Where the Bones are Buried

by Jeanne Matthews

  “I’m thinking.” The expert ran a finger along the downspout. “No anti-climb paint. Shows they’re not too hyper about security.” She clutched her hoodie and looked up. “It wouldn’t be hard to shinny up the downspout to the roof. Is there a skylight?”

  “No. Sunlight would discolor the art.”

  “We go through the door then. But unless you know the code, I’ll have to break the control box and they’ll know somebody was here. If I can’t find the box before the alarm goes off, we could have five-0 down on our necks and have to book, like really fast.”

  “If that happens,” said Dinah, “run toward Kurfürstenstrasse. Try to blend in with the crowd.”

  “Duh.” K.D. gave her a reproving look. “What do you expect to find in here, anyway?”

  “A secret someone would kill to keep.”

  “Okay. Here goes. Hold the light for me.” She leaned one shoulder against the door, bowed her head, and gently slid the key into the lock. So quick as to be virtually simultaneous, she gave the key a deft forward thrust and pushed the door open.

  A flurry of beeps commenced and Dinah’s heart speeded up as if to keep time. K.D. took back her flashlight and the baseball bat Dinah had been holding and walked inside. Dinah followed, closing the door behind her. The beeping continued.

  “Whoa, somebody’s been toking up,” said K.D., not bothering to lower her voice.

  “Weed with a soupçon of desert sage,” said Dinah.

  K.D. ignored the keypad just inside to the right of the door and moved on to the blue light on the wall across from Farber’s desk. “This isn’t the control box,” she said. “It’s a thermostat.” She advanced farther into the gallery, her light scaling the wall from floor to ceiling. “Geert says marijuana’s legal in Berlin. Is that right?”

  “Keep your mind on the job, K.D.” Her cool was more unsettling to Dinah than panic. Time was running out. How many seconds of beeping remained before hell broke loose? She ran her light around the gallery walls. She was the supposed grown-up and the instigator of this exploit, plus which, she had been in the gallery twice during daylight hours. She ought to be able to offer some kind of guidance.

  Her light lit on the katsinam mask. It was half of a hollowed-out squash with a crudely painted face as ugly as dried mud, but to the Hopi, a katsinam was the personification of a helpful spirit. Was it really as fragile as Farber said? He had reacted with such sudden vehemence when she tried to touch it.

  She stepped around K.D. and touched the edge of the mask. It felt sturdy enough. Gently, she lifted it off its nail. Behind it, a plastic apparatus the size of a playing card had been wired into the wall. “Is this it?”

  “Yep. Move back.” K.D. swung the bat like a power slugger. The beeping stopped. Pieces of plastic clattered onto the floor and the gallery went quiet.

  Dinah’s heart seemed to pause as she waited for the wail of a siren and the flash of bright lights. But seconds passed and nothing happened.

  “Good guess,” said K.D. “How’d you know to look there?”

  Dinah wasn’t ready to admit that her good guess was based on superstition and blind luck. She felt stupid enough as it was. “Thanks, K.D. I know it sounds hypocritical, but I’m sorry I had to involve you in this. Please don’t use your magic key again. Promise?”

  “Only if I’m asked by a responsible adult.”

  “I deserved that, but we’ll have that conversation another time. Get out of here and take extra care at the club tonight. Stick close to Geert and don’t—”

  “Do anything you wouldn’t do?” She snickered and pranced out the door giving Dinah no chance to reply, not that she had a reply.

  Alone in the Happy Hunting Ground, Dinah rehung the katsinam over the broken control device and walked slowly around the place, shining her light on the masks and other artifacts. If they had been purchased from American dealers, there would be documentation showing the provenance of each piece and the validity of the seller’s title. If there were gaps or discontinuities in the record of ownership, that should also be documented. She had constructed a narrative in her head in which Pohl and Hess stole, or procured stolen art, and Farber and Bischoff fudged the paperwork and either resold it directly or put it up for auction. When Pohl fell for Lena and announced that he wanted to cash out, one of the others—or all of them acting in concert—decided it would be safer and more economical all around to kill him. If she could scare up evidence of motive, maybe Lohendorf would look beyond the fact of Swan’s DNA.

