But it was what remained in the burgled drawer that Carter was after. The broken padlock still hung from the hasp, and as Carter slid the drawer open, he saw the crumpled handkerchief that he had used to conceal and transport the mysterious object that the La Brea Man had once held in his hand. The cloth was all that was left there, but it was still encrusted with bits of the tar and tiny flakes of bone or stone from the object itself. It wasn’t much, Carter realized, but it was all that he had to work with.
“Wasn’t that where the woman’s bones were?” Hector said, concerned.
“Yes.”
“And those, aren’t they the oldest bones in the whole museum?”
Hector seemed to be appreciating the gravity of the situation by the second.
“Not the oldest,” Carter replied, “but the most significant.”
Hector whistled under his breath, as Carter delicately lifted the handkerchief out of the drawer—he didn’t want to disturb or taint its odor in any way—and then held it down to Champ’s nose. At first, the dog tried to turn away, as if uninterested, but when Carter put a finger through his collar and pulled his head back to the cloth, Champ took a good whiff.
Then he looked up again at Carter, as if to say, Yeah?
“I want you to follow that scent,” Carter said, knowing of course that the dog couldn’t understand a word. But that’s what people did, wasn’t it? You spoke to the dog as if he could be made to comprehend your meaning . . . and damned if it didn’t work sometimes.
Champ turned and looked around, as if wondering exactly what to do. Carter led him a few feet back down the aisle—the only way any thief could have gone—and then pressed the handkerchief to his nose again. Champ took another strong sniff and trotted a few feet ahead, dragging out the length of his Extendo leash. Carter reeled him in, gave him another shot at the wadded-up cloth, then let him go again—and this time Champ seemed to be fully involved in the game. He put his head down to the cold linoleum tiles, then up in the air, then back down to the floor. Occasionally he would stop and sniff at another cabinet; how different could any of these artifacts and fossils really smell? Carter wondered. He could only count on the freshness of the sample to help Champ distinguish it from all the others resting in their silent graves all around them.
“This is the stupidest thing I have ever done,” Hector muttered. “This I will lose my job over for sure.”
“Maybe not,” Carter said as he followed along in Champ’s wake. “Maybe not.”
But when the dog started to retrace their steps directly to the elevator, Carter, too, began to wonder. Was Champ just leading them back out the way they came? Was that all he thought he was being asked to do?
But then the dog stopped, turned, and, with his head close to the floor, moved to the left, past the elevator bank and around the corner. “What’s back there?” Carter asked over his shoulder.
“Not much,” Hector said. “A storage unit, some machinery, a stairwell.”
Champ had wrapped his long leash around a steel column, and Carter had to hurry up to catch him. The dog was standing in front of a sealed metal door with a red slash painted on it warning that an alarm would go off if the door was opened.
“Where’s this lead to?” Carter asked.
Hector had to think for a second, and looked up as if to see what they might be under. “The garden,” he said.
“You mean the one in the middle of the museum?”
“Yes.”
Champ put his nose to the bottom of the door, and pawed at the metal.
“Can you open it?”
Hector stepped around him, using a passkey to disable the alarm—to Carter, it looked like the alarm hadn’t been in operation, anyway—then pried the door open with a resounding screech. It sounded as if the door hadn’t worked in ages, either. Inside, it was pitch black and a cobweb brushed across Carter’s face. Hector played his flashlight beam over the interior until he found the light switch. A bare bulb hung down from the ceiling, illuminating a rusted lawnmower, several gardening tools, some rubber boots, a stack of dented paint cans. It looked as if no one had been down there, much less passed through with a pile of stolen bones, in a very long time. But Champ was eager to go.
“Okay, boy, I’ll take your word for it,” Carter said, though he wasn’t really so sure.
Champ neatly threaded his way through the detritus, and he was halfway up the first flight of stairs before Hector had managed to close the door behind them. Carter was looking at the dust on the steps to see if there was any sign of a footprint, or anything at all to suggest a recent intruder, but in the dim light from the overhead bulbs—not to mention the haste with which he was trying to keep up with Champ—it was all he could do to see the steps themselves.
