The shrubs at the end of the tarmac were dense and tangled and she suspected filled with secretive animals. Like the murderer. There was no need to frighten herself with thoughts of rattlesnakes and wolves who had no reason to molest her. A human killer was quite deadly enough and might very well consider themselves justified in attacking if Juliet got in the way.
Of course, she didn’t know much about rattlesnakes. Were they nocturnal? Would they be out hunting, angered by the wind and looking for a fight as they slithered through the boulders heaved up by earthquakes eons ago?
It didn’t matter. She had to take a stab at finding the mummy. And the killer.
“So do it already,” she muttered to herself.
There was a saying from the Second World War that there were no atheists in foxholes. There were none in the desert either, not when the world was lit by a blood-red moon and the winds were blowing.
The gale was beginning to rise, and high up in the atmosphere the airstreams and storm fronts were locked in mortal combat. On the ground, the wind staggered like a drunk rustling here and there and reeling from rock to rock as it flung sand into the air and sent it slithering over her shoes in small eddies. Juliet turned her back on it. Better a flayed back than sand in her eyes.
A noise, not the wind but something like a foot slipping on rock and a shadow moving within a shadow, a piece of dark that looked like it was wearing a black cloak.
Juliet stifled a gasp and recklessly started into the scrub which grabbed at her legs with blunted claws. She hadn’t enjoyed scrambling around in nature when her legs and lungs were younger and stronger. She really didn’t care for it in her fifth decade.
The ascent up the ravine wasn’t too bad, though she managed to tear her stockings while doing a panic dance induced by some giant insect dropping into her décolletage and squirting her with some stinging and stinking fluid. She stifled a shriek as she scooped the scrabbling thing out of her dress but during her gyrations she slipped and fell on her butt. She cursed her leather-soled heels which were lovely but slick on the bottom. They were the worst choice of footwear for running around the mountainous desert. Why hadn’t she forsaken fashion and worn sneakers and jeans?
She jumped to her feet. Not content with her inelegant pratfall, she skidded a few feet in the dry dirt, but was spared severe damage when her dress caught on some painful outcrop of rock. The skirt tore, but she was saved from injuries more serious than a bruised butt.
For a wonder, neither ankle was sprained. Her painkilling neuropeptides must have been working overtime. Unfortunately, she had made an awful lot of noise. Juliet craned her neck upward. Nothing moved. She had to hope that with the wind at full moan the killer wouldn’t have heard much.
They wouldn’t. Unless they were close by. Or downwind.
“Damn it,” she whispered, dusting off her scraped hands.
Her second attempt at ascent was more cautious and she dug her heels into the ground like pitons, knowing that she was destroying them but willing to make the sacrifice. The effort to get up the ravine was greater than anticipated and left her winded, but she didn’t dare take the time to rest along the way. There were two figures at the outcrop now. One dark and amorphous, the other white and stiff and, well, mummy shaped.
Juliet stopped her noisy breathing and tried for silence, until she began to get lightheaded. Her lungs gratefully resumed their function.
Neither shape moved as she closed in and after a few more staggered steps, she found that she had been chasing a large garbage bag snagged on a rock and someone’s torn and stained windbreaker which was crucified on a thorny shrub. Had the mummy been inside the trash bag?
Juliet gave herself permission to use a bad word.
The sound of unfriendly but organized thunder began stuttering toward the museum. Alternately hot and cold breaths of air skittered by at knee level but they did little to shift the honey-thick air that settled on her sweaty skin in a hair shirt. If she were fanciful, she would have said that the hell wind was frightened and doing its best to stay low to the ground as it fled back into the mountains before the oncoming rain. It was a landscape worthy of Dante.
Above her was a line of boulders and then a cliff face. The misty moonlight pushed back the stone shadows and she could see the path that clung there, narrow, steep and awkward even for the deer and coyotes that used it. She could just make out where it dived back down toward the museum and the strange patch of darkness. The bonfire, whose flames at midnight would arise. Or that had been the intention. Unfortunately nature had conspired against them and the wind and the fire department forbade it.
A hard gust of wind and then the clouds left the moon. Her rational brain rejected the vision but down in her gut where her ancestors’ superstitions lived on, Juliet felt a welling up of true horror and paralyzing dread. Her heart was dancing the Charleston, reminding her pointedly of her mortality.
Should she give up? Leave this to the cops who were probably somewhere out in the darkness following the killer?
Then someone was at the bonfire, someone dark and shapeless in their cloak but tall. The pyre that had been growing daily but that they didn’t have permission to light.
And someone pale and ghostlike was standing in it, leaning to the left about twenty degrees off center. It was not Guy Fawkes or Joan of Arc.
“No.”
How perfect. The mummy was saturated with bitumen and would burn like a sap-ridden pinecone. Once it caught fire it would be consumed in minutes, taking with it any traces of DNA that might convict the killer.
Juliet fled down the hill, no longer thinking of bruises or rattlesnakes. Hearing her coming, the killer through the flare into the fire and fled into the cover of the cracked boulders.
Juliet called out, hoping that Black and Browne were nearby, but no one answered. There should have been at least one guard by the bonfire, she thought as she reached the tarmac and tripped over a body.
