Case of the Fleet-Footed Mummy

by Jeffrey M. Poole

  “And how would he know that?” Tori demanded. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “Tor, I had no choice! I had to admit to my boss that I had been withholding evidence on the case. Do you have any idea how bad that is for a detective?”

  “What. Did. You. Tell. Them.”

  “Tori, I know you’re angry. You have every right to be. And, I’m sorry to say, it gets worse.”

  “How could it get worse, Vance?” Tori wanted to know. Her voice was rising and it didn’t take a genius to see that her emotions were starting to show.

  “Captain Nelson is sending someone to collect you tomorrow morning.”

  “What?! Am I being arrested?”

  “No,” Vance said as he took her hands in his. “They want to ask you questions about how you knew the pendant was real. They’ve got it in their heads that you let it slip to one of your students and that’s how they knew it was worth a lot of money.”

  “I did no such thing,” Tori snapped, pulling her hands free from her husband’s. “Why didn’t you tell them that?”

  “He did tell them that,” I added. “Over and over. He protested your innocence so much that they pulled him from the case.”

  Shocked, Tori looked back at her detective husband.

  “They didn’t.”

  “They had no choice,” Vance admitted. “I can’t fault them for that, babe. The moment you were implicated it became a conflict of interest for me to continue to lead this investigation.”

  “What am I going to do? I can’t go to jail!”

  “That’s why we’re going to solve this,” Vance assured her, taking her hands back. “Tonight.”

  “Tonight? How?”

  “We’re going to go over everything that is known about the case so far. Four heads are better than one. Perhaps together we can find something that was overlooked?”

  “That’s your plan for keeping me out of jail?” Tori skeptically asked.

  “Do you have a better one?” Vance countered.

  “No.”

  “Okay. Let’s get started. Zack, do you have something we can write on? Notebooks, notepads, etc.?”

  I grinned, “I’m a writer. Of course I do.”

  Fifteen minutes later we were all munching on hot pizza and taking notes on our respective notebooks.

  “Okay, to get started, let’s review what we know. Jimmy Nelson and Dean Rupert learn about the pendant’s presence in Egyptian Exhibitions…”

  “Jimmy Nelson,” Tori muttered. “He was the one that noticed I had Googled the pendant. I noticed he was standing there only I don’t know how long he was looking. Oh, good God. I am responsible for this.”

  “You didn’t force those boys to steal the necklace,” Jillian reminded her. “It’s not your fault, Tori.”

  “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum hatch a plan to steal the necklace,” Vance continued as he made a few notes in his notebook. “They figured they’d also get a good chuckle out of this whole scheme by making it look like the mummy woke up from the dead, swiped the pendant, and wandered off.

  “Now this next part is speculation,” Vance said as he pulled his small, official police notebook from his back pocket. “We’re guessing that later that night Jimmy went back to the school in an attempt to sneak the pendant off the school’s campus, only his presence was discovered by Sherlock. We tracked him through the school to the band room only to lose him when he threw a chair through the window. Consequently, that’s what cut up his hands. Zack, remember the blood on his mummy costume? It was from the wounds he sustained trying to get through the broken window as fast as possible.”

  “So at this point the necklace is still at the school, right?” I asked.

  “Pendant,” Tori corrected.

  “Whatever,” I grumped.

  “Yes,” Vance answered. “People were being searched as they left the school. They knew that they wouldn’t be able to smuggle the pendant out of the school. Not without being caught. I can only assume it was at this time both boys had realized they had bitten off more than they could chew. So now the question is, what do they do with the pendant? By his own admission the pendant is in Jimmy’s locker. Now what does he do with it? They dare not show it to anyone. The whole damn town was talking about the mummy and the theft.”

  “I would say that it was right about then that the dumb-asses continue to fuel the rumor that the mummy had indeed come back to life and was now terrorizing the town,” I added.

  Zack nodded, “Right. These two hooligans incite panic by appearing in various places around town, but only in locations where they can make a clean getaway.”

