The Bone Conjurer

by Alex Archer

  This is a complete loss, she said to herself. Good thing it wasn’t hers.

  Setting the mug on the hardwood floor, she then unzipped the pack. Water dripped out from the inside, but not a lot. Inspecting the tag on the outer rim of the zipper teeth she read it was designed for hiking and was waterproof.

  “Good deal.”

  Tools and a metal-edged leather box were tucked inside. The tools she took out and examined, placing them on the floor in a line. Not like carpenter’s tools. A small screwdriver slightly larger than something a person would use to fix eyeglasses was the only one she thought fit for a house builder.

  The assortment included a handheld drill with a battery pack dripping water. A glass cutter. A few flash drives. A wide-blade utility knife. Soft cotton gloves, only slightly wet. A stethoscope. And a small set of lock picks in a folding black leather case.

  She blew on the flash drives, wondering if they would dry out enough to attempt to read. She wasn’t sure she wanted to risk an electrical failure by inserting the memory sticks into her laptop.

  “Who would use stuff like this?”

  She looked over the array on the floor. An interesting mix. An archaeologist might use the gloves, but she preferred latex gloves herself. Never left home without a pair.

  Instinct said thief. But why would a thief steal something like an ancient skull if they had little idea of its value?

  Though Sneak had said he’d been hired to bring this to someone. And he feared that someone.

  Too tired to push her reasoning beyond simple deductions, Annja decided to sleep on it. But not until she’d opened the box. She’d sucked in half the Gowanus Canal to get the thing and had taken a bullet. Kind of. It sounded more dramatic than it was, she admitted to herself.

  Secured with a small padlock, the box was made of a hardwood edged in thin metal. The wood was covered with pounded black leather, impressed with a houndstooth design. It didn’t look old, only expensive. It resembled a reliquary, though on the plain side.

  Annja eyed the lock picks tucked inside the leather pouch. She’d never used anything like them before, but had read a few Internet articles on how to manipulate the pins inside a lock with a pick. A girl could use a set like this. Definitely something to hang on to.

  The padlock was simple enough, though it was heavy, made of stacked steel plates. She might fiddle around with the picks, but would get nowhere.

  The wood box was hard, like ironwood, and she was glad for that. Hopefully it had kept the water from seeping inside.

  Foregoing any burgeoning lock-picking skills, she picked up the knife and rocked the tip of it around the metal edging. Small finishing nails secured each end of the metal strips. She managed to pry off two sides, and another, until the entire top square of wood could be removed.

  “So much for the security of a padlock.”

  A fluff of sheep’s wool poufed out of the open box.

  “Good,” she muttered. “Still dry.”

  Carefully plucking out the packing revealed the top of a skull. Annja drew it out and held it upon both palms. The eye sockets observed her curiosity without judgment.

  Immediately aware of what she held, Annja gasped. “An infant’s skull.”

  It wasn’t uncommon to unearth infants’ and children’s skulls on a dig. She did it all the time. But it didn’t make holding something so small, and so precious—obviously dead before it had a chance to live—less agonizing.

  Switching to the analytical and less emotional side of her brain, Annja inspected the prize. The bone had a nice polish to it. The cranium was overlarge compared to the facial bones, as infant skulls were. Large eye sockets mastered the face. The lower jaw bone, the mandible, was not intact.

  The parietal and frontal bones, normally fused with various sutures, were instead joined by thin strips of gold placed between them, much like glue, to hold it together. The anterior and posterior fontanels were also joined with those sutures. Each fontanel, normally the soft spot on an infant’s skull, was smooth and shiny gold.

  “Fancy. I wonder whose living room shelf this has gone missing from?”

  Turning it over and taking her time, Annja smoothed her fingers over the surface, feeling for abrasions or gouges. There were no markings on the exterior bone that she could find. Sometimes knife marks remained after a ceremonial removing of the scalp. The gold lining the plates was fascinating enough.

