Beautiful Sacrifice: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “If this guy’s a thief,” Jase muttered, following Hunter, “he’s lousy at it. Like a pickpocket with no hands.”

  “Poor impulse control has been the downfall of more than one master criminal,” Hunter said dryly. “Is this call hard or soft?”

  “Soft. Just wondering how he is, we haven’t heard from him, blah blah.”

  The steps up from street level grated underfoot. The crumbling stoop was crusted with dirt and greasy debris.

  Behind an apartment door, a dog barked madly. The dog’s bark changed to hysteria when he caught their scent. Someone yelled in Spanglish for the dog to cállete the hell up. The dog yipped and went silent.

  Hunter scanned the upper balcony for unpleasant surprises. Nothing moved.

  “Looks like everyone’s tucked in with TV and cerveza,” Jase said.

  Hunter grunted.

  “You armed?” Jase asked.

  “The usual.” For Hunter, that was a knife in his boot. “What’s the dude’s name?”

  “LeRoy Ramirez Landry. First door on the right.”

  “Let’s hope Mr. Landry doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  “Paying rent here is stupid,” Jase said.

  “You take the door,” Hunter said. “I’ll cover you.”

  Jase stepped past Hunter, whose narrowed eyes were scanning the other closed doors. Landry’s apartment was closest to the stairs. That would make a fast retreat easier.

  Feeling watched from behind, Hunter looked over his shoulder and out at the street. His neck had felt like he was in someone’s crosshairs since he’d left the lecture room with the professor on his arm. It wasn’t a good feeling.

  Nothing moved below but a feral cat scrounging for fast-food scraps and slow rats.

  Jase knocked on Landry’s apartment door. The door sounded dry and hollow, empty as a cracked bone.

  “It’s been kicked out of the jamb,” Jase said in a low voice.

  “Saw it from the stairs.”

  “Cat eyes. You’ve been out in the jungle too long.”

  “I like being in one piece,” Hunter said.

  “Not arguing, just saying.”

  Jase knocked again. He didn’t want to shout out “ICE” if he didn’t have to. No reason to get trampled in the stampede out of the building.

  A gust of wind licked through the broken street door, toppling the empty beer cans at the bottom of the stairs. Across the hallway, a dog whined once.

  Silence spread like dirt in the hallway.

  Hunter and Jase knew that all the televisions had just been turned down.

  “Dude isn’t home or he’s hiding,” Hunter said in a low voice. “Everyone else knows we’re here.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “Yeah. If you happen to lean on that door and it gives way, technically it isn’t breaking and entering,” Hunter offered.

  He pointed to the finger-wide gap between the barely open door and the frame.

  “Man, and I was hoping to get in another misdemeanor today,” Jase said.

  “Stay tight. A felony might be just around the corner.”

  Jase scratched at the spot where his reversed baseball hat met the back of his head. “Well, I’m concerned about the well-being of this citizen who may or may not have become involved in a crime. We really should check out the place. I mean, it’s for his own safety.”

  “You’re such a good citizen,” Hunter said. “How do you do it?”

  “Clean living.”

  “You forgot constant prayer.”

  “That’s Ali’s job.” Jase put the back of his hand on the door, pushed. It scraped open. “Oops. Look at that. Busted. We better check that Mr. Landry is okay.”

  Jase pushed the door wide open and stepped to the other side of the frame. Hunter was already at Jase’s blind side. They had both been trained the same way, by the same life.

  Nothing was behind the door. No one was within sight. Curtains shifted. They were dirty enough to have been used as napkins.

  Not one sound came from inside the apartment.

  The cramped room seemed to cringe at the afternoon sunlight flooding through the open door. A coffee table was littered with envelopes torn open carelessly. Empty bottles of malt liquor stood sentinel by crushed cigarette packs and overflowing ashtrays. Cigarette butts stuck out of the ashes like finger bones.

  “Guess he lives on nicotine and alcohol,” Jase said. “No fast-food trash.”

  “Lotto tickets,” Hunter said.

  The colorful stubs were ripped up, tossed everywhere in a kind of loser’s confetti.

