Grand Theft Griffin

by Michael Angel

  Since the ‘Hall of Gems’ didn’t have any giant dinosaur skeletons or hanging banners to display, the room as a whole was a four-story high cylinder of open space. Three rectangular skylights ran the length of the ceiling, though the middle one had been almost completely shattered. A low moan of dry air whistled through the jagged edges of the giant opening.

  I looked away from the skylight, taking stock of the ground-level surroundings. Hallways opened at either end, leading to other parts of the museum. Shattered glass covered great swathes of the floor behind the yellow tape border. Various exhibits on the history of gemology and their display cases lay scattered about, knocked over as if by a heavy weight or a gale-force wind.

  Directly across from where I stood, about eighty feet away, the metallic mouth of a large vault gaped open. The battered vault door lay nearby. Even in the museum’s dull green-white emergency lighting, the twisted remains of the steel hinges glinted back at me. Definitely not a break-in done with a welding torch.

  Something had torn the door off by brute force.

  Chapter Three

  “Dayna! Hey, over here!”

  The voice was familiar, but it didn’t sound like Esteban or Ollivar. A hand waved at me from around yet another display case, so I went on over. For the first time since I’d arrived on scene, I smiled. At last, an ally of sorts.

  Hector Reyes was the best crime scene photographer and evidence examiner I’d worked with to date. He stood in his usual pose, a wide-hipped stance that called attention to his exquisitely tooled Chihuahuan leather belt. Various bits of gear dangled from said belt, all to service the big black camera that seemed permanently attached to his right hand. His free left hand made graceful gestures in the air as he engaged in rapid-fire Spanish with a shorter, older man in a janitor’s uniform. I waited as the conversation wound down and Hector patted his companion sympathetically on the shoulder.

  “This is all we needed,” he said, with a shake of his head. “We have a real can of worms here. It’s chueco, hundred percent pure chueco.”

  I nodded agreement. I’d heard both Hector and Alanzo use the term. Depending on the situation, it either meant that a person was crooked, or a situation was completely screwed up. The latter seemed the more likely meaning this time.

  “Sounds like the time you photographed the blood spatters around that body for me,” I said, recalling the very case that had yanked me bodily into Andeluvia. “Remember the ‘Connor McCloud’ case? That one was the definition of chueco.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, I do. You ever I.D. that body?”

  “Not really,” I hedged. “Shelly Richardson’s put it in the cold case files.”

  “Figures. Hope we do better this time.” He turned, putting his arm around the shorter man. “I’d like you to meet our witness, Tomás. He’s also my cousin. Well, second cousin twice removed on my mom’s side.”

  Tomás nodded to me politely, but didn’t add anything. He was an older man, small and thin but wire-tough. His eyes were fever-bright and his hands quivered, but it wasn’t from age or drugs. He turned back to Hector, shook his head, and made a hands-up gesture that easily crossed the language barrier: enough. His cousin nodded and Tomás shuffled from the room as fast as his legs would take him.

  I gave Hector a puzzled look. “What was that about?”

  “He’s feeling a bit ‘stretched’, so he decided to go home and take a nap.”

  “Stretched?”

  “Tomás is still feeling jumpy from the ‘event’ that broke this skylight into a million pieces. He’s tired from working the graveyard and then telling the same damn story to six different cops. And he’s more than a little pissed off at being called loco, a drug addict, and worse.”

  I could understand that last bit a lot more than Hector could know. “So what did he see?”

  “He was setting up to sweep the Hall of Gems at a quarter to four. Then out of nowhere, he hears a huge bang. Something big crashes in from the roof. He thought maybe a plane had fallen out of the sky or something, at least until he heard a cry.”

  “A cry? Someone called out?”

  “Or something. Tomás said it sounded like a huge hawk or eagle. Then a beat of wings and a glimpse of something furry flying through the air. It was all too fast for him to really make things out, but he says it was part lion, part bird.” Hector paused, adding, “Dayna, I know this sounds ridiculous. But I know Tomás, he’s as straight-arrow as they come. He doesn’t do drugs, sniff aerosol cans, or whatever that idiot Ollivar is saying. My cousin is solid.”

