A Covenant of Thieves

by Christian Velguth

  The Art Crime Team did indeed have its own dedicated space in the building, on floor B2, squished into a corner between the overflowing shelves of old paper records and some HVAC equipment, in what had previously been a large storage room. The sign on the door said “ACT - Third Coast;” the one below that, handwritten, read “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.”

  There were two desks, his and the one belonging to ASAC Helen Martinez. Booker sat at his desk, jacket unbuttoned and chair swiveled so he could stretch his long legs out to one side, and watched as Helen reviewed the footage he’d collected from the parking garage and flooded tunnel. She watched in silence on her own lenses. He could tell by the pinch of her brow when she got to the bodies.

  “Well, fuck,” she muttered, leaning back in her chair. “Look at that. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Me neither,” Booker said. It went without saying, but he said it anyway. “Coroner’s office says triflic acid was used. Post-mortem, based on the limited blood flow and tissue reactions. CPD is tracking down all local sellers, but odds are the acid was ordered from an online supplier.”

  “So the acid wasn’t the murder weapon, it was the eraser.”

  He nodded. “Damage was extensive enough that we won’t even be able to match dental records with any degree of accuracy, and their fingerprints were burned off as well. Could still pull DNA, but that only helps us if these guys are already in somebody’s system. Whoever offed them went through a lot of trouble to make sure they couldn’t be identified.”

  Helen blinked, closing her lenses’ display to frown at him. It was a familiar frown, one that said she didn’t like the state of the world and was seeking someone to answer for it. “Why, though? These two were professional thieves, they’ve probably got a dozen aliases each. Why bother erasing their identities? Why bother killing them at all? It would’ve caused less of a stir if they’d just been allowed to crawl back into their holes.”

  Booker shrugged from his slouched position. “Depends on who killed them? Detective Hollis thinks it was the third man, the driver --”

  Helen’s frown deepened. “This sort of mutilation doesn’t fit the profile of a professional thief, even if it was pragmatic.”

  “I agree, but it’s what Hollis is betting on. Either way, we’ve got one body missing, which means we’ve got a potential eyewitness out there somewhere. Tracking down the driver is our best bet at getting any answers.”

  Helen snorted. “It’s been thirty-six hours since the museum got hit. We’d have better luck finding a waterfall in Nevada.” She fell silent, one finger pressed across her lips as if to keep herself from a sneer of disgust.

  “Can’t say it hasn’t been an interesting first day in the field,” Booker said, trying for a bit of levity. “Maybe we’ll actually get some funding out of this.”

  “You’re not wrong,” she said, pinning him with a cool grey gaze. “This case is big enough to put us in the spotlight, but the gore makes it a whole new ballgame. Nobody wants to think about a person capable of doing this running free in Chicago. We wrap this up neat? We’ll have something to bring to the Director at the next strategy review.”

  The subtext being, of course, Don’t fuck this up.

  “Don’t fuck this up,” Helen said flatly.

  “Only because you asked.”

  In truth, Booker wasn’t feeling optimistic. Hollis had the entirety of the CPD scrambling to pick up the missing driver, but with only the vaguest descriptions from the museum courier and security guard to go by, it was a long shot. Plus, Helen was right -- if you couldn’t track down a perp in the first forty-eight hours of a case like this, then they were as good as gone. It was why so much of the ACT work was done from the other end, tracing digital trails through the dark web to illicit auctions and getting the clientele to squeal on their suppliers. Once a professional thief vanished, odds were they weren’t coming out until they were good and ready.

  With that in mind, Booker booted up his terminal. Hollis and the CPD would do what they could to pick up the trail of the driver. He would work it from the other angle.

  The Mitchell-Hedges skull. Who wanted an obscure pseudo-artifact this badly?

  The ACT had an extensive database on virtually every piece of material culture to grace a Federally-funded museum in the United States, most of it compiled in the decades before Booker had ever been born. Yet, despite its comprehensiveness, he was still mildly surprised to find an entry on the skull.

