The Glass Thief (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Book 6)

by Gigi Pandian

  “Why would I think to take a photo? Like I’m going to stick around a room where someone wishing us bodily harm left a threat? I’m a pacifist.”

  The detective ignored them, but I’m fairly certain I saw him roll his eyes.

  “You didn’t see this note?” he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “Your door wasn’t forced.”

  “It wasn’t?” I followed his gaze to Miles.

  Miles scratched his neck nervously. “I didn’t say the door was broken down. I said there was a note—”

  “Miss Jones,” the detective said, “is anything amiss?”

  “Not that I can tell.” I scanned the office. It wasn’t the first time someone had gotten into my office. Perhaps it was time I considered installing a video camera hidden in Ganesha’s broken tusk. Before I could decide how to explain the complicated situation with the manuscript chapters, the older detective spoke again.

  “Thank you for doing your civic duty to make sure we knew the identity of the man in the Bay. I’m sorry for your loss. Good people are investigating. Now if you’ll let us get back to it.”

  We stared after them.

  “Our tax dollars at work,” Tamarind muttered.

  “Rick was famous,” I said. “They assume Miles was making it up for attention. I’m sure they’re getting tons of crank calls.”

  “Fair. But they didn’t have to be such jerks to Miles.”

  “I swear a note was right here, Jaya,” Miles said. “A handwritten note, written with black marker in creepy serial killer all-caps style, was in the center of the desk. It said FORGET ABOUT THE RICK CORONADO NOVEL.”

  “Shut. Up.” Tamarind said.

  “We should go after them,” I said. “The Gabriela Glass chapters—”

  “They’re not going to believe anything you say now.”

  I closed my eyes. “Even if they did, we don’t even know how they’re related. The chapters don’t tell us who killed Rick.”

  “Them,” Miles corrected. “Not us. The chapters don’t tell the police who killed him.”

  “No,” I agreed. But if we could figure out what the chapters were hiding, it might tell us what the killer was after.

  Tamarind had to get back to work, and after I promised I’d have dinner with the two of them that night, they left hand in hand. I was left with my own thoughts to sort out what had just happened. I sat down at my desk, and that’s when I noticed it.

  The desk drawer was ajar. A drawer I never left open.

  It was probably Miles who’d opened it before he saw the phantom letter. I pulled it open. My hand flew to my mouth and I pushed backward, sending the chair tumbling. A dead snake was curled inside the drawer.

  My survival instincts kicked into high gear. I flung open the single door to the office and peered into the hallway. Life carried on as usual. The dean of students was chatting with the department secretary at her desk at the end of the hallway and two graduate students were walking together.

  My heart raced as I tried to make sense of what had happened. If the person who’d left the note had second thoughts, why not take their snake as well? Unless they’d been interrupted. Tamarind’s voice always carried down the whole hallway, so the intruder would have had ample warning to get out of the office before we returned. I leaned against the door and closed my eyes. Miles hadn’t been making up the threatening note. Not that I’d thought he was, but now I could stop doubting myself.

  I had no idea what to do with a dead snake, but at least it wasn’t alive. I wasn’t Gabriela Glass so I’d have had zero chance of killing a snake with my bare hands. With my jiu-jitsu, I could hold my own against a human adversary, but I doubted flipping a snake onto its back would do me much good.

  I forced myself to get a better look at the poor dead creature. Only…This wasn’t a dead snake. It was a fake snake.

  My fear turned to indignation. Did they really think they could scare me off like this? The culprit who’d left the threats clearly understood nothing about psychology. No, they did. They realized they’d acted rashly and tried to take it back. Or could it be two people working together? Is that why the first one thought a note would be a good idea, and the second thought better of it?

  I groaned. I needed to face the fact that I had no idea who—or what—I was up against. I locked my door and headed to the library.

  “Miles wouldn’t lie to you,” Tamarind said when I appeared at her desk.

  “I know. I believe him about the note. That’s why I’m here. We need to find the Serpent King.”

  Chapter 17

  Tamarind steered me to the secret courtyard. “I don’t want to frighten the students with talk about dead authors. They’re stressed out enough with only a few days left in the semester.”

  Rain was no longer falling, but the stones and benches were slick with rainwater.

  “To find out what happened to Rick,” I said, “we have to follow the clues he laid out for me. I think we know more than we think we do. If we start with the Serpent King—”

  “Um, Jaya. It’s time for me to stage an intervention.”

  “You have somewhere else you need to go?”

  Her nostrils flared. “Rick Coronado is dead, Jaya. Someone killed him and tried to scare you off. The police are looking into Rick’s murder. The intervention is for you.”

  “He’s dead because of me.” I looked away. I couldn’t face her. “He was coming to see me. I hadn’t figured out enough—”

  “He was manipulating you.” She grabbed my shoulders and spun me around. “Go home. Get some rest before I make a big plate of enchiladas for dinner. Everything will seem better with good food and great friends. Do you want to invite Lane too?”

  “Definitely not. I’m too emotional. That’s been the problem with our relationship from the start. I’ve been making decisions when there’s some crisis throwing us together.”

