Crescent Moon

by Delilah Devlin

  Maybe part of what had set off Juste and sent him sailing across that desk was the fact that deep inside, for just a second, he’d been glad it hadn’t been him. Now he wondered why he’d been spared. No one would have missed him. Despite a wall of commendations, he wasn’t such a great detective that he was irreplaceable. Someone else sat at his desk in Homicide while he had sunk to following up calls from museum curators dumb enough to lose a few “artifacts.” Big fucking deal.

  “Dr. Dorman will see you now.”

  Juste pulled his gaze from the display in the Garden Museum’s business office near the entrance. The sight of six-inch-tall statues that looked as though his godson could have made them in a preschool art class didn’t really hold his interest. But pretending interest was better than watching “Mikey” as he hit on the curator’s secretary. From the moment they’d been asked to wait, his younger partner sat on the edge of her desk chatting her up while she walked back and forth to her printer.

  Juste shook his head. At thirty-five, he was too young to feel this damn old. He aimed a glare at his partner, whose gaze wasn’t straying from the woman’s twitching skirt as they followed her down a long hallway and a set of stairs into a large back storage room.

  Tall crates filled the area. Packing peanuts and straw littered the floor. A crowbar stood to the side of one splintered and empty wooden box.

  “This can’t be happening.” A tall, thin man paced in front of the burgled crate. Dressed in a tan suit with his bowtie askew, he looked the part of the curator.

  Juste snorted when the secretary approached the man and politely cleared her throat, because his guess had been correct. Which left in question the identity of the second man standing beside the crate. This one had darker skin, dark eyes, and a thin mustache trailing down the sides of his lips and around his chin. His large, curved nose marked him Middle Eastern, and he stood frozen, staring at the empty box.

  Already, Juste didn’t like him, seeing in his mind not an urbane, well-dressed man but one of the crewmembers who had scattered to the winds during the police sweep at the docks. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but Bobby’s loss was still too fresh for him to be objective.

  “Why these two artifacts?” Dr. Dorman asked, his question not directed to anyone in particular as he paced. “The theft makes no sense. If they were looting for antiquities, why not steal the gold tomb relics?” When the secretary cleared her throat again, he looked up and spotted Juste and his partner striding toward him. His eyebrows lowered into a worried frown. “Detectives, you have to do something—quickly.”

  Juste stood silently by as Mikey introduced them.

  His partner oozed the right amount of sympathy. “What a terrible thing to have happen. We’ll get to the bottom of this. During your call, you said you have some Egyptian artifacts missing—can you be more specific?”

  Dr. Dorman stopped pacing. His gaze went to the darker man, before he spoke. “We’re scheduled to open a new exhibit next week.” He reached into his back pocket and unfolded a pamphlet which he held out.

  Juste took the brochure, giving it only a quick glance before tucking it into a pocket.

  “It’s a traveling exhibition of Egyptian pieces from a private collection,” the curator said. “Quite spectacular. We’re the first stop on the tour. The crates arrived yesterday. We were to begin unpacking and cataloguing today, but I walked into this mess.” His hands spread wide. “It’s a catastrophe.”

  Wrong. A catastrophe was your best friend lying in a pool of blood, but Juste stifled his irritation. He had a job to do. “I’ve heard ‘artifacts.’ What exactly is missin’?”

  “You mentioned gold?” his partner asked, glancing at Juste as though begging his pardon for interrupting, but sidling closer to the curator anyway.

  Did he think Juste might reach for the man’s throat too? Juste wondered how much of his inner monologue showed on his face and decided to dial back his sarcasm.

  “That’s what’s so strange,” the curator said, his expression tense, seemingly real concern shining in his eyes. “They didn’t steal any of the more precious items. Not a death mask, not Re’s golden boat. No statuary at all. They stole two mummies.”

  Mummies? Juste pressed his lips together, fighting the urge to cuss under his breath. He’d gone from hunting gangbangers to looking for missing mummies. Bobby would have bust a gut laughing if he could see him now.

  Mikey sniffed and then turned to the side to cough. When his glance met Juste’s, humor gleamed. “Perps used a crowbar,” he said under his breath, “so it’s not an escape.”