  She sat down at Farber’s desk. She wished she could have gotten inside the gallery without leaving behind evidence of the break-in, but one brilliant thing that she had done was to memorize the password he used when he opened his laptop to show her the slideshow. His business records were probably stored on that computer and for transactions involving Native American art, some of the documents would be in English. She looked high and low, drawer by drawer. The laptop wasn’t there. She sorted through the papers on top of the desk, but they appeared to be mostly advertisements and art catalogs. She riffled through the file folders, but there was nothing in English, nothing with the words auction or auktion, no correspondence from or to Reiner Hess, nothing to show for this risky sortie but a surfeit of adrenaline.

  The marijuana odor was stronger here and she got up to nose it out. A light parka hung on a peg behind the desk. She gave it a sniff. It was redolent enough to get high just from touching it. She didn’t know if Farber smoked, but Viktor did. On the off chance she’d find something to make this night’s risk worthwhile, she went through the pockets. The left yielded nothing but few bits of loose grass. The right held a nubbly something that felt like a heavy key fob.

  “Schiesse! Die Tür wird entriegelt.”

  She froze, her hand still inside the pocket. Somebody was coming through the back door. Somebody who sounded seriously angry. Breaking the alarm box must have alerted the police after all. Maybe it was designed not to make a noise on this end so as to catch an intruder red-handed, still inside the premises. She looked around in desperation. The only thing big enough to hide behind was that stone lion-bear chimera in the corner. She killed her light, crammed it in her coat pocket, and slunk into the shadows, feeling her way along the wall and around the statue with her left hand. Her right was still clenched around the key fob. The space between the back of the statue and the wall was miniscule and she was barely able to squinch through.

  There were two voices, both male. One belonged to Farber. The other, she didn’t recognize. They spoke in rapid German. This had happened to her once before in Greece, trapped in a tight spot while her captors gabbed in a language she couldn’t understand. Why did she never get in trouble in places where people spoke Muscogean or Quapaw? She could at least have picked up a smattering.

  The overhead lights came on. She dared not move, though she couldn’t if she wanted. There wasn’t enough room to crouch. She couldn’t bend her knees or turn sideways. Her shoulders and heels were flat against the wall, her nose against the rough-hewn stone. It smelled like dirt. Like a fresh-turned grave.

  Farber ranted, his voice traveling around the gallery. The other guy sounded phlegmatic, but somehow more frightening. She couldn’t see, but he didn’t seem to be firing off questions the way a cop would have done. Whatever they were saying, they would have seen the pieces of the broken control box on the floor. Maybe they’d calm down when they saw that none of the art had been stolen. The only thing she had taken was Viktor’s key fob.

  She heard desk drawers being opened and closed with force and what sounded like some serious swearing. Had she put papers back in the wrong order?

  She glanced down at the object in her right hand and her eyes dilated. Not a fob. Mother of God. It was a grenade.

  Her brain shut down. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t breathe. She no longer heard or cared what the Germans were saying. She saw h
er obituary as clearly as if it had been printed in boldface on the inside of her eyelids.

  After a lengthy battle with stupidity, Dinah Pelerin was splattered across the walls of The Happy Hunting Ground art gallery by what might have been a WWII grenade, which she had nicked out of the owner’s pocket during the course of a break-in.

  Farber’s voice dropped to a less furious pitch. She willed herself to concentrate. She was alive. The critical question was how to stay that way. As her brain rebooted, she recalled that grenades had pins and the pin had to be pulled before the world went kaboom. This particular grenade had a metal tail that ran the length of it and a ring. Her fingers curled around the grenade under that tail. So long as she didn’t mess with it, or with the ring, she would probably remain in one piece. She was also beginning to think that Farber and friend weren’t going to look behind this statue. Their tour seemed to be winding down. If they left, she could squeeze out of this cranny and escape. If they stayed, she’d have to decide whether to show herself and brave the consequences, or wait them out. She didn’t think she could stand in this cramped and rigid posture much longer.

