“Find anything?” he asked Rose as we supped on mushroom-linguica pizza and iced coffee served up on the gleaming, black hood of a Park Service SUV.
“The story here won’t be in what we found, Greg. It’ll be in what we haven’t found—what I suspect we aren’t going to find.”
His mouth full of pizza, he gave her a look that clearly said, Enough with the mystery-speak already.
“The thieves seemed to have been highly selective. There are a lot of very fine Mimbres, Hohokam, and Mogollon pieces still here. Some of them are freshly broken. What there aren’t are Mesoamerican artifacts. We know Bridges had them—”
“We know he had one. We’re not even sure it’s authentic—”
“I’m sure. That piece is Early Classical Mayan, I’d be willing to bank on it. The point is: if he had them, someone took them. All of them. Why?”
“Because they’re worth a hell of a lot more than the other stuff?” Rodney guessed, wiping cheese grease from his All-American-Boy face. Even in the gathering dusk, I could make out his freckles and suspected his blond-on-blond hair would be visible long after dark.
“That would be a good guess,” said Greg. “Bridges was so freakin’ proud of his damned Mayan potsherd, I’d be surprised if we were the only dealers he showed it off to.”
“Well, apparently he showed it off to the wrong people.” Rose sighed, sliding off the hood of the truck. “We’d better get going if we’re going to finish cataloguing all that loot before next week.”
“Actually,” Greg said, “I’d like to suggest a division of labor. You guys finish toting up the dragon’s treasure while I see if the police will let me go through his files.”
Rose nodded. “Good idea. No telling what we’ll find in there.”
It took another two hours to finish our accounting task and repack the artifacts, trying as best we could to reunite items with the boxes they’d been stored in. While the others assembled the cache in the center of the room, I made a last visual sweep for small, easily overlooked bits.
I was skulking about the workbench when I noticed that the old black rotary phone that sat on one end was tilted at a slight angle. I lifted the phone and a piece of folded glossy paper fell out from underneath.
It was a travel brochure for a resort near Cancún, Mexico: El Playa del Pavo Réal—Peacock Beach. On the back of the brochure a name was written in fortuitously legible script: Revez. Next to it was a date: May 2. Two weeks ago. The date was circled . . . and not because it happened to be my birthday.
There was a little map on the back too. One that highlighted several archaeological sites that had been opened to tourist traffic.
“Hey, Rosie, is this anything?”
When she looked up from her packing I handed it to her.
A slow, sly grin spread from her lips all the way to her eyes. “Oh, I sure hope so.”
“Good find, Gina,” Greg told me as we hung out at the airport awaiting our homeward flight. “It may not lead anywhere, but you never know.”
“Yeah, I suppose chances are it’s just a souvenir from Bridges’s last vacation,” added Rose, “but we can always hope.”
It was Friday. It had taken three—count ’em—three days to tie up loose ends with the local PD and the Park Service’s Phoenix field office. It seemed inter-agency encounters almost always required extra patience to make certain the aquatic avians were marching in proper cadence. I knew this well from my own interactions with the SFPD.
We were standing in the queue making bovine progress toward the jetway when Rose took out her cell phone to switch it to airplane mode. It went off in her hand. She jumped, shook her head wryly, and answered it.
“Hey, Ramon, make it quick, okay, we’re just about to board. What . . . ? Could you repeat that?” She raised her eyes to mine, practically shooting off sparks of electricity. “Oh, I wish I could kiss the messenger. Mwah!” She made a loud smacker into the phone and hung up.
Greg, Rodney, and I were all giving her the Vulcan Eyebrow, but she made a big show of deliberately turning off and pocketing her cell phone.
“Felipe Revez,” she finally said, when she was done toying with us, “is the owner of El Playa del Pavo Réal. Mr. Revez has a most interesting hobby. Anyone care to guess what it is?”
“Uh, amateur archaeologist?” I guessed.