  The write-up that scrolled across his monitor gave him the basics of the story. In 1924, adventurer-explorer Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges, along with his daughter Anna, went on an expedition to South America in search of the lost cities that were all the rage at the time. In the jungles of Belize, Anna – not her father – discovered the strange artifact within the ruins of a collapsed temple and brought it home to London.

  As romantic as the “official” story was, however, there was very little to corroborate it. Later independent investigations into the skull showed that nobody involved with the expedition, not even Anna’s father, was aware of the discovery when it supposedly happened. In fact, there was no mention of the skull at all until 1943; coincidentally, the same year in which Anna’s father made some purchases at a Sotheby’s antiquities auction in London.

  Conversely, there was plenty to call into question the Mitchell-Hedges name. Apparently old F.A. had a history of making fraudulent claims, consulting with mystics, attending seances, and selling travelogs detailing bogus expeditions in search of Atlantis and El Dorado. The final nail in the coffin came in the form of an excited letter F.A. Mitchell-Hedges had written to his brother, specifically mentioning the acquisition of a crystal skull at Sotheby’s.

  This, apparently, did nothing to dissuade the true believers. Further examinations of the skull were carried out in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the significance of what they revealed meant different things to different people. To the skeptics, the fact that the skull had apparently been fashioned using tools far more modern than those available to the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations stood as proof that the entire thing was a hoax. But for the true believer, it only deepened the mystery. How had the ancients crafted the skull? Did they possess advanced technology, or did they get help?

  The database entry made only cursory mention of the fringe beliefs regarding the artifact, so Booker was forced to take to Google to get more detail. According to various claims throughout the decades, the crystal skull had been observed to “darken” randomly, the normally-clear crystal growing cloudy and opaque, sometimes accompanied by an apparent “wetness” on the surface of the crystal and a drop in ambient temperature. Most notorious of all, several people – including Anna Mitchell-Hedges herself – claimed to have been granted prophetic visions while in the skull’s presence. Visions that always seemed to foretell some tragic event, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to 9/11.

  There were infinite more claims to be read – that the skull had been used in Mayan rituals to channel the life-force from a virgin sacrifice, or that it was one of thirteen artifacts left behind by extraterrestrials – none of which Booker believed for a second. That wasn’t to say he disregarded it all. Quite the contrary; as he’d told Hollis, the stranger an artifact, the more weirdos it attracted. He’d tracked the illicit sales of everything from Aboriginal dreamtime art to monkey fetuses in formaldehyde jars. Usually the buyer was simply eccentric, and might not even know that what they were purchasing had been stolen.

  He doubted that was the case with the skull. Everything pointed to it being specifically targeted by the patron. Add to that what he’d now learned about the skull, and Hollis’ doomsday cult wasn’t looking too far beyond the realm of possibility. Climate shift had turned the world upside down, leading to more than a few apocalyptic communes and religious offshoots. It wasn’t hard to believe they were coming to the end of something, even for Booker. All he had to do was browse the newsfee
ds.

  While Helen coordinated with other ACT offices, Booker stayed late into the night, taking the mythos surrounding the skull and using it to compile a list of potential auctions and markets. There were contacts he could reach out to for some of them, but most would require dark web monitoring. Depending on how quickly the skull made it to market, that could mean months of sitting and waiting. Assuming it made it to an auction at all, and wasn’t destined to just disappear into some private collection.

  Either way, this job was looking more and more like what he’d grown accustomed to over the years. A far cry from the flashy resolution they were hoping for.

  At ten past midnight, Helen stood and stretched loudly, then went to get them some late-night Chinese. Booker headed up three floors to grab a fresh mug of coffee. He was lingering by the elevator, not really ready to go back down to the basement, when his watch buzzed and his lenses displayed an incoming call from Hollis.

  “Yeah?”

  “Special Agent Hopkins,” the detective said, and something in his voice made Booker perk up more than the coffee had. “You might want to come on down to the station.”

