The Inquisitor's Key: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “What do you mean?” Descartes leaned closer to inspect the tooth.

  “This isn’t the canine we sent.” I raised my palm closer to his face. “At least, it’s not the canine that I pulled from the skull.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because when I pulled the tooth, it broke. The root snapped off in the jaw. Look—this one’s perfect.”

  He plucked the tooth from my hand gently, as if it were a gem, or a ripe raspberry he didn’t want to bruise. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, he turned it, scrutinizing it from every angle. “You are sure of this?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You think there is some mistake at this laboratory? A mix-up?”

  “No,” I said slowly, an idea dawning in my mind. An idea whose brilliance was matched only by its wickedness. “I think Stefan swapped the samples,” I said. “I think he traded the teeth I pulled for teeth from another skull. A skull he knew was two thousand years old.”

  “But how is this possible? Where would he get such teeth?”

  “Hell, he was an archaeologist,” I said. “He could have gotten them anywhere. A dig in Greece or the Middle East—a site he knew dated from the first century. The catacombs of Rome, where there are thousands and thousands of skeletons that age. Maybe even the Museum of Natural History in Paris; there’s a whole building there filled with fossils and bones.” I snapped my fingers. “I just remembered—the first night I was here, we were talking about C-14 dating. He mentioned something about Turkish goat bones from the first century. He might have teeth from that same site.”

  “So he faked it? Merde, every case I get now involves a faker or a forger. Do you think he planned this tout entièr—the whole thing—a long time in advance?”

  I opened my mouth to say yes, but I found myself shaking my head no. “No, actually I think it was a spur-of-the-moment idea,” I said. “I think he really did find the bones in the palace—the wall collapsed first, Stefan was called second. I think the only thing he faked was the C-14 test, once he found that ossuary. I think the inscription—the cross and the lamb—put the idea into his head.” A realization struck me: If Stefan had rigged the C-14 test, maybe the skeleton was medieval after all…and maybe the Shroud of Turin really was created in Avignon. “The skeleton Stefan found is significant,” I added. “But he wanted it to be the most important—and most valuable—skeleton in the world. Unfortunately, his plan worked too well, and it backfired on him.”

  Descartes was staring off into space. I wasn’t sure he was following me, or even hearing me. “Inspector?”

  “Excuse me for one minute, please.” He took out his cell phone and made a call. The only words I caught for sure were “cherchez” and “appartement.” Descartes listened a long while, then murmured, “Ah, oui? C’est bon.” When he hung up, his face was a mask, but his eyes were gleaming. “As you were talking, I remembered. In his apartment were some small glass jars containing bits of metal, pieces of pottery, small bones. And—this is what I called to ask them to look for just now—two teeth. A dent de sagesse, the tooth of wisdom”—he pointed at one of his third molars—“and a dogtooth, a canine, broken at the root, exactement as you describe.” He caught my gaze and held it. “Okay, I’m leaving now. We should finish with a small fight.” He jabbed a finger in my chest. “You are not telling me everything, Docteur,” he said loudly. “I think you know where are these bones. I am watching you. And I can make things very bad for you if you give me a reason.”

  He spun on his heel and walked toward the street. “Descartes,” I called after him. He stopped and looked back at me. “We saved your butts in World War Two,” I shouted. “If not for America, you’d be goose-stepping and eating sauerkraut.”

  He resumed walking, and he raised both arms, his middle fingers extended. Unless it had a radically different meaning in France, the gesture needed no translation.

  And the man claimed to be a lousy actor.

  CHAPTER 25

  WHEN MIRANDA AND I LEFT THE LIBRARY AN HOUR later, we persuaded Philippe to let us out a back door. We took a long, meandering way back to her hotel, detouring through the Rue des Teinturiers—the street of the tinters, the dyers. For centuries this was Avignon’s textile district, where the wools and silks for tapestries, vestments, courtiers’ cloaks, and ladies’ gowns took on hues of red, orange, gold, green, blue, violet, indigo. A small canal paralleled the street, and the buildings lining that side all had small bridges leading to their entrances. A smattering of ancient waterwheels, some still turning, offered picturesque reminders of the importance of waterpower to medieval industries. Miranda stopped to snap a waterwheel photo with her iPhone, then climbed the steps onto the small bridge beside it. Leaning on the stone balustrade, she peered down at the water. “Fancy a dip?” I called.

