by Lee, Rachel
“Okay,” she said when he didn’t speak. “What did you want to talk to me about?” She almost thought he looked reluctant.
“About,” he said slowly, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a strip of newsprint, “your family ties with the exhibit.”
“I told you…”
He shook his head. “Anna, read this. Unless you read the Sentinel this morning.”
“I stopped subscribing when that weasel Reed Howell started bugging me.” She looked at the newsprint with distaste.
“Take it and read it,” he insisted. “You need to know because it’s going to make your life uncomfortable for a while.”
“I already know how he was pushing the curse angle. It’s like he hated me for using it, but he couldn’t get away from the whole idea. It fascinated him in some ugly way.”
“Apparently so. But this is about more than a curse.”
Full of disgust, Anna reached for the clipping and after a moment forced herself to read it.
It started the way she expected, mentioning the discovery of Pocal’s tomb, the earthquake and fire. Then it segued into local legend, insinuating that the curse might have played a part. So far so ordinary.
But then the article touched on Anna personally. Not only did it mention that her father had been involved in the finding of the tomb, however remotely, but it suggested that the theft made Anna a victim of the curse herself… and then went on to mention that her mother had been a witch.
“Good God,” she said, her head snapping up and anger pushing in pounding waves through her. “Good God! What a piece of tripe.”
“I agree,” Gil said gently. “But this is all over the bay area this morning.”
“I knew he was after something like that. You’ll notice I was never once quoted.”
“No, you certainly weren’t. Was your mother a witch?”
“Oh, she and my aunt dabbled in Wicca once. Briefly. I don’t think it lasted more than a few months. They were both… eccentric. But what does that have to do with anything? Other than that it’s a nuisance, and now I’ll probably receive some very strange looks from my coworkers. Ivar may even hang his head in dismay, but since he does that a couple of times every day, I’m not exactly worried about it.”
Gil smiled. “Ivar annoys you?”
“He’s a fussbudget. A complete devotee of bean counting. He is, in fact, quite talented. He can turn any molehill into a mountain in five seconds flat. He’ll certainly make Everest out of this.”
She felt the corners of her mouth quirk up with a sour smile. “Since I discovered the robbery, all he’s been worried about was that having police all over the place would keep visitors away.”
But then she shook her head and sighed. “I’m not being very fair to him. He can be a good person, a very good person, when he’s not hysterical.”
Gil spoke. “Are you a witch?”
“Me? Hah. Not in this lifetime.”
“Shoot. I was hoping for a cure for what ails my daughter.”
“What does ail her?”
“A boyfriend.”
“She’s suffering from the frog-prince syndrome?”
“That’s a good way of describing it.” Gil sighed. “Although I think he oinks more than he ribbits.”
She chuckled. “Dad’s impartial eye, huh? Poor kid. It must be hard to get a date when your dad’s a cop.”
He looked a little surprised, as if he hadn’t considered that before. “Well, you know us cops. We follow in an unmarked car, spy on ‘em with video cameras, and knock on the window with a baton anytime they seem to be getting too close.”
Another laugh escaped her. “But oh, those handcuffs!”
It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed even harder when Anna realized what she had said, and her cheeks started to burn.
“Okay,” he said after a moment. “This is unprofessional. So I’m going to go back to being a dry stick. At least for now.”
“Pity.” But actually she was relieved. She didn’t have time for complications of that sort.
Just then, Peter Dashay walked into her office, doing an imitation of a lowering thundercloud. He was a handsome man, of average height, with a surfer’s dark suntan and shaggy sun-bleached hair. At the moment he looked like a sixties throwback, in cutoff denim shorts and a black T-shirt that screamed Hell’s Angels are more FUN. His students loved him.
“Hi, Peter,” Anna said.
Peter didn’t respond immediately. He scanned Gil, who was looking mildly interested, and apparently didn’t approve of his Latin good looks.
Then he turned to Anna. “I’ve been popping in and out all morning looking for you. Did you get the flowers?”
“Yes, I did. Thank you. I meant to call, but then I discovered the burglary….” She trailed off, wondering why she felt she had to explain, especially when his question had been anything but courteous.
“Then you got my note. We were supposed to have dinner last night. And where are the flowers?”
Anna put her hands on her hips and simply stared at him. After a few moments, he unpuffed, but only a little.
“First,” she said, “once you gave the flowers to me, they became mine to do with as I wished. It’s none of your business whether I dumped them in the trash or put them somewhere else.”
“Trash?” His eyes bulged. “That was an eighty-dollar bouquet!”
“Which I didn’t ask for. Thank you for sending them. But they’re still mine to do with as I please.”
He resorted to scowling.
“Secondly, I got your note. There was a question mark after ‘dinner tonight,’ making it a question, one which I didn’t answer. Therefore, you should not have assumed it was firm.”
“A question mark? I didn’t tell that girl to make it a question. Damn it!”
“It would have been a question anyway,” Anna said firmly, “because we had never discussed it.”
“God, I don’t know why I keep trying to please you.”
“Neither do I,” Anna said. “We’re just not suited, Peter.”