  “Which doesn’t make for the best decisions. I get it. But there are only two days left in the semester. You told me you’re totally behind. Rick isn’t your concern. Not anymore. You need to be more concerned about Naveen Veeran. You know he wants to steal tenure out from under you.”

  “I can handle Naveen.”

  “Maybe. But just because a handsome celebrity had a wild theory he convinced someone was worth killing over—”

  “It’s not just a theory.”

  “Seriously, Jaya. Go home and get some rest. You’re totally messing with my image of myself if I need to be the responsible one in our friendship.”

  “I can’t go home.”

  Tamarind gasped. “You think they’ve gotten to your house?”

  “What? No. It’s freezing at my place—” I broke off and we both started laughing hysterically.

  “I’m glad you didn’t start bawling,” Tamarind said in between hiccups of laughter. “I was primed for any emotional outburst.”

  “You’re right. I’ll go home. I didn’t find anything in the archives before anyway.”

  “You got through the newspaper archives already? You weren’t here for that long before.”

  “The digitized archives make it fast to look things up.”

  Tamarind frowned. “Our digital archives are behind the times and don’t have images linked yet. But you miss the photos if you don’t look at the microfiche scans. Dammit. Your eyes just lit up. Why did I say that?”

  “Because your librarian genes make it impossible for you not to.”

  “Stay where I can see you,” she called after me as I ran back inside the library.

  Two hours later I was still looking through images of old newspapers. Text searches of old materials that had been digitized made a lot of research easier, but it couldn’t tell you everything. When Tamarind came to remind me the library was closing soon, I was staring at the photograph. I
couldn’t quite believe what I’d found.

  I’d already searched for snakes, naga, cobra, and the Serpent King. Those key words weren’t in the text of any of the articles, but something was in the photos from the time when Beauregard Delacroix was pushed down the stairs. The mansion. The one with the serpentine art nouveau designs on the facade.

  “The mansion,” I whispered. “The mansion is real.”

  Rick had altered the names and the story to hide the real history, but he’d described the house exactly as he’d seen it.

  “Shut. Up.” She looked over my shoulder. “That’s the house Gabriela Glass described. The Durants. He didn’t change the name that much. The Durant family, who suffered tragedies across generations.”

  “Beaumont Durant, who broke his neck when he fell down the stairs in the mansion his grandfather Aristide built, shortly before Christmas in 1950. His wife Daphne, a celebrated artist who slipped in the same spot a year later. Their grandson Marc, traumatized by the family curse so he got drunk on the fateful anniversary and fell down the same stairs.”

  “Huh,” Tamarind said. “No mention of the woo-woo ghost story or of Marc being raised from the dead after being strangled. He was just a lush who slipped on the stairs. Closest we get to the ghost is this quote from a cop who showed up and was scared of being at a haunted house.”

  “Look at the timing of the most recent death,” I said. “It’s not a new crime like in a Gabriela Glass story. It was seven years ago. Seven years ago, Tamarind.”

  “You don’t think—”

  “I do. Marc Durant was killed shortly before Rick Coronado disappeared for six weeks. Marc died in a supposed accident at his ancestral home in Paris. Rick Coronado thought it was murder.”

  Tamarind swore. “This is big.”

  I scanned the rest of the article and searched for others now that I had a name. There was speculation that depression ran in the family and that these were all suicides, because no evidence of murder came up in any of the cases. No reputable news sources mentioned a ghost.

  “Don’t you think they would have realized those were some dangerous stairs and built new ones?” Tamarind mused. “Though I suppose if we believe Rick Coronado’s manuscript, they did take precautions.”

  “By leaving the house on the fateful anniversary when they expected the ghost to strike, you mean?”

  “Yeah, since they believed that was the only day of the year the ghost was a danger to them.” Tamarind frowned. “It’s so sad. All of this took place right before Christmas.”

  “There’s nothing mentioned about them leaving the house two nights before Christmas each year, but they wouldn’t have broadcast to the press, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re freaked out by our family ghost so we’re leaving our home full of riches on the same night each year.’ So we don’t know if the real life Delacroix’s—the Durants—weren’t as superstitious as their fictional counterparts.”

  The lights overhead flickered. I stared at Tamarind.

  “The alert that the library is closing in ten minutes,” she said. “Though pretty good timing, right?”

  “We need to hurry.”

  “As in hurry our little butts to the police station, right? Okay, fine. You’re right. I know you’re the only one with a little butt.” She rested her hands on her ample hips.

  “We can’t tell anyone what we’ve discovered.”

  “Why not?”

  “Rick wasn’t just killed because he was going after a real-life treasure,” I said, feeling a tremor emerge from my voice as I spoke. “He knew that someone had murdered Marc Durant in Paris. Someone smart enough to have covered their tracks got away with a murder seven years ago. If that person finds out we know what Rick’s been trying to tell us—”

  “I don’t want to go into Witness Protection. Does that even work anymore with facial recognition technology?” Tamarind’s chest heaved with distressed breaths. “OMG will I have to disguise myself with boring hair and no piercings? I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I can handle that.”

  “Nobody is going into Witness Protection.”

  “Really?” Tamarind’s breathing calmed slightly. “Why not?”