  * * *

  Booker studied the figure sitting on the other side of the one-way mirror. “What can you tell me about her?”

  Hollis sighed, folding his arms. “Baum, Jane, according to our records. A pretty obvious alias – she’s a ghost, exists in name only.” He motioned lazily to the sparse lines of data being displayed on the glass, data that only reinforced the hollowness of the persona.

  “I’ll have the Bureau run a deeper check. The skull?”

  “Wasn’t on her, so that sucks. Facial rec matches several other cases going back five years, always placing her as the driver. Nothing as showy as the Field Museum, but enough to put her away for a long time.”

  “History of violence?”

  A pause. “No.”

  “Mental illness?”

  “Other than your standard delinquency? No. Nothing, ah, psychopathic.”

  “She given you anything useful?”

  That was met with a snort. “What she’s given me is about seven flavors of Fuck You. She’s a professional, I’ll give her that.”

  “And yet she just walked through your door.”

  The detective’s fingernails rasped over his stubble. “Yeah. I’ll take it, but I don’t get it, either. She won’t deny her involvement, but she won’t actually talk about it either. Her mind’s pretty focused on those two bodies we’ve got cooling in the morgue.”

  “Still think she did it?”

  “Forensics took a look at her. No sign of chemical burns or residue, and they tell me that means she was nowhere near that shit her partners took a bath in. I said she could have been wearing gloves.” He sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know what to think, Hopkins. When we found those bodies I thought I was en route to becoming this city’s new favorite political punching bag. Now I might just be the luckiest asshole in the history of the CPD. She could’ve disappeared; there was enough time. That she decided not to…Dunno. I’d say it means she’s scared, but I’d have better luck reading a brick wall.”

  He turned to Booker. “I was hoping that standard-issue suit and badge of yours could loosen her up a bit.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But not here.”

  Hollis frowned. “You got a better place in mind?”

  “Is there a lounge? Some place with soft chairs and coffee?” When the detective didn’t immediately offer a suggestion, Booker explained: “Like you said, she’s a professional. Cold steel and fluorescent lighting doesn’t scare her, just shuts her up. Plus, if she’s scared already, then we need to go in a different direction. Let her know she’s safe here.”

  Hollis looked skeptical. “Cozy up to her? That’ll work?”

  “Yes.” In theory.

  The detective was willing to give it a try. He had his people clear out the station’s lounge, then let Booker into the interrogation room.

  Jane Baum sized him up immediately, taking the measure of him with cold eyes and a stony face. There was nothing to suggest she was impressed, or underwhelmed, or cared at all. Her face was a mask of neutrality.

  She did speak, though. “Something tells me you’re not my public defender.”

  Booker put on an apologetic smile and buried his hands in his pockets. “Afraid not. Booker Hopkins, FBI.”

  That did elicit a raised eyebrow. He stepped further into the room, leaving the door open behind him. Baum regarded him coolly and remained motionless when her cuffs unlocked with a bleep. He nodded towards the open door. “Let’s get some coffee.”

  “I’m good right here.”

  Booker shrugged. “It wasn’t really a request.”

  She stared up at him for a moment, then sighed and got to her feet. Hollis was waiting in the hall to escort the two of them. Baum gave him an icy look that firmly dashed any hopes the detective might have had of sitting in on the conversation.

  “I’ll be outside,” he said stiffly, speaking more to Baum than Booker. “If you need anything.”

  The lounge had all the comforts of a government-designated recreational space, but it was still a step above a cold interrogation room. Booker shut the door behind them and closed the blinds on the window, blocking out the city lights made watery by the rain. He turned to see Baum examining the room.

  “No cameras,” she finally said, fixing him with her flat stare. “That why we’re here?”

  “Oh, there’s a camera.” He tapped his cheek, just beneath his eye. “And I will be recording. Part of the job. But even if there wasn’t – no. Nothing like that.”

