by Jean Thomas
“I’m beginning to catch on,” Mark said. Realizing he was shedding water on the floor, he helped himself to another towel and began to wipe his hands. “My amulet is a ceramic piece, as the others must be. And you think by examining mine this Duval could identify it, maybe even give us more than that?”
“It’s worth trying.”
“Let’s go for it. You know how to reach him?”
“I don’t have his number, but unless he’s unlisted he should be in the directory. Oh,” she remembered, “my phone book is still in the apartment.”
“You’ve got a laptop here, haven’t you? Didn’t I see it set up on a card table in the living room?”
“You did.” She could access a New Orleans directory on the internet.
Recovering her cell phone from the counter, Clare headed for the living room with Mark behind her. It took her only a few moments after seating herself in front of the laptop to locate what she was searching for.
“Here it is. Etienne Duval, the only Duval whose address is in the Garden District.”
Reaching for her phone, she called the number listed. It was answered after a few rings by a male voice a bit creaky with age but making up for that with a robust cheerfulness.
“Duval here.”
“Professor, this is Clare Fuller. I don’t suppose you remember me...”
“Ha, I never forget my students, especially the pretty ones. What can I do for you, Clare Fuller?”
She explained why she was calling.
“Sounds intriguing. Of course, I’ll see you and that amulet. I’m free now. You know the address?”
She told him she did, thanked him and added before she rang off that they were practically on their way.
“We’re in,” she reported to Mark.
* * *
There was a grim look on Mark’s face as the SUV carried them in the direction of the Garden District. She suspected that his mind was occupied with last night’s bold invasion of her home and his promise to keep her close to him and safe.
It was why, out here in the open like this where they could be a target, he kept checking his rearview mirror. She, too, was on the lookout for the blue sedan, but there was no evidence of it this morning.
“You don’t need to be so worried, Mark. There’s no sign of his following us.”
“But he’s out there somewhere waiting for another opportunity. I can almost feel him.”
Like Mark must have sensed the enemy waiting to strike in places like Afghanistan, she thought. It wasn’t just because he had been trained to that, either. It was his innate ability to perceive danger that made him the ranger he was.
There was no point in arguing with him about it. This role of protector was something he was determined to fulfill. She just wished he didn’t have to be so intense about it.
Not until they reached the Garden District did Mark relax a bit. Maybe because this area of the city was too interesting to ignore.
“More streetcars,” he said, eyeing one of the restored trolleys rumbling along the center of the broad thoroughfare that was St. Charles Avenue.
“They used to be more commonplace in New Orleans,” she told him. “Now there are just enough of them to please the tourists.”
“And, man, the houses!”
Clare knew what he meant. The homes here in the Garden District weren’t just residences. They were grand mansions equal in splendor to the antebellum plantation houses along the River Road, and made even more imposing by some of the city’s oldest live oak trees that surrounded them.
Playing tour guide again, she explained to him, “A good many of them were built before the war by wealthy Creoles.”
“I take it we’re talking about the Civil War.”
“Please, if you are a true native of the Deep South, you refer to it as The War Between the States.”
Her correction won a chuckle out of him. “Are you a Creole descendant, teacher?”
“Sorry, I can’t claim that distinction. But I’m willing to bet, from his name alone, that our Professor Etienne Duval can.”
The professor’s home, a dignified Greek Revival behind a waist-high iron fence, gave weight to her supposition when they turned into its driveway behind the house a few moments later.
The professor must have been watching for them, because he appeared almost instantly on the back porch, bounding down the steps like the young man he no longer was to welcome them as they exited the SUV. Whatever his heritage, there was nothing formal about the rotund little man. He greeted them with exuberance, pumping Mark’s hand when Clare introduced him.
“I had the old carriage house converted into a potting studio,” the professor said, indicating a handsome building toward the rear of the property. “Everything I might need to identify this amulet of yours is there.”
He led them along a brick path and into the former carriage house where he switched on a battery of lights that revealed a spacious studio occupied from end to end with all the required implements of a potter. Among them, Clare was able to identify a potter’s wheel, a massive kiln and open shelves along which were ranged a variety of ceramics in their raw state waiting to be fired.
Noticing her interest, the professor explained to her, “I’ve never lost my desire to have my hands in clay. Sell most of my pieces, too. A shop on Magazine Street carries them for me. But that isn’t why you’re here.”
They followed him to a long work table.
“Now if I can have that amulet, Lieutenant.”
Mark removed the amulet with its attached cord from around his neck and handed it to the professor, who turned it over in his hand.
“Afghan in origin, is it?”
“That’s right.”
Mark went on to tell him how he had come to own the talisman, what he had been told by the man who had gifted him with it and of the magic powers it allegedly possessed. None of which he believed himself, Mark hastened to add.