  Juste shook his head, fighting the smile beginning to twitch at the corners of his mouth. “Boy, don’t start,” he said under his breath, surprised by the kid’s sense of humor.

  The curator glanced from Mikey to Juste. Instantly, his brows lowered and two bright spots of color burned on his cheeks. “These mummies date from between 3500 and 2500 B.C. They’re in remarkable condition. Recent finds. Their resting place was undisturbed for at least four millennia. We have X-rays to tell us what’s inside them, but they’ve never been unwrapped. If the thieves do so, the damage to the corpses could be catastrophic. Just the moisture in the air could cause rapid deterioration—”

  “To say nothing of the treasures inside the wrappings.” This statement came from the Middle Eastern man. His gaze burned with quiet fury.

  Juste pursed his lips. “Sorry, gentlemen. Our amusement wasn’t appropriate.” He paused and gave Mikey a narrow warning glance, not that his new partner needed one. Already, he looked contrite, his expression schooled into fresh sympathy. “You said treasures in the wrappings?”

  “Inscriptions. Talismans,” the darker man said, his accent more pronounced. “There’s much to learn about who these two mummies were and why they were interred. I agreed to include these finds in the exhibit shipment due to Dr. Dorman’s expertise in ushabti.”

  “Shabti?” Juste met the man’s hard gaze and he stiffened. Cool intelligence and the determined set of the man’s chin had Juste wondering if there was more going on here. He didn’t seem like an academic sort. His expression was too alert and hard. “Excuse me, who are you?”

  The darker man bowed his head. “I am Youssef Haddara. I travel with the exhibit. I am the protector.”

  Juste’s brows lowered. His hackles had risen with each guttural, rolling “r.” “The protector?”

  Dr. Dorman pointed a finger. “He’s security, assigned by the owner of the artifacts, Sheikh Khaled Fathy.”

  Juste was getting impatient dealing with the two men. “The museum have security?”

  “We do,” Dr. Dorman said, nodding. “Two roving guards who saw and heard nothing, and a man who monitored the closed-circuit cameras. My assistant is reviewing footage now, but I don’t hold much hope we’ll see anything helpful. We had issues with our equipment yesterday—the camera at the cargo bay,” he said, pointing to the back of the large room, “and there. Both feeds were compromised.” He pointed upward to a camera mounted some twenty feet above them.

  “When did the equipment begin to malfunction?”

  Dr. Dorman’s lips settled into a straight line. “Just before the semi delivered the crates.”

  Juste shared a quick glance with Mikey. If the cameras were deliberately sabotaged, they might be looking at an inside job. “Any ideas why anyone would want the mummies? Are they valuable?”

  “It’s not yet determined,” Haddara said. “A pharaoh’s mummy could be quite valuable to a collector, but two nameless persons in an unmarked tomb . . . ” He shook his head.

  “Then why your interest? Why have them brought here?”

  The dark man narrowed his eyes. “Because of the markings on the linen wrapping the female.” He strode to a white table in a corner spread with documents and rifled through the stack until he found what he was looking for. He held out pictures, taken in color, of the two mummies. Both were slender—one plain and begrimed, the other equally encrusted but with f
aded paintings covering the place where the eyes should be and symbols stretching from the face down the length of the mummy. Haddara pointed to the painted mummy. “The inscription was unusual. It begins, ‘Khepri, ushabti to the nameless one.’” His gaze locked with Juste’s. “She was a human ushabti.”

  Juste remembered the word from the plaque on the display case housing the small statuettes he’d been looking at outside Dorman’s offices.

  Haddara continued. “Ushabti were statues made of various materials, but usually stone, clay or faience, and quite small, doll-sized. They were placed inside tombs with the belief that once the dead crossed into the next life, the small statues would grow to human-size and come alive to serve the person being entombed.”