  No dirt. It didn’t smell as if it had been freshly unearthed. It was musty but clean.

  It looked an average skull, stained with age enough she’d place it a few centuries old, at the least. There were no teeth in the upper maxilla, nor did it look as though there ever had been teeth. Could it be newborn?

  “So sad,” she muttered.

  And yet, the elaborate gold decoration might prove it was an important person. Perhaps a child born to a royal or great warrior.

  Retrieving a digital camera from the catastrophe she called a desktop, Annja then placed the skull on top of a stack of hardcover research books. She snapped shots of the skull from all angles. When the flash caught the small gold triangular posterior fontanel section, she noticed the anomaly in the smooth metal.

  “So there is a mark.”

  Sneak had mentioned a curious marking in his e-mail. Holding the skull close to the desk light, she squinted to view the small impression in the shiny gold.

  “A cross? Looks familiar.”

  She had seen it many times researching renaissance and medieval battles, religions and even jewelry.

  A cross pattée was impressed in the gold. It was a square cross capped with triangular ends. An oft-used symbol in medieval times. It did not always signify a religious connection, and some even associated it with fairies or pirates. The Knights Templar had worn a similar cross on their tabards.

  The cross pattée was more a Teutonic symbol than Templar, she knew that. The Templar’s red cross on white background tended to vary in design. That set her original guess of a few centuries back, perhaps to the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

  Sneak had thought it twelfth century. It was possible, she acknowledged.

  Hell, the skull could be contemporary. She wouldn’t know until she could get it properly dated. And Annja knew the professor who could help. But first, she’d send out feelers to her own network. If the skull had been stolen from a dig, someone would be looking for it.

  Powering up her laptop, she inserted the digital card from the camera into the card reader to load the photos she’d taken.

  As she waited for the program to open, Annja wondered again about the man on the bridge. Dead now. Yet, a part of his life sat scattered beside a puddle on her floor. A foul-smelling puddle. That canal water was something else.

  At the time, she’d suspected he’d been frightened. But now she altered that assessment to worried. Fear would have kept him from approaching her. Worry had kept his eyes shifting about, wondering what, if anything, could go wrong.

  Had he been aware he was being watched? By a sniper? Perhaps by the buyer who didn’t trust the thief would bring the prize right to him?

  What about the bald man who must have followed her swim through the waters and waited for her to surface? Same guy as the sniper? Or an ally tracking the target by foot? Was he allied with the sniper or Sneak?

  Something Sneak said now niggled at her. He’d been hired to hand this over to—how had he put it?—a specific individual, and had a bad feeling about it.

  So who was Sneak? An archaeologist? He’d only claimed to work on digs over summers, and that was part-time. Could have just been a lark, joining friends to see if he liked the job. He hadn’t struck her as someone in the know. If he had rudimentary knowledge on skulls, such as she, he could have puzzled its origins out.

  Maybe. She hadn’t figured the thing out yet, so what made her believe anyone else could?

  Online, Sneak had sounded like a layman who stumbled across an artifact while hiking with friends near a defunct dig
site in Spain. And yet, that explanation didn’t feel right to Annja.

  Add to the leery feeling the fact a lock-pick kit, drill and glass cutter had been on his person…

  Annja knew when people hired others to handle artifacts and hand them over it was never on the up-and-up. Whoever had hired the sneaky guy may have also killed him.

  But why? If the sniper had known the man carried the artifact on him, why then kill him and risk losing the skull in the river?

  Annja envisioned a body found floating in the Gowanus Canal come morning. It wasn’t as though it never happened. Heck, the canal was rumored to have once been the Mafia’s favorite dumping grounds. But it had been cleaned up quite a bit since the Mafia’s heydays.

  Annja considered her options.

  Bart McGilly was a friend who served on the NYPD as a detective. He knew trouble followed Annja far more closely than she desired, and was accustomed to calls from her at odd hours of the night.