“Yes,” the professor said, “I’ve heard the Afghans can be a very superstitious people. Well, let’s see what this piece can tell us.”
He turned on a gooseneck lamp positioned above a large, powerful-looking magnifying glass on a stand. Placing the amulet under the glass, he bent over the table and began to examine both sides of the wedge-shaped piece through the glass.
With a tension that, given their situation, Clare regarded as understandable, she and Mark waited for the professor’s verdict. When at last he stood erect and turned to them, the amulet back in his hand, there was a grave expression on his round face.
“I’m afraid I have disappointing news for you, Lieutenant.”
Chapter 13
“We’re ready to hear whatever you have to tell us,” Mark assured the professor.
“To begin with, this is not an old piece. Therefore, it has no value as an antique.”
Mark exchanged looks with Clare. She knew from the what-did-I-tell-you expression on his face the message he was conveying to her: that all along he’d maintained the amulet was not a valuable antique.
“How can you tell?” Clare asked the professor.
“The buff-colored glaze alone indicates that. It has no age on it. There are other signs, but I needn’t elaborate on them. Added together, they mean that this amulet was created using modern techniques and materials.”
“How long ago?” Mark wanted to know.
“Difficult to say. I would estimate no more than twenty years, if that. That’s as close as I can get without a lab analysis.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Clare guessed.
The professor nodded. He turned to Mark with an apologetic “I’m sorry to say, Lieutenant, that your amulet isn’t, in fact, an amulet at all.”
“Then what is it?” Clare asked.
>
The older man shook his head. “Beyond being nothing more than a ceramic pendant, I have no idea. I’ve seen many amulets in my time, both new and old from various countries, but never anything like this. For one thing, the characters that were etched into both sides before the piece was fired are all wrong. Can you see what I mean?”
They moved in close to him, Clare on one side, Mark on the other, in order to have a better look at what he was indicating to them.
“They don’t represent a language,” he continued. “For want of a better definition, they’re some kind of crude symbols. By themselves, they mean nothing. Possibly because they end so abruptly on both ends of the wedge.”
“As if they were meant to go on from there,” Mark surmised.
Clare had noticed this herself that first night when she had briefly inspected the piece after coming away with it from Mark’s room at the Pelican Hotel.
“Exactly,” Professor Duval said. “There’s some evidence for that, too. Look here. Can you see how the rounded bottom of the wedge is smooth, but the edges of both ends are slightly rough? As if the wedge started out as part of a much larger piece and then at some point was cut away from that piece.”
Leaving the rest to be divided into those other amulets? Clare asked herself. Or whatever they were meant to be, because all of this still remained a mystery.
“Let me illustrate for you what I think might have happened. Although, of course, it’s only a theory.”
Taking paper and pencil from a drawer, the professor placed the sheet on the table. He laid the wedge over it, with its pointed end facing up and its curved bottom facing down, and began to outline it with the pencil.
Clare and Mark watched in fascination as, once he had its shape on paper, he lined the wedge up against the side of his drawing and repeated the process. Moving onward from there, like a hand on a clock counting out the hours one by one, he ended up with the last outline exactly meeting the other side of the first one, with neither a gap nor an overlap. What he’d formed was the closed circle he must have visualized.
Was she the only one, Clare wondered, who saw it as a pie divided into five equal slices? The three of them gazed down at the drawing in silence. It was Professor Duval who roused himself first from his reverie.
“Your wedge could have started out as a disc like this, locked together with the others until they were cut apart from each other one by one.”
“And if they were available to be fitted together again?” Mark asked him.
“Creating what was intended when whole, I suppose. Perhaps a meaningful pattern or design. That’s entirely possible.”
“Or,” Clare suggested, “maybe a kind of code. Even, say, a picture map?”
The two men turned their heads to stare at her.
“Yes,” the professor said, “that’s a thought, too. But,” he added, elevating his shoulders in a little shrug, “without the other wedges, there’s no way of knowing. In any case, it makes for a highly interesting riddle. I just regret that I wasn’t able to provide you with more information.”
“No apology necessary, professor,” Mark said, taking the pendant the older man handed to him and looping it back over his head. “You’ve given us new information, and we thank you for that.”
* * *
Mark was quiet when they left the carriage house and climbed back into the SUV. She waited until they were driving away from Professor Duval’s home to ask him the first of all the questions that were chasing through her mind.
“Are you disappointed your amulet isn’t genuine?”
“Pendant,” he corrected her.
Mark hadn’t answered her question, though. He was silent again and remained silent until he pulled over to the curb on a side street, where there were no other vehicles in sight.
“Why are we parking here?”
“We need to talk, and I don’t want to be distracted by a bunch of traffic.”