“Close, my dear. Felipe Revez is into collectibles. Specifically, art and antiquities.”
By the time we touched down at SFO, the “hounds,” as Rodney liked to call the research team, had determined that the date on the brochure coincided with the last time Ted Bridges had visited Cancún. At least he had a round-trip airline ticket that sandwiched that date. They had also determined that he had not stayed at Peacock Beach under his real name, and were trying to establish whether he’d checked in under an alias.
When we reconvened in Ellen Robb’s office bright and early on Monday morning, the initial crime report from the Phoenix PD was on her desk. She shared it with the team—Greg, Rose, Rodney, and me—during the debriefing, for which the five of us gathered around her office table with little room to spare.
“It was a spectacularly clean crime scene,” she told us. “No prints, no footprints, no discernible tire treads, no DNA evidence, no fibers—nothing. The murder weapon was Bridges’s own gun; the only prints on it were his. It looks as if he was surprised in his treasure room and shot once in the head.”
Greg was nodding. “Why is none of this surprising? I somehow didn’t think we were dealing with amateurs.”
“Nor are we dealing with minor artifacts,” Ellen said. “Rose was right—the piece has been confirmed by two more experts as Early Classical Period Mayan work.”
“From?” Rodney asked.
Ellen deferred to Rose, who evidently had spent her weekend doing homework instead of vegetating on the seaward deck of a houseboat like some of us had.
“Possibly from a previously unknown hoard,” Rose reported, and couldn’t quite keep the excitement out of her voice. “The research team is checking the artifact database for matches, but so far, no hits. This could be a new piece from a recent find. The style of the art and the subject matter resembles artifacts that have come from the Chiapas area.”
“So then, the site could be either Mexican or Guatemalan,” said Greg, and shook his head. “That’s a lot of territory.”
“No kidding,” said Rose. “We could be looking at Yaxchilán, Piedras Negras, or a new site that hasn’t been developed yet. Even Tikal and Palenque are in the right geographical area, but I think they’re too well exploited to have produced this piece.”
“Unless it turns out to be from a known cache after all,” added Greg, then looked to Ellen. “How long until we know for sure?”
“I’d give the research team another day or two to complete their work.”
“Then what?” I asked. “What’s your next step?”
“Do we even have a next step?” Greg countered. “If this thing is from Mexico or Guatemala, we may not get clearance to go any further with the investigation. It may just be a case of making a report to the appropriate government and washing our hands of the whole affair.”
“Aren’t you just a little ray of sunshine?” asked Rose fondly, patting Greg on the shoulder. “Realistically, as long as we don’t ask them to kick in any money, either government might be quite happy to have us come in and bust a crook. Especially if it results in us unearthing another archaeological prize.”
Greg grimaced. “True, they can barely afford maintenance of the sites that have already been discovered, much less further excavation.”
“No,” Rose agreed, “but chances are some university can. At least for a season or two. If they’re willing to battle their way through all the bureaucratic crap.”
Ellen was looking thoughtful, her eyes focused on something outside her office window. “Rose, assuming we could get clearance from the governments involved, what would you recommend we do?”
Rose put both elbows on the table and leaned forward, pushing electric energy before her like the bow wave from a harbor ferry.
“I’d set up a sting operation. For Felipe Revez. Try to find out if the artifacts Ted Bridges was hoarding came from him, or if Bridges was selling him stuff he’d gotten from other sources down there.”
“Isn’t that a bit of a long shot?” Greg asked. “We don’t know if his relationship with Revez was even in that context.”
“What other context could it be?” asked Rose. “Somehow I doubt Ted Bridges was a member of Revez’s yacht club.”
“Yacht club?” Greg’s brows rose toward his thinning hairline.
“You know what I mean. Revez is loaded. He owns a popular resort, he collects expensive art. He bids at Sommers and Sotheby’s. You know what his last purchase was? A Chagall. Ted Bridges’s art collection consisted of framed travel posters.”
