Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  Maria handed her a brown padded envelope the size of a paperback. Zoe’s name and address were printed on the envelope in block letters. There was no return address.

  “That’s odd.” Then she thought, Grandmother. She hefted the package in her hand. It was light. “Thanks. I gotta go, but I’ll call you later.”

  She walked past the elevator—a creaky, old metal cage a person would have to be insane to get into—and headed up the stairs. Her loft was at the top of six flights and usually she liked to see how fast she could run up them before she became winded, but not tonight.

  Tonight, she walked slowly, holding the envelope tight, as if it were a magic talisman.

  SHE COULDN’T BELIEVE it, simply couldn’t believe it. Her front door was wide-open. The lights were on.

  She ran into her loft without stopping to think the intruder could still be in there. The place was a shambles, but—

  My cats.

  God, oh, God. They were indoor cats, they’d spent their whole lives in this one big room. If they’d gotten out, if someone had hurt them …

  She dropped her satchel and the envelope on the floor. She ran to the bed, flung up the quilt that was now dragging on the floor. Two sets of yellow eyes peered at her from deep in the corner. Her own eyes blurred with tears of relief.

  Bitsy, a calico sometimes too brave for her own good, came right out at the sound of Zoe’s voice. Barney, big and black and fat, wouldn’t budge and hissed at her when she reached for him.

  She had to resort to the cream cheese. Barney was a sucker for cream cheese and he had the potbelly to prove it.

  The crinkle of the tinfoil wrap did the trick. His whiskers emerged first, followed by the enormous rest of him. He waddled over to lick a dab of the cheese off her finger, in between meows to let her know what he thought of this fine state of affairs.

  Zoe sat on the floor and gathered her babies into her lap. She buried her face in their warm fur.

  When her heart had finally quieted, she looked around her loft. Whoever had done this had not only searched the place, he’d savaged it. Shattered china, split sacks of flour and sugar, broken wine bottles, ripped cushions. The lock on her door was the best out there and it was the only thing that hadn’t been broken. It had been picked.

  A professional then, of some sort, but one who’d been angry. Angry enough to take it out on her things.

  She scratched Barney under his chin. “What did he look like, babe? Did he have a long brown ponytail? Do you think you could pick him out of a mug—”

  Out beyond the open door, a board creaked. She’d climbed up and down those stairs every day for five years. It was the fourth flight, third tread.

  Barney heard it, too. He leaped out of her arms and shot back under the bed, Bitsy right behind him.

  Zoe quickly and quietly got to her feet and picked up her satchel where she’d dropped it on the floor. She eased open the zipper, took out her gun, released the safety. She reached for the padded envelop nearby and slid it under the bed. Barney hissed.

  She went to the door, thought about closing it, then didn’t. She flicked off the lights instead.

  She pressed her back against the wall, holding her gun two-fisted, barrel pointed up, and waited, her heart beating fast and hard.

  A shadow crossed the threshold first, followed by the silhouette of a man. Zoe pressed the gun muzzle into his head, right behind his ear.

  “Don’t even breathe.”

  16

  THE SILHOUETTE didn’t move, but he did breathe, a sharp intake that ended with her name. “Zoe? It’s me.”

  Zoe pulled back the gun as her own breath whooshed out of her and she sagged against the wall. After a moment, she reached behind her and turned on the lights.

  Inspector Sean Mackey stepped farther into the loft, his hands spread, half-raised in the air. His chest heaved with the adrenaline shooting through his system. “Dammit, woman. Are you nuts? I could’ve shot you.”

  “Yeah? You were the one with the muzzle of a Glock pressed against your ear.”

  “So will you put it away, for Christ’s sake?”

  Zoe looked down and saw she still had the gun pointed at his heart. “Sorry. I’m a little jumpy here.”

  “No shit.” Mackey lowered his hands as he looked around him. “Jesus. What happened? It looks like a bomb went off.”

  “I’m guessing it was the ponytailed guy looking for the altar of bones—whatever that is. What are you doing back here anyway? I thought you were on your way to Homicide.”