  “I almost had the twerp,” I recalled. “I chased him from Gary’s Grocery all the way to the high school.”

  “Thus proving we were dealing with high school kids,” Vance confirmed. “Not very bright kids at that. But, it worked to our advantage.”

  “How?” Tori asked.

  “Because they kept showing off,” Vance told her. He looked up at me and nodded. “They wanted to show that they were smarter than everyone else and keep the town paralyzed with fear.”

  “I think they relished the attention,” Jillian softly added.

  “Of that, I have no doubt,” Vance said, giving Jillian a nod of his head. “So what do they do? They wait until it starts to get dark. They get into costume and sneak into the maze using that tiny trail that could barely be called a road.”

  “But how did they get a car in there without it being heard?” Jillian asked. “You know as well as I do that it’s very quiet out in that field. An engine would be easily heard.”

  “That’s one of the things we need to figure out,” Vance admitted. “I’ll add it to my list.”

  As if we were all in a class listening to a professor give a lecture, the three of us jotted the same thing down in our own respective notebooks.

  “Now, this is where it starts to get good,” Vance said, rubbing his hands together. “Zack and I catch Jimmy and Dean in the maze. Sherlock IDs Jimmy from the school and he finally confesses to masterminding the whole operation. Jimmy admits that he and Dean stole the pendant, and the mummy, and stashed the pendant in his locker.”

  “Number 151,” Vance recalled, glancing at his notebook. “Sherlock led us straight to his locker a few days after the crime took place. Now, I will admit that I’m curious as hell. Did he take us to the locker because he smelled marijuana or was it because he somehow knew the pendant was in that locker?”

  “I’d have to go with the latter explanation,” I decided. “When we left that locker Sherlock kept looking back at it. He was reluctant to leave, as if he were trying to tell us that we were missing something. I think the pendant was still in the locker at that time.”

  Vance nodded, “I would agree. So, now that we caught the perpetrators, we’re told where the pendant had been stashed, only guess what? The pendant wasn’t there.”

  “Do you believe the boys when they said they didn’t know where it went?” Tori asked.

  Vance shrugged, “It’s hard to say.”

  “I’ll say it,” I announced. “I happened to be looking straight at Jimmy when the principal announced there was nothing in the locker. The look on the kid’s face was priceless. There was someone who truly thought the pendant was in that locker. Both of them did.”

  “So how was it stolen?” Tori asked. “How did someone else figure out where the pendant was?”

  Vance shrugged and held up his hands in an I-don’t-know gesture. He picked up his notebook and added some more notes. The rest of us did the same. Vance finished writing and looked up at us.

  “Alright, that’s two things for the list. Does anyone else have anything to add?”

  I cleared my throat, “I’ll say. You’re forgetting about Ammar Fadil.”

  Vance snapped his fingers, “Damn. You’re right. I totally forgot about him. Okay, we also need to figure out how it’s humanly possible to turn a body into a mummified person in less than a
day.”

  “It’s not,” Tori vowed. “No matter how you look at it, you can’t rush the laws of physics. Certain things take a very specific amount of time to accomplish. There’s simply no way for a body to become mummified in such a short amount of time.”

  “Then how?” Vance demanded. “You tell me how it’s possible.”

  I made a ‘T’ out of my hands and held them up for everyone to see.

  “Ok, wait a minute. Let’s look at this logically. If what Tori says is true, and I’m inclined to believe her since we heard Dr. Tarik say the very same thing a few days ago, a human corpse takes somewhere around 35-70 days to become a mummy. There are no shortcuts, so that can only mean it was done by the usual way.”

  “But there wasn’t enough time!” Vance protested. “We saw the assistant on the night of the heist, remember? That was only a few days ago.”

  “That’s right,” I confirmed. “That would mean that the body isn’t Ammar Fadil.”

  “Dr. Tarik would disagree with you,” Vance pointed out. “As would modern science. While we don’t yet have the complete results from the lab, thus far the DNA recovered from the mummified body is pointing to one person: the assistant. It has to be Ammar Fadil.”