  She shook her head. “Remember what Stefan said about the pollution in the Rhône? This looks a lot worse. The water’s opaque.”

  “Urban runoff,” I said. “Brake fluid, mop water, dog crap—not great for the water quality.”

  “Imagine, though, what this must have looked like in 1350. If all these buildings were dyers’ shops? This water probably changed color every time somebody emptied a dye vat. Wouldn’t that be fun? The canal running fuchsia one minute, burnt orange the next? Like something out of The Wizard of Oz.”

  “That’s a pretty image,” I said. “And Avignon did play the part of the Emerald City for most of a century.”

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore, that’s for sure.”

  A few blocks later, we wandered past the historic marker that mentioned the poet Petrarch and his unrequited love, Laura. Pointing it out to Miranda, I asked, “Do you know their story?”

  “Petrarch and Laura? A little. He saw her at church and fell instantly in love. But it was doomed—she was married to someone else, I think—so he spent the rest of his life worshiping her from afar.”

  “They were never together?”

  “Only in his dreams. Well, and his poems.”

  “DO YOU KNOW THE STORY OF PETRARCH?” ELISABETH and Jean looked up from their wineglasses and nodded in unison.

  I’d dropped Miranda at her hotel after an early dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant near the clock tower—couscous, grape leaves, hummus, and eggplant; not my favorite fare, but Miranda liked it. The last of the daylight was fading as I entered the sanctuary of Lumani’s garden, and Elisabeth and Jean were sharing a bottle of red wine. A candle burned on the small table between them, and the wine in their glasses glowed like liquid rubies.

  “Petrarch, oui,” she exclaimed. “A famous poet pastoral.”

  “Pastoral? Like a pastor, a priest?”

  Her brow furrowed, then brightened. “Ah, non. Like sheeps. Shepherds and maidens. Petrarch loved the countryside.”

  “And Laura? What do you know about his lady love?”

  “She was very young,” said Jean, “and very beautiful. Almost as beautiful as Elisabeth.” She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. “She was married to a French nobleman. Petrarch loved her, but could not have her.”

  “Une tragédie,” said Elisabeth. “For him. But very lucky for us. He wrote many poems about her. He invented the sonnet, the love poem, just for her.” She pursed her lips, thinking, then held up a finger. “Ah! Wait here. I will come back.” She hurried across the courtyard to their house; a moment later she returned, holding a small book aloft as if it were a prize. “I have a book of Petrarch’s sonnets. A gift from Jean years ago.” She leaned down and kissed the top of his balding head—a simple gesture that spoke volumes about the easy, entwined intimacy of their lives.

  She flipped pages in the book; some, I noticed, were dog-eared, including the page where she stopped. “Listen. This is the poem he wrote when Laura died. He had loved her for twenty years by this time. He wrote in Italian; this is in French, which I will try to put into English for you—sorry if the translation is not good.” She scanned the page, mentally trying out a
word here, a phrase there, then held up a hand theatrically and began to read.

  The eyes I used to speak about with words of fire, the arms and hands and feet and beautiful face that took me away from myself for so long and set me apart from other men; the waving hair of pure gold that shone, the smile that beamed with angel rays that made this earth a paradise—now they are only a bit of dust, and all her feeling is gone. Yet I live on, with grief and disdain, left behind, here in darkness, where the light I cherished no longer ever shows, in my fragile little boat on the tempestuous sea. Here let my loving song come to its end. The vein of my art has run dry, and my song has turned at last to tears.

  She stopped, then wiped a tear from each eye. “Such sweetness, and such sadness.”

  “You say he loved her for twenty years?”

  “More than that. He loved her for twenty years while she was alive. But then she died, during the Black Death. Still he loved her, after she died. He kept loving her, and writing about her, for the rest of his life—twenty-five, thirty more years.”

  “But he never got to be with her?”

  “Non, never. She was married. She refused all his advances. We don’t even know if they ever talked together.”