There had been a guard. There still might be one, but Juliet didn’t stop to assess his injuries or try to give first aid out in the dark. She did scoop up his radio and attempt to use it to call for help.
Many things can affect a person’s response time to sudden danger: age, health, general alertness, training—especially training. She was fortunate to have had at least three of those things in her favor when the killer struck.
She was also lucky to have her arm raised and the radio in front of her face when the wire dropped over her head.
Many people would react with fear to a violent assault. Juliet didn’t. Rage at the killer for having the effrontery to attempt to end her life made her ruthless and inventive. She found herself willing to commit acts of violence and recalled how to do that. God bless her boss for insisting she take classes in hand-to-hand combat.
The wire cut into her hand just above the wrist. She gasped with pain but used her left arm to strike back with her elbow, aiming for her assailant’s diaphragm. She struck repeatedly with hammering blows that were designed to paralyze and even kill, ignoring the fact that her right arm had gone numb and she could see blood falling in the firelight. The cloak the killer wore was offering some protection but every blow brought a grunt.
Though busy fighting for her life her brain still registered the scent the killer was wearing and it allowed her to place her attacker.
She was disappointed. She also knew that no referee was coming to break up the fight. The only way to save her own life was to kill or disable her opponent.
The killer was taller than Juliet but had had to stoop down to get proper leverage on the garrote. Juliet snapped her head back with all her might and heard the satisfying crunch of a nose breaking. There was no scream but that was because her last elbow strike had paralyzed her assailant’s diaphragm. She threw back her head again, prepared to crack her assailant’s skull and pulverize her brain, if that was what it took to make her let go of the wire slowly slicing through her hand.
And suddenly there wer
e people racing toward them—Esteban, Browne, Black, the phony professor, and others that Juliet didn’t recognize.
“Fire,” she gasped as the wire came loose, and pointed with her left hand which was already swelling but still useful.
Esteban veered toward the bonfire, leaving Juliet to the others’ care.
For a moment Juliet was afraid that he would be engulfed by the fire, but Esteban was able to shove apart the pyre and pull the mummy out before it was reached by the flames.
He was coughing violently and slapping at his shirt when the rain began to fall and a latecomer moved in with a fire extinguisher to put out the blaze.
Seeing that the police had managed to subdue Vickie and that the mummy and Esteban were safe, Juliet allowed herself to escape from the pain in her bleeding hand and to faint into the fake professor’s arms.
Chapter 7
“There is nothing certain in a man’s life except this: That he must lose it.”
—Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Juliet opted to stay in the basement until the museum had emptied of guests and paparazzi. Esteban stayed with her, supplying her with hot coffee and brandy as needed. She was also wearing his suit coat over her wet dress. The dress was beyond hope. His coat would need cleaning.
A paramedic had already bound up her hand and arm. She would need stitches eventually, but the guard’s radio had saved her from cut tendons. She would not lose the ability to paint, though healing would take a while and there would probably be a scar as a reminder.
Vickie Bremen was not in as good a shape; an ambulance had taken her and the guard away, heading for the nearest hospital that could deal with head trauma. The paramedics did not look hopeful as they shut the doors on their patients. Browne had offered to call another ambulance for Juliet but she rejected the idea.
Juliet was not sure how she felt about Vickie being near death. Not sad. But surely not pleased. No, not that.
Their fight had been down and dirty and there was no doubt that Vickie had planned to kill her rather than let her preserve the mummy, which had to have enough DNA evidence to convict her of Geary’s killing. Juliet had been fighting for her life and every blow she had struck had been meant as a death blow. And it had worked.
Maybe she was just a little bit pleased. It was going to take a while for events to digest. At the very least, she hoped that Herrick was glad that she had found his mummy for him.
“Drink your coffee, Bella.”
Someone opened the side door and she could hear the rain outside. The small bit of air to reach them was cold but clean and she wished that she could go out and stand in it.
“I don’t like sugar,” Juliet whispered.
“You do like brandy,” Esteban said firmly and sat beside her to make sure she finished her unpleasant brew. He was wonderfully warm even if he was also rather damp and she leaned into him.
Eventually the guests and the caterers were gone. Even Herrick finally called it a day, surrendering the museum to the police and the night security team.
Black had followed the ambulance to the hospital, and Browne stayed to clean up loose ends at the museum and to arrange transport for the mummy. The dead thing was going to get a very modern forensic examination before being returned to its display case.
Browne and the fake professor looked tired as they joined Juliet and Esteban in the back corner of the basement, choosing a comfortable packing crate to seat themselves. They also had coffee, probably the last of the pot that the caterers had brewed for the party. It was at least two hours past being drinkable.
“The mummy has DNA evidence on it?” Browne asked directly. “Those stains are Victoria Bremen’s blood?”
Juliet nodded, though she couldn’t say for sure that the blood was solely Vickie’s. Certainly something on the mummy had come from her body. Something she couldn’t remove.
Esteban’s brows drew together at her failure to speak and she patted his hand reassuringly. It wasn’t that she couldn’t talk, but that would require a lot of effort and for the time being a nod would suffice. She was saving her voice for when it really counted.