  Haddara pulled another photo the stack—also of the painted mummy, but shown in daylight beside the opening of a cave. “The woman in the tomb was wrapped, but oddly; her organs were never removed, as was the usual practice. That fact, and the markings on the linen strips, lead me to believe she was wrapped while still alive.” His eyes glittered with excitement. “Incantations meant to reanimate her covered the wrappings. The X-rays taken by the Sheikh’s physician show an amulet in her mouth, a dagger in her hand, and many little amulets tucked into her wrappings. Some gold, some silver or electrum. Richly ornate items, which point to the possibility she held some rank, or that she was designated as the ushabti to someone else of very high rank.”

  Dr. Dorman nodded. “Just from the photographs and the X-rays Youssef shared, I was very excited. Symbols appeared several times in the glyphs—describing a man of consequence who must remain nameless, but whose identity was substituted with the picture of a scorpion.”

  Juste felt a headache throbbing in the center of his forehead. “This is all relevant because…?”

  “If the body the ushabti accompanied is who we think he is,” Dr. Dorman said, his hands waving with his excitement, “the mummy could be the most important find since King Tut’s treasure. At least, more important to the academic community because he might be the remains of one of the actual Scorpion Kings. They predate the richest tombs. The age, the legends—it’s all very exciting. And now we’ve lost him. We need both. She could provide us the proof we need to authenticate his identity.”

  “So we might be looking for someone with an interest in Egyptian mummies,” Juste said, his tone even. He was looking at two such subjects right now.

  “You can narrow the search by concentrating on anyone who knew about the find,” Haddara said. “It was recent. Not part of the actual exhibit. I included the mummies because of the added security surrounding the event, but I wanted to keep quiet the reason for our interest.”

  “How many people knew the mummies were here?”

  “Only a handful. The team from the University of Memphis who were invited by Sheikh Fathy to conduct the excavation. Most are in town for the exhibit. There is myself, since I represent the owner of the land where the tomb was found, and Dr. Dorman here.” Haddara bowed his head. “A small group.”

  “No officials in Egypt or here?”

  When Dorman and Haddara shared a quick glance, Juste’s senses sharpened.

  Haddara pressed his hands together, his forefingers steepled. “Due to political unrest in my country, the Supreme Council for Antiquities is in shambles. We, the Sheikh and I, decided not informing them of the find was far safer. If they’d known, they might have taken the mummies. Treasures are disappearing all the time.” He waved a hand. “And it was easy enough to add the mummies to the artifacts for the exhibit, which we gathered hastily to get the collection out of Egypt until order is restored.”

  “So you smuggled them into this country,” Juste said, keeping his tone carefully uninflected.

  “We did nothing illegal … in this country. In my own, the oversight was slight … a clerical error. Mummies are plentiful, not usually a remarkable find.”

  Juste studied his expression. “And yet you didn’t identify what went missing when you placed the call.”

  Haddara bowed his head. “We would like this matter kept quiet.”

  From that small gesture and Haddara’s gleaming eyes, Juste knew Haddara suspected this possibly unremarkable find was likely very remarkable indeed. He raised the photo in his hand of the two mummies. “I’ll keep this. We’ll get a crew here to dust for fingerprints and anything else the robbers might have left behind. Call in last night’s guards as soon as possible. We’ll interview them here. And I want a supervised inventory of the contents of the remaining crates, just in case anything else is missing.” He turned to his new partner. “I have somewhere else to be.”

  His partner nodded. “I’ve got this covered.”

  Juste was sure he didn’t. Mikey might have his heart in the right place, but he hadn’t been around long enough to smell a lie. From Juste’s standpoint, there was an elephant’s crapload of lying going on. But missing mummies and hard-eyed desert “protectors” weren’t foremost in his mind. He had a ballgame to get to.

  Episode Two

  Chapter Six

  Denise, Bobby Guidry’s widow, glanced up from her seat in the bleachers and offered Juste a small smile. “Glad you could make it. I wasn’t sure you would. Heard you had some trouble.”

  Juste turned sideways to slide between the bleacher seats. “Trouble’s blown over,” he said, flashing an easy grin.

  She grunted and crossed her arms over her stomach. “Bobby would have liked seein’ you shake the snot out of Lieutenant Maines.”