Champ stopped on the landing to make sure he had his pack in tow, then trotted up the next flight of steps, which culminated in another sealed door. At this one he whined, as if anxious to capture his prey just beyond. Hector, huffing and puffing, climbed the last steps, released the alarm, then yanked the door back with a loud screech. Carter was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of wet leaves and thick foliage, and by the sound of swishing sprinklers.
Champ leapt out into the garden so fast that the leash came out of Carter’s hand. There were modest lamp poles with amber lights every few yards along the pathways, but otherwise the garden was lighted by the moon, which shone down through the open, unobstructed roof. Carter could hear the plastic leash handle clattering after Champ as he dragged it down the cement walkway, then over the little footbridge that crossed the meandering, koi-filled stream. Though it was not as strictly planned as the Pleistocene Garden on the grounds outside, where nothing but plants indigenous to the area during the last ice age were grown, here—in this secluded atrium, surrounded by the curving glass walls of the museum all around it—visitors still had a sense of the quiet, natural landscape that this place had once possessed. A gnarled gingko tree rose up in one corner, slender palms rustled in the night wind, the furtive splashing of turtles—who enjoyed their own little nesting ground—joined with the constant rushing of the waterfall toward the back of the garden. And it was there that Carter spotted Champ, trying to drag his leash up a small escarpment overgrown with ferns.
“Okay, hang on,” Carter said, but Champ didn’t turn. It was as if he were trying to enter the streambed from the miniature waterfall.
Carter unhooked the leash from his collar—there was no way the dog could escape from the enclosed atrium—and Champ instantly ran down the path to a spot that afforded easier access, then went up the slight rise to the source of the waterfall again. For a second, Carter thought he might just be thirsty, but then he saw it—lying there, atop a larger, flatter stone in the center of the stream.
The object from the La Brea Man’s grasp.
But now, perhaps because it had been partially cleansed by the running water, it gleamed, like the mano—or grinding stone—it had clearly once been. On its surface there were long diagonal scratches, made with another, possibly redder stone. Champ, unable to reach it, was hovering over the small pool from which the waterfall descended. Carter, not quite able to see everything from the pathway, stepped off the cement and, wrapping his arm around the base of a slim pine spruce, hauled himself up. He had to nudge Champ to one side just to make room for himself; this was an ornamental garden, and it wasn’t designed for off-road adventures. But the ground around his feet didn’t look as ornamental and undisturbed as the rest of the garden. Carter could see that some brush had been cleared to one side, and the dirt here looked freshly turned.
Champ barked, as if confirming his discovery, and Carter, suddenly realizing what he was standing on, instinctively stepped back.
“What’s there?” Hector asked from the walkway below.
Carter wasn’t sure how to answer that. But then he said, “A grave, I think.”
Hector crossed himself.
Carter looked again at the mano stone, sitting in th
e stream like a kind of marker, and then at the turned earth on the bank where he stood. It was as if he had stumbled upon a prehistoric burial site.
“What do you mean, a grave?” Hector said. “Whose?”
That much, Carter knew. It was the grave of the La Brea Woman, who had died just a few hundred yards away, over nine thousand years ago—though who had dug it here, and how, he couldn’t even guess.
“Damn,” Hector muttered, “this is something we got to report.”
“Not yet,” Carter replied. First he needed to know more about how it had happened. And then, he would need some time to think through its consequences. “Just let me handle it. Okay?”
Hector looked dubious, but at the same time glad to be off the hook. “You’ll say that it isn’t my fault? You’ll say that I did my job?”
“Yes,” Carter said, reaching down to ruffle Champ’s fur in gratitude, “I’ll keep you out of it entirely.”
Hector’s mind appeared at rest.
But Carter’s was not. As he surveyed the marking stone, the last and most precious thing in the world to the La Brea Man, and then the earth that still bore the trace of bony fingertips, his own mind was decidedly in turmoil.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
FOR SADOWSKl, IT felt as if this night would never end. It was the night before the Fourth of July and it felt a hell of a lot like Christmas Eve, back when he was a kid. He remembered not being able to get to sleep or even stay in bed, and one year, when he was about five, he’d crept into the family room early, started unwrapping his presents, and gotten a good walloping for it when he was caught. But he was all grown-up now, and he had no excuse.
