by P. W. Child
Maria got up and licked his neck, groping his crotch and breathing hard in his ear. “I love it when you get all…depraved.”
“I wonder if I should trust you with Mrs. Beach,” he said suddenly, breaking the sexual spell.
“Why? Geez, babe, you said you trust me with your life. Now this?” she moaned and sat down in front of her precious audio-visual equipment.
“I don't know. You females always get soft on one another. I know her type. I have psyche training from the SIS and I know her type, believe me. She is going to play on your feelings and before you know it you’re going to let her call her husband and shit like that. I don't like that.”
“Oh God, here we go again with the psyche shite,” she groaned. “Take her, then. Just take her with you. I’m sure getting Purdue done will be a walk in the park while a woman is waiting in your car – a desperate mother who knows that she is like, five minutes away from her own home and her kiddos,” Maria painted the scene realistically for him. “You go on ahead and throw her in the boot, babe, because if, God forbid, something goes wrong you would do great with the fuzz when they find two people hog tied in your car.”
“I get it! I get it, for fuck's sake. Can you shut it for a moment?” he barked. “I just…just don't fall for it, okay, babe? Just don't let her fuck with your head while I'm gone.”
“I won't. Now get going and get it done so that we don't have to fear for our lives anymore,” Maria smiled. Beck nodded in sincere agreement. He kissed Maria on the brow and left, looking absolutely focused on the task. She sank down in the chair, watching Nina's house on the monitor.
“Alexander the Great,” she muttered. “I wonder if all that treasure would help us forget that we killed a mother and wife just for getting in the way at the wrong time.”
On the other side of the locked guest room door Sylvia sank to the floor, covering her mouth and weeping as quietly as she could. Her heart throbbed erratically at the words of Beck's woman. Terrified, she sobbed at the thought of never seeing her children again, but she could never allow Maria to hear her. It would only urge them to kill her faster. She had to play dumb. She had to pretend that she was unaware of her fate and try to procrastinate their plans as far as she could.
There was one problem though. Sylvia had no idea how, when, or where Maria was planning to kill her.
Chapter 13 – Cold Trail
After determining that the large coin found in the dead woman's deteriorated esophagus was indeed ancient in origin, Nina asked Joanne to take her out to the place where the body had been found.
“It’s a crime scene, Nina. I don’t think they’ll allow us to go there,” Joanne warned.
“Why not? Is the body still there?” she asked nonchalantly, munching on a protein bar.
“No,” Joanne replied carefully, “they removed the remains long before the local police even wrapped tape around the area.”
“So, as far as they are concerned it was the scene of a crime from decades ago, right? No expected forensic evidence…none which would even make a difference anyway in solving a cold case like this,” Nina motioned with her snack.
“I…guess,” Joanne responded, still trying to figure out how correct police procedure along with the special circumstances of this specific corpse might cause this to be treated differently than the average crime scene.
Nina was correct. Although it was a crime scene, it was a very old one and the police had little more to do at the spot where the woman's body had been recovered. They would have to see if the camp director would allow them access, though, as he did mention putting some sort of memorial to the murder victim there. The two women made their way through the thick brush, trudging through the undergrowth and forest plants just a few steps away from the lake, keeping their voices low and moving as quietly as they could.
“Did you bring a weapon?” Nina asked softly.
“You can’t be serious,” Joanne replied, looking totally shocked. “A weapon?”
“Aye,” Nina nodded, frowning at her friend's strange reaction. “You always need to carry a weapon, especially when you’re not familiar with the area you’re exploring. It's common sense.”
Joanne looked sobered and a little wary of her companion. “You’ve been hanging out with Sam Cleave too long, sweetheart.”
Nina stopped walking and stared at Joanne, lifting her shirt to reveal a Bowie knife, twelve inches long. “And if I did not carry a weapon at all times I would not be standing here having this conversation with you, believe me!”
“Well then, you can walk in front,” Joanne mentioned, “so you can kill the insurgents who jump out at us, okay?”
Nina chuckled sarcastically. “Oh, God, you are so funny.”
As they stalked along the pathway where Joanne had walked before with her class and colleagues, the woodland grew gradually more quiet with every second as the night drew closer. Although Nina was used to Scotland's cold weather, Canada had a different kind of chill that she was not used to. Soon she felt the urge to return to the comforts of the fire, but the need to uncover the origin of the one singular medallion of antiquity was too intriguing to neglect.
“Here, a few paces from this line. That is where we found her,” Joanne affirmed, visibly wary of approaching the site where the clothed skeleton had been found.
“What's wrong? Come on,” Nina whispered, but Joanne shook her head. Like an obstinate mule she stayed put, refusing to move.
“I-I can't,” she said with a static expression Nina construed as terror. “I can’t set foot there again. Besides, what if there are snakes? I hate snakes! I don't want to be creeped out.”
Nina sighed, placing one hand on her hip. “Earle-girl, you stuck your hands inside a skeleton's rib cage to retrieve a piece of gold. That is some intimate contact, I'd say. And now you won't even go to the patch where she was before? Bullshit. Come on.”