  He didn’t know everything about her. Like at certain times she could be found defending herself with a kick-ass medieval sword. And after successfully dispatching the threat, the sword would then simply disappear into a strange otherwhere Annja still couldn’t describe or place.

  What was it about the sword? Since she’d taken claim to it, weird stuff happened to knock on her door weekly. It was as if the sword attracted things to her. Things she needed to change. Things that required investigation. Things that could not always be determined good or evil, but, Annja knew innately, mustn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.

  It was as if she’d become the crusader for lost artifacts and weird occurrences. World-changing occurrences. And that put a heavy weight on her shoulders.

  Bart was also unaware she really could use a good hug every once in a while. With the sword came challenge and hard work and, oftentimes, danger. Survival and strength could only be maintained with good old-fashioned friendship. Of which, she had a few, but not a single person she could call a BFF.

  Did she need a BFF? Probably not. Then again, probably.

  With a sigh, Annja retrieved her mug from the floor and took a sip. Cold. But still, it was chocolate. Propping a hand at her flannel-covered hip, she leaned over the laptop.

  The photo program allowed her to choose a few good shots of the anterior and lateral views, and close-ups of the gold on the fontanels. She cropped them to remove the background. Didn’t need anyone knowing her curtains were badly in need of dusting or that her desk was a disaster.

  Signing on to her favorite archaeology site, Annja posted the pictures along with a note about a friend showing her the skull. She wouldn’t make up a story about finding it on a dig, because that could get her in trouble. She had no idea where this had come from, and if she guessed a wrong location, well, then.

  She’d check back in the morning.

  Before signing off, she searched the Carroll Street Bridge to see if it had security cameras. It didn’t. Which wouldn’t help her sleuth out who she’d spoken to, but proved excellent should the sniper want to track her.

  On the other hand, if the sniper and the bald guy were indeed two different people, the sniper may have tracked her home.

  Flicking aside the curtain, Annja scanned the street below. Car headlights blurred in the snow that had turned to sleet and rain. No mysterious figures lurking.

  She picked up the phone to call Bart. It was past midnight, but she dialed, anyway. Bart’s answering machine took her cryptic message about swimming the canal with a stranger. He’d call her in the morning, for sure.

  With one last inspection over the skull, she decided to forego doing an Internet search on random skulls. That would bring up more hits than her sleepy eyelids could manage.

  Instead, she flicked off the desk light and wandered into her bedroom. It hadn’t felt so good to crawl between warm blankets in a long time. Annja dropped instantly to Nod.

  4

  In the meeting room attached to a fiftieth-floor corner office overlooking Central Park, a crew of three cameramen noisily went about setting up for a photo shoot. A top business magazine had declared Benjamin Ravenscroft CEO of the year. They wanted to flash his mug across their pages, and he was obliged to agree.

  He’d gotten an e-mail that morning regarding the Fortune 500 list. Another photo shoot was imminent.

  The entrepreneur’s company, Ravens Tech, had risen from the detritus of struggling dot coms over the past year. CNN had crowned him Master of the Intangible Assets. Ravens-Tech now held weekly cyber auctions for intellectual property rights, such as patents, trademarks and copyrights. They’d netted six hundred million dollars last year, and this year looked to double that figure.

  Just goes to show what a little roll-up-your-sleeves ingenuity can do for a man. And the proper connections, he thought as he waited to be photographed.

  “Ten minutes and we’ll be ready for you, Mr. Ravenscroft,” the photographer said.

  Ravenscroft waved a slim black clove cigarette at the photographer, who then disappeared inside the meeting room.

  Leaning against the edge of his granite-topped desk, ankles crossed and whistling the first few bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusic, the businessman tucked the grit between his lips and inhaled. It made a faint popping sound.

  He had the cigarettes imported from Indonesia. He preferred them over regular cigarettes for their intense scent. He’d become addicted to them during his college days when he’d sit through the night, eyes glued to the computer monitor as he shopped his way through available domain names.