He couldn’t even talk about any of this to Ginger. It was all top secret. Not that she’d have understood it anyway. All she could talk about lately was going to Las Vegas to catch that faggot, Elton John, at some casino. “It’s for my act,” she kept saying, and Sadowski kept promising he’d take her some other time, though the point of taking a stripper to Las Vegas, on your own dime, eluded him. There were more strippers and more hookers per square inch in Las Vegas than anywhere on the whole fucking planet. Why bring your own? It’d be like carrying a six-pack into a bar.
“Stan, aren’t you ever coming to bed?” she asked now, from under the covers. “You’re keeping me up.”
There were only two rooms in the apartment and there wasn’t a real door between them—just a couple of louvered panels that swung back and forth. Sadowski had the TV on—another one of those Cold Case files—and he was swigging his fifth or sixth beer of the night. “I’m not sleepy,” he shot back, and she instantly retorted, “Then why don’t you go back to your place, because I am.”
She had a point—though he would never have admitted it. He’d only come over here to get his rocks off—and he’d already done that—and there was only one reason not to go back to his own place now.
All his gear was there and he knew, if he did, he would start fiddling with it again.
He watched TV until the show ended—it was another one of those where the DNA from a semen stain caught up with the guy ten years later—and then, when he was satisfied that he’d made his point and kept her awake long enough, he tossed the can into the garbage pail, burped loudly enough to elicit a disgusted groan from the bedroom, and headed out.
The night air felt good—it was relatively cool, maybe high sixties, but it was still dry. The only thing that could have spoiled their plans was rain, and there was absolutely no fucking chance of that. During the commercials on Cold Case, he’d kept flipping back to the Weather Channel, just to hear more about the arid conditions in the L.A. Basin and the advisories for anyone planning some Fourth of July festivities: “The whole county is a tinderbox,” one blow-dried blonde declared, “so don’t even think about setting off those Roman candles or cherry bombs, folks.”
Well, it wasn’t any goddamn cherry bomb he was planning to set off.
Driving home in his black Explorer, he was careful not to go too fast or make any mistakes that some cop on patrol might pull him over for. Even a guy his size would never pass the Breathalyzer test with a six-pack under his belt. (Once, he’d been pulled over and failed the test after having only three.) No, easy does it, he kept telling himself. Easy does it.
His own place was a dingy apartment above a mechanic’s shop, accessible by a wooden staircase off the alley. Ginger had never been there; nobody had ever been there. And that was just the way he liked it. He’d replaced the landlord’s door, at his own expense, with one made of vulcanized steel, with a kick-proof base panel and a dead bolt that could withstand anything short of a battering ram. Inside, he had a warren of small, dark rooms, the last of which had its own locked door on it. He took his key ring out of his pocket, opened it, and flicked the switch on what he called his War Room.
A bank of ceiling lights came on, bathing the room in a stark, white glow. On the walls he’d mounted topographical maps of L.A., along with some free gun posters he’d gotten from Burt at the firing range. In the center of the room, there was a beaten-up desk and chair, and behind that a couple of green metal lockers he’d salvaged from a gym being demolished up the street. That was where he kept his field gear.
Should he just suit up, he thought, and get it over with? He knew this would happen—that if he got anywhere near his stuff again, he would want to get started.
But he also knew what Burt had told them all, a dozen times: “If it goes off too soon, it’ll go nowhere.” The whole idea was to carefully plant the incendiary devices in all the places marked on the map, and time them to go off so the resulting blaze would be unstoppable. As soon as the fire department moved its resources to stop one, another one would start up, just beyond where a firebreak might have been formed. Burt knew all about this stuff—he’d been a volunteer firefighter in the Northwest, and he’d made a thorough study of the L.A. geography and terrain. If everybody in the inner circle did exactly as he was supposed to do, then the whole west side of Los Angeles, from Westwood to the Pacific Palisades, would go up in the biggest fucking conflagration the country had ever seen. And the Sons of Liberty would have done in one night what the Minutemen hadn’t been able to do in years: put the illegal aliens—and the terrorist threat from our unguarded borders to the south—in the dead center of the national radar screen.
