody made off with some big black dog. I think they called it a Nebis or something like that.”

  “The Anubis? Someone stole the Anubis?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “I haven’t read the paper for the past two days, so I totally missed it.”

  Something clicked in my mind. Stolen Anubis. Volunteer at the exhibit winds up dead with strange puncture marks.

  I remembered the Professor saying that the King Cobra was the symbol and protector of the Egyptian Monarchs.

  “I think we’d better take a closer look around,” I said. “There may be more to this than just spider bites.”

  “What are we looking for?’

  “Anything that could relate to the King Tut exhibit. I’ll take the bedroom.”

  I went through the dresser, drawer by drawer and then the closet, but found nothing of interest. I was about to head back into the living room when I thought about the bed. I lifted the corner of the mattress and was surprised to see and old dog-eared journal tucked between the mattress and box spring.

  I plopped down on the bed and started thumbing through the pages.

  I discovered right away that the journal had belonged to a Nasser Maloof who had been part of the team of artisans that restored the artifacts in the King Tut exhibit. Most of the narrative was of a technical nature, describing how Maloof had used wood and plaster to replace the gold and silver of the original artifacts.

  I flipped through the pages quickly until I came to a passage where Maloof spoke of the death of his wife. From that passage on, the message in the journal changed from a documentary to a plot to avenge the loss he had suffered by abandoning his family to work on the exhibit.

  He described his last work, the Anubis, and how he had hollowed out the belly of the jackal and filled it with gold and precious gems.

  The last entry in the journal spoke volumes. “My task is complete. While no amount of riches can bring back my beloved Anat or assuage the torment that I feel, I have, at the very least, struck a blow against the ghost that pulled me away from my family. These riches from the pharaoh’s tomb shall remain hidden until such time as I or a member of my family can claim them.”

  Bernie Maloof was that family member. He had found his uncle’s journal, discovered the secret of the hidden treasure and concocted a plan to steal the Anubis and claim the riches hidden inside.

  That all made sense, but it raised even more questions. Where was the Anubis and what killed Bernie Maloof?

  I was about to call Ox into the room and share my discovery when I heard him mutter, “Holy shit!”

  While I was in the bedroom, Ox had been rummaging through the kitchen and living room looking for clues.

  I could tell by the tone of his expletive that he had found something significant.

  I paused at the bedroom door to see what had startled my partner and was shocked to see Ox staring into the eyes of a King Cobra, poised to strike, hood flared, just a foot or so from his face.

  He must have been examining the contents of a bookshelf built into the wall. Removing the books, still in his arms, must have exposed the hiding place of the reptile.

  The cobra’s tongue was flicking in and out, undoubtedly trying to sense whether the huge beast standing before him was a foe or his next meal. Either way it didn’t bode well for Ox.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” I whispered. “Don’t even breathe or blink your eyes.”

  I was probably preaching to the choir. Ox was frozen in his tracks.

  I pulled my pistol from my holster, pulled back the hammer and slowly raised my arm. Because of where I was standing, the path of the bullet would clear Ox’s left ear by maybe a foot. My hand was shaking almost uncontrollably, so I inched my way to the door casing for stability. It had been months since I had fired my weapon. I was supposed to go to the firing range to practice for our recertification, but I had been putting it off. At that moment I regretted my procrastination.

  I took a deep breath, lined up the sights with the cobra’s flared hood and squeezed the trigger.

  I heard the report and saw Ox immediat
ely fall to the ground. I figured I had missed and shot my partner.

  I ran to his side and saw the cobra writhing on the floor. I kicked it aside and put another two rounds in its head.

  Ox was on his back gasping for air. “What took you so long? I couldn’t have held my breath another second.”

  “Just trying to make sure I put the slug in the right head,” I replied, helping him to his feet.

  “Looks like you made the right choice,” he said, looking at the snake a few feet away.

  “So much for Brown Recluse Spiders,” I said. “Looks like you found what killed Bernie Maloof.”

  “But where did it come from,” Ox wondered. “King Cobras aren’t native to Missouri.”

