Tear of the Gods

by Alex Archer

  Given the hoops she would have been forced to jump through to accomplish that on her own, Annja felt very lucky indeed to have made the trip to Paris to meet de Chance.

  After a few more minutes of polite discussion, Annja thanked the professor one more time and then took her leave, anxious to get to her hotel and to be certain the torc had arrived without incident.

  NO SOONER HAD the American woman left his office than de Chance picked up his phone again and dialed another number. To de Chance’s surprise, it was answered after only a few rings by Shaw himself.

  “She just left,” de Chance told his sometime partner.

  The two men had met years earlier at a conference and recognized in each other a certain mutual interest in seeing the occasional archaeological artifact get rerouted into the hands of a private individual from time to time. The association had made de Chance a very rich man, and the opportunity before him at this moment made all the other transactions they’d conducted pale in comparison.

  He had no intention of missing it.

  “Does she have the torc?” Shaw asked.

  “No, not yet. But she is having it sent to her via overnight courier so that she can have it dated and chemically analyzed tomorrow,” de Chance said, and then proceeded to tell Shaw exactly where the elusive Miss Creed would be at nine the next morning.

  It was a piece of information he knew Shaw would be more than happy to compensate him for at a later date.

  29

  The hotel wasn’t much to look at from the outside and the interior didn’t do much to dispel the initial impression, either. It wasn’t the kind of place he’d expect an American television star like Annja Creed to stay in. Then again, he wouldn’t have expected a woman like Creed to be wrapped up in a multiple homicide, either.

  Shows you just never know, Beresford thought.

  A nervous-looking young man in his mid-twenties with a bad case of acne watched him from the front desk, one hand held out of sight beneath the counter.

  Beresford didn’t blame the kid for his caution; if he was stuck working the late shift all alone in a place where two men had been murdered without anyone noticing until hours later, he’d have his hand on a weapon, too. To keep the clerk from getting nervous and blasting away with whatever he had hidden under there, the detective held up his ID as he approached the desk.

  “Police,” he said.

  The clerk relaxed. Anticipating Beresford’s next request, he took out a keycard and passed it across the counter to the detective.

  “Fifth floor,” the clerk said with disinterest. “Room 511. You’ll have to walk, though, the elevator’s out.”

  Of course it is, Beresford thought, because that’s the kind of day I’m having.

  He trooped up five flights of stairs and moved down the hall to where a ribbon of police tape stretched across a doorway.

  He went inside and had a look around. It was your typical fleabag hotel room—a narrow bed, a dresser that had certainly seen better days and a nightstand with a television bolted to it. The bloodstain near the bed had dried hours before but the thick scent of it still filled the room. A fine black powder coated many of the room’s surfaces, evidence that the forensics team had already been there looking for prints.

  Good luck with that, he thought. It looked like the rooms were cleaned once a month; the place would have dozens, if not hundreds, of fingerprints all over it.

  He didn’t envy the poor tech who would have to go through and match them all.

  He crossed the room, glanced into the adjoining bathroom, then squatted down near the bloodstain. From the way it spread across the floor Beresford surmised that the man had been in a seated position when he’d died, his back to the wall. They still didn’t have an ID on either of the victims, but Gibbons had told him that the pattern had been repeated; one had died from a broken neck and the other had bled to death after being stabbed in the chest with a long-bladed weapon.

  It seemed that anyone who got in Miss Creed’s way ended up dead and he made a mental note to himself to be extra careful when he was ready to take her into custody.

  After staring at the bloodstain for a few minutes without learning anything more, Beresford got up and turned to leave.

  That’s when he saw it.

  A section of the baseboard near the dresser had been pulled free of the wall.

  By getting down on his hands and knees, he could see that there was a small, recessed space at the bottom of the wall that normally would have been covered by the baseboard. He took out his key chain and used the penlight he kept clipped to it to peer inside the hole.

  The light revealed a cavity that was about three inches deep and six inches long. It was the perfect place to hide something small and, in fact, he could see that the dust inside the space had recently been disturbed.

  The space itself was empty.

  The detective got up and dusted himself off, his thoughts churning.

  He’d originally thought that the Creed woman might have been in on the attack at the dig site. The more he learned about her, however, the more unlikely that theory seemed to be. While everyone had their price, a fact that had been proven in his line of work again and again, what he’d been able to dig up on her showed that she was a staunch defender of those who couldn’t fight for themselves. She was also well-liked and respected in the archaeological community; she seemed to have friends everywhere. So the idea that she would turn on the very people who supported and welcomed her into their midst was just too far-fetched for even a cynic like him.

  Given that assessment, he’d been forced to revise his theory over the past twenty-four hours to one that put her on the run from those who’d slain her companions, rather than a willing accomplice. Now it looked like she was intentionally hiding something from them, as well. The space behind the baseboard wasn’t all that big. That meant the sword she’d apparently been using on those who came after her wasn’t the item in question. She might have taken it from the dig site, as he suspected, but it wasn’t what the RHD thugs were after.

