I mulled this over. When you got down to it, Chanda had a world-class security system. Unfortunately, it was a world-class security system that had been trained to expect bread on Saturday afternoons, and had a social media presence which documented their movements.
“When’s your glass guy coming by to fix the window?” I asked.
“Monday,” she replied. “My service couldn’t get a replacement window in stock before then.”
“All right. This is what I think happened. I think somebody paid Travis to break a window on Saturday morning,” I said. “They knew the crows would be distracted with the bread and the neighborhood kids on Saturday afternoon. That would give them an opportunity to dive through the window, grab the hard drive, and leave.”
“Yeah…” she said, and then a little more assuredly: “Yeah. That sounds right.”
“So this person would have to know about your work habits, and they’d also have to know about the crows.”
“But why?!”
That wasn’t the question I was asking myself. No, I was wondering why whoever had stolen the data didn’t simply poison the crows. A couple of loaves of bread soaked in pigeon avicide, and the crow problem was solved. Permanently. Except whoever did this didn’t want to hurt anyone.
Wait. No, that’s not exactly right. They didn’t want to hurt anything, human or bird.
What kind of thief puts in that much extra work just to avoid hurting a bunch of birds?
“Come with me,” I said, as I stepped into the street to hail a cab.
“Where?”
A cab pulled up, and I held the door for her. “The community center.”
I was getting tired of running all over the city. Back and forth, back and forth, nearly twenty-four hours of bouncing around chasing dinosaurs which no longer existed, hadn’t existed for millions of years, were dead and gone and now deleted.
I was getting sick of crows, too, but there was no chance I’d ever admit that to Chanda. The novelty of being part of a flock had worn off. But I needed to recognize that whoever was doing this had compassion for the crows and passion for dinosaurs, and I was crunching up against my own dislike of past and present wild creatures.
Me? I’m a creature of the city. I belong here and now, with other people. This was true long before I volunteered to become a cyborg.
Time to get back to my roots, so I could remind myself why it’s important to always keep moving forward.
The community center always has a roving band of children and preteens, all of whom were dropped off by parents who couldn’t quite afford childcare but could maybe afford a few hours’ of lessons. When I had the time, I showed up and taught a computer class or two. The kids were great. Screaming horrible monsters who’d happily take a chunk out of your leg with their teeth, but great nonetheless. Once you got them focused on a project, they turned into creative miracle-workers, their imaginations breaking through every barrier I could throw at them. The future of the planet was in good hands.
(Murderous hands, but still.)
Half an hour later, Chanda and I were surrounded by children ranging from age six to fourteen, the oldest busy disassembling some of the old cell phones I had lying around the office. Chanda had the younger ones matching different kinds of dinosaurs on some educational program that was three times older than they were. The younger kids, used to computer animation and dinosaurs that looked real enough to step out of the screen and into their living rooms, had better things to do than watch it.
“Is this your giiiiiiiirlfriend?” one of the kids, a class regular, asked me.
“Nope,” Chanda replied to him, grinning at me.
“Gonna maaaaarry her?” asked another.
“Only if she asks,” I replied, grinning back at Chanda.
Chanda laughed and laughed.
It was a good afternoon. The class only lasted about an hour, but when you’re teaching kids, time becomes a strangely distorted phenomenon where it both flies by and seems to last forever. When we reached the end of class, Chanda and I grabbed a couple of sodas and found an empty bench where we could watch the little kids play soccer.
“This is nice,” she said.
“I love it here.” I took a drink from the can. It was room temperature, but that was fine: I was in it for the caffeine and sugar anyhow. “Reminds me of the important things.”
“Please. I know for a fact you’ve sat on national security councils.”
“Like I said. Reminds me of the important things.”
We decided on dinner and then going back to her place. And then, her phone chirped. I already knew Chanda had been getting calls, texts, emails…you name it, and it had made an appearance in her phone. None of these had been important enough to trigger her alert noise.
“It’s from my colleague in China,” she said, as she skimmed an email. Her eyes went wide, as she whispered, “Oh my God, no!”
“What’s wrong?” I reached out to grab her as she staggered in place.
“Josh…the fossil. The one she managed to smuggle out of Tibet?” She swallowed, and tried again. “Someone stole it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The email was brief. The fossil had been hidden in a mismarked crate in the museum where Chanda’s colleague worked. Each time her colleague returned from the field, she checked on it to make certain it was still safe and secure. She had just gotten back from a short expedition, and this time, the fossil was gone.
“Not a coincidence,” Chanda said, shaking her head, her short hair flowing around her face. “My data missing…the last existing fossil missing?!”
Her head snapped up. “I know who did this.”
“What?” I stood. “Just like that?”
“It’s fucking Rudnick!” she said loudly. The swarm of children playing soccer burst into giggles and sharp oooooh! sounds. Chanda dropped her voice as she gathered up her purse and jacket. “Elliot Rudnick. He’s got the office next to mine.”
“Another paleontologist? Wait.” I thought back to my first trip to the museum. “Rudnick was the guy in the hallway.”