  “I think I might have found a clue to that puzzle,” I replied.

  I took him to the bedroom, showed him the journal and gave him the short version of Bernie’s plot to steal the treasure.

  When I was finished, Ox just shook his head. “Let me get this straight. The dead guy’s uncle was part of the team that built the King Tut exhibit, but when he built this Anubis thing, he hid gold and gems inside. The dead guy found the journal and concocted a plan to steal the thing. Am I right so far?”

  I nodded.

  “I get all that, but it doesn’t explain the cobra, and if he took the Anubis, where is it now?”

  Ox had asked the same questions I had asked myself before the snake incident.

  I wasn’t about to voice the one thing that kept popping into my mind --- the cobra curled up in Howard Carter’s birdcage on the day he had opened King Tut’s tomb, a symbol of the dire consequences that come to those who desecrate the tombs of the kings --- the curse of the pharaohs.

  CHAPTER 4

  On the way back to the precinct, I made two calls.

  The first was to Captain Short. I told him that we had found evidence to tie our victim to the King Tut robbery and asked him to have the lead detective assigned to the case meet us in his office.

  The second call was to Dr. Grimm, the Medical Examiner. I told him about the body on the way to the morgue and asked him to verify our suspicion that the cause of death was cobra venom. I also asked him to check for trace evidence on the victim’s hands. I was hoping that we could find some hard evidence that Bernie Maloof had actually handled the Anubis.

  When we entered the captain’s office, Detective Derek Blaylock was waiting for us. We had worked together on a number of high profile cases and Blaylock was constantly amazed at how two grunt cops like us always seemed to find ourselves in the thick of things.

  “Well, well, Frick and Frack,” he said, smiling. “Why am I not surprised that the two of you are in the middle of this?”

  “Good day to you, too,” I replied, shaking his outstretched hand.

  The captain was shaking his head. “After squad meeting, I send the two of you out on regular patrol, you end up with a dead body and supposedly a lead to the King Tut theft. Unbelievable! What have you got?”

  During the next half hour, I told the sequence of events starting with seeing Bernie Maloof at our gang’s tour of the King Tut exhibit and ending with Ox’s near-death experience with the cobra.

  When I was finished, Blaylock was silent, just staring at the journal I had given him. Finally, he spoke. “Who knows about the treasure hidden in the Anubis?”

  Ox and I exchanged glances. “As far as we know, just the four of us in this room. We haven’t mentioned it to anyone else.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way. If word gets out that there’s treasure inside a replica, every nut job in Kansas City will be ripping off a piece of the exhibit hoping to find more.”

  He rubbed his chin. “So the theory is that Maloof stole the Anubis and took it to his apartment, but you found no trace of it there. Is that correct?”

  We both nodded.

  “And it looks like it was a cobra bite that killed the vic?”

  We nodded again.

  “Then where the hell is the Anubis and how did a cobra get inside an apartment in Kansas City, Missouri?”

  Blaylock was asking the same questions that Ox and I had asked in Maloof’s apartment. None of us had an answer and I wasn’t about to mention anything about the pharaoh’s curse.

  The next morning, I opened the Kansas City Star and was surprised to read the headline, Theft At King Tut Exhibit Linked To Body Found In Midtown Kansas City.

  The article pretty much covered every detail of our investigation, linking Bernie Maloof to the Anubis replicated by his uncle. There were no details of how the robbery actually took place, but there was a detailed account of Maloof’s death by cobra.

  The article went on to say that the Anubis had not been recovered and police were puzzled as to its disappearance and how the cobra happened to be in Maloof’s apartment.

  There was no mention anywhere in the article that a treasure had been concealed inside the Anubis.

  I was surprised to see that the last paragraphs of the article pretty much told the same story that the Professor had shared about the evil things that befell many who had defiled the tombs of the kings. The last sentence of the article asked the question, “Could it be that the curse of the pharaohs is alive and well in Kansas City?”

  After squad meeting, I was not surprised when the captain summoned Ox and me into his office.