  “What if it isn’t?” I asked, warming up. “Could it be someone else? You said it yourself. The DNA analysis hasn’t been completed. Preliminary results can still be wrong.”

  “Look, Zack,” Vance said as he set the small notebook down and reached for his beer, “you can’t fool a DNA test. The only way that body couldn’t be Ammar Fadil was if… was if…”

  “…if he had a twin?” Jillian quietly suggested. “Is that what you were going to say, Vance?”

  “I was going to suggest another family member, like his father,” I said, “but a twin would work. Do twins have the same DNA?”

  “I believe I can answer that,” Tori said, raising a hand. “I’ve done genetic studies before. A typical person has about 100 new mutations in their DNA. Spread that out over six million base pairs and you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. Give it enough time someone, somewhere, might be able to come up with a way for scientists to be able to tell identical twins’ DNA apart. To answer your question, Zack, technically no, but as far as forensic science is concerned, yes. There is no way to tell the DNA apart. Not yet, anyway.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked, looking around the room. “Are you telling me that, forensically speaking, the mummified body could be Ammar’s twin? Then what happened to Ammar?”

  Vance was silent as he considered. He then pulled his cell from his pocket, placed a call, quickly terminated said call, and then looked over at Tori.

  “I can’t call the station about this. I’m off the case. That would have been bad. Tor, tell me something. Last year, at Christmas. What was the name of your friend we ran into at the mall in Medford?”

  “Connie?”

  “No, not Connie. She was short, had black hair, and had a tattoo on her right shoulder.”

  “Oh. Susan? What about her?”

  “What’s her last name?” Vance asked. He had returned his attention to his phone and was scrolling through the many numbers in his phone’s address book.

  “Williams. You want to call Susan? Why?”

  “Not Susan but her husband, Jeremy. I know I’ve got them in my address book but I must not have punched in their last name. I can’t find them anywhere.”

  “That’s because Susan’s husband is Jessie,” Tori pointed out.

  “Right. Jessie.”

  “What do you want to talk to Jessie Williams for?”

  Vance found the entry and tapped the number. Once it was ringing he finally looked up at Tori.

  “Because Jessie Williams works at the FBI. He owes me a favor. It’s time to collect.”

  “You’ve got friends in the FBI?” I asked, impressed. “Not bad, pal. Not bad at all.”

  “He’s… hello? I’d like to speak to special agent Jessie Williams, please. That’s right, he’s out of the Medford, Oregon, office. Hmm? What’s that? Oh. Detective Vance Samuelson, Pomme Valley Police Department. Yes, ma’am. I’m in Oregon, too. Thank you. I’ll wait.”

  “I thought you had a direct number to him?” Tori asked.

  “That makes two of us,” Vance grumbled. “The last time I did this I got straight through to him. They must have changed their phone system out. Maybe they changed their… hello? Jessie? It’s Vance Samuelson, PVPD. How’s it goin’, buddy? Listen, I need to call in that favor you owe me. I need a background check for one Ammar Fadil. He’s an assistant curator at a traveling Egyptian show called ‘Egyptian Exhibitions’. I need to know about Ammar’s family. Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc. I need to know if there’s any connection to PV. You will? That’s great. Thanks, pal. Yes, that’s still my cell number. I look forward to your call. Thanks again.” Vance hung up and looked at each of us. “We should have some answers shortly.”

  “If it turns out Ammar has a twin,” I slowly began, “what does that tell us? Who killed his brother? How did he end up in a corn field?”

  “I would say that someone definitely went to a lot of trouble to get that necklace,” Vance mused. He polished off his beer and leaned back on the couch.

  “If I didn’t know any better,” I said as I polished off my own beer, “I’d say those two punks messed up someone else’s plans.”

  Vance looked at me, his eyes opening wide.

  “Say that again, Zack.”

  “What? The part about the kids messing up someone else’s plans?”

  “Yeah. That’s it. I think you hit the nail on the head. In fact, it makes total sense. I think I’ve got this figured out.”