“I’m scared,” Joanne admitted. “It feels wrong. You know how long she must have been lying there? And now two strangers are desecrating her grave.”
“Joanne, we are no more desecrating her resting place than whoever put her to sleep there years ago, okay? Besides, our snooping hardly constitutes violating her corpse or anything. Nothing we do here could do her worse than what was done to her the moment she swallowed that coin,” Nina explained. Her companion winced at the thought, but she had to concede that Nina was right again.
Reluctantly she started forward. “We can't be too long. It will be getting dark soon.”
“I know,” Nina said as she came to the uprooted spot where the local police had worked when they removed the remains. “This is going to sound macabre, but, do you have any pictures of the corpse?”
“Why?” Joanne asked.
“Do you know how she died? If I could see the position she was in, or what she was wearing, for instance, I could maybe figure out more about her involvement in such an ancient treasure,” the historian clarified.
Joanne thought for a second. “I could not take pictures at the time, because by then that idiot Spence and the other kids had already come to see what the big deal was and it would have been in extremely bad taste if I had stood there snapping photo's, you know?”
“Aye, not even I would dare do that,” Nina giggled. Then she gave it some thought. “Maybe I would have. God, you're right. I have been hanging out with Sam too long.”
“Where is he? I am sure he would love to cover this story,” Joanne smiled proudly for connecting the great and renowned Sam Cleave with something she discovered.
Nina stared at her for a long while, displaying no indication of what she was thinking. It was a splendid idea, actually. Sam was in Kuala Lampur. Probably drinking too much and missing good times in hazardous situations. He would be ecstatic to cover a story like this. Groundbreaking and huge, it would once again shoot his reputation over the walls. She knew he was not about ego, but it would elevate his work, his achievements, right into the history books and that was too good
to pass up.
“But Nina, then we keep all this hush-hush until we actually find where this trinket comes from, right?” Joanne ascertained, since she was not sure how the experts handled something this monumental.
“Absolutely,” Nina assured her. “Remember, we know what kind of vermin come out to play when word gets out about something like this. We will keep you posted on the developments as we go along, I promise.”
“Nina! I am coming with you, wherever this thing goes,” the teacher protested.
“No, you are not,” Nina countered. “Do you not trust me? Do you think I will take the credit for it, because I don't tick that way, honey.”
“That's not why, Nina. Jesus, how could you think that I make you out to be some sort of crook? I just…well, the reason…” Joanne hesitated, feeling stupid for what she had to confess.
“What? What then makes you want to track our every move?” Nina asked.
“I feel really childish and silly saying this,” Joanne presented her case, “but…all my life I have been sitting in classrooms, libraries, and exam rooms, talking about great explorations and excursions, teaching kids history about great discoveries. It’s been only from a room, from between four walls, that I’ve had the opportunity to look into the world of history, the excitement of finds and the rewards of hard work in finding these things. Now I have found something that could mean something and…”
“And you don't want to watch from a classroom,” Nina smiled, feeling Joanne's plight wrap around her heart.
“Yes,” Joanne sighed in relief that Nina understood. “I want to be the one on the computer monitor or the TV screen that other people watch and wish they were me, for a change.”
“I get it, honey,” Nina soothed with a hug. “I’m just scared for your safety, should something come of this and we run into trouble. I don't want you to end up dead or get arrested for snooping in places we aren't exactly carrying permits for, you know?”
“Fuck that! If it means I get to live a little and I get in trouble for my passion, then so be it, dammit!” Joanne smiled. Her face flushed and she seemed more confident all of a sudden. The dead emotion and the hopeless expressions were lost in favor of motivation and happiness. For once she felt the addictive thrall of something exciting on the horizon, instead of only having a new syllabus to look forward to in her miserable, anchored existence. “It’s weird, you know,” she told Nina. “You don't realize how pathetic your life is until something un-pathetic happens to you.”
Nina chuckled and nodded in agreement. She remembered when she was living only for tenure at the University a few years ago, taking all manner of shitty lecture positions and submitting theses all over the place just to get her papers published for a bit of recognition. She recalled with no fondness working under the insufferable Prof. Matlock, the misogynistic fuckwit who’d thwarted all of her chances of success and even took the credit for Ice Station Wolfenstein from her.
“Oh, I know all too well what it is like to bust your balls and nobody gives a shit, Earle-girl,” Nina said. “And once you discover what you are capable of, you cannot imagine having lived, no, waded through, such a shit life.”
“I see we are exactly on the same page, Dr. Gould,” Joanne laughed, patting Nina on the shoulder. “In fact, we are down to the letter of the sentence.”
The vicinity of where the dead woman had spent the past few decades was barren of anything not put there by nature. Much as the two women searched, no matter how impeccably, there was nothing else that resembled, or could belong to, the collection the medallion could have come from. For over an hour, braving the cold and the gaining darkness, they examined every square inch of the dark soil of the under story. Nina even resorted to digging a few inches into the loose dirt in the exact spot where the corpse had been found, just I case her body was but a marker for something precious that was never recovered by those who buried it there.