  No, it was more likely that it was something far more damaging to those involved, such as photographs, or possibly even video footage, of the attack on the dig site. Otherwise, why else would they be pursuing her?

  Satisfied that he’d gotten everything possible from the scene, Beresford locked the room behind him and returned to the lobby.

  “Are you Jeremy Hanscomb?” he asked the desk clerk as he returned the key.

  The youth glared at him. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “To do with what?” Beresford asked.

  “Whatever you’re here to ask me ’bout. I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

  Beresford considered that response for a long moment and then decided that explaining the concept of a double negative to the youth would definitely be a waste of time. It was simpler just to ignore the remark and push on.

  “I don’t care what you did or didn’t do. I just want to talk to you about what happened last night.”

  The clerk glanced away, already bored with the line of inquiry. “I already told the other cops everything.”

  Beresford stamped on the irritation he felt at the kid’s remark. What he’d told the first responders had been bull, plain and simple. Two men had died, one of them rather violently, and he hadn’t seen or heard a thing?

  Give me a break.

  Rather than getting in the kid’s face, he decided to try a different method. You caught more flies with honey than vinegar, as his mother always used to say. Pulling a twenty-pound note out of his pocket, he laid it down on the counter but didn’t take his hand all the way off it.

  The clerk glanced at it and then licked his lips, his tongue flicking out and then disappearing again, like a snake.

  “I’ve got a few questions that the other guys probably forgot to ask. Help me out and I’ll make it worth your while,” Beresford said reasonably.

  The kid looked at the money again a
nd then nodded.

  “The report said you were working the front desk when this happened, that right?”

  Another sullen nod.

  Beresford wasn’t going to put up with talking to a bobble-head doll. The kid was going to talk, one way or the other. If he wanted to play hardball, Beresford could do that just as well as the next guy.

  He slid the money back off the counter.

  “Hey, it’s no skin off my back whether or not you want to earn some extra cash. Either you talk here, where things are nice and comfortable, or I can haul your ass down to New Scotland Yard, let you sweat for a while in a small little room and keep my finder’s fee. Which is it?”

  Hanscomb glared at him for a minute, but couldn’t keep it up. Breaking eye contact, he said, “Yeah, I was on duty.”

  Beresford smiled, a friendly kind of grin. He put the cash back on the countertop as a little positive reinforcement.

  “And you always stay right here at the desk during your shift?”

  “Where else would I be?”

  Beresford kept smiling. “Where else would you be indeed? So then you saw the two guys come in, right?”

  Hanscomb suddenly looked uncomfortable.

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “You don’t remember? But I thought you said you were right here for your whole shift. How could you have missed them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I was helping another guest.”

  More likely you were goofing around out back, Beresford thought, but he let it go. He already confirmed the kid hadn’t seen the assailants, so there was no sense embarrassing him further.

  “Tell me about the woman who rented the room,” he asked instead.

  Hanscomb shrugged, though Beresford could see the relief in his eyes.

  “Good-looking bird,” Hanscomb said. “Nice arse, ya know?”

  Now that’s helpful, Beresford thought with disdain, but outwardly nodded as if he knew exactly what the clerk was talking about.

  The things I do for this job.

  “What else do you remember?” he asked. “Was she tall? Short? Blonde, brunette or redhead?”

  He walked him through a physical description, checking it against the one he’d already given to the responding officers. It held up pretty well. More importantly, it matched the one Father Anderson had given of Amy, the woman he’d picked up on the side of the road.

  Beresford pulled a publicity photo of Annja Creed that he’d printed off the web out from his pocket and put it down on the counter.

  “This her?” he asked.

  Hanscomb glanced at it, trying to play it cool, but then his eyes widened as he looked again and saw the caption identifying her as the star of Chasing History’s Monsters underneath.

  “Yeah!” Hanscomb said, surprise in his voice. “Yeah, that’s her! I checked her in.”

  “Did she come in alone?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “What do you mean?’

  “A lot of guests check in alone. Doesn’t mean they stay that way. Sometimes, people don’t want other people to know their business, if you catch my drift, so they have the other person wait outside until the coast is clear or they let them in through the back.”

  Miss Creed didn’t seem like the type to be setting up illicit trysts in a fleabag hotel, so Beresford let the comment pass.

  “Do you remember what time she checked in?”

  Hanscomb shrugged again, a habit that was starting to annoy Beresford.

  “Late at night,” he said. “Two, maybe 3:00 a.m.”

  Beresford nodded, doing a quick mental calculation to be certain that she would’ve had enough time to get there if she had, in fact, been involved in the events that occurred on the road near the dig site.

  Turns out she could have made it here with time to spare, actually.

  “Did she have anything with her when she came in? A wrapped package? A long box? Anything like that?”

  “No. Just a backpack.”

  “You’re sure?” While he couldn’t see her just walking into the hotel sword in hand, it didn’t feel right that she’d just leave it outside, either.

  However, he wasn’t about to solve that puzzle.