“This is Jonathon Bryant,” Brown said, belatedly introducing the fake professor. “He is a homicide investigator from Florida. He teaches part-time at the police academy.”
Juliet nodded again and managed the smallest flicker of a smile. She had been right about the calluses on his hands. He was observant too. He had probably noticed her eye play with Browne and then noticed how she was watching the others and figured out that she was someone to keep an eye on, especially once Vickie disappeared.
“We found out late this afternoon that Geary was using an assumed name. His fake I.D. was good—a professional job that fooled the agency where he applied for work. We are still trying to track down where he got it.” Juliet held up her hands and rubbed her finger and thumb together. She didn’t chastise him for not sharing information with her. “Yeah, that was it. His fingerprints didn’t match those on file. The real Geary died in a fire. It took a while to search the national database and come up with a match. He was actually a man named Lawrence Hughly, a corrupt cop wanted for aggravated assault and murder in Florida. He disappeared around 2011 when it became obvious that he was going to be arrested. No one looked real hard for him either because they really didn’t need that kind of publicity for the department.”
So he had been on the naughty list. And Jonathon Bryant had wanted answers enough that almost three years later he came to California to look for them, and wasn’t bothering to defend his department’s actions. That seemed above and beyond the call of duty. That meant that the killing was personal and not just business.
Juliet didn’t have to look far.
Bitches. And then Vickie’s hard eyes as she said that Celeste reminded her of her older sister.
“Vickie’s sister—he killed her?” Juliet guessed, her voice barely a whisper. Perhaps she could have forced more power into it but her vocal chords seemed to know that they had been in mortal danger and were feeling shy.
Browne had read her file and didn’t look surprised at her accurate guess, but Bryant did.
“Half-sister. Different last name. But, yes, we think that was it. Hughly and Amanda Bierce had been dating and when she broke it off he started stalking her. She was a musician and on the nightclub scene a lot. One night, after a party where a lot of homemade pharmaceuticals were consumed, he broke into her house where he beat and then strangled her. He disappeared the next day after trying to fake his own death. Locals found his boat in the swamp and there was some blood and a lifejacket with a bullet hole in it. There were gators. Things got busy and eventually it became a cold case.” Bryant shrugged. He wasn’t judging.
Hughly had strangled the sister. The choice of the garrote was deliberate. It had been a message to the killer.
“And you knew her, the sister?” she asked Bryant.
“Yes, we were engaged. I had never met Vickie though—not until tonight. They look nothing alike. Were nothing alike.” He said this emphatically, as if expecting an argument.
“You are one lucky woman, Miss Henry,” Browne said, changing the subject. He probably also wanted to call her an idiot. “Vickie Bremen surely did mean to kill you for trying to take her mummy.”
Juliet nodded. If they had missed most of her fight with Vickie and chose to believe that it had been providence that saved her, they were welcome. With any luck there wouldn’t be any security tape of the struggle to get leaked to the press.
“I don’t understand why she touched the mummy in the first place,” Bryant said.
“Bait.” Juliet nudged Esteban and he took over explanations, outlining how the mummy, probably propped up against the display case, had distracted Hughly when he entered the burial chamber to check out the blacked-out camera and made it easy for her to sneak up behind him.
“And then she got some of her own blood on it?” Browne asked.
“Yes, blood or something she could
n’t clean up,” Juliet said. “Not fingerprints. She wore gloves.” As she had tonight. “Check her for wounds, probably on her arms. There hasn’t been time for her to heal and she has been wearing long sleeves.”
“So the mummy had to be gotten rid of—and that was more important than hiding Hughly’s body?”
“She ran out of time,” Juliet said. “She hoped she could hide the body in the bathroom and get rid of it that night, but it didn’t work.”
“It was awfully ballsy to do this during the day,” Bryant said. “Wouldn’t it have been better to wait for night and kill the guard then?”
“Yes, but Hughly wasn’t working nights this week. And more security was going in before the opening—more cameras, more guards. Everyone knew this. Herrick has made no secret of any of the security arrangements.” Juliet stopped and swallowed. “She was running out of time. It was a calculated risk and she was enraged enough to take it.”
“Did she seek him out?” Bryant asked. “I mean, did she find out he was here and get in the show so she could kill him?”
Juliet shook her head. It was only a tiny shake. Her neck hurt.
“This was good old karma in action. Vickie got chosen for the show on the merit of her art, and once she was out here she ran into Hughly. Maybe at first she wasn’t positive about who he was and that was why she delayed killing him as long as she did.” Juliet was thinking of how Vickie had started to ask about Esteban being a private eye but then thought better of it. Hiring him would leave a rather obvious trail back to her. “She had probably only seen pictures of him. But Geary did something or said something that tipped her off. It may have been his habit of referring to women as bitches.”
Or his air of suppressed violence. Juliet had certainly recognized him for the woman hater that he was. Vickie likely had the same reaction too.
“Well, we will get it sorted. Though if we are lucky she’ll die before trial and save the city some money.”
mementoMori_-_Nook Page 9