“You’re on,” he agreed.
Chapter 3
Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat. (All the hours wound you, the last one kills.)
—Latin proverb
Wednesday, 6 p.m.
The first cry of alarm came from the Egyptian room when it was discovered that one of the cases was open and a mummy was missing. Juliet had never heard Celeste raise her voice but she knew at once who was shouting. So taut were her nerves that Juliet was on her feet and running before the echoes died away.
It took people awhile to leave their own exhibits and make it into the “tomb.” The only person there ahead of Juliet was the casket maker. Meyers looked more annoyed than startled by the pointing and gasping. Certainly he hadn’t rushed over to pat Celeste on the back.
“What?” he demanded. “Speak up!”
“What is it?” Bowman demanded, arriving with his takeout lunch in hand. The smell of Chinese was unpleasant mixed with the mustiness of the still air.
“Look! It’s gone!” She pointed again at the mummy case and this time it sunk in. The mummy was missing.
“For heaven sake, don’t touch anything!” Juliet snapped as Celeste started to reach inside the case. “Come away from there before you mess up any fingerprints. Bowman, call the police.”
The janitor arrived looking like he had had a fall. He was pale and covered in sweat and lurching like Frankenstein’s monster. The knees of his overalls were wet and he smelled of disinfectant.
“Dios mio!” he exclaimed and put out a hand.
“Yes, but don’t touch the glass!” Juliet snapped.
They had barely had time to gather at the empty mummy case when there was another scream from down the hall. This one held terror along with the call for help. Naturally they all rushed away from Celeste and the missing mummy and toward Delores and what proved to be a dead guard in the bathroom.
This surprised Juliet who had expected to find the missing mummy. Instead it was a fresh corpse, sloppily wrapped in bandages.
Meyers muttered something obscene.
“It’s Geary,” Bowman said blankly. “He’s dead.”
That was obvious. No one said anything else. Juliet knew it was the calm before the storm. Juliet shook her head angrily. She had felt this coming for days. Pressed, she would even have been willing to bet that it would be Geary who was involved, though she had seen him more in the role of attacker than that of the attacked.
Esteban, who had been up a ladder and burdened with marionettes that tangled easily, finally joined them. Juliet’s Spanish wasn’t good enough to follow his whispered imprecations, but she knew he was angry.
After his brief lapse Esteban was silent. He had the gift of stillness, which was in no way peaceful even when he wasn’t actively hunting prey. Just then he looked absolutely dangerous, a man who had had his eyes open for too many hours—even days—in a row, and fatigue had robbed him of whatever tolerance he may have had for hysterics and nonsense. The others felt this too and gave him some space.
“No one else go into the bathroom. This is a crime scene,” he said flatly.
He didn’t speak to Juliet as she looked around at the others in the hallway and she was grateful. He knew that she could learn more from undisturbed observation than most people would pick up with a strip search and a headshrinker. He had told her that there was a scientific name for what she did: Hellstromism. It was the art of muscle reading, the study of small muscular giveaways that tell a body reader if someone was lying or nervous.
It was unfortunate that shock and fear could sometimes produce similar reactions.
And why was she looking with suspicion at her fellow artists? Juliet paused at this question but only for a fraction of a second. She was looking at them because her gut said that one of them was a killer. Instinct, honed by years of experience, did not believe that what she was looking at was a robbery which led to an incidental killing when a thief was confronted by a security guard. The crime was murder. The missing mummy was window dressing.
Juliet spared one glance for her friend. Esteban was poker-faced but he was probably thinking beyond the horror of the moment to the need to find the killer if he or she were still in the building. Unless this matter was cleared up and quickly, it was possible that the opening would have to be canceled while the police carried out an investigation. That would be financially disastrous to the gallery. And delay would leave the museum bruised. A long delay would cause a hemorrhage that the museum might never recover from since it would be bleeding money it didn’t have. Eventually the others would figure this out too. Delores, always pragmatic, might already be calculating the cost of a corpse in the bathroom.
Juliet was also aware of these facts, but paying attention to the body and those crowded around it, not touching with their hands but trying to peer through the bathroom door at the corpse of the guard they had all disliked. She didn’t push her way to the front of the crowd. She didn’t need to. Delores had already exposed Geary’s neck and face while trying to find a pulse. There was a small pile of gauze on the floor next to her with the ends still draped over the body.
The flesh tattooing at the throat was not pronounced but it was there. The gauze had probably been added later since she couldn’t imagine Geary cooperating while he was alive, and probably for effect rather than actual concealment. Certainly the sloppy wrapping would never have been able to conceal the fact that the body underneath was a fresh corpse and not an ancient, desiccated mummy.
But might it look more real if the killer had had enough time to finish? Was it possible that if the body were properly wrapped and placed back in the climate-controlled case, the switch might not have been detected, at least for a little while? Juliet filed the question away with the others and moved on with her inventory.