  Booker then busied himself with preparing two cups of coffee. When he asked Baum how she took hers, he was met with silence, so he dumped a packet of sweetener and a blister of vegan creamer in.

  She had not moved from the middle of the room when he finished. Nor did she move to take the mug when he offered it to her. Shrugging, Booker went to the table, pulled out two chairs, and sat. He drank deeply from his own mug. It wasn’t good, but it was better than what the Field Office brewed and burned away the dampness that settled in his bones on wet summer nights like this.

  He sighed, eyeing her while trying to look like he wasn’t. “Been a long couple days. For both of us, I imagine.”

  Baum said nothing.

  “You can sit if you want. The chairs aren’t great, but they’re better than where you came from.”

  “I’ll stand,” she said coolly. There was a beat, in which she sized him up again. “How old are you?”

  Booker wondered if he should lie, then decided against it. Baum seemed the sort that would sniff him out instantly. “Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight this December.”

  “Jesus,” Baum snorted, shaking her head. “I could be your mom. When did the FBI start hiring children?”

  He resisted the urge to straighten his tie. “Right around the time I turned twenty-three. It helps when the department you’re applying to is in desperate need of personnel.”

  She cocked an eyebrow, looking less than impressed. But it was a reaction, and they were talking. Booker’s satisfaction deepened when she sat and pulled the mug towards her. She didn’t drink, just held it in her hands as she studied his face.

  “So you’re some sort of kid prodigy, huh? Let me guess, you were busting bullies on the playground. Got your ass beat plenty, but your innate sense of justice kept you going.”

  “Ha. Actually, I wanted to be an artist – a painter – until I went to college.”

  “You can’t want to be an artist. You are or you aren’t.”

  Booker shrugged. “Well, I aren’t. Majored in history of art, Medieval and early modern art of Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.”

  “Interesting.” Her tone said it was anything but.

  “Sure, but it didn’t get me much after graduation. Spent a while feeling sorry for myself, figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.”

  “So you joined the Feds. How do
es that work?”

  Booker smiled into his mug. They were establishing a rapport. Good, even if they were denigrating his life choices. “A stint with the National Guard helped. But, mostly, it comes down to the fact that the Art Crime Team is a repository for a portion of the country’s Liberal Arts majors. Not the biggest or the flashiest department in the Bureau, but we do good work. Even if not many people care these days.” He nodded. “Which brings us back to you.”

  Baum smiled thinly and took a drink -- her first -- before speaking. “You’re good, I’ll give you that. Better than the other guy, but that’s a low bar to hurdle.”

  “He does his best, God bless him.”

  She laughed, a breathless sound that was bitten off quick at the end. There, Booker thought triumphantly. Just beneath her cold veneer, shifting under the momentary release of emotion – fear. It was only a glimpse, but now that he’d seen it, he could track it even behind her mask. The set of her shoulders, the whiteness of her knuckles as she gripped the mug. The way she kept glancing at the door.

  Booker softened his voice, leaning forward slightly. “Jane. You turned yourself in for a reason. Want to tell me why?”

  She chose to study the tabletop rather than look at him. “Maybe I was tired. Felt like getting coffee with a hot young piece of Federal ass.”

  He smiled. “I’m flattered, but I don’t buy it. You’re a pro. Even if I hadn’t seen your record, I’d know it just by sitting here with you. Tired isn’t in your vocabulary. Besides, you were free. I doubt we’d have tracked you down if you hadn’t done the job for us.” Booker paused, letting the moment play. “But it’s not us you were worried about, was it?”

  Baum drank again, eyes still down.

  “Tell me about the bodies, Jane. Who killed your partners?”

  “What makes you think it wasn’t me?” Suddenly the icy mask was back. Her eyes locked onto him with a piercing defiance. “Like you said, I’m a professional. Maybe I got sick of working with amateurs hopped up on testosterone. Maybe I figured I deserved the full payout for once, instead of just a cut. Or maybe I just felt like doing it.”