  “I came to tell you that I’ve radioed for a patrol car to give you a lift. In case that asshole decides to come after you again. Now I’m thinking after we do the sketch and go through the mug books, you oughta spend the night in a hotel somewhere.”

  “I’ll be okay. I doubt he’s coming back—for one thing he already knows that what he’s looking for isn’t here. And I got a bar I can put across the door on the inside. The only way anyone can get through that is with a battering ram…. Mack, I really, really have to take a shower.”

  He waved a hand. “Okay, okay. I’m going. The patrol car should be here in five minutes tops, but I’m going to stick around outside until it gets here, just in case. And I’m sending the lab guys to go over this place with a fine-tooth comb.”

  After the door closed behind him, Zoe lowered the iron-reinforced bar and latched it into place. She watched out the window until she saw Mackey emerge and go to lean against a lamppost to wait for the patrol car. Feeling safe now, for the moment at least, she dropped to her knees and wriggled under the bed, feeling for the padded envelope.

  She couldn’t find her scissors in the mess, so she used a steak knife to slice carefully through the glued-down flap. She wet a towel and wiped flour, sugar, and some unidentifiable brown, gooey stuff off her flea-market table, and if the lab guys didn’t like it, they could lump it. She found one chair that wasn’t in splinters, pulled it up to the table, and sat down.

  Barney and Bitsy joined her, purring and rubbing against her arms and generally getting in the way. For a moment longer she simply held the envelope in her hand. She felt excited and she wanted to cry. Her grandmother had left this in her mailbox not long before she was murdered, Zoe was sure of it.

  She opened the envelope and emptied its contents carefully onto the table: a postcard, a key, and a couple of folded-up pieces of lined tablet paper.

  The postcard, worn at the edges and bent in one corner, was of a famous medieval tapestry, one of those with a unicorn. She turned it over.

  It wasn’t addressed, but in the space for the message her grandmother, or someone, had written what looked like a poem in Russian:

  Blood flows into the sea

  The sea touches the sky

  From the sky falls the ice

  Fire melts the ice

  A storm drowns the fire

  And rages through the night

  But blood flows on into the sea

  Without end.

  It didn’t quite scan like a poem; it was odd all the way around. The words were simple, they conjured up clear images in her mind, but she couldn’t make sense out of the whole. She read it twice more. Got nothing.

  The small print at the top of the postcard identified the tapestry as The Lady and the Unicorn: À mon seul désir. Musée de Cluny, Paris, France. She flipped it back over. A woman stood in front of a tent with her maid-servant beside her, holding open a casket. A unicorn lay on the ground next to her. But there was nothing in the tapestry of flowing blood or falling ice or a raging storm.

  She tucked the postcard back into the padded envelope and picked up the key.

  It looked old. No, beyond old—it looked as ancient as the beginning of time and felt heavy, like bronze. And strangely warm in her hand, as if it still held captive the fire from the forge that had fashioned it. One end was in the shape of a griffin, an animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. But the key’s teeth were particularly st
range—like Ferengi teeth, jagged and angled in a crazy way. Zoe couldn’t imagine what kind of lock such a key would fit into.

  She put the key back into the envelope with the postcard, then picked up the sheets of notebook paper and unfolded them. It was a letter, also written in Cyrillic, the words ragged and shaky.

  Here, Zoe saw, were a few words had been heavily crossed out, before the letter went on.

  Then at the bottom, the words darker, sharper, as if fear had made her grandmother press the pen deeper into the paper:

  “THE ALTAR OF bones,” Zoe said out loud, and she shuddered as if she were looking down into an open grave. Her grandmother had died with those words on her lips.

  She shivered again as she got up quickly and went to the window. Inspector Mackey was gone, but the patrol car was here now. A uniformed cop stood next to it, talking into his shoulder radio.

  She read over her grandmother’s letter again. The altar of bones, becoming the next Keeper, a secret pathway and riddles to unlock—it should seem silly, like something out of a Russian folktale, yet her grandmother was dead, murdered.