“And Hustler pinups,” I murmured.
Greg wagged his head. “Yeah, I see your point. Okay, Rosie, what’s the game plan?”
The wave of electricity hit me again, and we were off into a strategy session that made me feel like a water skier behind a warp-powered speed boat.
It was enlightening.
It was intoxicating.
It was scary. I mean, wearing-a-thin-spot-in-my-obereg scary.
And I loved every second of it. I’ve been a major crimes cop. I’ve investigated and interrogated and arrested criminals. But, this was a whole different ballgame. This was international espionage that Rose was proposing take place on foreign soil. I was terrified . . . but in a very pleasant way.
Things moved with extraordinary speed after that, in a sort of cosmic domino effect. We hatched a plot (well, mostly they hatched, I oohed and aahed over the chicks); we were given personas (or is that personae?); we invented contingency plans, backup contingency plans, and disaster plans.
We would fly to Cancún, where Rose would pass as Marianna Esposito, the wealthy and spoiled fiancée of an equally wealthy and spoiled San Francisco businessman and art collector. Ostensibly, she would be shopping for a unique wedding present for her beau—Geoffrey Catalano by name—a fictitious person with an electronic and paper presence, should anyone go looking for him. Money would be no object.
I would be her personal secretary, and Greg would be the fabulously wealthy Mr. Catalano while running the behind-the-scenes backup team with Rodney as second-in-command.
This was serious stuff to Rose.
How serious? Serious enough that she got her hair cut and colored. Cut! A lifetime of “just take a little off the bottom” gone—poof!—in one salon session.
I think that freaked me more than the strategy session. Freaked her hairdresser too. I swear he said, “Oh, honey, are you sure?” after every snip. The poor man was traumatized.
It did not, however, rattle me enough to make me forget about our stalkers. I saw no beefy joggers; I saw no Banderasian journalists. The coincidence of their scarcity made me wonder all over again about how they connected to Rose. The Blankenships’ trial for their pillaging of the Anasazi site was coming up; the Bridges sting was over with unqualified finality. Were they connected to the first and just giving up? Or were they connected to the second and no longer on duty because they’d eliminated Bridges from the equation and disappeared his Mesoamerican cache?
Had that been the idea all along—to keep Rose from taking part in the sting because she might recognize the artifacts for what they were? Had they been trying to avoid what, in fact, happened—the U.S. National Park Service turning its eagle eyes south? It was possible, I realized, that our good Dr. Veras and the most recent stalker had been running interference, trying to keep Rose Delgado and company from bunging up the works. It struck me that if someone of Veras’s stature was involved in that effort, the stakes must be much higher than some Early Classical pilfered potsherds.
I broached the idea with Rose amid preparations for our Cancún trip: “In view of what we found—or didn’t find—is there any reason someone would want to keep you, in particular, away from Ted Bridges?”
She stopped and gave me a very serious look. “Wow, with all that’s happening with the Revez connection, I hadn’t even stopped to think. . . . I suppose it could be because Mesoamerican artifacts are one of my areas of expertise. I’d be more likely than anyone else to spot them or be able to authenticate them. In fact, I have had to authenticate them in the course of my work.”
“In court?”
“Yes. Frequently.”
“Which is a matter of public record, right?”
Her bronze skin shifted a couple of shades up the pallor spectrum. “I see what you’re getting at, but Greg—”
“Greg’s expertise is in process and law enforcement and Rodney’s pretty new to the team, right?”
“Well, yeah. But that seems like such a long shot, doesn’t it? I mean, who’d know me from Sacagawea?”
“You don’t expect an answer to that, do you?” I asked, thinking of Cruz Veras.
She grinned at me. “No, not really. I don’t know, Tink. Anything’s possible, I suppose.”
Anything’s possible.
Later events would make me wish I’d taken those words to heart.