Burt had all the rest figured out, too—how it’d look like some wetbacks or foreign agents had done it (this was part of the plan that Burt had kind of kept under wraps), and the war to reclaim America’s borders, and its proud white heritage, would be well under way.
Sadowski couldn’t resist popping open the lockers and looking over his equipment one more time. Army fatigues (he considered this work to be a continuing part of his national service), flashlight, canteen (filled with Gatorade to keep his electrolytes high), a forty-caliber Browning Hi-Power pistol (its grip made from the wood of the last surviving Liberty Tree), and most important of all, his fireproof asbestos sheath; this was what the smoke jumpers up north used, just in case they found themselves caught in the middle of a fire. Burt had shown them what to do. As fast as you could, you made a depression in the ground, then lay down in it with the sheath zipped up (from the inside) from your feet to your head. If the fire lingered, you’d probably cook to death—“like an ear of corn in aluminum foil,” Burt had joked—but if you were lucky and it swept on past quickly enough, you’d make it out alive.
In a rucksack, under a wadded-up mosquito net, there were a half dozen incendiary bombs on timers, all of them housed in empty Kleenex boxes—the boutique style. It was amazing how cheaply Burt had been able to make them; all he’d needed was some battery-operated alarm clocks, a bag or two of fertilizer, some of those Fire Starter sticks for home barbecues. Sadowski wondered why there weren’t more arsonists; you could create some major havoc for not much money, and with very little chance of ever getting caught. Most of the evidence against you went up in the blaze. (Burt had bragged that he’d been arres
ted several times, but never convicted, for fire-related crimes.)
There was a portable TV in the corner, perched on top of a mini fridge, and Sadowski turned it on. Cold Case had been replaced by another of his favorite shows, American Justice. The host, Bill Kurtis, was someone Sadowski thought he could really get along with; he seemed like a regular guy. Sadowski took a cold beer out of the fridge and plopped himself down on the rickety desk chair. It was a rerun—about some woman in Texas who’d run over her cheating husband in a parking lot—but it was still good. And it took his mind off what he had to do—at precisely 1700 the next afternoon—in the swanky hills of Bel-Air.
And wasn’t his old army buddy—Captain Derek Greer—going to get a good swift kick in the ass out of that? Sadowski hoped—though it wasn’t likely on the Fourth of July—that he’d get to see him up there, at the Arab’s place. It would be so much sweeter if Greer actually knew who had fucked him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
EVEN THOUGH IT was the Fourth of July, it was business as usual around the Cox household, Beth reflected. Carter had run off to the Page Museum to catch up on some urgent paperwork—or so he claimed—and Beth had managed to prevail upon Robin to come to the house for just a few hours to watch Joey, so she, too, could go to work. With the museum closed for the day, and the staff all off at backyard barbecues and pool parties, Beth thought she’d never find a better time to run in, enter the last few paragraphs of the scribe’s secret letter into the computer database, get the translation . . . and find out, at last, how the drama had come to an end.
Traffic was heavy—it was another hot, dry day, and everybody in L.A. seemed to be heading for the beach—but fortunately Summit View wasn’t far from the Getty. And of course there were no cars, other than those belonging to a few of the usual security personnel, in the garage. Beth had an assigned spot, but it wasn’t as close to the elevators as some of the others, so she took one of those. The parking garage was at the foot of the hill, and the tram, which took visitors all the way up to the museum complex, had no one else on board. As the sleek, air-conditioned car made its way up the curving track, Beth looked out over the 405 freeway—the cars inching along, bumper to bumper—and toward the neighboring hills of Bel-Air. Way up at the top, though well hidden from view, was the al-Kalli estate . . . and on that estate was the book Beth considered one of the most remarkable in the world. A book that might now remain unknown, and unseen, forever.
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