  “Hell, yeah, I’m sure,” Hanscomb said. “I gave her a good long look, if you know what I mean.”

  Unfortunately, Beresford did, and it really was too bad he couldn’t just arrest the guy for being a creep.

  He’d been operating on the idea that the RHD soldiers had followed Creed from the dig site, but it occurred to him that perhaps she’d just stumbled on them by accident.

  Just to be certain that the hotel wasn’t being used as a base of operations by the terrorist group, he pulled out photos of O’Donnell and MacGuire and showed them to Hanscomb. If the four men had met there previously, perhaps he’d seen them before.

  No such luck, however.

  “Anything else you can remember?” Beresford asked.

  The clerk thought about it for a minute, and then nodded, much to Beresford’s surprise.

  “She had something all over the front of her shirt. A big reddish stain. At first I thought it was blood, but then I figured it had to be paint or something since she’d have had to kill someone to have that much…”

  His voice trailed off and he visibly paled as he realized the possible connection between the two events.

  The expression on Hanscomb’s face actually brought a chuckle out of Beresford; it surprised him, given the day he’d had. There hadn’t been many opportunities to laugh since he’d caught this case.

  “Did she appear hurt or injured in any way?”

  Hanscomb shook his head.

  Okay, then, so it wasn’t her blood. Best guess was that it was MacGuire’s and she’d probably gotten it on herself when she dragged his body out of the car. If he could find the clothes, he’d have a direct link between her and MacGuire. That would be a big step in the right direction.

  He thanked Hanscomb, left the twenty-pound note on the counter in front of him and headed back to his car, pulling out his cell phone as he went. Figuring Creed would have ditched her bloodstained clothing the first chance she got, he called Clements and instructed him to get half a dozen uniforms out into the neighborhood searching for that shirt as soon as possible.

  With that done he sat back and stared out the windshield into the night, wondering just where in creation Annja Creed had disappeared to this time.

  30

  After leaving the museum Annja made her way across the city intent on checking into the Hotel Apollinaire. As planned, she’d asked for Suzette when she arrived at the registration desk and was quickly shuffled over to the cute, blond-haired woman who was now waiting on her under the name Stephan had picked out: Allison Smith.

  “Ah,” the woman said, a twinkle in her eye. “Stephan’s ‘special guest.’ A pleasure to have you with us, Miss Smith, and if there is anything I can do during your stay, please do not hesitate to ask.”

  It took Annja a moment to read between the lines; Suzette thought she was sleeping with Stephan and was here for a wild weekend of illicit romance. Hence, the “special guest” comment. Annja thought about correcting her but swiftly decided against it. Stephan, she knew, had a reputation as a bit of a player and if the staff wanted to think he was trying to impress his latest conquest with a suite at the hotel, so be it. Leaving that impression with the staff might make things easier for her while she was there, as their desire to stay on Stephan’s good side would keep them from looking too closely into the situation.

  “Do you have a package waiting for me?” Annja asked, and then spent an anxious moment as Suzette spent several minutes pecking away at the keys and staring at the computer screen, as if the presence or lack thereof of a package for her was an issue of national security. In the end, though, the package was right where it was expected to be and it took only a few more minutes for the bellhop to bring it to her while she waited at the desk.

  Annj
a felt a definite sense of relief once the torc was back in her hands. The chances of the package having been intercepted by her pursuers were so miniscule as to be astronomical, especially when you factored in her use of the name Stephan had chosen for her on the mailing label, but that hadn’t stopped her from worrying about it. Her thoughts had run through a gamut of problems, from a simple error in delivery to a catastrophic accident involving the delivery truck in which the package itself was destroyed in a fiery conflagration.

  Thankfully nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  Her room turned out to be a gorgeous suite on the second floor of the hotel. From the balcony outside her bedroom she could see the Montparnasse Cemetery. She knew a number of important historical figures were buried there, including Frédéric Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, and Paul Deschanel, a former president of France.

  She ordered room service, ate a leisurely meal for the first time in what felt like weeks and then drew herself a hot bath. Soaking in the warm water, she tried to make sense of everything that had happened in the past few days.

  When the Red Hand Defenders, if that was indeed who they were, had first attacked her on the road south of Arkholme, she’d assumed that they’d done so in an attempt to eliminate her as a possible witness to the slaughter at the dig site. She’d gotten a good look at several of the men who had participated in the attack, so getting rid of her made sense; after all, a dead woman would have a rather difficult time testifying against them, now wouldn’t she?

  But the men who had broken into her hotel room in London seemed to have been looking for something—the torc?—as much as they were looking for her.

  The question was why? What would an avowed terrorist group want with a two-thousand-year-old necklace?

  Her meeting with de Chance might have provided her with the answer to that very question.

  De Chance had scoffed at the legend surrounding the torc, that whoever wore it in battle would never suffer defeat at the hands of his or her enemies. After all, magic wasn’t real, right? The idea that the torc had some kind of mystical power was simply absurd.