  Jase walked a bit farther into the room. Hunter’s movements mirrored his partner’s.

  The television was off, and Hunter could see where the screen had been dusted with an open palm. The ring of grime at the edges clung. He moved the back of his hand close to the screen. Cold. Like the room, despite the cracked door. Air-conditioning hummed and rattled as it came on.

  “Looks like he hasn’t been here for a while,” Jase said. “But I’m not going to open that fridge to check expiration dates.”

  “How long?” Hunter asked.

  Jase understood the rest of the question. “Feels like days. Maybe more.”

  “It smells bad, but not dead-body bad. Back room?”

  Nodding, Jase headed farther into the apartment.

  “Unmade bed,” Jase said, looking into the tiny bedroom.

  “I’d be surprised if it was made.”

  Jase pushed the door wide open, flat against the wall. Nothing

  “No obvious signs of struggle.”

  “Just the everyday fight to keep in beer, cigarettes, and lotto tickets,” Hunter said. “No sign of any artifacts either.”

  “Man, I really don’t want to wreck this place to find them,” Jase muttered. “Just standing here makes me want to wash my hands.”

  He pulled a wad of exam gloves from his jacket pocket and handed a pair to Hunter. Both men snapped them on. Jase opened what he could of the closet’s sliding door before it jammed on the gritty rails.

  “A few shirts, pants, some of the clothes have DeWatt janitorial service logos,” Jase said quietly. “Ratty tennis shoes. Flip-flops. Dirty socks.”

  Hunter was glancing around the coffin-size bathroom. No cupboards. Drawers half open, empty of everything but used razors and crusty soap. The bathtub held the rest of the dirty laundry, but there wasn’t enough of it to hide anything interesting underneath.

  “Do we toss the place?” Hunter asked neutrally.

  “Son of a bitch,” Jase snarled, ripping off his hat and slamming it onto the dirty linoleum floor near the bed. A faint ring of dust rose and spread from the impact.

  “Take it easy,” Hunter said, approaching Jase. “We’ll find the artifacts. If not here, somewhere else.”

  He crouched down, reaching for Jase’s hat. As he grabbed it, he spotted something.

  “We need a warrant to take anything from under the bed?” Hunter asked.

  “You thought you saw a scorpion run across your shoe, stomped, and crouched down to make sure you nailed it,” Jase said instantly.

  “Oh, right. Huh, the bug got away. But lookee here.”

  Hunter hauled out a dark blue duffel bag.

  “He can’t have had it long,” Jase said. “It’s clean.”

  Manufactured by some company called Élite, the duffel was crisply cut from a thick, woven nylon that looked like it could stop a bullet. A cardboard sales tag still hung on one of the handles, fastened by thin nylon line. Academy Sports.

  “About a mile from here,” Jase said. “Big place. Sells cheap. Open the damn thing.”

  “The artifacts won’t be inside. Not heavy enough,” Hunter said, turning the top flap over.

  Jase kneeled down and rooted around in the bag. He pulled out wadded-up paper towels. All of it came in three-sheet segments.

  “Spread it out,” Hunter said. He took a double handful of the stuff and smoothed it over the dirty floor. “W
e’re not going to have the time or money to CSI this stuff, are we?”

  “That’s only for big murder cases, not my-ass-is-in-traction moments.”

  Hunter looked over the towels. There wasn’t much to see. “Even if the artifacts were wrapped up in these, there wouldn’t be much evidence of it. The obsidian wouldn’t shed and…”

  “What?” Jase demanded when Hunter’s voice died.

  “Most worked obsidian is sharp. It would tear the paper towels. See? This bunch of towels has little slits, like maybe they were wrapped around something sharp and it cut through.”

  “Hey, there’s some dirt or something on this one!” Jase said, pouncing.

  “Dial it down,” Hunter said. “The walls are listening. What do you have?”

  “Looks like a piece of…pottery?”

  “Wrap it up. I know an expert who can tell us.”

  While Jase took care of the find, Hunter undid all seven zipper compartments in the duffel and ran his hands around the slick interior of the nylon. He found nothing but an inspection card and tissue paper put in by the original manufacturer to make the duffel look solid.