  She squirmed and wiggled her left hand up to her nose to stop a sneeze. The dirt smell wasn’t helping. She tilted her head back for air. Just above eye level was a label. MALAWI NATIONAL MUSEUM, Minya, Egypt. That museum had been in the news just a few days ago. Over a thousand artifacts had been looted. Did Farber deal in stolen art from other parts of the world? It made sense. An unscrupulous art dealer might specialize, but he wouldn’t turn up his nose if loot from a different source became available.

  The phlegmatic voice said in perfect English, “I’ll take care of it,” and somebody doused the lights.

  They were leaving. Dinah let out the breath it seemed she’d been holding forever. She counted slowly to five hundred after she heard the back door close before she sucked in her stomach and squiggled out into the open. With her left hand, she took out her flashlight and with her right, as carefully as if she were replacing a baby bird in its nest, she replaced the grenade in the parka pocket. First thing tomorrow morning, she would call Lohendorf and tell him about her discovery. If he arrested her for burglary, so be it. She could point to stone cold evidence that Florian Farber was an art thief, and to circumstantial evidence that the owner of the jacket hanging behind Farber’s desk had tried to kill Margaret. Taken together, the facts should give the police ample cause to question both Farber and Viktor again regarding Pohl’s murder.

  If only she could have gotten to her phone and recorded the voices to play back to Margaret. She had a strong feeling that the phlegmatic voice belonged to Reiner Hess.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Dinah dragged in the door dead-tired. She turned on a lamp, peeled off her damp coat, and hung it on the peg on the back of the door. It was almost three a.m. Soon the caged cuckoo would be moaning. It was ridiculous to feel pity for a mechanical bird, but after what she’d been through in the last few hours, she decided to let the pest fly free as soon as the sun came up, regardless of the racket. He might not be as raucous as he had been. The clock hadn’t been wound in a week. Thor was the only one who knew how.

  Jack was asleep on the sofa, apparently none the worse for her neglect. She picked up the blanket he had kicked onto the floor and covered him. How weird would it be to have a child? To be on duty full-time? To always be conscious that someone was counting on you to do the right thing, looking up to you as a role model and making life choices based on your advice and example? Responsibility like that would petrify her.

  Thor hadn’t been petrified. Why not? He couldn’t look after Jack all the time during those six-month visits. His job demanded that he be available on a moment’s notice. Did he have a live-in nanny?

  Jennifer probably had a career, too, but from what Dinah could tell, she’d done a terrific job with Jack. When she left him in Berlin, she obviously trusted that Thor had paired up with a conscientious girlfriend. If she’d thought for a minute that this girlfriend would leave her son in the care of a dipsomaniac while she went out to burgle a local business, she would be petrified.

  The bedroom door was closed, but she could hear Margaret sawing logs on the other side. She wondered if she’d left any gin in the bottle. After that close call with the grenade, she could use a tranquilizer. She plodded into the kitchen. A half-full bottle of Monkey 47, Schwarzwald Dry Gin, sat on the table and next to it, a packet of little green pills. Bionorica Sinupret extract. Must be some sort of sinus remedy. In her terror, she had almost forgotten her sore throat. It was probably some kind of allergy. To stress, most likely. But an ounce of prevention couldn’t hurt. She grabbed a glass, poured herself a jigger of the Monkey, swallowed two pills, and chased them down with a sip that scalded. It tasted like a mixture of Pine-Sol, kaffir lime, cardamom, and something perfumey. Honeysuckle? Whatever it was, it was fantastic. Being alive and in one piece was fantastic. She savored another sip, closed her eyes, and heaved an enormous sigh.

  “Hard day?”