  The ponytailed man. He was close by still, Zoe could feel him, and her throat burned as if the chain were still wrapped around her neck, choking her.

  She looked around at the shambles he’d made of her loft. Surely he hadn’t expected to find an altar made out of bones in here? But maybe it wasn’t really an altar, or maybe it was an altar but it wasn’t really made out of bones.

  The riddle was making her head hurt. Whatever the altar of bones was, the ponytailed man had killed her grandmother trying to get his hands on it.

  Well, to hell with him. Zoe wasn’t going to allow her grandmother to have died in vain. If Katya Orlova wanted her granddaughter to be the next Keeper, then her granddaughter would do whatever it took to become just that, even though she had no earthly idea at this point what it even meant, let alone what it would entail, beyond—

  Look to the Lady … She took out the postcard of the lady and the unicorn to study it again.

  “Beyond a trip to the Musée de Cluny,” she said to Barney, who was pawing through the mess on the floor for more cream cheese.

  She took another quick glance out the window—the patrol car was still there, but the cop was gone. He must be on his way up. She would have to hurry.

  She looked for her jewelry box and finally discovered it dumped upside down in her bathtub. She sorted through the tangle, looking for a sturdy chain, and found a silver one that would work. She threaded the chain through the key, then fastened it around her neck and hid it beneath her sweater.

  A fist pounded on the door. “Ms. Dmitroff?”

  “Just a minute,” she called out. “I’m not quite dressed yet.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. I’ll, uh, be right out here in the hall.”

  She tucked the postcard and her grandmother’s letter into a zippered compartment inside her satchel. Then went quickly to her rolltop desk and opened the secret cubbyhole. Her passport was still there, thank God. She put it into her bag as well, then checked her wallet: $85 in cash, plenty for a cab to the airport. If she couldn’t get a direct flight to Paris tonight, she would try to go through Chicago or New York, or even Atlanta. Once she landed, she could get euros from an ATM.

  She would text Gretchen, her paralegal, while she was in the cab, have her apply for a continuance on the one court case she had scheduled for next week. She also needed to file an amicus brief on behalf of a custody case, but Gretchen could deal with that, too.

  Zoe felt a sudden pang at the thought of her grandmother lying in that white plastic body bag in the morgue’s refrigerator. She didn’t want her to be buried as an indigent, and she didn’t trust Anna Larina to care enough to make the proper arrangements. Maybe she could get Gretchen to at least start the paperwork for her if she didn’t get back from Paris in time.

  Another knock on the door, gentler this time. “Uh, ma’am? How you doing?”

  “Coming …”

  She grabbed up fresh underwear, socks and panties and bra, stuffed them in her satchel. She really would’ve loved to shower and change. The clothes she had on, black jeans and black cashmere turtleneck, had been through hell today. But there was no time.

  She got Barney and Bitsy in their carriers—they were cooperative for once. Then she unbarred and opened the door.

  She gave the young, fresh-faced man who stood on the other side of it her brightest smile. “My poor cats are so terrified I thought I’d leave them with a neighbor while I was gone. I’ll only be minute. If you could maybe wait here by the door, keep an eye on things?”

  MARIA SANCHEZ PRACTICALLY had her door open before Zoe could knock.

  “Are you sure you’re not in trouble, Zoe? All these cops here tonight, coming and going—”

  “Could you take care of the critters for me?” Zoe said, the words tumbling out in a breathless rush. “I have to go out of town for a few days.”

  “Of course. Anything. You know I would die for you.”

  She said it as if she meant it, and it didn’t sound silly or melodramatic. Besides, Zoe trusted her with her babies, and that was pretty much the same thing.

  They hugged, then Zoe said, “Thank you, Maria. And don’t worry, I’m going to be fine. In a few minutes a nice young patrolman is going to be down here asking you where I’ve run off to—”

  “So don’t tell me. It will be better that way.”

