The Tomb (Scarrett & Kramer Book 3)

by Neil Carstairs

  He took a breath and Ben saw what was coming. Kramer did too. She grabbed his jaw and turned his face away as he spat. Ben saw her fingers sink into his flesh. “Not nice,” she said.

  Ben heard a cop car blip its siren as it did a U-turn further up Huntington Avenue. “They’ll be here soon,” he said to Kramer.

  She looked at him. “I think I hurt him too...”

  The guy made a sound, half-cough and half-shout. Ben saw his throat moving as he swallowed something. Kramer saw it too. She prised his jaws apart and shoved her fingers down his throat, but the guy’s eyes were already rolling back into his skull as his body began to shake violently. Kramer dropped the limp body and rolled it over; she pounded hard on his back. The body spasmed again, limbs stiffening. Kramer was swearing as the patrol car pulled up. Two cops emerged, guns drawn. Ben had his ID out and held high, shouting they were friendly and needed paramedics.

  When he looked back at Kramer, she’d sat down on the sidewalk, a lifeless body sprawled beside her.

  ***

  Uniformed cops became plain-clothes cops. Kramer and Ben were taken in separate vehicles to Boston PD’s headquarters on Schroeder Plaza. They were treated decently enough, although the cops weren’t pleased about two Homeland Security agents not making themselves known to officers on scene at the museum. Ben spent five hours in an interview room going over the grenade attack and then the confrontation with the dead John Doe. He repeated the facts four times to four different pairs of detectives.

  “So why didn’t you alert officers on the scene about your suspicions?”

  “Because it could have been a local watching all the activity.” At some point, they’d brought Ben a ham and mayo bagel with a half-decent cup of police station coffee.

  “And he attacked you?”

  “You recovered the knife, right?” Ben stared at them. “He tried to kill me.”

  “And then you killed him.”

  “No,” Ben said in exasperation. “He killed himself with poison.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Two pairs of cop eyes rolled in disbelief. “A hollow tooth. Do you think this is the movies? When was the last time someone did that in real life?”

  “Check his mouth.”

  “We will,” the last cop said as he checked his watch and said to his partner. “Reckon she’s finished by now?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Who’s finished?” Ben asked.

  “Your partner, she’s been up in the Captain’s office talking about the old days.”

  Ben frowned. “Old days?”

  “She served in the same army regiment as Captain Manchillo.”

  Ben’s jaw dropped open. “You mean I’ve been down here saying the same thing for the last I don’t know how many hours and she’s been enjoying herself upstairs?”

  “One of you has to give a statement,” the cop said with a grin.

  “Can I go?” Ben asked.

  “Sure, you could have left after the first go-round, but we thought you were enjoying yourself.”

  Ben considered showing the cop an upright finger but decided they might run him through the events one more time if he did. The cops took him up a couple of floors to where Kramer sat, feet up on a desk as she laughed about some lame army story the police Captain had told her.

  “Hey, Scarrett, they finally finished with you?”

  Ben bit back his first reply, took a breath and said, “Yep, you ready to go?”

  “I guess.” She brought her feet down with a thump.

  Manchillo came around his desk and gave Kramer a hearty handshake. “Great to meet you again, Jo. If you know you’re going to be in Boston again give me a heads up and we can get together one evening.”

  The Captain escorted them out of the headquarters, still going on about guys he and Kramer had known in the army. Ben put up with it because the elevator dropped fast and before Manchillo could start reminiscing again they’d reached the main entrance. Another handshake and Ben made it out into early evening daylight with his nerves about intact. “Enjoy your afternoon?” he asked Kramer.

  “I did. You?”

  “No.” He turned to face her. “I sat in a windowless room with a bunch of no-neck cops who seemed to believe I was a murderer.”

  “And you’re not,” Kramer said. “Which is why you are out here and not in a holding cell.”

  “Thanks for the support,” Ben said. “It would have been nice to have seen you down there as well.”

  “Jeff thought it best if I stayed up with him as a liaison while you gave the witness statement.”