  “Because we’re not going to wait for multi-jurisdictional police forces to be convinced our story is true and catch whoever killed Marc and Rick. Rick said the Serpent King statue was the key to solving Marc’s murder. It’s the key to solving Rick’s murder too. That’s one thing Gabriela Glass and I have in common that we do better than the police—we can find missing pieces of history.”

  The library plunged into darkness.

  Chapter 18

  An eerie glow from the screen gave enough light to see each other as silhouettes.

  “Don’t worry,” Tamarind said. “That’s just to convince the students to take us seriously that we’re closing. The lights will come on again in a few seconds. Um. I think.”

  “Do we really need to leave?” I asked.

  “I’m supposed to be doing a sweep for lingering patrons right now, so we’ve got five minutes at most.”

  “I only need two. I need to finish reading this one article about the Durants. I saw something in there.”

  The lights came on.

  “Here it is,” I said. “The Durants made their fortunes when France was a protectorate of Cambodia, not in India. Rick’s shoddy research—” I broke off and gasped so dramatically it would have done justice to Gabriela Glass. “That’s what was wrong with Rick’s research for the book! He was talking about Cambodia the whole time, not India.”

  “Wait,” Tamarind said. “I read the pages. He clearly said India.”

  “I expect it was to get me interested because he wanted my help. And if he planned on publishing the book, he wouldn’t want to get sued by the Durants. India and Cambodia have so much of a connection that his misdirection worked. And the Serpent King statue—I should have seen it. Naga are much more prominent in Cambodia than India. Where Rick set Empire of Glass.”

  I examined the few grainy photos of the art the family had collected. Two other statues from Asia. Numerous paintings by artists I didn’t recognize. A small collection of ostentatious antique jewelry the family claimed was from a noble French family in the Middle Ages from whom they were descended. Nothing was officially catalogued, and there was no mention of the Serpent King by name, which is why I hadn’t found it in my initial search, but the family had proudly displayed their art collection in the fortress-like library.

  The sandstone Naga King sculpture was larger than I’d imagined from Rick’s novel. More than a foot high, carved as a slab with bas-relief snake heads that looked as if they were crawling out of the stone. The central cobra figure—presumably the king—was larger and fiercer than the rest. It spoke to the skill of the artist that Rick hadn’t taken dramatic license when he said there was a regal quality to the king. The poise of the serpentine head and the baring of its sharp fangs conveyed strength, not malice.

  There was something else about the small image of the seven-headed naga. The shape was odd. Had a portion of the stone been chipped off toward the bottom? No, I didn’t think that was it. I zoomed in.

  “Tamarind!”

  “I’m right here. And now I’m deaf.”

  “The naga is a guardian, either watching over Buddha or guarding a treasure. And look at this.” I pointed at the flat lower portion of the sculpture. “This is similar to what Gabriela Glass described, but not quite. Gabriela wondered if the sculpture was incomplete because of a flat portion on the bottom. But look, the base of the stone juts out several inches and has been smoothed.”

  Tamarind leaned over my shoulder. “Like a pedestal to set something else?”

  “Exactly. The naga is a guardian of treasure. The treasure our naga king was guarding isn’t here.”

  “Shut. Up.” Tamarind whispered.

  “T
he Serpent King statue itself is a treasure, but it also points to something more important. Something it was guarding. Seven years ago, Rick Coronado realized the significance of the stolen statue. He knew Cambodia intimately from his research for his most ambitious novel. This all started with Empire of Glass.”

  “Wasn’t he found in Thailand at the end of his missing six weeks?” Tamarind asked. “Not Cambodia.”

  “The countries share a border. A disputed border. And there are undeveloped areas with thick jungle canopies.”

  Lost for six weeks. Found in Thailand, a country that not only bordered Cambodia, but controlled access to one of Cambodia’s temples because of land routes. Fifteen pounds thinner, as if he’d been in the jungle searching for the treasure the Serpent King was meant to guard.

  “His amnesia was a sham,” Tamarind said.

  I nodded. “That explains the reason he publicly feigned amnesia. He knew someone had killed Marc Durant and stolen the Serpent King—a family heirloom looted from Cambodia that was meant to be guarding another treasure that was still out there, waiting to be found. Rick’s editor told me how he was unfulfilled by success and wanted to kill off Gabriela to be something more.”

  “A real-life treasure hunter. A hero. But look where it got him—”

  “Excuse me,” a voice said. “The library is now closed. Tamarind? Are you still helping a student? Do I need to remind you of the library policies?”

  “Sorry, Betsy,” Tamarind said in a saccharine sweet voice. “We’re leaving.” She clicked off my screen and hoisted me up by the elbow.

  We stayed arm in arm as she led me to the locked front doors. “God, I hate that woman,” she hissed. “My apartment. Two hours. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid in the meantime.”

  “I promise.”

  I really had meant the words at the time.

  But when I returned to my apartment, Nadia was sitting on the porch swing with a martini in her hand.

  “Shall I make you one?” she asked, raising her glass. Her Russian accent was stronger than usual, so I suspected she’d had a couple already. “You look as if you have aged five years in the three days since I have seen you.”