  He leaned down and picked up Maisy from the bench, before sitting beside Denise. Maisy was four, but unusually solemn these days. She didn’t understand much more than the fact she missed her daddy and still looked for him everywhere. But her expression brightened as Juste set her on his knee. Her dark gaze clung to his face as she popped a thumb in her mouth—a habit she’d outgrown a year ago. Knowing the action comforted her, he didn’t comment.

  The last time he’d seen her, she’d cuddled against his chest during the service for her father’s funeral. He’d been late, having only made up his mind to attend because he didn’t want Denise to be without “family.” When he’d slid into the pew, Denise, her face tight from trying not to break down, had leaned toward him. “Thank you,” she’d whispered.

  He’d felt a pinch in his chest. “Sorry I missed the band.”

  “They made a mournful sound,” she’d said quietly, a tear glistening beside her eye.

  “As they should,” he’d murmured, kissing her cheek. “As they should.”

  And then they’d quieted as the priest and a host of speakers followed each other.

  His arms had grown weary holding the little one close, but he hadn’t cared. He could do this for Bobby. Be there for his little girl and boy. Bobby had taken the bullet meant for him. Juste would make sure they never wanted for anything, that he’d be there to watch Bobby Jr.’s games and to sip imaginary tea at Maisy’s tea parties, and he’d dance the father’s dance at her wedding when she grew up. Long before they’d been partners, he and Bobby had been best friends.

  Juste thought the hole in his heart might never mend.

  He glanced out at the field, noting the black and white uniforms of the opposing team, and then glanced into the dugout where Bobby Jr. sat.

  The boy stared, his dark face split by a wide grin. He waved.

  Juste gave him a nod, then tapped his nose twice and rubbed his chest over his heart—his signal to tell him good luck. Then Juste sat back, Maisy dozing against his chest in the shaded bleachers, and let his worries—his irritation over the new investigation and his baby-faced partner—bleed away. With Maisy’s little-girl, talcum-and-soap scent in his nose, he finally relaxed, but not without feeling a pang in his chest that Bobby wouldn’t have anymore moments like this. Not that Juste would ever forget he shouldn’t be the one here. Not with Bobby’s son looking so much like his lanky daddy fidgeting in the dugout.

  His phone vibrated, and he pulled it from
his pocket to glance at the screen.

  Two guards coming in tonight. Last not answering phone. Sending squad car to house.

  Juste tapped k and shut the screen.

  Denise raised an eyebrow. “Forgot how annoyin’ that is.”

  “I’m not leavin’.”

  Her brow arched. “Sure you shouldn’t?”

  Juste lifted his chin toward Bobby Jr. who strode to the plate, his uniform hanging on bony shoulders. “Not until they win the game.”

  Denise chuckled beside him. “Your new partner know how stubborn you are?”

  Juste’s mouth quirked up on one side. “Don’t think it’s a secret.”

  Her chuckles faded, and they both turned their attention as the first pitch flew. Bobby Jr. swung. The ball cracked against the bat.

  Juste’s heart soared at the look of pure joy on his godson’s face as the ball arced high and over the fence. Tears pricked, but he blinked. It was just the sun. And just a game.

  He’d cried once. When Bobby’s breaths slowed and stopped as he held him in his arms.

  Juste drew a deep, jagged breath and felt a soft hand touch his forearm.

  “He’s more like his daddy every day,” Denise said, leaning her head against his shoulder.

  Juste cleared his throat. “That make it harder?”

  Her head turned. Her dark eyes gleamed with a hint of tears. “No. Bobby’s here, in both the little ones. I’m not the one he left all alone.”

  When Juste returned to the museum, the sky was darkening with clouds. It looked like rain would soon fall, and from the forecast, the storm might produce some flooding. He hoped like hell they could wrap up soon so he wouldn’t spend the night there.

  Inside the door, he donned latex gloves. The crime techs were still in the warehouse. One was on a ladder dusting the camera in the corner for prints. Good idea. He looked around for his partner.

  Mikey stood beside a crate with a clipboard while museum workers carefully swept away straw before pulling out bubble-wrapped artifacts. His partner gave him a nod. “With the storm comin’ in, I told the two guards we’d see ’em here in the mornin’.”