  “Jeff.” Ben put his hands on his hips.

  “It’s his name.”

  “Liaison?”

  Kramer peered at him. “You know, Scarrett, there’s this little switch on the side of your head, and all I have to do is flick it, and away you go.”

  They stared at each other. Ben tried hard but his lips twitched first, and Kramer grinned at him. “Got you,” she said.

  “That’s another reason to resign,” Ben told her. “I’d only have to put up with this every few weeks instead of every day.”

  “Aw, you don’t mean that.” She stepped in close enough that Ben had to put his arms around her waist.

  Kramer’s phone rang. “Damn,” she said.

  “Leave it.”

  “After what happened earlier?”

  Ben sighed, duty called. He kept Kramer close as she took the call. She rested against him. Ben listened to Kramer’s side of the conversation, and it didn’t sound good. She became tense in his arms, listening more than talking. Ben could make out a male voice coming out of the phone and from the rasping sound he knew it was their boss, General Hugo Dawson.

  “We’ll get right onto it,” Kramer said, as she finished the call.

  “What’s happened?” Ben asked as Kramer stepped away.

  “Ruth Meyer, one of the Museum Directors we met earlier? She died in hospital of a cardiac arrest this afternoon. And our dead guy? Preliminary autopsy reports suggests cyanide, self-administered from a false tooth.”

  Kramer swiped through her phone and said, “Dawson’s emailing me the home address of James Steele, the expert we met. We need to see him as soon as possible because we still don’t know why we were called in by the museum.”

  ***

  Steele lived in Weymouth, thirty-five miles down I-93. Kramer sorted a hire car while Ben hit a take-out to get pizza and cokes for the journey. Kramer phoned ahead and spoke to Steele’s wife as they drove in the rush-hour traffic. He’d gone to bed early with a headache and ringing in his ears. She didn’t want to disturb him, but Kramer stressed the urgency and how this was now a murder investigation.

  “I’m a doctor,” the wife said. “I’ll give you thirty minutes, but if it looks like you are upsetting him you go, no arguments.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Kramer agreed because she wanted to get inside the house. Once in, getting them out would be the wife’s problem, not Kramer’s.

  They switched driving halfway so Kramer could eat and Ben allowed the soft voice of the phone’s GPS to guide them to Steele’s address. The area was made up of colonial weatherboard houses sitting in individual lots. Single-storey, two-storey, single fronted and double fronted. All sat back from the street behind grass lawns. The daylight had near enough gone as Ben drove slowly down the street, Kramer checking house numbers until she pointed to a two-storey property with dark sedans in the driveway. A light had been left on over the front door, and it guided them up past the cars and onto the verandah.

  Kramer rang the doorbell, and as they waited, she said, “We’ll need to smooth talk the wife first.”

  Ben didn’t get a chance to answer as the door opened without warning and a tall brunette stared at them. “You’re the people from Homeland Security?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kramer said as she showed her ID. Ben did the same.

  “Katherine Steele,” the woman said. She didn’t move, fixing her gaze on Kramer. “My h
usband is still in shock. As a physician, I’m not happy about you interviewing him and–”

  “Mrs Steele? Katherine?” Kramer held up a placatory hand. “We understand, and it’s the last thing we wanted to do today after all that has happened, but time is of the essence, and if we can move quickly we may be able to catch the people who carried out the robbery and killed Ruth Meyer.”

  Katherine Steele took a breath, held it for a moment and then released it in a sigh. “I understand you have a job to do.”

  “We only need a few minutes. We were there with your husband when the attack took place.”

  Katherine stepped back in an unspoken invitation for them to enter. “He’s in the kitchen,” she said. “Straight ahead.”

  Steele sat at a big oak table nursing a mug of coffee. He wore a multi-coloured rugby shirt, jeans and a pair of old slippers. A basset hound lay at his feet, snoring loudly. Katherine Steele offered them coffee, and they made brief small talk until she put the drinks in front of them. “Do I need to leave?” she asked.