A credible reason, she thought, but not his only one. She understood that when he failed to look at her. Instead, he checked the street both ahead of them and behind them.
He’s making sure we’re safe here, she realized. That our mystery stalker hasn’t managed to find us. Which, after what they had learned from the professor, could very well mean Mark’s pendant was far more valuable than an antique amulet.
Satisfied the street was deserted except for them, that there was no one else in evidence either in a blue sedan or on foot, he answered her question.
“No, I’m the one who insisted all along it was a fake, remember?”
“But the Afghan who wanted you to have it considered it was genuine.”
“Because the cousin he inherited it from,” he reminded her, “somehow communicated it was a powerful amulet and to always keep it safe.”
“And if instead it’s part of a code or a picture map...”
“Then it explains why the guy who’s chasing it wants it so badly. Because, unless he’s able to reassemble all of the pieces, mine included, then he probably has no way of reading the whole thing.”
“There’s something more, Mark. When Professor Duval divided that circle, there were five wedges.”
“Yeah, I didn’t miss that.”
They were silent again, gazing at each other. Clare couldn’t help noticing the scrape on his jaw and remembering how he had gotten it.
It maybe didn’t make sense in this situation, but she experienced a strong urge to lean over and plant her mouth on it. She didn’t. Not because she thought he would object to her sensual action. Knowing his sexual appetite, he would probably want to get intimate right there in the car. Or would have, if he didn’t have the need to remain vigilant.
She didn’t ask him about the injury. He wouldn’t have welcomed that. Besides, it already seemed to be healing nicely.
There was something else, however, she couldn’t ignore. Mark was slowly, maybe unconsciously rubbing the upper part of his leg where it had been wounded in Afghanistan.
“Is it aching again?”
“Like I told you the other day, it sometimes does that. Nothing to worry about. Let’s get back to the subject of the pendants and how we can account for there being five of them.”
“Well, we’re fairly certain because of the lanyards that both my brother-in-law and Malcolm Boerner each had one. And if our unknown killer already had one of his own before he went after Joe and Boerner, that, along with yours, makes four pendants.”
“Unless one of the others had two of them, which would add up to five pendants. But somehow...”
“You don’t think so,” Clare pressed him.
“No, I don’t. What I’m thinking, even if I don’t have any solid reason for thinking it, is that there were five players in whatever this game is they were playing and that each of them was given a pendant. Mine we know I got from Ahmad, who inherited it from his deceased cousin. And if this cousin was the fourth player—”
“Then,” she said, completing the thought for Mark, “there’s a fifth pendant out there somewhere.”
“Yeah, in the possession of someone who’s as much a mystery as our unidentified killer. And if that suggestion of yours about a picture map or a code is at all accurate, the question is a map or code to what and where. We’ve still got a hell of a lot of missing pieces in this puzzle, Clare.”
“But enough to go to the police now,” she said anxiously. “You do agree with that, don’t you?”
“Okay, we go to the cops.”
* * *
Mark knew that Clare wouldn’t be put off any longer in her quest to enlist the police to aid her in clearing her sister of the murder of her husband. But he was far from convinced they would seriously listen to them as she directed him to the department’s headquarters on Broad Street, although he hoped for her sake t
hey would.
The headquarters for the New Orleans police department turned out to be housed in a five-story, modern building. When compared to so many other structures in the historic city, Mark considered this one to be of no particular architectural merit. Not that it mattered.
Parking in an area reserved for visitors, they made their way into the ground floor lobby where two uniformed officers, both female, were on duty behind the reception desk. It was the elder of the two, an African American woman, who greeted them with a courteous smile.
Mark had decided this was Clare’s scene more than his. He let her state their business.
“We’d like to see the homicide detective in charge of the Malcolm Boerner murder investigation. We believe we have information pertinent to the case.”
“That would be Detective Myers,” she was told. “Let me see if he’s available.”
The officer picked up a phone at her elbow. They waited while she explained their errand. Ending her call, she informed them, “He’ll see you. I’ll need your IDs before I can send you up.”
Satisfied after examining their driver’s licenses, she issued them visitor tags, which were to be clipped to their shirts.
“Homicide is on the third floor.” She handed Clare a key card, instructing her, “This is to be inserted in the slot inside the elevator. It will only allow you to be carried to the third floor and back down again when you’re ready to leave.”
No question of the security in this place being as tight as the latest practices can make it, Mark thought. Something that as a ranger he both understood and appreciated.
“Detective Myers will be waiting for you when you arrive,” they were informed. “You use that elevator there.”
Mark’s reservations about this errand were emphasized a moment later when the elevator door rolled back on the third floor. He recognized the beefy man who confronted them. It was the stern-faced detective the reporter had tried to interview this morning on TV. He had the same bushy eyebrows that needed grooming and was chewing on another toothpick.