  He’d made millions nabbing domains. Another intangible. He loved buying and selling things a person could not physically hold, touch or see.

  He tapped the calendar on his iPhone. He verified two meetings that afternoon: Accountant and Marketing. Both would be a breeze.

  Another tap. The plans for the Berlin office were due to arrive before noon by courier. Where the hell were they?

  He eyed his secretary’s desk through the glass wall that separated their offices. With a touch of a button on his desk the electrochromic glass would turn white, granting privacy. A necessary amenity.

  Rebecca was on the phone; her red hair spilled over one satin-clad shoulder. She would notify him as soon as the Berlin plans arrived. Lunch with her in the meeting room—her legs hooked over his shoulders—was scheduled for twelve-fifteen.

  He hadn’t scheduled Harris in, but he expected him before noon, as well. Not the best time to arrive, with the photographer in the next room, but Ben was anxious to get his hands on what Harris had retrieved.

  He twisted and eyed the blurry photograph on the desktop. The skull had been removed from a glass display case, and a glare from the glass blurred part of the photo.

  “Good things,” he muttered. “Soon.”

  But the day would give him a migraine if he didn’t dose on Imitrex before facing the camera’s bright lights.

  And tonight he had to leave the office early to arrive home in time to tuck his daughter in for bed. He and his wife had agreed he’d make a concerted effort to be home at least twice a week to do so.

  He hadn’t tucked Rachel in for more than a month.

  He sent a text message to his secretary. Send flowers to wife. White roses, two dozen. As he hit Send, Rebecca buzzed on the intercom. Her voice made him want to dash the damned schedule and today’s commitments and lift the frilled red skirt above her hips and take her right now.

  “Mr. Harris is here for you, Ben—er, sir.”

  “Thank you, Rebecca, send him in.”

  Stepping over to assure the photographer he’d be right in, Ben closed the meeting room door and strolled to his desk. He snubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray, inhaling the clove fumes deeply.

  He settled into the leather chair that had put him out a mere ten grand. It heated the lumbar area and massaged overall. It also included a heart monitor and blood pressure cuff. It had been worth every penny. A man could forget his whole family sitting in thi
s thing.

  But never Rebecca. That’s where the ultravibrating function came in handy.

  Lifting his feet, he propped them on the ottoman he kept to the left side of his desk. The slight elevation kept his legs from clotting. He’d spent his early twenties running marathons, pushing his body to the limit. His desk job reminded him daily how quickly the body degenerates without exercise. Hell, he was only forty-two.

  He made a mental note to have Rebecca check into treadmills. Then he ditched the idea. He had no time for extracurricular activity. Lunch dates with Rebecca would have to serve as his exercise.

  Time was more precious than gold to Ben. But he’d learned to control it. He controlled all aspects of his life. Save the one. Rachel. And that frustrated him no end.

  Harris entered the massive office and offered a respectful bow, hands pressed together before his mouth like some kind of besuited samurai. The heavy oak door closed slowly on hydraulics behind him. The white-haired behemoth looked completely out of his element in the ill-fitted navy-blue suit and red tie.

  He did not carry a briefcase or box.

  Ben leaned forward, waving a hand frantically. “Where is it?”

  “Sir.”

  Harris bowed again. He fingered the gaudy red tie strangling his thick neck. His glance around the room, as if checking for trespassers hidden behind the potted cactus or narrowed behind the blinds, revealed his anxiety.

  “There was an altercation,” he said cautiously.

  “I don’t like the sound of that, Harris. Either Cooke was apprehended or he was not. I don’t see anything on your person which would indicate you retrieved the artifact, so I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you failed me.”

  “Sir, there was a woman.”

  Ben raised his eyebrows. An exhale settled him in the comfortable chair. Relaxation was far from his mind.

  “Before or after you began to trail Cooke?” he asked. “I don’t need to hear about your amorous liaisons, Harris. And I certainly hope you were not entertaining the flavor of the week on my time.”