  “I’m not dismissing anything out of hand, believe me. What else did he see?”

  “Whatever it was, it got close enough to him so that all he saw was a blur of colors. White, gold, and green.”

  “Green? You’re sure?”

  “I asked him twice, he says he saw the color green. At least, until whatever it was smacked into him, knocked him senseless. He woke up to find the alarms ringing, the place a shambles, and that vault door torn off and tossed into the room like it weighed nothing.”

  I didn’t say anything at first, but my own emotions were getting a little ‘stretched’. As a matter of fact, I was really, really worried. Fayleene and centaurs had made it through to my world before. Perhaps another species had found a way through.

  “You set to walk on some glass?” Hector asked.

  In answer, I lifted one leg, showing off the thick sole of my oh-so-attractive stompy boot.

  “Looks good,” he pronounced, and lifted the yellow tape barrier to duck underneath.

  I followed suit. The crunching noises from moving over the BB-sized granules of glass made it sound like we were tramping around a mountain of puffed rice cereal. The sound shifted to the nerve-tingling jangle of glass shards grinding away at each other as we moved directly into the breakage zone.

  Hector wasn’t a fully licensed analyst like myself, but he’d been around hundreds of crime scenes. His ability to read patterns in everything from blood splatters to glass fractures was even better than mine. He led me out to the center of the room, directly under the shattered skylight, and spread his arms as if to encompass the scene.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s hear your observations. See if they match up with mine.”

  “Sounds good,” I agreed. We’d done this before on the odd occasion that one of us was puzzled as to a particular pattern. Sometimes we were able to make a breakthrough this way. “First off, a skylight has to use tempered or laminated glass. The breakage I’m seeing has some long shards. Tempered glass won’t do that – it explodes into little cubes. So I’m guessing this is laminated glass, held together with Grade-C polyvinyl butyral.”

  “Grade A, actually.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. I didn’t figure it out on my own, I asked Tomás. Those are thirty-foot long window slabs up there, they needed the strongest glass around.”

  It made sense. Laminated glass was held together by a thin sheet of polyvinyl, sandwiched between an upper and lower pane. That made it tougher and more likely to stick together after breaking. Otherwise, Hector wouldn’t have led me under the break without better headgear. Sheets of falling glass made very efficient guillotines.

  “Second,” I continued, “we’ve got a twenty-foot hole, and relatively long glass shards here on the ground. The laminate had a chance to spread the weight of impact before the pane gave way. That means it’s not a small, high-velocity object that punched its way through. Not unless they’re making rifle bullets in a lot larger, slower calibers these days.”

  “You’re seeing what I’m seeing, then. Something huge hit that pane at sub-terminal velocity. And that is what boggles my mind. If the unknown object wasn’t falling like a boulder dropped from a sky crane, then…could it have been under a controlled descent?”

  “You think whatever-it-was flew through the window, instead of falling through it.”

  “That’s the only
conclusion that makes any sense! Look at this.” Hector turned his camera so that I could take a look at the digital screen on the back. I saw an image of a dark surface, pitted with tiny bright dots. “That’s a shot I took of a cork board hung on the wall section under the break. It’s studded with small glass shards that entered at a near-horizontal angle.”

  “So they didn’t fall onto the board. Or bounce there after hitting the floor.”

  “Unlikely. They must have been picked up and flung against the board by vortex turbulence. A small helicopter descending through the break at power could generate one strong enough.”

  Or a griffin’s wings as it hovered in place, I thought.

  “Let’s follow that line of thinking,” I said aloud. “They do make drone aircraft now. Some are small enough to fit through a skylight, maybe weigh enough to make that hole. Some even have rotors which allow them to hover in place.”