Peter turned to Gil. “What kind of woman throws away an eighty-dollar bouquet?”
Gil shrugged.
“It’s you, isn’t it,” Peter said harshly. “You’re the interloper.”
Tebbins’s voice suddenly issued from behind the obscuring cloud that was Peter, startling them all.
“He isn’t an interloper, he’s a detective working on the burglary case.”
Peter swung around, revealing Tebbins in all his sartorial glory to Anna. He wore a double-breasted blue pinstripe with a wide gray tie. The diamond—or most likely cubic zirconium—stick pin was ostentatious. In his hand he held a few sheets of paper.
“Who are you?” demanded Peter.
“Detective Clarence Tebbins, Tampa PD. And this is Detective Gil Garcia, St. Pete Homicide.”
“Homicide?” Peter seemed to catch only the one word. Reaching for the one vacant chair, he sat. “My God, who was killed?”
“One of the guards,” Tebbins said. “What do you know about that?”
“Me?” Peter practically squeaked.
Tebbins smiled, an almost sharklike expression that surprised Anna, for she hadn’t considered him capable of anything except looking ridiculous and being bright. “Yes, you,” he said. “You spend a lot of time with Ms. Lundgren?”
“Uh…” Peter looked wildly at Anna. “Actually… uh… no. Not for weeks.”
“Hmm. But you sent her flowers? An eighty-dollar bouquet?”
“I was just congratulating her on the exhibit!”
“I see.” Tebbins sounded as if he did not see. “Did you know Edward Malacek?”
Peter whitened. “Eddy Malacek? He’s in one of my graduate seminars. If it’s the same one. Why? Is he in trouble?”
Gil spoke. “He’s dead.”
“Oh, my God!”
Gil spoke again. “How well did you know him?”
“As well as I know any of my gradu
ate students. Occasionally we socialize as a group. I see all of them quite a bit. Know something of their personal lives. But I’m their mentor, not their buddy.”
“Hmm.” Tebbins nodded knowingly.
“Do you know anything about his playing Dungeons & Dragons?”
“Oh, he mentioned it. I’ve talked with the students about it a few times. A lot of them like it.” Peter seemed to be regaining his confidence. “But what would that have to do with his death?”
“Maybe nothing,” Gil said.
Anna was beginning to feel sorry for Peter. He’d come to her office in high dudgeon over the flowers and the dinner. And maybe he had a right to; it was an expensive bouquet after all. If she hadn’t gotten caught up in the burglary, she would have called him to thank him for the flowers and to decline the dinner invitation. But he hadn’t received even that bare courtesy from her, and now he was being grilled by a couple of cops who seemed awfully suspicious of him.
But Peter was not without his resources. “Well, I guess I’ve come at an awkward time.” He rose from his chair and faced Anna. “I’ll call you later.”
Anna didn’t want to further embarrass him by telling him to forget about it, but the last thing she wanted was to talk to him. So she didn’t respond at all.
Pausing on the way out, Peter gave the two detectives a significant look. “Take care of my girl.”
His girl? Anna had to resist the urge to throw a foot-stomping hissy fit as he disappeared.
Tebbins and Gil exchanged looks.
“A veritable brass-plated boor,” Gil remarked.
“The south end of a mule,” Tebbins replied.
Gil looked at Anna. “What’s the story with this guy, and what’s his name?”
“Peter Dashay.” Pulling out her chair, she sat at her desk. “I don’t see what business it is of yours.”
“Wrong,” said Gil flatly.
“Exceedingly wrong,” Tebbins agreed.
“You two are starting to sound like the Bobbsey Twins.”
“Anna,” Gil said firmly, “answer the question.”
“Not until you tell me why you’re interested.”
Tebbins drummed his fingers impatiently on the side of his thigh. He was still standing by the doorway, papers in hand. “Should I?” he asked Gil. “Or will you?”
“Oh, let me.”
“Most certainly.”
Gil’s dark eyes, now harder, fixed on Anna again. “Essentially, anyone with a potential ax to grind against you or this museum is of interest to us.”
Anna felt something inside her shrinking. Since Nancy’s arrival, she’d managed to forget the notion that someone might be stalking her. All of a sudden it was staring her in the face again.
“Peter doesn’t have an ax,” she said finally. “We had dinner together once. Just once. I didn’t think we’d suit, and I told him so.”
“But he’s still hanging around?”
“Every now and then.”
“He seemed awfully insistent today.”
She shrugged. “That’s why I didn’t think we’d make a good match. He seemed to consider one dinner a lifetime commitment.”
Tebbins and Gil exchanged looks. “How long ago was that? The dinner I mean?”
“Three, maybe four months. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Tell me about him,” Gil prompted, pulling a pad out of his pocket.
Tebbins started to follow suit, but realized he was still holding papers. “Oh!” he said. “Here, this one’s yours.” He passed one of the papers to Anna. “I took it off your bulletin board to make a copy of it.”
She nodded, accepted the paper, and turned to pin it back up. It was then she saw the small white envelope propped against the wall beneath the corkboard.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered as her heart slammed. “Oh, my God.”