  “This bag is really new,” Hunter said.

  Jase scooped up everything but the tissue paper, pulled clean plastic bags from his wind jacket, and folded all the paper towels away. Everything disappeared into his pockets.

  “I’d really like to talk to LeRoy Landry,” Jase said.

  “I’d like to help.”

  Hunter stuffed the tissue paper back in the seven compartments, zipped everything, and shoved the bag back under the bed. Together he and Jase did a fast, discreet search of the apartment. No cell phone, no regular phone. Nothing in plain sight, and no place to hide anything in the empty cupboards. The refrigerator held two beers and a few moldy lumps of something organic. There was a piece of paper halfway under the trash can. The top of the paper had an ICE logo. The rest was blank.

  “Short of pulling up the floor, tearing apart the mattress, and axing the walls, we’re done,” Jase said. “Let’s haul—”

  Squeaky brakes came to an ear-ringing stop in front of the apartment.

  Hunter eased over to the side of the window in the main room, looked out carefully at the street, and held up two fingers.

  “We’re outta here,” Jase said. “I don’t like jail food.”

  Hunter followed Jase out the apartment door, pulling it almost closed, just the way they had found it. They shucked the exam gloves and crossed the concrete balcony to the top of the stairs just before company appeared.

  Two well-dressed men, relaxed and hard-eyed, stepped through the useless security door and headed up to the second floor. In the sun, their long black hair was shiny, straight, their features more Maya than Mexican, and their cowboy boots blindingly expensive. Though neither man was above medium height, they carried themselves like they were ten feet tall.

  One of the men showed a flash of recognition when he saw Hunter. Then the man’s face became expressionless again. Silently the two men climbed the stairs and stepped past Jase and Hunter, going single file.

  Jase started down the stairs in a hurry.

  Hunter swore loudly in Tex-Mex Spanish and grabbed the rail. “Damn cramp is back,” he said in the same dialect. He clung to the railing and flexed his left leg violently. His face was a grimace of pain.

  Jase started to say something, then thought better of it.

  The two strangers hesitated outside Landry’s door. They spoke in a language that sounded like one of the many native dialects that pocked Mexico, words from a time before Spanish sails had ever been seen in the New World.

  Hunter couldn’t figure out a damn word.

  “You okay, man?” Jase asked clearly in the same kind of border Spanish Hunter had used.

  “Yeah, I’ll live,” Hunter answered in the same language, kneading his left calf and knee. “I’m too old to get beaten up in soccer scrums.”

  Jase understood Hunter’s game immediately. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump you on your ass.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Help me down. If we’re late to pick up your sister, she’ll kick my other leg.”

  Both he and Jase were careful to keep their back to Landry’s door, but Hunter had unusually good peripheral vision.

  One of the men knocked hard on Landry’s broken door.

  “You want to lean on me?” Jase asked.

  “I’ll walk. You get ready to catch me.” Hunter took a tentative first step and then hobbled very slowly down the steps, toward the busted street door.

  Behind them Landry’s apartment door scraped open.

  As soon as Hunter and Jase got out of sight of the building, they walked quickly to his Jeep.

  “Let’s keep an eye on this place,” Hunter said softly in English. “The liquor-store parking lot down and across the way should work.”

  “You like those dudes for something? They sure were too expensive for around here.”

  “No crime to be a dude. But if their business is with Landry, then hell yeah, I like them.”

  Hunter waited in the parking lot while Jase went inside. He came back out with a box of incredibly greasy burritos and something in two brown paper bags. Jase climbed in, handed over half the grease and one paper bag. They sat swigging water from the anonymous brown bags, wolfing down lousy food, and waiting.

  Half an hour.

  No one reappeared.

  An hour.

  Nothing but locals.

  Another twenty minutes.

  “I’m going in,” Jase said.

  “What’s your excuse?”

  Jase touched his shoulder holster under his wind jacket. “It’s called a nine-millimeter warrant.”

  Hunter started to argue, but got out instead. It was Jase’s butt on the line, so it was Jase’s call.

