by Lee, Rachel
“Quite,” said Tebbins.
“Theoretically there’s a control on who’s allowed to have the keys. They’re supposed to be carefully tracked. It is, however, possible that someone with some skill could duplicate these keys.”
“Do the security guards have access to the keys?” Gil asked.
“I presume so, but I don’t know for sure. Anna?”
Anna, who had been listening silently with her hands folded on the table, gave a small shrug. “I really don’t know, Dinah. I assume they must have, because after we worked late, someone turned on the system. Ivar would be the one to ask.”
“They probably do,” Dinah decided. “The motion detectors are the least of it anyway. As for the video system, it can be switched off, but doing so is more difficult. As I understand it, the procedures in place require that only one person have access to the recording room, and that person changes the tapes once every three days. Otherwise, the auto changer just pops in a new cassette.”
Gil made a note on his pad. “How much data do you lose on the regular changeovers?”
“Rarely more than a couple of minutes on each camera.”
“And what about the automatic changes?”
“Maybe a minute, max.”
Gil looked at Tebbins. “What about this morning?”
Tebbins shrugged. “The videotape filming the dagger was changed around 12:30 A.M. and again at 8:30 A.M. About thirty seconds of static, then everything was normal.”
“Thirty seconds isn’t long enough.”
“Nope.”
“There’s more,” said Dinah. “And quite honestly, if you hadn’t assured me the dagger was gone, I’d think it was a hoax. Because he couldn’t have gotten to the dagger.”
Gil’s interest perked. “I thought you said no system is infallible.”
“Well, it’s not, but this one comes as close as it can.”
Nearly ten minutes later they were back in the tomb mock-up. The overhead lights were still on, making the set look less than real. Dinah went over to the tall case holding the dagger. “Is it okay to touch it now?”
Tebbins looked at the criminologist, who was standing to one side. “Sure,” the guy said. “It’s been dusted and checked.”
“Did you find anything?
“Some threads, a couple of hairs. And a whole bunch of smudged prints. Looks like the visitors can’t resist touching the glass.”
The hairs and cloth were possibly useful, thought Gil, for tying the perp to the scene, but not for actually finding him.
“So,” said Tebbins, tugging on his moustache, “what is so difficult about this?”
Dinah actually smiled, as if she felt proud. “This is the beauty of it. We not only have a disturbance sensor that cannot ever be switched off without causing an alarm, but we have a continuously refreshed vacuum seal. If anything raises the pressure even a little, the alarm sounds. And it cannot be turned off. Any power drop, disconnection, et cetera, will send alarms to our data stations, and sound alarms in here. So… it’s damn near impossible to remove anything from the display cases. In fact, if this hadn’t happened, I’d’ve bet my future earnings that nobody could do it.”
Gil stepped closer to the case. “What exactly do you mean by a disturbance sensor?”
She tapped the case with a fingernail. “There’s a sensor under the dagger. If the item is removed, it sends an alarm.”
Anna was staring at the case as if it held a snake, Gil noticed. He wondered what was bothering her, other than the fact that she was probably going to suffer from the fallout over the theft; to him it certainly looked like more was troubling her.
“Let’s open it,” Tebbins said.
Gil’s attention snapped back to the display case. That white corner sticking out from beneath the dagger had him intrigued. A thief and murderer who left messages. Inside a fierce delight bloomed in him. Those who left messages were generally fools who sooner or later tripped themselves up.
He glanced again at Anna, who was now tight-lipped. Behind her the fake wall looked tacky in the bright lighting.
Dinah Hudson had a two-way radio clipped to her belt, and she used it now to contact her office. “We’re opening the display case,” she said into it. “Station J-3. Ignore the alarm. Call Woody and tell him to silence the audibles after four seconds. I want these folks to hear them. Thanks, Suzi.”
Dinah clipped the radio to the waist of her pants and looked at Anna. “Do you have the keys?”
Anna nodded. Stepping forward, she pulled a key out of each pocket and started to lean toward the case. Tebbins stopped her.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and turned to the criminologist. “Did you check these locks?”
“No external sign of tampering,” he answered. “I didn’t want to go any further because of the alarms.”
“Okay. Well, you’ll have more to check out in a minute.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tebbins turned to Anna. “Go ahead, Ms. Lundgren.”
She inserted each of the keys into the locks, and turned them both at the same time, one clockwise and one counterclockwise.
Gil spoke. “What if somebody turns them the wrong way? Do you get an alarm?”
Dinah shook her head. “No need. They just won’t open. But wait and see what happens next.”
Reaching out, Dinah lifted the clear cover from the case. Almost the instant it parted from the stand below, a shrieking, deafening alarm began to whoop. Gil winced, and Anna covered her ears. After four seconds, it was silenced.
For a moment no one said anything, as if shocked by both the noise and the sudden silence.
“That’s the vacuum-pressure alarm,” Dinah said finally. “You can see it’s functioning. The same thing would have happened if someone had cracked the case. Which is polycarbonate, by the way. Harder to break than glass.”