“He just got back from China on a work trip,” Chanda said, nodding. “Good scientist, but hates my work. Hates the idea of computer imaging in paleontology. Says that it’s pseudoscience, modeling dinosaur movement and appearance on just the bones. Something that’s only good for television!”
She was furious. I didn’t know if I’d be able to get her to take a breath before she charged into Rudnick’s office and straight-up murdered him.
“Are you sure it’s him?” I asked.
“When I showed him my data on the microraptor, he said it looked fake,” she said, as she started walking towards the exit. She was tapping on her phone as we moved; I was pretty sure there’d be an Uber waiting for us by the time we got outside. “But the only reason he said that was because he made a name for himself in feathered dinosaurs. He doesn’t like…competition.”
Chanda had paused before that last word.
“Ex?” I dropped my voice so the kids still swarming around us couldn’t hear it.
“No, I don’t take lovers at work,” she said firmly.
“Really? Oh, right. Shitting where you eat.” I shook my head. “I’ve been part of a hivemind too long.”
We left the community center at the same moment a plain white compact car with an Uber sticker rolled up to the curb. Chanda ripped open the door and slid across the back seat.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Shit, I don’t know Rudnick’s address,” she said. “Give me two minutes. I need to call a friend.”
“Wait,” I said to the driver. Then, I turned to Chanda. “Can we go to the museum instead?”
“Why? He’s not going to be there. It’s Saturday. He’ll be at home.”
“Just a hunch,” I said. “Besides, do you really want to show up at a coworker’s front door and accuse them of theft without any proof?”
She growled something violent, but told the driver to head t
o the museum. “You keep talking about how you’re not going to do anything seriously illegal,” Chanda said to me, very quietly. “How do you expect to find any proof without breaking into his office?”
“I don’t know, but something will come up,” I replied. “It always does.”
Chanda shook her head at me, and started to sing a little song about my ego. I laughed and hummed along with the tune. She had a great voice, and even if she was making them up on the spot, the lyrics were clever (although at one point, I had to clarify that I had never literally followed my dick into a woodchipper).
By the time we reached the museum, we were headed into the later hours of the afternoon. There was a steady stream of people leaving the building, and a smaller stream of people headed inside to take advantage of the break in the crowds.
“This is a pretty place,” I said. Autumn was coming, and these late days of summer made for a splendidly lazy afternoon. I could imagine spending an afternoon or two at one of the museums on the Mall, losing myself in an old-world approach to education. “I need to come here more often.”
“Really?” There was a suggestive thread within Chanda’s voice which drew me towards her. I found myself with my arms around her, my fingers resting against the side of her cheek.
“You’re wonderful,” I said. “Can I kiss you while you’re at work?”
She drew my head down, and whispered, “Once we’re inside, you can do more than kiss me.”
I took her by the hand, and ran with her up the stairs and into the building.
A few minutes later, we had descended into the cavernous halls below the main part of the museum. “I honestly thought there’d be more people here,” I admitted, as we walked through the enormous echoing corridors. “Aren’t you scientists supposed to have no lives and spend your time bent over your microscopes?”
“I already spend a lot of time bent over,” Chanda said. “Sure as hell not going to waste it on a microscope.”
I had to hop in place to get my sudden erection to lie flat again. “You’re killing me,” I muttered, as she laughed.
“How do you get anything done?” she asked.
“I’m not usually on such a hair trigger,” I replied. “You’re a bad influence.”
“Am I?” Chanda’s voice went smooth and sexy, and I had to lean against a wall for support.
“How do you do that?” I gasped.
“Do what?” she asked, as innocent as arsenic, and she leaned over in front of me to make sure her shoes were tied.
(She was still wearing those new pumps, those sweet kitten-heeled pumps, and they were firmly on her feet, and oh God she made me ache and I loved it!)
“Tell me what you want,” I said, a volcano’s worth of heat within my own voice. “Be clear.”
Chanda turned towards me, and gave me the same look that she had given that security guard. I had to step away—
“I think it’s time to introduce you to my triceratops skull,” she said, and turned towards her office.
I followed. If a bomb had gone off and collapsed the space between us, brought the entire great shell of the Smithsonian down into the hallway and cut us off? I still would have found a way to follow, even if I had to hurl a mountain’s worth of marble out of my way.
She let me catch up with her just outside her office door, and kissed me.
“Want me to fix the security cameras?” I asked
“No,” she whispered, as she moved her hands down the folds of my shirt, unbuttoning each button with her nimble fingers.
“Are you sure?”
“I think my boss likes to watch,” she said. “Or, let’s say he likes to imagine. The cameras end at the door.”
There were a few fumbling moments as she got her office door open. Chanda leaned over to turn on the lights, and—
She screamed!
I turned to see what—
There was a body on the floor!
“Shit!” I shouted. I pushed Chanda out of the room and slammed the door shut behind us.
“Is he dead?” she asked, her hands tight in her hair. “He looked dead. Is he dead?”
I blinked at her. I had only seen the body for a split second, but I had clearly seen a hammer sticking out of his eye socket. “Call the cops,” I said. “I’ll check to make sure he’s dead.”