Then again, the fact that the piece had been swallowed was a clear clue that it had been hidden successfully from whoever had killed the woman. If they had buried the rest she would not have gone to such lengths to conceal it. Nina gave up the search to find more of the coins – in this area, at least.
“Come, Jo, let's get back to the cabin,” she suggested, peering through the tall tree trunks for signs of detection. The place was getting exceedingly creepy as time wore on and she realized why Joanne had been so uncomfortable being there. It felt spooky, as if the dead woman were screaming so loudly to be heard that everything else in the woods became mute. “Jo.”
“Okay, I'm coming,” Joanne said, and stumbled out of the bushes to join Nina on the path back. Their walk back was a lot faster than their approach had been. “You can feel it too, right?”
“Shut it,” Nina snapped softly in her rush to get as much ground between her ass and the recently relieved grave. Had Joanne not been so anxious herself, she would have laughed at Nina's response. It was quite funny.
When they finally made it back to the solace of their cottage, Joanne made a fire while Nina unpacked her laptop for a bit of research on the historical significance of the area. If she found anything worth investigating, she was going to dislodge Sam from whatever he was busy with and drag him along.
“Hey Nina, I just remembered,” Joanne noted, “I could get you pictures, maybe, of the corpse.”
Nina looked sternly over the top of her laptop screen, the blue-white glow giving her a decidedly luminous quality. “We are not breaking into the local morgue, Joanne,” she jested.
“No, man,” she laughed, “I could ask Lisa, the girl who found the hideous pile of bones. That’s how she found the corpse in the first place, while taking pictures of the woods! I bet she would still have the shots. You know kids; she would have sent it to all her pals by now.”
“Do you have her number?” Nina asked, perking up at the prospect.
“I think I do. Let me check,” she replied, and switched on her phone to check her contacts. “I have Pam's. I can ask Pam to get Lisa's number pronto.”
“Excellent. While you do that, I'll see if there was any reason someone would kill in Canada for something connected to a conqueror from centuries before Christ,” Nina said.
Chapter 14 – The Snare Set
Purdue was relieved to have made it all the way to Oban without even a question about his identity. It had been a very strenuous journey from his hiding place in the Unites States, but he could not find a way to save Nina while he was so far from her ground zero. He had arrived at her house by taxi (he had returned the rental to its agency in town) in order to not draw attention to her house with the movement of an unknown vehicle. The place was void of the action he had expected. It was almost as if the citizens of Oban did not realize that she’d been taken, or that they did not care.
Confounded by the murky circumstances, Purdue gained access to Nina's house by means of a gadget he had invented years ago. In short, it was a device that used electromagnetism to mimic the unlatching edges of a key.
Using it, however, presented a peculiar feeling for him. Simultaneously he had to use his master technology in such circumstances where he was suddenly thrust into an alien world of having to get by like an ordinary person. Two opposing worlds – his own, with boundless technology and limitless resources where he could usually just board his private jet – and his present misfortune of having to keep track of the money he used, utilizing public transport and means to get to where he needed to be.
Nina was gone without a trace, yet pedestrians passing by on the sidewalk or people driving by turned their heads to look at the infamous residence as if they knew she was absent. Still, nobody deigned to spy if she was indeed gone and nobody came to call on her home in reverence, at least.
“Why does nobody want to know that you are gone, my dear Nina?” he asked as he wandered the darkness of her house with Bruich on his heels. Purdue looked down. “Where is she, old man? Did you see who took her? Did you hear her cries?”
But his innate positivity stopped him from asking any more morose questions. He was a problem solver, a go-getter who did not relent until the end, and he was not going to allow nostalgia and assumption to bring him to a level where he could not but expect the worst. Kidnappers normally abducted for money or some kind of vindictive revenge, not for murder. She had to be alive and whoever had her had to keep her healthy and well if they wanted to trade her.
The question was, who had abducted her and why? If he was the target and they took Nina for a ransom, because he had unlimited wealth, why have they not made contact yet?
Oh yes, because you are presumed dead, you imbecile! he thought immediately.
But this brought up another possibility, which made even less sense. Consider that they had also heard the news of his demise and assumed that he was dead. Why would they kidnap her then? A hundred questions hammered Purdue's sense of logic and deduction until he was sure he had nothing to do with her abduction at all. The whole endeavor simply remained a mystery to him, but nevertheless, he decided to stay in Nina's house for the time-being while he investigated her affiliations over the last few days. Any discrepancy should shed light on what she could have been involved with, he figured.
It was all so muddled up, twisted and back to front that it left Purdue's brain to do just one thing with it all. “The answer is ridiculously simple and right before my eyes,” he announced as he glared out the bay window in Nina's bedroom, overlooking the town's roofs and some of the ocean beauty to the left. “I just need to stop thinking and regard the first, most ludicrous simplicity to know what it is.”
Suddenly there was a knock at the door, a sound that Purdue found both uncanny and unbelievable. With the veil of secrecy surrounding Nina's disappearance, the billionaire was reluctant to answer the door, even just to avoid questions as to his identity, which could prove detrimental on all levels. Quickly he calculated the risks between his options and with the second sounds of knocking he had still not decided what to do.