Leaning forward, she surveyed the setup. “There are two pressure sensors, here and here. Redundancy, like I said. Underneath, in the case, is the vacuum pump. If it fails for any reason, the alarm will go off immediately, even if the pressure in the case hasn’t dropped.”
Tebbins spoke. “How sensitive is the sensor?”
“We had to allow a range of variation because of the way the pumps work and because no vacuum is perfect. Within a certain range of pressure rise, the sensor merely notifies the pump to kick on. However, if the rise is too sudden, the alarm will sound. If someone opened the case in some way, the pump would kick on, of course, but the pressure would rise precipitously, causing the alarm to go off.”
“Hmmm,” said Tebbins thoughtfully, twisting his moustache. Then he signaled the criminologist. “Lift the dagger, please.”
“Wait,” Dinah said, and spoke into her radio again. “There, we won’t have the alarm this time.”
“Thank God,” Tebbins said with feeling.
The tech stepped forward. Wearing rubber gloves, he used a pair of tongs to lift the dagger. Holding it upright, he showed it to Tebbins.
“Ms. Lundgren?” Tebbins said. “That is the dagger that was on your desk last night?”
On her desk? Gil was suddenly full of questions and very irritated that this wasn’t his case. What if Tebbins didn’t tell him everything? Already something had been withheld. Although in fairness, they hadn’t had much time to cover every detail.
When Anna didn’t answer, Gil glanced at her, and found her staring at the small white envelope that was folded in half on the stand where the dagger had been lying. She looked horrified.
“Anna?” he said.
She jerked and looked at him. Apparently the sound of her first name had caught her attention more than Ms. Lundgren. “What?” she said, sounding shaky.
“The dagger,” Tebbins said. “Is this the same dagger?”
Anna edged around until she was closer to the glass blade and gleaming hilt with a stylized jaguar head at the top. “Yes,” she said after a few moments. “It’s the same one. And look how the envelope’
s been slit with a letter opener. I’m sure it’s empty, and I’m sure it’s the same envelope you opened last night.”
* * *
Tebbins, Gil, and Anna were in the conference room. The April day had turned dark with thunderclouds, but the room insulated them. And Anna was pacing up and down, frightened and annoyed.
“Tell me this isn’t aimed at me,” she demanded. “Tell me I’m wrong to feel like I’m being stalked.”
Tebbins took a break from twirling his moustache to spread his hands. “I can’t.”
Gil was fed up. “What the hell aren’t you telling me, Tebbins? I know I’m an observer here, but we agreed to cooperate.”
Tebbins waved his hand, a theatrical gesture that Gil was already coming to loathe. “My apologies. Last night at the preopening gala for the exhibit, Ms. Lundgren went to her office to get her notes for her speech. There she found a box addressed to her. Naturally, she opened it, and inside was the same dagger we just removed from the case.”
“And the envelope?”
“The same envelope, which had no card in it, I might add. Just an envelope with her name on it.”
“I suppose there’s no hope of fingerprints.”
“Probably not. However,” Tebbins added, “when I opened the envelope last night, I took care not to touch it. So perhaps…”
Gil stiffened. “You were here last night?”
Tebbins gave a deep shrug. “I attended with my aunt, who is a museum benefactor.”
“And just happened to be there when Ms. Lundgren found the dagger?”
“I heard her cry out.”
“Ahh.” Suspicions were blooming in the back of Gil’s brain faster than weeds on a poorly kept lawn.
Tebbins, as if he knew it, merely smiled.
“All right, all right,” Anna said. “There’s something more important right now, to me at least. Am I being stalked?”
Tebbins lifted his brow. “One can’t say for sure.”
“Of course not.” Anna threw up a hand. “You know, I felt pretty uneasy last night, the way that thing turned up on my desk and then disappeared. But right now…” She shook her head and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I don’t like this.”
She sighed, then lifted her head. “I’m sorry. The important thing is, of course, the theft of the dagger. It’s going to make this museum look bad, and it’s certainly going to make it more difficult to get visiting displays in the future.”
Gil spoke. “Will it affect your employment?”
“It might. I mean, I’m not in any way responsible for security, but…” She shrugged. “It won’t look good regardless.”
“Crap does roll downhill, doesn’t it?”
The corners of her mouth lifted slightly. “Someone has to take the blame.”
“Whatever happened to the buck being passed up the chain?”
Tebbins answered. “The devaluation of the buck.”
Gil had to grin. Even Anna managed a smile.
“All right,” said Tebbins. “With regard to the stalking question, I’m afraid, Ms. Lundgren, that you do somehow appear to be targeted by the thief. He wants you to know that.” He looked at Gil as if for confirmation.
Gil nodded slowly. “At the very least he wants your attention.”
“I agree,” said Tebbins. He tugged at his moustache, inadvertently straightening it. At once he began to wrap it around his finger, restoring the curl. “Now… I heard something last night about your parents being involved in the discovery of the Pocal tomb?”
Anna shook her head impatiently. “Involved is too strong a word. My father was an engineer. He built oil pipelines all around the world. One of his crews stumbled upon the Mayan city where Pocal’s tomb was discovered while they were clearing the forest for the pipeline to pass through. My father merely notified the authorities, as he was required to do, then began work on rerouting the pipeline so as not to disturb the ruins. That’s not exactly involvement.”