  “We’re all ears, pal,” I told my friend.

  Jillian placed her hand over mine. A split second later Watson jumped up onto the couch with us and settled herself directly between me and Jillian. She turned to regard Jillian with an expression that almost said, Behave yourself around my daddy. I almost choked on my beer.

  Vance regarded Watson with a bemused expression on his face.

  “I think someone is jealous.”

  “She’s a dog,” I pointed out. “How could a dog be jealous?”

  Jillian stroked the silky fur on the back of Watson’s neck.

  “Don’t you worry about your daddy,” Jillian assured the little corgi. “I would never hurt him.”

  Watson turned to gaze up into Jillian’s eyes. She licked her hand in response. I also noticed that she had sighed happily, indicating she wasn’t planning on going anywhere anytime soon.

  “As I was saying,” Zack said, trying again, “I have a theory. I think what we have here are two separate crimes, only the first happened before the second could be played out.”

  “You’re thinking someone has been planning on stealing the pendant for quite some time now,” I guessed.

  “Nothing screams out premeditation like mummifying a body,” Vance agreed.

  “I want to hear Vance’s theory,” Jillian announced. “All of it, from start to finish.”

  Vance took another pull on his beer, managed to close his mouth before the belch could escape, and then pulled his notebooks closer.

  “Okay, here goes. I’m thinking our friend Ammar, who is employed by an organization responsible for setting up a mobile display of Egyptian artifacts, decided he was tired of making peanuts. My guess is that he somehow learned about the plan to transport that pendant across the United States by being just another trinket in a show that has nothing but replicas of the real thing.”

  “With you so far,” I said. Jillian promptly shushed me.

  “Now, Ammar starts making plans. He…”

  “How could he have possibly made plans that far ahead to steal Nekhbet’s Pendant from PV?” Tori asked, perplexed. “Their visit here was a last minute decision. At least that’s what Dr. Tarik told me.”

  “Let’s assume what you say is true,” Vance he told his wife. “Let�
��s say the mastermind behind all of this didn’t know about this stop in PV. In fact I’m willing to bet he didn’t have a clue. However, with that being said, I’d say Ammar discovered he had the perfect opportunity to pull it off.”

  “Here in PV?” I skeptically asked. “How?”

  “Think about it,” Vance urged me. “They knew they were going to pull off this robbery of the necklace.”

  “Pendant,” Tori corrected.

  Vance grinned and shook his head.

  “Pendant. Whatever. They knew it was going to be difficult to pull off the heist in a big-name city. Pomme Valley presented too tempting of a locale to pass up. So Ammar began preparations to steal the pendant, only…”

  “Someone beat him to it,” Jillian added. She nodded her head. “That’s impressive, Vance.”

  “Oh, don’t praise him,” Tori moaned. “His head’s already big enough.”

  “I heard that,” Vance said, not bothering to look up from his notes. “Continuing on. Now Ammar is in trouble. All his carefully laid out plans are for naught. After months of planning he ended up with not a damn thing.”

  “How does this help us?” Zack asked. “Where does that leave us?”

  “I’m getting to it,” Vance answered. “Keep your panties on. Now. Let’s switch gears for just a moment to young Mr. Nelson and his counterpart, Dean Rupert. Jimmy Nelson just happens to discover that one of the items in the Egyptian show setting up in the school happens to be worth lots of money. What’s a young teenager to do when tempted with that much money?”

  “Not all high school kids think like that,” Tori scolded, throwing her husband a frown.

  “But they should still know right from wrong,” I pointed out. “Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to steal the necklace.”

  “Pendant,” Tori corrected.

  “Whatever,” I grinned.

  “Thanks, Zack,” Vance said. “That’s the point I was trying to make. Kids should know when NOT to make a bad decision. Anyway, back to the point. Two kids are tempted enough to do something about it. So they hatch a plan to steal the pendant,” Vance threw a look at Tori, who returned his look with a grin. “They make it look like a mummy is the culprit and have a little fun terrorizing the town in the process.”