The manual strangulation had been done with something thinner and harder than fabric, probably a wire garrote. Once the cartilage was broken and the internal hemorrhage began he would not have been able scream or even breathe. Done right, it would have been a pretty quick and quiet death. This might have been quiet but it wasn’t all that quick. There was blood on the neck and in the mouth. It took a lot of wherewithal to use a garrote. At the moment of the kill, the murderer’s blood pressure would have been high enough to cause panic in the E.R., and then they had needed to move the body.
She looked at everyone but they all seemed pale rather than flushed.
“He’s been strangled. And look at those bandages! It’s like that movie I saw last night—the one about the mummy’s curse where Boris Karloff comes to life and murders everyone,” Celeste breathed, sounding half-hysterical and half-fascinated, and Juliet saw Delores look up and stare sharply. Herrick’s kneeling assistant was shaken but a long way from panic now that others had arrived. Juliet was relieved to see it. She feared that if Delores flipped out then Celeste wouldn’t be far behind her in a display of histrionics.
The wrapping around the legs was clumsy, a child’s attempt at creating a mummy or perhaps an attempt at restraint. Actual Egyptian mummies were wrapped in elaborate ritual patterns, especially the later ones interred by the Copts. This mindless wrapping was nothing even remotely like the actual funeral wrapping ritual, and yet Juliet could see why it leapt to mind, especially if one had been watching the mummy movie marathon last night.
Juliet looked at Esteban and shook her head once.
“Everyone, step back from the body,” Esteban said quietly, taking charge since everyone seemed frozen. “Bowman, have the police been called?”
A pale Bowman pulled out his cell phone and stepped away from the others. Reception inside was sketchy and everyone went to the parking lot if they wanted to make a call.
“My God! I have to tell Sam,” Delores said, allowing Jorge to help her to her feet. The janitor looked in worse shape than the woman he was helping. Maybe he was thinking that he would have to clean up after the body was gone. Perhaps he didn’t know how to clean blood off of marble.
Esteban shooed everyone to the end of the hall and back into the Egyptian room, and Juliet noted that the last to leave the scene of death was the casket maker. He still didn’t look all that upset as he glanced back at the corpse. Of course, he hadn’t known Geary and he did make custom caskets, so maybe his reaction wasn’t surprising.
The tomb was perhaps not the most auspicious place to wait, though it was large enough to accommodate everyone while keeping everybody else in sight. It had been designed to give guests the experience of being in an actual burial chamber, though sanitized so one did not have deal with bats, bad air, and potential death from cave-ins.
They all stayed away from the empty mummy case whose air conditioning unit was gushing cold air into the room which nevertheless smelled musty. Juliet was still baffled by the absence of the ancient Egyptian. Whoever had taken the mummy had to be strong. Or have an accomplice. And they needed to know how to turn off the sensor on the display case. Of course, Juliet knew how to do that and so did Esteban. So did anyone who had taken the tour of the security room and could point and click a mouse. The new computerized system made it all so easy. There was no disarming code sequence to be punched in as there would be on a house alarm. A password was required to log into the system but the guards never logged out of their terminal and after that it was all point and click. Shutting off the alarm to the case would take fifteen seconds at most. One might have to watch for a few days, but surely there were times when the guards all took bathroom breaks or headed for the cafeteria at the same time. They weren’t supposed to, but no one was taking security all that seriously yet since the museum wasn’t open and, frankly, none of the displays—excepting maybe the hearse—were worth enough for someone to steal. And disposing of the property would be hard because memento mori was a very specialized market. There were also plenty of legal ways to obtain death art.
Juliet, still searching for clues that would tie a missing mummy to a dead guard, saw something she had missed earlier. She touched Esteban’s hand and deliberately glanced upward at the mock tomb’s ceiling. The small dome of the security camera in the south corner had been covered in dark blue spray paint, the same color as the cobalt “sky” above them. There was still a faint scent of chemicals in the air though the ventilation system was rapidly cleansing it away. There had also been no rigor in the body.
“It has to have happened recently,” Esteban muttered.
“Within minutes. The security tape could have been running,” she whispered back. “Maybe it caught something.”
“We can hope.”
“The scene is compromised but we had better make an effort to preserve any clues,” Juliet said.
Esteban nodded.
“Everyone, we had better make ourselves comfortable. The police will be here soon but it will take them a while to get our statements. I suggest we go to the cafeteria where there are chairs. Stay together. There may be a murderer in the building.”
The others took Esteban’s advice, though Meyers looked resentful at being kept from his work.
Juliet considered the idea that someone wanted to stop the museum from opening. Or from opening on time. The notion was rejected at once. Everyone wanted the museum opening to be a success.
“I should have picked a safe, peaceful career,” Juliet muttered. “Like arbitrage trading.”
It seemed to take forever because of the traffic, but as Esteban had promised, the police did come. Juliet gathered from the bits of overheard conversations that there had also been some argument about whose jurisdiction the museum was in. She had already figured out that the relationship between jurisdictions was complicated, even Byzantine. This was unfortunate but familiar since she had worked with the NSA where they—theoretically—liaised with other branches of intelligence. In that instance, the county sheriff’s office had won—or lost—the toss and had been assigned the case.
County or city, every time she encountered a new branch of law enforcement it became a burglary, or at least a trespass, of her private life. People pawed through her files and received just enough information to make them either hostile or overly curious about her. Neither was pleasant.