  “Yeah, perhaps. And I suppose whoever it was kitted out their drone aircraft to look like a lion. Or a giant eagle. Maybe even Big Bird from Sesame Street.”

  “And even then,” I finished, “how could you equip the drone to wrench open a foot-thick vault door?”

  “Ah, now that’s where things get interesting,” Hector said with a flourish. “It’s not really a vault door.”

  “It’s not?” I bit my lip in thought.

  Curiouser and curiouser, as someone from Wonderland might have said.

  Chapter Four

  “We’re not talking about a real vault door,” Hector explained, as he motioned for me to follow him. “It’s just a plain metal piece that was built mostly for show, back when Eisenhower was president. They keep it propped open when the museum’s open so people can get the feeling that they’re looking at something valuable.”

  We passed the broken door where it lay atop a small mound of glass shards. A quadruple set of short grooves or gouges along the side made me think of gripping talons. Hector stopped, and I looked over his shoulder. The inside of the ‘vault’ had been a display room filled with tables set inside glass cases. The cases were shattered, the contents long gone.

  I considered that. “So it was propped open last night?”

  “No, they shut it, and Tomás says he saw the closing crew lock it when he checked in. It still doesn’t help answer anything, though. The door isn’t strong by bank vault standards, but it still had a heavy deadbolt and steel hinges. A human being wouldn’t be able to bust it open.”

  In my mind, I envisioned my friend Grimshaw as he tore off the entire top half of a pickup’s metal camper shell. I only had a moment to contemplate the idea. My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of multiple footsteps at the far end of the room.

  A squad of men in the same unmarked black suits had entered the hall, but they didn’t cross the tape border. Instead, they formed a perimeter of their own around a section of the museum exhibit still draped in white drop cloths. More men wheeled in a safe mounted on sets of heavy metal casters. A pair of the men remained with the safe while the others entered the inner part of the exhibit, out of sight.

  “What in the world is going on over there?” I asked Hector.

  “Ollivar didn’t tell you?”

  “He was too busy trying to win a pissing contest with me.”

  “Figures. If it makes you feel any better, I’d have bet on you.”

  I bit my lip, suppressing a grin. “Thanks, Hector.”

  “The guys in black are a private security firm. According to Tomás, the museum was set to open a brand new exhibit tomorrow morning: the Montana ‘Cornflower’ Sapphires. Worth millions, so they were kept in the new vault across the way. Given what’s happened, they’re sitting on it like a flock of mother hens.”

  “Did Tomás tell you what was in this older vault?”

  “No, but I found a description of the contents in a museum guidebook. It held one of the museum’s vintage collections.”

  “A collection of diamonds? Rubies, maybe?”

  Hector shook his head. “Quartz. The museum’s had a flawless set of clear quartz crystals from Brazil displayed here since the Sixties. Quite a rare find, from what the museum guide says. A completely pure variant of crystal with no inclusions, called ‘phantom’ quartz.”

  “You said it was rare. Rare enough to be worth stealing?”

  “I suppose. If you’re someone who gets a hard-on from reading gemology journals. The entire set’s supposed to be worth ten, eleven thousand dollars. That’s enough to categorize it as grand theft, at least.”

  “But with the sapphire exhibit in the same hall…”

  “That’s right. Someone passed up the chance to steal million-dollar sapphires for some crystals worth chump change by comparison.”

  Now my mind was awhirl with confusion. McClatchy had picked the right case for Ollivar to pin on me, that much was sure. And in the back of my mind was another worry: the ultimate purpose of the theft. A being from Andeluvia might have use for those crystals that no one from this world could conceive of. Not for the first time tonight, I wished that I had Galen’s wizardly counsel at my side.

  “All right,” I sighed. “We’re getting wrapped around the axle here. Let’s put aside possible motive for the moment and just focus on evidence collection. Have you finished taking pictures of the entire scene yet?”

  He grimaced. “I thought I had. But I had to switch to some different lenses and start over a few minutes ago. The lights here are playing havoc with my photos.”