  They walked back slow and quiet. The afternoon was settling into heat with a slanting promise of evening. Eventually. The river birches that had been planted along with the buildings were the only break in the concrete and dirt.

  The car with the squeaky brakes was still parked in front of the apartment building. The steps leading from the street to the apartment were still dirty, the security door was still broken, and the staircase to the second floor still complained. The only thing that had changed was the opening in Landry’s door. Now a small pony could walk through without sucking in its breath.

  Beyond the door was chaos. Overturned table, chairs, TV knocked down, bedroom door wide open, ripped sheets, and trashed mattress.

  “This was a message, not a search,” Jase said.

  He drew his pistol, holding it parallel to his leg in case any civilians opened an apartment door. He and Hunter stepped into the destroyed apartment. Hunter went straight to the bedroom.

  The blue duffel was gone.

  Jase began swearing in the kind of gutter Spanglish his mother wouldn’t have allowed. Hunter joined him.

  “Can’t believe they walked out right past us,” Jase said.

  “Bet there’s a fire escape at the back. Or they just walked into a ground-floor apartment, threatened the occupants, and went through the window,” Hunter said. “Either way, they’re gone and we’re standing here with refried beans on our face.”

  “What now?” Jase asked.

  Hunter didn’t point out that it was the other man’s case. “Give me the paper towels and piece of pottery. I’ll drop you at your apartment. Or use mine if it’s too soon for you to be home. Can you run the plates on their vehicle from there?”

  “Ten to one it’s stolen.”

  “No bet. It’s a piece of junk. The two men were expensive.”

  “I’ll do it anyway,” Jase said. “And I’ll see what I can shake out about LeRoy Landry. What are you going to do?”

  “Find out what Dr. Taylor can tell me about the pottery.”

  “A hot Latina and all you can think about is a broken pot. My man, I taught you better.”

  Shaking his head, Hunter stalked out, leavin
g the apartment as he had found it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LINA SAT IN HER OFFICE, STARING AT THE LINES SHE HAD SO hastily entered into her electronic notepad. She printed them out and stared some more, hoping to see something other than Hunter’s slow grin and long body.

  Nothing new or old spoke to her.

  The artifacts have to be fake, she thought.

  Unfortunately, Hunter didn’t really care. Fake or straight from the ground on a sponsored dig, he wanted them.

  If they’re fake, it doesn’t matter where or how they were “found,” she reminded herself.

  The relief was intense.

  But she couldn’t afford to assume the artifacts were fake. If they were real, and her family was involved…

  “Damn it, Philip. Return my call.”

  But her cell phone remained quiet. So did her desk phone. Not that she was surprised. Out on a salvage dig in Belize, Philip couldn’t care less about the rest of the world. Even her use of the word “scandal” hadn’t piqued his interest.

  It will take dynamite to get through that limestone block he calls his head.

  Lina breathed out a few choice words and nerved herself to do what she didn’t really want to do—call Mercurio ak Chan de la Poole. During the looted artifacts scandal that had shaken her family, Mercurio had logically decided that being mentored by Philip was no longer a fast road to academic recognition. It hadn’t been a difficult decision. Not only was Philip an exacting master on dig sites, he wasn’t going to make room for anyone other than himself at the top of the pyramid. The scandal made a hat trick on the side of Mercurio working alone.

  Lina had been there on the hot, steamy night when Mercurio and Philip had unloaded years of mutual tension. Mercurio had left at dawn and had never come back. He had kept in touch with Lina, though.

  Sometimes too much touch. Especially after the scandal had died down. Lina never had been sexually drawn to the handsome young Mexican, no matter how delicate or deliberate his pursuit. Yet they had retained an odd kind of remember-when friendship rooted in past digs and present interest in Yucatec Maya artifacts.

  Reluctantly she punched in the number Mercurio always made sure she had. The phone rang several times before a male voice answered in Spanish. Around his words she heard the sound of a sea breeze through open windows and the cry of birds. A cross between homesickness and nostalgia swept over her. There was no place on the earth like the Yucatan.