A pale Victoria arrived right after the representatives of the law, carrying a white bag that reeked of garlic and clashed with the church smell that always clung to her clothing. She was wearing a long, red sweater which she huddled in even though the air conditioning was not turned especially high. She insisted on staying with the other witnesses though she probably had nothing to tell the police about the missing mummy or the dead guard since she wasn’t around when the body was discovered. Maybe she just felt the need to express solidarity with her fellow artists.
Though Juliet asked politely, Vickie declined to share a cup of coffee with Juliet and Esteban, preferring to wander around the cafeteria and stare out the narrow window at the sunset. The police left to guard the room were watching to be sure that they didn’t speak to one another about the killing before being interviewed by someone from homicide. It was shutting the barn door after the horse. They had already had nearly an hour to talk it all out.
The coroner, or his representative, arrived along with the forensic team.
Juliet wandered back to the Egyptian wing and studied the mock tomb from the arched doorway. There were informative historical notes displayed on plaques, but none of which went into detail about how the pharaohs had been procreating with their siblings. Death was an okay subject. Incest was too controversial.
The chamber was slightly larger than an actual burial chamber since it housed displays for three mummies. The corners of the room were graced with gilded columns topped with lotus capitals. The panels in between were realistically painted and chipped plaster showed the panoply of Egyptian deities who seemed oddly watchful. Anubis especially. The jackal-headed god had a gaze that followed Juliet no matter where she went. It was probably a trick of the wall sconces which resembled torches right down to the flickering light. She made a note to find out who the artist was.
Like the mill of the gods, as was perhaps fitting, the investigation seemed to be moving infinitely slowly. The detective in charge was named Andy Browne, a name which sounded friendly, and he had a façade to match. His suit looked like a bathmat whose rubber backing had begun to rot. This wasn’t because it was a fine, slubbed linen. It was just pilling and looked as harassed as the man wearing it. Perhaps on other occasions, like fishing with his kids on the weekend, he was laidback and charming. That day his rounded face was grim and harassed, a cherub stuffed into a suit and having a temper tantrum.
“God damned wind. It brings out the crazies,” she heard him mutter to one of the uniforms as he asked a flushed Delores for an office where he could conduct interviews. She had been lamenting that she couldn’t reach Herrick and tell him what was going on when the police asked her to put away her phone.
One by one they were interrogated in Herrick’s small office in the third floor tower, which had been turned into a makeshift police headquarters in the director’s absence. The climb was aggravating, but non-display space was limited inside the museum which did its best to be wheelchair accessible.
Juliet and Esteban were among the last to be interviewed so they had time to watch the forensic unit gathering evidence. The team seemed competent, and they were soon joined by another detective named Black who also organized a second and more thorough search of the building and the cars in the parking lot. Luckily, the castle had no secret passages. By the time it was built such things were out of style and the drug lord hadn’t had time to do a remodel.
Black and Browne were a strange team. Someone had definitely robbed Peter to pay personable Paul. If the slightly rounded Browne had charm at least in potential, Black possessed none whatsoever. He was gaunt, sallow, and had cheekbones that were trying to tear through the skin of his face. In short, he looked a lot like their missing mummy. Black moved and spoke with an intensity that might have been charismatic if he had bothered to
smile as he gave his orders. She also knew that he had killed at some time in his life, perhaps in the military. Something happened to people when they had to take a life. Their innocence died and no matter how justified the killing, the person was never the same after. Something in their psyches was forced into rearrangement and they often showed the psychological changes in physical ways. It was somewhere in Ecclesiastes about once something was made crooked it could never be made straight.
Juliet hoped that no one else would think of the missing mummy when they looked at him, especially not Celeste Ames. So far, the proceedings had been blessedly free of hysterics and drama. Vickie and Delores would be alright, Juliet thought, but Jorge looked ill and on the verge of panic. And Matt Meyers was getting more and more anxious, pacing and muttering to his silent, ghost-white assistant who was apparently Bill something. It was a relief when the coffin maker’s helper was called in for questioning. His obvious terror was poisoning the atmosphere for everyone else and keeping them on edge.
Juliet and Esteban were better at waiting than the others and filled time by taking mental notes on how the police functioned. It varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and from state to state. Black was efficient and observant and by the book, even sending an officer up to the roof to check the ramparts which were predictably empty. Not that efficiency would probably matter in this case. Juliet was getting a sixth sense for murder scenes, and she had a bad feeling that it wouldn’t be forensics that solved this one. Juliet found herself thinking of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary and his definition of homicide. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another—the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.
Was Geary’s killing praiseworthy, or even justifiable? She remained convinced that the crime was murder and not a robbery gone wrong. Why would thieves break into a museum in broad daylight and steal one the heavier yet less valuable exhibits? And if they were caught, wasn’t it more likely that they would pull a knife or try to bash a guard over the head rather than sneak around behind him and garrote him with a wire? And then, with the danger of being discovered worse than ever, why would they take the guard into the bathroom and try to wrap him like a mummy?
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