“You can’t go back in there!” Chanda took a deep breath. “Not alone.”
“I’m just going to go in, check if he’s got a pulse, and get out,” I said. “This isn’t my first dead body.”
“It’s mine.” She was trying not to hyperventilate. “I think that’s Rudnick.”
“Did you see his face?”
“No, because there’s a hammer in—”
“Okay.” I turned towards the door. “Call the cops while I scan the room. If nobody else is in there, we’ll go in and check to see if he’s alive, and whether it’s Rudnick or not.”
In my opinion, the most useful trick in an Agent’s toolkit is going out-of-body. This is when we project our minds along the electromagnetic spectra, essentially walking around without the need for a physical body. As far as I could tell, I’d be the first Agent to use it to inspect a murder scene.
Is that true? Has Rachel done this? Maybe one of the Hippos…
Focus, Josh.
I sat on the floor, shut my eyes, and stepped out of my body.
Going out-of-body is as easy as breathing. With concentration, you can project an avatar that looks and moves exactly like your physical body. You’re still you.
However, you have the additional benefit of being able to walk through walls.
I pressed my avatar through the door of Chanda’s office. On the other side was the room as we had left it: there were the fake dinosaur bones, the wooden crates, and the old computer still grimly downloading email.
There was also a man with a hammer in his head.
Poor bastard. I hope he didn’t get caught up in this by accident.
I swept around the room, making sure that no one was lurking in the shadows. I even poked my avatar’s head into a couple of the crates to make sure that we wouldn’t be jumped by a murderer playing at Jack-in-the-box. When I was sure the room was secure, I returned to my body and opened my eyes.
“It’s safe,” I said, as I stood and went to open the door. “Come with me to make the ID, but stay behind me, just in case.”
“Oh my God, I can’t believe we’re doing this.” Chanda was speaking very quickly. Her short fingernails were pressing into the skin on my arms, and she was beginning to shake. This had been a rough day for her, and she was about at the end of her endurance. “Oh my God, there’s a dead man in my office!”
We walked into the office. Now, with the shock of the discovery behind us, we noticed more of the details. The man’s skull had been crushed. Blood splatter ran up the nearby crates and across the wall. Several of the reproduction dinosaur bones had a little extra gore on them.
I tried to keep us moving in a straight line; if there was trace evidence anywhere, I didn’t want to track through it. When we got to the body, I knelt down to take his pulse.
“Stay behind me,” I reminded her, as I reached out to touch his neck.
As I touched him, his head moved to the side, showing the part of his head that didn’t have a hammer in it. “Oh my God, Josh, that’s Rudnick! That’s definitely Rudnick!”
“And he’s definitely dead,” I said, as I pulled my fingers away from his neck. I wiped my hand on my pants. “He’s getting cold, too. This happened a couple of hours ago.”
“Oh my God, they’ll think I did it.” By now, Chanda was truly shaking. “I was with you all day, right? And Rachel, and Santino, and…oh my God, they’ll question Blue! The poor girl doesn’t need that! Could her week get any worse?”
She was looking at a dead man—a dead man she knew!—and she was worried about what might happen to a girl we had met in a sketchy little store. I swear my heart grew three sizes at that.
I turned and swept Chanda into my arms, and took her straight out of the room. “Do you have a lawyer?” I asked.
“What?” She was losing her ability to concentrate.
“They’re not going to think you did it, but they’re still going to ask you questions and you should have a lawyer present. Can you get the museum’s legal counsel to come down here?”
“…I think…” she whispered. “…I think I need to call my boss…”
Do you want me to take care of this?”
She stopped talking, and turned to press her face against my chest.
I kissed the top of her head, placed a call to the museum’s front desk, and held her until the elaborate dance of the murder scene got underway.
Rachel and Santino weren’t the first to arrive. That honor went to a couple of MPD’s officers, who had plenty of questions about who the victim was, who Chanda was, and so on. You’ve seen enough police procedurals to fill in those details for yourself. By the time the questions were rolling, Chanda’s boss had arrived, and we should have been able to dump the burden of everything else onto middle management. Except…
“I’m going to have to call his wife,” Chanda’s boss said, his hands pressed against his face in near-panic. “I’ve never had to do that before… What do I do?”
As I said, I know when I’m needed.
I left Chanda with Rachel and Santino, made a two-hour side trip with Chanda’s boss that turned out to be one of the worst experiences of my life (but was nothing compared to what poor Mrs. Rudnick went through), and got back to the museum after the sun was down. Chanda was sitting alone in an employees’ lounge, nursing a coffee that came with a strong smell of whiskey.
“Thank you for doing that,” she said tiredly. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even imagine…” She trailed off, unable to finish.
I slid into the chair beside her, and lifted her hands in my own. Despite the warmth of the mug full of coffee, her skin felt like ice. “Rachel tells me they found your stolen hard drives in Rudnick’s office.”
Chanda nodded. “The two I had stashed in the museum, and the one from my house.” All of the life sounded as if it had been sucked out of her voice. “Rachel says they found Rudnick’s fingerprints in my kitchen, and upstairs in my office.”
The Dinosaur Heist Page 8