by R. J. Jagger
No.
She didn’t.
“It says, Cleopatra,” Twister said.
“It’s about Cleopatra?”
“No, not about her,” Twister said. “That’s her signature. This was written by her, if it’s genuine.”
“Do you think it is, genuine?”
“I’d have to see the original,” Twister said. “But everything here fits. Cleopatra—formally Cleopatra VII Philopator—was the last Egyptian pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Although she bore the ancient Egyptian title of pharaoh, the Ptolemic dynasty was Hellenistic. As such, Cleopatra’s language was the Greek spoken by the Hellenic aristocracy, not Egyptian. That’s what this is written in. If Cleopatra wrote something, this is exactly what it would look like.”
“Interesting,” Jina said.
Twister smiled. “This is so far past interesting that it’s not even funny,” she said.
“So what do you think it means?”
Twister spun around in her chair, full circle, three times.
Then she said, “I can speculate if you want me to.”
Jina nodded.
“Please do.”
16
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Afternoon
Wilde chain-smoked as he paced back and forth in front of the windows, occasionally throwing a glance at the black bag sitting in the middle of his desk, Night’s black bag to be precise, Night’s black bag filled with Grace Somerfield’s stolen jewels and valuables to be even more precise.
Damn it.
One split-second decision.
That’s all it took to ruin his life.
“I’m technically an accessory after the fact,” he told Alabama. “I don’t think you’re anything at this point. All you did was drive and you didn’t really know anything that was going on.” He blew a smoke ring and said, “If I were you, I’d just walk out that door right now and never look back.”
She cocked her head.
“That’s a lie.”
“What’s a lie?”
“When you said if you were me you’d walk out the door,” she said. “If you were me, you wouldn’t walk out the door. That’s the last thing you’d do.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because that’s not what you did when Night needed you,” she said. “You stuck by her even though you had to get dirty to do it.”
“That was just a stupid, bad decision on my part,” Wilde said. “If I would have had ten seconds to reflect on what I was doing I wouldn’t have done it.”
“That’s another lie,” Alabama said.
Wilde almost debated it but realized she’d never let him win.
“So what are you going to do with all the stuff?” Alabama asked. “Just give it back to Night?”
Wilde shrugged.
Good question.
“I don’t know.”
He walked over and locked the door, just so no one would bust in and see the bag sitting on the desk. Good thing, too, because three minutes later the knob turned and someone tried to enter.
Wilde handed the bag to Alabama and said, “Take this in the next room and hide it.”
Someone pounded at the door.
“Wilde, are you in there?”
He recognized the voice.
It belonged to Detective Warner Raven, the head of the homicide department.
Shit!
He whispered to Alabama, “Don’t make a sound,” then closed the door between the two rooms and let the detective in.
Warner Raven’s gun showed through his suit jacket. It was still in the holster, though, and he didn’t have a group of cops behind him. He had a hard, manly face with a cleft chin and a morning shadow. As far as hunters went, he was the best Denver had seen in the last twenty years. He took off his hat, tossed it at the rack and got a ringer.
“It’s called finesse,” he said.
Wilde lit another cigarette and held the pack towards Raven, who declined.
“It’s called luck,” Wilde said.
“Maybe a little.”
“So what’s the occasion?”
“The occasion is murder,” Raven said. “Ugly, ugly murder.”
17
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Afternoon
Lloyd the gun dealer wasn’t home so Durivage and Zongying caught a late lunch at a dirty spoon across the street while they kept an eye on the building.
“Tell me about Spencer,” Durivage said. “You said he had his hooks in you. How?”
Zongying frowned, deciding, then looked into Durivage’s eyes.
“It’s a pretty simple story,” she said. “I did something I wasn’t supposed to, something illegal, not a little illegal, a lot illegal. Nothing happened for two years and I actually almost forgot about it. Then one day out of the blue, two men showed up at my door. One was Spencer and the other was his buddy, Kent Dawson. They saw what I did and spent the next two years tracking me down. They wanted to arrange a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“Their silence in exchange for favors,” Zongying said. “They ran in high circles and needed an escort or two for important people when they came to town. They didn’t want the ordinary city whore, though. They wanted someone classy and pure.”