“But,” said Tebbins, “I heard he was killed.”
Anna’s tone was exasperated. “Damn that Reed Howell. I keep telling him it was an earthquake. Earthquakes happen all the time in that region. Why does he keep trying to turn it into a story about that curse?”
“Because,” Gil said sardonically, “it sells papers. So what’s your version?”
She pulled out a chair at long last and sat down.
“It’s really quite simple. His crew found the ruins while clearing the pipeline route. My father reported it. Everybody makes a big deal out of it, but about four days after the dagger was found and shipped out to a museum where it could be properly cared for, a devastating earthquake took place. Unfortunately, the earthquake tore open a section of the pipeline that was being tested, and natural gas ignited. I don’t know the whole sequence of events, but the refinery exploded and leveled an area of two square miles, killing nearly three thousand people.”
Gil whistled.
“It was terrible,” Anna said. “Just terrible. But if you look at the facts, you’ll see that it was unfortunate that a set of circumstances joined together to cause a massive blast. It was an accident, nothing more.”
To Gil it seemed that she didn’t quite believe that herself, but he didn’t want to press her on the issue. Not yet, anyway. He was in a delicate jurisdictional situation, and despite his and Tebbins’s agreement to share, that didn’t mean Tebbins would be happy if Gil just stepped in and started acting like the detective in charge.
“Doesn’t seem like a very well designed curse,” Tebbins remarked.
“No,” Gil agreed. “Rather a broad brush to tar a few trespassers with.”
Surprising him, Anna actually laughed. A brief, weak laugh, but it reached her eyes.
“Exactly,” she said. “The local legend is that trespassers and those who handle the dagger will suffer the wrath of the jaguar god into the second generation. But… an awful lot of people died who had nothing to do with the tomb’s desecration.”
The second generation. The words struck Gil, and he tucked them away for future consideration.
Anna glanced at her watch. “I’m late. We’re getting a new shipment for the exhibit upstairs, and it must have arrived a while ago. I need to go check.”
Excusing herself, she walked out. But her head was not held as high as it had been.
“So,” Tebbins said to Gil, “we have a curse.”
Gil nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself, because something else had occurred to him, something very nasty.
“It gives one an interesting view of the mind of this thief and murderer, if the curse plays a part.”
“It certainly does.”
“Of course,” Tebbins said, “the curse may have nothing to do with it at all. We may be dealing with something as simple as one of Ms. Lundgren’s angry former suitors.”
“Or,” said Gil reluctantly, “we may be dealing with a young woman who lost her father in a terrible accident that many blamed on a curse. A young woman who’s been forced to deal with the artifact that supposedly bears the curse.”
Tebbins beamed. “Great minds think alike! Of course she is a suspect. The dagger appearing and disappearing from her desk last night makes her a suspect.”
Anna left the museum under a low, dark sky with lightning forking from cloud to cloud. The streets were still soaked from the earlier downpour, and rivers ran along the gutters.
Her stomach was queasy; it had been queasy all day, ever since she had discovered the theft. Worse, the back of her neck crawled with the apprehension that she was being watched and stalked.
Was he behind her now in a car, following her home? The fear was strong enough that for several minutes she considered dining out in some busy restaurant. But that wouldn’t solve the entire problem, because she’d still need to go home. And the later she went there, the harder it was going to be to make herself go inside.
The clouds were hanging even lower by the time she pulled into the driveway outside the
snug little house she rented in Temple Terrace, not far from the university. The wind had ripped dead and dying leaves from the overhanging trees, and scattered them over the driveway. Rainwater dripped with a lonely sound from the roof.
And for the first time she noticed just how far away the neighboring houses were.
Coming from Minnesota and a small town, the first thing she had noticed here was how small many of the houses were, and how close together. But right now that “close together” looked like a huge distance. Would they be able to hear her if she screamed?
She hesitated again, then told herself not to be a ninny. If this guy was really after her, he wasn’t going to do something so quickly after the robbery. No, he wanted to torment her first.
She climbed out of the car and locked it, then walked to the front door with trepidation, half-expecting to see something waiting for her on the stoop. Maybe another artifact, maybe… oh, something awful. Something sickening.
But there was nothing. She was being too paranoid. Shoving the key in the lock with trembling hands, she scolded herself until she was able to turn the key and push the door open.
The first thing she saw was the back of the swivel recliner. Had she left it that way? She usually liked it to face the window. Reaching out, she flipped on a light.
And saw, propped on the ottoman, denim-clad legs and cowboy boots.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gil pulled into his driveway at dusk. The rain that was soaking Tampa had stopped by the time he crossed the bridge, and his yard was still as dry as a bone. The lights were on in the house, though, and he figured he was about to discover what Trina had been up to all day.
Part of him didn’t even want to bother. He knew what was coming, and he just plain didn’t want to deal with it. A couple of hours of sleep didn’t hack it, especially when dealing with a teenage daughter. Besides, his head was clogged with swirling impressions of the day’s events and the people involved. If he didn’t spend some time organizing his thoughts, he was never going to sleep tonight.