  “It’s really important, Hector.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll have a full set ready for you to look over.” He stepped away, then looked back over his shoulder. “What about you? What are you thinking of doing?”

  “I’ll start with a visual sweep of the vault and this door on my own. Maybe I’ll stumble on some metal shard or piece of fiber that can prove our ‘drone aircraft’ theory.”

  Reyes carefully crunched his way through the glass as I started at the vault entrance. I began with the metallic door frame, looking for the telltale marks of jackhammers, hints of explosives, fibers or cutting tools. But I knew what I was really looking for.

  The ‘clunk’ of wood on metal made me look up. The private security team had brought out a display board festooned with perfectly cut sapphires. The stones glittered like little lavender flowers as the men on the team slipped the board carefully into the waiting safe.

  A chuff as the safe’s door closed, followed by the clack-clack of tumblers.

  I forced my attention back to the problem at hand. I was really looking for marks of talons, traces of pinfeather. Yes, I knew that it was bad form to do a sweep with a single conclusion already formed and in place. Starting with the end in mind could cause even the sharpest investigator to miss otherwise important details. But I couldn’t shake it. The one ability of mine I trusted more than any other was my sense of smell. And that tiny trace of animal musk in the hall when I first walked in told me one unmistakable truth.

  Whatever else was true, a griffin had certainly burgled the Natural History Museum to steal a bunch of near-worthless crystals.

  What the hell was going on here?

  I put the thought out of my mind as I began my sweep at the top of the vault door. At slightly higher than shoulder height I found a set of four matching indentations on each side, conical thrust and compression marks against the hard steel edges of the door frame. Based on the marks, the thrusting force came from the outside in. I stopped and considered my options.

  My knowledge of griffins stemmed almost completely from being around my friend Grimshaw. Medieval heraldry commonly showed griffins as having full eagle half-bodies, with hawk-like talons for forepaws. In Andeluvia, the griffins were more leonine. Only stern eagle faces and wings displayed their avian side.

  Shaw’s forepaws had five talons, similar to a large cat. Unlike earthly felines, he also had a semi-opposable thumb. Without a fully opposable thumb and sporting thick, fur-clad fingers, it would be very diffic
ult for Shaw to pick up a coffee mug and nearly impossible to type on a keyboard. That said, I’d seen him work doorknobs, car horn buttons, and pick up large to medium-size objects with relative ease.

  So, it was certainly possible for a griffin to grab hold of the vault door around the edges. Of course, lion strength or no, it would be difficult to jam a griffin’s fingers into the small opening around the frame without injury. But I’d also seen griffins from Andeluvia’s Air Cavalry wear all sorts of armor. And if a griffin could wear Andeluvian-crafted gauntlets…

  I considered for a moment before diving back into my crime-scene case for some additional gear. I started with a new sample bag and a smaller set of forceps. Next, I pulled out a goggle strap with magnifying lenses and put that on. Finally, I found a disposable face mask and slipped the loops over my ears.

  You learn a lot about crime scene analysis work in the classroom and laboratory, sure. But only on-the-job experience teaches you how to avoid the little ‘gotchas’ that can trip you up. I was looking for something really small, either a tiny metal shaving or a piece of feather. The last thing I wanted when I was closing in for the kill with my forceps was for the object to get blown away by my breath, hence the face mask.

  My hunch paid off. A couple of minutes of carefully going over each indentation in the door frame with the magnifiers turned up something small but significant: a thin flake of metal. I bagged it and mentally bet myself that it would turn out to be the same mixture of iron and carbon as ‘blister steel’. Said steel was only manufactured in the High Middle Ages.

  Or in a fantasy world complete with kings, wizards, talking deer, and griffins.

  Chapter Five

  I looked over the shattered remains of the rest of the room and wondered if I should get the filtered vacuum unit from the van to find traces of fur or feather. But before I could make that decision, I heard someone crunching their way towards me over the mounds of broken glass outside the vault room. Then a good-natured chuckle.