  “That seems foolish,” I said. “He wasted his life sighing for a woman he could never have instead of looking for a love that he could have.” I gestured at the two of them. “Like you and Jean.”

  “But he was pledged to the church,” she pointed out. “He was not supposed to have any woman.”

  “He was doubly foolish, then, to obsess about her for his whole life.”

  She gave me an odd look then—a look both critical and pitying. “Ah, monsieur scientifique—does your heart always obey the orders of your head? Have you never been foolish in the thing you wanted or the person you loved? Have you never loved unwisely, never grieved too much for someone you lost?”

  Her question blindsided me. I felt light-headed and reached out to steady myself on the trellis beside me. Years before, when my wife, Kathleen, died of cancer, I’d retreated from people for two years, burying myself in my work. Then, just as I felt myself beginning to come alive again—just as I started falling in love with Jess Carter, a beautiful medical examiner from Chattanooga—Jess was killed. Then there was Isabella, with whom I’d had a brief romantic encounter, and who’d died in Japan when the tsunami struck the coast where she was staying. And now? Now I was struggling with my feelings for Miranda, a young woman who, because of her age and position, should be as off-limits to me as Laura was to Petrarch.

  Elisabeth reached out a hand and laid it on my arm. “I spoke too strongly,” she said. “I think I have reminded you of something painful. I am sorry. Please forgive me.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s all right. It’s my fault. What do I know about what’s foolish and what’s wise, or what’s the best way to cope with pain? When I’m in pain, I study a skeleton. When Petrarch is in pain, he writes a poem. Most people prefer his way to mine. And who can blame them?” I gave her a rueful smile; she returned it with one of warmth and kindness.

  “You find poems and stories in the bones,” she said, and Jean nodded. “Good night.” She gave my cheek a quick kiss, took her husband’s arm, and walked with him across the courtyard into the golden light spilling from the windows of their home.

  I wondered if it was too late in life to take up writing sonnets.

  CHAPTER 26

  DESCARTES SETTLED INTO A CHAIR. I’D EXPECTED HIS eyes to light up at the array of pastries and berries—Jean and Elisabeth had started doubling the portions for his sake—but he looked bleak and bleary. “I’ve been up all night,” he said, in answer to the question in my eyes. “Fishing. We have some information on all three of the fishes.”

  Coffee sloshed from my cup as my hand began to shake, filling the saucer. When I set the saucer down, milky coffee sloshed onto the table and dripped through the wooden slats, splatting onto the stones of the courtyard. “Tell me.”

  “The one in London is a British art dealer.”

  “An art dealer?” I was surprised, though I swiftly realized I shouldn’t have been. After all, if collectors and museums prized fractured Roman pottery and gem-encrusted Aztec skulls, why wouldn’t someone covet the bones of Christ, arguably the most revered figure of all time? “What else do you know about him?”

  “Not him. Her. A woman named Felicia Kensington. She’s very shady. She’s been on the watch list of New Scotland Yard and Interpol for years now.”

  “What for?”

  “Buying and selling black-market art. Forgeries and fakes. Stolen antiquities. Her name has come up more than once in cases like this—”

  “Murder cases?”

  “No, nothing violent. Cases where a valuable piece of art—a painting, a sculpture, a precious document—disappeared, or mysteriously reappeared. Sometimes with fake papers, sometimes with no papers at all. But she’s slippery. Someone else always takes the fall.”

  “She’s never been convicted of anything?”

  “She’s never even been arrested.”

  “Sounds like she’s lucky, or smart, or both,” I said. “What’s your take?”

  “My take?” He looked startled, then he frowned. “Isn’t that what you call a corrupt policeman’s bribe—his take?”

  “Ah. Not quite.” No wonder he’d looked confused and unhappy. “We do say that a crooked cop is ‘on the take,’ yes. But the money that a cop gets when he’s on the take is called his ‘cut,’ I think. ‘What’s your take?’ means ‘What’s your impression, what’s your intuition?’ So, what’s your take on this shady art dealer, Felicia Kensington—could she have killed Stefan?”