  Her eyes flew open. Thor stood in the doorway, one shoulder leaned against the jamb. He was barefoot and shirtless and his drawstring pants hung low around his hips. Her first impulse was to jump up and throw her arms around him, but he stayed put, arms folded across his chest. The air between them had changed. They weren’t the same people they’d been four days ago, not to each other. She stoppered the bottle and feigned a blasé expression. “When did you get home?”

  “Around eleven. Margaret said I’d just missed you. She’s quite a character, by the way. She tells some interesting stories.”

  “I wouldn’t put too much stock in them.” She gave a careless little wave. “Come in and have a drink of the very aptly named Monkey.”

  He picked up a chair, twirled it around, and sat down with his chin resting on the back. “If I were to ask you for a rundown of the last few days, what would you tell me?”

  “Rain, lies, houseguests, murder. That about sums it up.”

  “That’s pretty thin. You’ve left out some important details, haven’t you?”

  “You’re the expert in leaving out details.”

  “Okay, Dinah. You’ve been handed a surprise, for which I’m sorry. Don’t generalize about my trustworthiness in every other way.”

  “All right, I won’t. You’ve proven yourself to be an absolute puritan when dealing with professional matters. But that kind of selective trustworthiness is not what I need. You’ll just take anything I say and repeat it to your friend Lohendorf.”

  “You know I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I thought I knew what you wouldn’t do.”

  “Is it that you don’t trust me to know the facts, or you don’t trust me to know the truth?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Facts can change, not truth.”

  “Oh, give me a break. I held a grenade in my hand tonight, Thor, and thought about death. Don’t come in here with your pants at half-mast looking like a Playgirl centerfold and try to, to mousetrap me with philosophy.”

  “A grenade! Are you serious?”

  “As a lit fuse.”

  “Jesus, Dinah. Where? What happened? I swear to you, it won’t go any farther if you don’t want it to.”

  She took another sip of gin and told him about her night at the gallery, making no apologies for the break-in. “It’s clear that Farber is crooked and the man who was with him was probably Hess. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hess is hiding Farber’s money for him in a secret account in Cyprus, and Farber is hiding Hess from the police while he’s in Berlin. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about me holding out on the police. I plan to call your pal Lohendorf as soon as his office opens and sing like a canary.”

  “He could arrest you, you know.”

  “I don’t think Farber will report the burglary. I don’t know how he had rigged his security system, but it wasn’t desi
gned to bring in the police. The last thing he wants is for people to start poking around and asking about the provenance of his inventory. Anyhow, I didn’t take anything. Maybe he thinks it was vandals or kids looking to score drugs. Somebody, probably Viktor, spends a lot of time with his Aunt Mary Jane. The coat with the grenade stunk to high heaven.”

  “Tell me what the grenade looked like.”

  “A pound or pound-and-a-half, olive drab with indentations or grooves. It had a curved lever like a tail, and a ring.”

  “Sounds old, and American made. The Germans used stick grenades, no ring.”

  She shivered and took another sip of gin. “In the dark, I didn’t know what I’d grabbed. I felt that ring and like an idiot, thought it was for keys. I could have been blown to bits, along with one of Egypt’s pharaonic treasures.”

  He reached out a hand and stroked her hair. “I just thank God that the Egyptian patrimony was saved.”

  She looked into his eyes and laughed. “Yeah. If I’d pulled the pin, I’d have landed in Egyptian hell, tormented by demons and damned to swim in my own blood for eternity.” The laughter was cathartic, but his touch sparked side effects that disrupted her defenses. She got up from the table and stood next to the counter. “What I can’t figure out is why Farber, or Viktor, or Hess would try to kill Margaret. It’s possible that she knows where Hess is hiding out, but it would be a lot easier for him to move than to kill her and call down the wrath of the entire Berlin police force on his head.”

  “What makes you think that Hess was the other man in the gallery tonight?”

  “I don’t know. His voice sounded so commanding, like he was the honcho and Farber had better do what he said or else. Hess was with Margaret at the lake on the night of the murder and I think he’s into a lot shadier schemes than hiding his money in Cyprus.”