  Kramer looked at her husband. “Is what you were going to tell us at the museum something your wife can hear?”

  Steele looked at Katherine. “It’s...unusual, but I’m sure she can keep anything she hears tonight confidential.”

  Kramer nodded, and Katherine sat next to her husband. They held hands. Ben thought they looked like one of those couples who spent Sundays reading newspapers and sharing walks in the country. Katherine was American, her accent from the West Coast.

  As the basset hound snorted, looked at the visitors with a disinterested eye, and went back to sleep, Kramer said, “Why were we called in?”

  “You saw the carving they stole?”

  “Briefly,” Kramer said.

  “It looked Egyptian,” Ben put in.

  Steele smiled. “What makes you say that?”

  “It looked like some of the others I saw on display in the exhibits.”

  “It’s not Egyptian,” Steele said. “It’s Mayan.”

  Kramer gave Ben a look that told him not to be clever. “Valuable?”

  “Very. The museum’s had the statue since the 1920s when a collector gifted it to the MFA.”

  “And why raise a question about it now?” Kramer asked.

  Steele glanced at his wife and said, “Time to suspend all your beliefs,” he said.

  “Mr Steele,” Kramer started.

  “James,” Steele said.

  “James,” Kramer smiled, “trust me. Scarrett and I have seen things that defy any explanation.”

  “Okay. A few days ago one of my assistants was carrying out an audit on the collection. She noticed something peculiar; the statue was warm to the touch. She could feel it even through the gloves she wore.”

  “Could it have picked up warmth from somewhere like being in the sun.”

  Steele laughed. “In a windowless, temperature controlled room?”

  “How warm?” Ben asked.

  “At one point too hot to touch.”

  Kramer sat back, “And you called us?”

  “A few months ago we received details about contacting the authorities if any unexplainable events occurred. We sent an email and arranged the appointment where you turned up.”

  Ben thought he could see something in the way Steele looked at Kramer. “It’s not only the warmth?” Ben asked.

  “No,” Steele drew the word out.

  “What else?” Kramer prompted.

  “We could hear a voice coming from inside the statue,” Steele said.

  “What?” Katherine’s voice showed her disbelief.

  “It’s true. We all heard it.”

  Katherine shook her head. “Are you sure it wasn’t picking up some local radio broadcast or taxis or anything?” she said.

  “It was the statue. And it was speaking in Yucatec.”

  “And what’s that?” Kramer asked.

  “A Mayan language. It’s still spoken today in one region of Mexico.”

  Ben thought about the robbery and his dazed memories of the people who carried it out. He nudged Kramer’s leg with his foot. When she looked at him, he said, “The people who stole the statue were talking in a foreign language. When was the decision made to use that particular room, because the attackers knew about the meeting,” Ben said. “That’s how they targeted it so well.”

  “Boston PD will follow up on that,” Kramer said. “We need to find the people who took the statue and recover it.”

  “And how are you going to do that?” Steele asked.

  Kramer smiled. “We’ll find a way,” she said.

  Chapter Four

  The river didn’t seem like a very glamorous place to die. Lined by industrial plants on one side and densely packed tenement housing on the other, it formed little more than a strip of polluted gunk that filtered through reeds, mud and the discarded detritus of humanity. Patches of exposed water caught the late afternoon sunlight with sparkling flashes. Dark clouds of mosquitoes danced above stagnant pools. The smell of mud and decaying vegetation formed an almost physical barrier to stop anyone straying too close to the waterway.

  Anyone but Billy Reynolds and the three people killing him.

  Billy clung to life. His face, submerged in the river, had angled and lay half-buried in sediment. His mouth, open at one stage to scream for help, filled with thick silt that tasted of death. He kicked again, his one free leg lashing out at his attackers. Two of them held him down. One knelt on Billy’s back, and the other held his shoulders. Nothing Billy did with his leg harmed them.