“What is it?” the two men asked at once.
“An envelope… just like the other one…” She turned, feeling the blood drain from her face, and looked from Gil to Tebbins and back. “It wasn’t here this morning!”
“Don’t touch it,” Tebbins said swiftly. He dropped the other papers he was holding on to the desk and felt around in his pockets. “Damn, I don’t have any gloves.”
“I do,” Gil said, reaching into his trousers pocket. “A homicide prerequisite.”
“A prerequisite for my line, too,” Tebbins said flatly. “I carry a gross of them in my car.” Pulling them on, he reached past Anna for the envelope. “It looks the same.”
“But it’s addressed differently,” Anna said. She had noticed that first thing, and the difference made her feel creepy. Before she had been Ms. Lundgren. This time she was Anna. And it made that creep, whoever he was, feel entirely too close.
“I see that,” Tebbins remarked as he held the envelope by the corners. “Let’s take a look inside, shall we?”
Gil reached into his other pocket and pulled out an evidence bag. “Here, put the envelope in this.”
Tebbins thanked him, then proceeded to use Anna’s letter opener once again to slice the envelope and tease it open.
“Ah,” he said after a moment, “we appear to have a newspaper story here.”
Anna felt herself freezing inside, turning icy with fear. If it was the article from that morning’s Sentinel, what would it mean? That this person had more knowledge of her? Or that this person had been feeding information to the press. Intimate information that was hard to discover, such as the fact that her mother had dabbled in Wicca many years ago? How closely watched was she?
Impatience seized her as she watched the meticulous care with which Tebbins eased the clipping out of the envelope, the seemingly endless space of time it took him to make sure there was nothing else in there, and then the laborious eternity that passed while he used the letter opener to carefully unfold the article.
“It appears,” said Tebbins as he worked, “to be an old AP article about the earthquake in Mexico.”
The temperature in Anna’s chest seemed to lower even more. Her hands felt so cold that they were nearly numb.
Then Tebbins flipped over the last fold and the top of the article appeared. And scrawled across it in bright red ink was the word: CURSED!!!
CHAPTER NINE
A slight bit of overkill,” Tebbins said as he looked down at the article.
“The word or the story?” Gil asked. His mind was ranging over a number of things, not the least of them that Tebbins had been in this office earlier when Anna wasn’t here. So, perhaps, had Peter.
Tebbins moved aside so Gil could read. “It’s pretty factual,” Gil said after a few minutes.
“Yes. But the word scrawled across the top is overkill.”
“Perhaps,” Gil said, angling his head to look at it, as if he were a connoisseur viewing a piece of art. In fact, he thought Tebbins was making too much of it. The thief and possible murderer had a message to get across, and there was no reason he should be subtle about it.
“Well,” Gil said, as Tebbins slipped the article into the evidence bag, “we know one thing for certain now.”
Anna, as pale as if she’d seen a ghost, looked at him. “What’s that?” she asked, her voice uncertain.
“Actually we know two things,” Gil corrected himself. “We know that he’s tying the curse into this.”
Tebbins nodded. “Quite. And the other?”
“That Ms. Lundgren is the focus.”
Anna’s voice rose a bit. “Focus? What do you mean by focus?”
“I mean that he’s directing this action at you. Probably to frighten you.”
“Well, he’s succeeding!”
Gil didn’t doubt he was. If there was a he. He looked at Tebbins and saw a hint of his own doubts reflected there. Anna could be doing this herself, to direct attention away from her, to make herself appear a victim when she was instead a perpetrator.
But if so, she was doing an exceptionally good job of looking frightened.
&n
bsp; Hell, this whole thing was getting wacky beyond belief. “You know,” he announced, “this is beginning to stretch my credulity.”
“Why?” Tebbins and Anna both said at once, Tebbins curiously and Anna irritatedly.
“Well, a thief would take the dagger and run. He has in his possession a priceless artifact he could sell to some collector for a fortune. In that context, even the fake dagger being presented the night before could just signal an arrogant thief with a bit of the prankster in him.”
“Yes,” agreed Tebbins, as if he savored the thought.
“But to hang around afterward and continue delivering his little messages? No. That’s nuts. Everything he does increases his likelihood of being caught.”
Anna sagged. “Don’t tell me a nut is after me.”
“I don’t know,” Gil said frankly. “But I can guarantee you one thing. Whatever his purpose is, he’s only just begun.”
Gil and Tebbins adjourned to the conference room, which the museum had offered to let them use as long as it wasn’t reserved for another group.
Gil spoke first. “What do you think?”
Tebbins smiled and rubbed his hands together. “I think I like this case.”
Gil snorted. “The criminal mastermind again?”
“Absolutely. Someone with a mission. So much more interesting than the usual dope-addict-steals-to-support-his-habit, don’t you think?”
Gil, who had sometimes found it quite challenging to identify and locate some of those dope addicts, didn’t agree. “Depends on the addict,” he said.
Tebbins’s eyes sparkled. “Perhaps. But how many addicts return to lay clues?”