  He studied the biggest of the strawberries, then plucked it from the platter and bit off the lower half. “My take is, she’s a morceau de merde—a morsel of shit, you would say?”

  I smiled at the translation. “Americans don’t say ‘morsel’ a lot. We tend to say ‘piece’ instead.”

  “Okay, she’s a piece of shit,” he said, popping the rest of the strawberry in his mouth. “But I don’t think she’s the killer.”

  “Because?”

  “Because she’s a woman, for one thing. Women almost never kill. They only kill their husbands or lovers. Well, sometimes their kids, but that’s rare. Besides, this woman has an alibi. She’s been in Cairo for the past two weeks. Probably buying mummies or robbing tombs.”

  “Okay, so we can probably rule her out. Who’s suspect number two?”

  He crossed himself, then raised his eyebrows expectantly, waiting for some sort of response. I shook my head and shrugged. Looking disappointed that I’d not understood the clue, he said, “The pope.”

  “The pope? The pope? As in the Holy Father in Rome? Holy smokes.” The inspector nodded, cheered up by my dramatic reaction. “Well, well. I’ll say this for Stefan—he might have been stupid, but he wasn’t guilty of thinking small, was he? That’s a damn big fish.”

  Descartes wagged a finger of clarification. “Not the pope himself, I think. The fax number belongs to the Vatican, though. The Vatican Museum, to be precise.”

  “I’ve been to the Vatican Museum,” I said. “Took me six hours to go through it, and I skipped a lot. I’m guessing it’s not a one-man operation. Any idea who Stefan was negotiating with?”

  “Not yet. The wheels of the Vatican roll slowly.”

  “Gosh, there’s a revelation.” He didn’t seem to get the pun.

  “They have two different police forces. The Swiss Guard is there to protect the pope.”

  “Like the Secret Service in the U.S.,” I said. “They protect the president.”

  “Exactement. The other force is the Vatican police—they do everything else. But neither group will cooperate with me unless someone très important commands it. The Catholic Church has had too many scandals lately. They don’t want bloody hands from a murder.” His lips twitched in an ironic little smile. “En particulier a crucifixion.”
r />   “That wouldn’t look so good,” I agreed. “But do you think it’s possible that someone at the Vatican Museum would want the bones enough to kill for them?”

  He shrugged. “I’m no expert. There’s plenty of blood on the hands of the Church. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Sexual abuse and cover-ups. But would the Vatican kill to possess the bones of Christ—or to destroy them? Only God knows.”

  I slathered cherry preserves on a croissant and took a bite; for some reason, I’d started imitating Descartes, who seemed unable to string together more than three sentences without refueling. “So what do you know about the third fish, the one in Charlotte? Is it the Institute for Biblical Science, the place that contacted me?”

  “No, that is not the place, but maybe there is some connection. This is a church.”

  “Catholic?” He shook his head. “Protestant? Why would a Protestant church in North Carolina want to buy the bones of Jesus?”

  “It’s not typical Protestant, I think. It’s called the Church of Dominion and Prophecy. A church gigantesque—a megachurch, oui?—with twenty thousand people. Also radio and television stations. The preacher is named Jonah Ezekiel. Not his original name; he changed it. He calls himself ‘Reverend Jonah, Apostle and Prophet of the Apocalypse.’ He’s—how do you say it?—on the fluffy edge of crazy.”

  “Lunatic fringe?”

  “Exactement, lunatic fringe.”

  “Why do you say that, Inspector?”

  “He thinks the world will end soon.”

  “I hate to say it, Inspector, but millions of Americans—like, forty percent—think the world is about to end. Almost half of Americans believe that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world will happen by the year 2050.”

  He held up a finger. “Ah, but this preacher—he says he knows exactement when these things will happen. God brought him to Heaven, he says, and gave him a special preview.” I had to admit, this was starting to sound fringy. “Two years ago, he tells everyone, ‘The Rapture happens in six months.’ So his followers quit their jobs to help him warn everyone. When the Rapture does not happen, does he say, ‘Sorry, I was wrong, I am an idiot’? Non! He says, ‘God gave me more time to save souls, so give me more money.’” He spat out a strawberry cap. “Morceau de merde.”