  He wanted to breathe. His heart hammered like the piston of a racing steam train. His lungs, emptied by fear, were now on fire as they demanded oxygen. Billy felt his body slipping away, the prickling tingle of cells in his limbs told him the build-up of lactic acid had peaked. He knew he was dying. Billy pushed down into the mud, his arm sinking a few inches, seeking a solid surface. Nothing but thick, cloying silt that ran between his fingers. A hand grasped his hair, twisting his head until he lost sight of the daylight and his vision became encompassed by darkness.

  Lights began to flicker through his mind. White, red, purple. The pain in his body lessened, a numbing calm settling onto him. Billy’s control vanished, swept away by the automatic need to breathe. He sucked liquid mud into his lungs. The blossoming of fire in the centre of his chest made his body buck one last time, and his dying brain caught the motion of his attackers as they slipped off his wet body.

  Not enough to give him a chance.

  They were on him before he could even form the idea that he might be able to escape. The weight of their bodies driving him deeper into the mud. Billy stopped fighting. His thoughts drifted, his life a rush of images from a child to adolescence and into adulthood. A sweet peace carried him up from the mud and water. He saw the two men and one woman, soaking wet and plastered in mud. They had no care. Their duty lay with their master.

  A shadow loomed above, like a cloud passing before the sun. Billy turned. The Death God’s eyes were black and surrounded by a mask of blood. From the elongated fangs that were its teeth hung shreds of human flesh. Billy felt his soul stripped bare, the hungry eyes of the god exposing him. Dealer, addict, pimp. Billy shrank back, but the god had a power that seized his soul and drew him close.

  I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have tried to steal from these people.

  The god seemed to agree with him, and Billy’s reward for his honesty was to have his soul devoured.

  ***

  Itzel Capriel heard Billy’s soul shriek as it died. She glanced up, her god a liquid outline against the sky, much like a watermark on paper that only a true believer could see, as it faded back into the ether. Before he vanished, she saw the smile of satisfaction on his face. “He is dead,” she said of Billy.

  Her companions stood, slipping a little on the bed of the river. The stench that clung to them burned at the back of Itzel’s throat. She wanted away from this place with its foul-smelling mud a
nd poisoned water. The apartment they rented was a short walk away and the bathroom, even though small and lined by mould, seemed very inviting now.

  “Do we bury him?” Yancha asked. He was the oldest of the two others, with flecks of grey showing in his midnight black hair. Right now, mud covered him, clumps of it clinging to his beard like leeches.

  Itzel shook her head. “It’s getting dark. No-one will see him now, and if his body is discovered in the morning we will be long gone.”

  Ramon stepped onto Billy’s lower back, his hands out for balance as the body settled deeper into the silt. “That helps,” he said.

  Itzel smiled. She shouldn’t humour Ramon too much, his inclusion in the group made the dynamics change. He always told jokes despite the seriousness of their mission and flirted with Itzel too. Yancha and Ciro didn’t much care for that kind of behaviour. They were committed to the task; warriors in the face of god. Ramon, well he was a little boy playing at being a man.

  Ramon caught her eye and winked. “We need to clean up,” he said to Itzel. “Do you need me to scrub your back?”

  “No.” She kept her face straight because Yancha was looking at her. “But I will use the bathroom first because it will be too dirty after you’ve been in there.”

  “Let’s go,” Yancha said, his feet making sucking sounds as he plodded towards the bank. “Ciro should be back soon, and we need to prepare for tomorrow.”

  Itzel nodded. She pointed Ramon to follow and knelt next to the body and put her hand on the back where it was exposed above the water. Another little shove made it sink deeper into the water and mud.

  She rose and followed the men to the bank. They pulled her up and then, in single file, they walked with squelching sounds down a narrow alleyway and into the side entrance of their apartment building. Few people were around at this time of day. Itzel could hear televisions and radios coming from behind closed doors. The modern world reaching out to tempt her. Itzel ignored it. She had the one thing she needed, and that was faith. To be seduced by a world that worshipped money would burn her soul.