Chapter 9
Superstition
I am not a person who believes in premonitions. Premonitions are the classic Catch-22. If you don’t act on them the Unspecified Bad Something might happen and you’ll be history; if you do act, the Unspecified Bad Something won’t happen, and everyone will think you’re a superstitious twit. Which is why I tend to ignore premonitions and pray for survival.
I leave clairvoyance to Mom, and I generally try to ignore her premonitions as well. But on this particular morning, as I prepared to escort Rose to a pretrial meeting with the NPS attorneys on the Anasazi case, Mom showed up on my foredeck.
“Gina, I had a vision,” she said without preamble.
“Mom, I’m going to be late.”
“Better late than dead,” she assured me dramatically, and stepped into my living room. She held something out to me on the palm of her hand. “Here.”
It was a medallion. A Saint Boris medallion.
“Mom, I’ve already got an obereg. And a mingei.”
“Not like this one. It’s from a saint sharing your birthday for extra protection.”
“Mom . . .”
“I saw a road. And, sitting in it, a raven. And much water.”
All the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up and shivered. Not because my mom had seen a road and a raven and water, but because I’d had a Bad Feeling about today when I rolled out of bed this morning. I’d told myself it was the natural reaction to discovering Ted Bridges’s body and not yet knowing why someone had felt compelled to kill him and disappear his collection of Latin American artifacts.
As I said, I can ignore my premonitions, and I make a point of ignoring Mom’s. But when we both have them, it’s kind of hard not to at least mutter an Abracadabra. Still, I ignored my little hairs and said, “Mom, we are surrounded by much water. I can’t look out a window without seeing much water. Rose and I have a meeting in Pacifica, where there is much water.”
“Yes, and this is going with you.” She pointed at Saint Boris with her considerable nose.
There are rules for dealing with Nadia Eliska Arkhangelski Miyoko. I learned these from my father. Rule One: Nadia is always right. All other rules refer back to this one. In fact, neither Dad nor I remember what the other rules are. I took the proffered obereg and tucked it into the pocket of my jeans.
“There. Happy?”
“Better you wear it,” she said, then added, “Edmund says ‘be careful.’”
Dad always said that, whether I was going out on a case or down the street for ice cream. But coupled with my Bad Feeling and Mom’s “vision,” this warning carried unwanted weight.
“Thanks,” I said, shrugging into my leather jacket. I picked up my helmet from the
table beside the front door and gestured Mom in the general direction of the waterfront. “Now, I’ve really got to go. Rose is waiting for me.”
She followed me out onto the foredeck verandah. “You have backup?”
I opened the lapel of my jacket to show her my shoulder holster. The bright titanium finish of the little Taurus reflected back the blue of the sky.
“I meant an obereg.”
Oh, real backup. Not some Mickey Mouse handgun.
“Yes, Mom. I told you: I have my lucky Caddie wire.” I tugged the chain out of my shirt so she could see it.
She seemed content with that and left me with a kiss on the cheek and the observation that I needed to eat more fruit. I tucked the wire back down the front of my shirt, glad I hadn’t mentioned my own premonition. Then she would probably have insisted I carry a whole set of babushkas and Dad’s tanuki as well.
I locked the house, pocketed my keys, and started down the ramp to the bike pad. I was surprised to see Mom standing next to Boris, apparently in conversation with it. She saw me, gave me a wave of her hand and continued on down the dock to her place. I surveyed the bike, wondering what she’d had to say to it, and if she’d managed to conceal any additional “backup” on it somewhere. That was when I realized the candy apple red finish of the rear fender was dappled with beads of water. Mom was nothing if not thorough.
I rolled Boris across the street to Rose and Dave’s landlubber, where I had Rose laughing over the scene with Mom. I said nothing about premonitions, Bad Feelings, or ravens, preferring to play Mom as a yenta and encouraging Rose’s laughter. It was a welcome sound.
“Holy water? God love her. When is she going to give up the pretense and admit she’s a true believer?”
The Antiquities Hunter Page 10