  Outside, the elevator clanged into motion, going up. Maria made shooing motions with her hands. “Go, go. Call and let me know you’re safe.”

  Zoe would call. She thought it might be a while, though, before she was safe.

  17

  New York City

  AFIRE ROARED in the library of Miles Taylor’s four-story Upper East

  Side brownstone, but it wasn’t helping the cold he felt in his bones. He sat in his favorite tufted leather chair, nursing a glass of whiskey. A Laphroaig this time, not the sixty-year-old Macallan. The Macallan was only for celebrating the good times, and this was not a good time.

  The cell phone in his pocket vibrated, and he jumped as if he’d just been goosed. Damn things. He couldn’t decide whether he loved them or hated them.

  He fumbled around with the phone for a moment, trying to remember which button on this model he was supposed to push, then he barked, “Taylor, here,” a little too loudly.

  “Hey, lover boy,” Yasmine said in his ear. She sounded breathless, and more than a little crazy. The kind of crazy she got right before or just after she killed someone. “We’ve found Katya Orlova.”

  “About goddamn time.” It had been a year and a half since Mike O’Malley had breathed his last, and since then an army of investigators had been scouring the world over for the woman, with not even a nibble. Until now.

  “Yes, well, don’t pop the champagne just yet,” Yasmine said. “Because there’s good news and there’s bad news.”

  “You know how I hate it when people do that. What’s the bad news?”

  “Not over the phone. Where are you—at home? I got a call to make. I need to nail down a couple of things, then I’ll be there in …” There was a pause, and he imagined her checking her watch. It would be the $100,000 Patek Philippe he’d given her for Christmas. “An hour,” she said, and hung up.

  Miles folded up the phone and dropped it back into his pocket. He wanted to get up and pace the room, but his knee already ached like the devil and he didn’t want to pop any more pain pills. And, besides, he suddenly felt drained, limp. Good news and bad news. Why did it always seem that the bad news was more bad than the good news was good?

  Yaz said they’d found the woman. So what was the bad news—that she didn’t have the film anymore? Or maybe Mike O’Malley had been lying on his deathbed? Miles wouldn’t put it past the son of a bitch. Maybe she never had the film in the first place. But if she never had it, and O’Malley never had it, then who did?

  Dammit, this was making him nuts
.

  He started at a knock on the library door, spilling whiskey into his lap. He half stood, hoping it was Yasmine, even though it was too soon.

  It was his butler instead, bearing a magazine on a silver tray. “I believe you were expecting this, sir. Next month’s Vanity Fair delivered by messenger. Hot off the presses.”

  “Thank you, Randolph. Leave it here by the lamp, will you?”

  Miles waited until the man left the room before he picked up the magazine. He held it out at arm’s length, squinting because he didn’t have his reading glasses handy. His own face looked back at him, and beneath it, in black boldface type, the subhead MILES TAYLOR, AMERICA’S KINGMAKER.

  He had to flip through what seemed to be twenty pages of ads before he got to the table of contents and found the page number for the article. There was another picture of him, standing in a wide-legged stance with his arms crossed over his chest. Only this one had been photoshopped, so that it looked as if he were a giant, straddling a miniature stock exchange and Wall Street.

  Miles’s eyes scanned the article, not really absorbing it, just a few sentences popping up here and there.

  Few people outside of this country’s elitist of the elite have even heard of him. And in this camera- and video-hungry age, he shuns the media as if we were the proverbial plague. Yet his few friends and many enemies alike all agree he has more money and more power than God. What they don’t say, at least not for the record, is that unlike God, Miles Taylor is not afraid to get his hands dirty in the day-to-day running of the world.

  His first real money—and by real money, I’m talking billions here—was made when he was only thirty. When he shorted $500 million worth of Thai bahts, profiting from Bangkok Bank’s reluctance to either raise interest rates or float their currency. At the time a reporter asked if it bothered him that whole companies had gone under and people’s life savings were wiped out in an instant. That because of him, little old mama-sans had been thrown out on the street and were now living off dog food.