  Waiting there was a red-faced Detective Blaylock and Dr. Grimm.

  Blaylock wasted no time. “Okay, which one of you spilled the beans to that reporter?”

  Ox and I looked at one another with bewilderment.

  “I haven’t talked to anyone about this,” I replied defensively. “Not even Maggie, and I resent your accusation!”

  “Me either,” Ox replied. “I haven’t said a word to anyone.”

  Blaylock slumped in his chair. “Sorry. I had to ask. The only people that knew anything about our case are in this room. Dr. Grimm hasn’t spoken to anyone either, but last evening I got a call from a reporter. He seemed to know everything about our case. I asked him where he got the information and he said it was an anonymous tip. He said he was going to run the story and just wanted confirmation of the details. I tried the ‘no comment’ thing, but he just wouldn’t let it go. In the end, I figured it was better to at least acknowledge that we had found something than be accused of a cover-up.”

  “I noticed that the story didn’t mention anything about a treasure concealed inside the Anubis,” I said. “I can’t believe the reporter would have left out a detail like that.”

  “Unless he didn’t know,” Blaylock replied. “Another piece of the puzzle.”

  I turned to Dr. Grimm. “Did your autopsy confirm our cause of death?”

  Grimm nodded. “You were right on, cobra venom, but that’s not all I found. There were traces of black and gold paint on the vic’s hands. If we ever find the Anubis, I wouldn’t be surprised if it matched the paint on the replica.”

  “So,” I said, “we have a direct link from the victim to the Anubis, but still no idea how he got it out of the Union Station.”

  “I might be able to help there too,” Grimm replied. “There were some threads of a very coarse material on the vic’s clothing. They appear to be from some type of heavy canvass. I’ve sent them to the crime lab for further analysis.”

  “What about the last paragraph in the article?” Ox asked. “The thing about the curse of the pharaohs. We’ve got a missing treasure from King Tut’s tomb and a cobra nobody can account for. It would sure explain a lot of things.”

  Blaylock looked at him like he was nuts. “That’s just superstitious bullshit, stuck in there to sell newspapers. There’s no such thing as a mummy’s curse!”

  I wasn’t so sure, but I wasn’t about to disagree.

  We were heading south on Main as we do on most days. We were just coming up to the Pershing Road intersection when we noticed a crowd had gathered under the huge statue of the Anubis in the corner of the parking lot at Union Station.

  Whe
n they spotted our cruiser, they began frantically waving their hands.

  “Better take a look,” Ox said, turning into the parking lot.

  The crowd parted as we approached, revealing what appeared to be a homeless man sitting and staring at a large canvass bag.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  A bystander pointed to the homeless guy. “Ask him. He found it.”

  I nudged the guy with my foot. “Whatcha got there, Pal.”

  “Body,” he mumbled. “But I didn’t do it.”

  The clasp on the canvass bag had been opened. I moved the opening with my foot just enough to see the top of a head.

  “Looks like a body all right. Ox, get these people back and let’s rope off the area. I’ll radio for the Medical Examiner.”

  After the crowd had been pushed back, I returned to the homeless guy. “So what’s your story?”

  “This is my lot,” he said, gesturing to the Union Station parking grounds. “I check it every morning for money or other stuff people might lose or toss out of their cars. I spotted this bag under the jackel thing. Figured it must have fallen off a truck. Thought maybe there was somethin’ in it that I could use. When I opened it, I saw that. I didn’t do it! I swear!”

  I believed him. I figured the bag had to weigh over a hundred pounds. There was no way this emaciated guy could have moved it.

  About that time, the M.E. arrived with the meat wagon. He took one look at the scene and barked, “Put on your hazmat gear and let’s get this back to the lab. I don’t want anything disturbed until we can control the environment.”

  As they were loading the bag, I noticed the words stenciled on the underneath side, ‘Property of the U.S. Post Office.’

  I grabbed Ox. “We need to get back to the station and talk to Blaylock.

  “What now?” Blaylock asked as we entered the captain’s office.

  I told him about the body we had just found.