“You.”
She nodded.
“I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t,” she said. “If you hate me after I tell you, I’m not going to blame you.”
Durivage ran his fingers through his hair.
“That’s not going to happen.”
“You haven’t heard what I’m about to tell you yet,” Zongying said.
“Then do tell so I can prove myself right.”
She chewed salad, swallowed and said, “This morning, I was supposed to show up for an escort deal, which got set up late last night, after Sam Poppenberg called me with the assignment to help you. I decided to scope you out, which explains the cab ride this morning, to see how tough you were. I knew either Spencer or Dawson would come looking for me after I stood them up. I also knew that if you were with me at the time, there’d be a confrontation.”
Durivage shifted his body.
“So you set me up.”
She nodded.
Her eyes got wet and she put her hand on his.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. The problem is that they’ve been in my life for so long. I had to get them out and I had to do it in a way that they didn’t know I was doing it, in case it didn’t work.”
Durivage tilted his head.
“You got some nerve to tell me, I’ll give you that.”
“To be honest, if Spencer was the only problem, I wouldn’t be telling you anything,” she said. “The reason I’m telling you is that Dawson’s still out there. By the end of the day, he’ll figure out that something happened to Spencer. He’ll coming looking to see if I had anything to do with it. He’s ten times worse than Spencer. He’s got the eyes of a rattlesnake. I don’t want you to get blindsided by him. I need to tell you the truth so you have the chance to get away from me, if that’s what you choose to do.”
“That’s not what I choose to do,” Durivage said. “So relax.”
18
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Afternoon
Blanche Twister, Ph.D., got up and shut the door. Then she collected her thoughts and told Jina, “In 31 B.C., Cleopatra was the reigning pharaoh of Egypt. At that time she had Mark Antony at her side and was preparing for an impending attack on Alexandria by the Romans under the command of Octavian. Antony's forces eventually faced the Romans in a naval action off the coast of Actium, which later became known as the Battle of Actium. Antony’s fleet, which was poorly equipped and manned, lost resoundingly. Alexandria fell and both Antony and Cleopatra ended up committing suicide shortly thereafter. The rumor is that Cleopatra enraged a viper until it bit her. In any event, her two children, then ages six and
ten, were spared and taken to Rome where they lived out their lives.”
“Okay.”
“A lot of Cleopatra’s treasures and valuables were recovered by Octavian,” Twister said. “There has always been a historical question, though, as to whether all of her riches were there.”
She scratched her ear.
“So far, everything I’ve told you is fairly well documented,” she said. “Now, you asked me to speculate, so here’s where the speculation part starts. Put yourself in Cleopatra’s shoes. There you are, about to embark on a war you’ll probably lose. You have two children, ages six and ten. You don’t want your valuables to fall into enemy hands. Does this make sense?”
“It does.”
“So what do you do?” Twister asked. “If I was Cleopatra, I’d take a small group of trusted men and bury my most precious valuables where nobody would find them. If by chance I won the war, I’d go back and get them, and just hope that the men I thought were trustworthy actually were. If I lost, however, at least my hated enemy wouldn’t get my treasures and maybe, just maybe, there would be a way to get them into the hands of my children down the road.”
“And that’s the scroll,” Jina said.
“Precisely,” Twister said. “I think what we have here is the metes and bounds descriptions of five different sites where Cleopatra buried her riches just before the Battle of Actium. The reason the five different starting points aren’t described on the scroll is because Cleopatra had them in her head. If she wrote them down, anyone who came across the scroll would be able to find them.”
“So what do you think she did with the scroll?”
“I think she buried it in a safe place that only she and Antony and her two children knew about,” Twister said. “I think it’s been buried for the last two thousand years and that the world never knew it existed.”
“It’s got to be worth a fortune,” Jina said.
Twister frowned.
“Make no mistake about that,” she said. “There are five hundred people in Denver right now, not even counting the rest of the world, who would slit your throat in a heartbeat to lay their hands on that scroll if they knew it existed. My advice to you is to not utter a single word about it to anyone.”
“Edward Berkley knows about it,” Jina said.
“He doesn’t know what it is,” Twister said. “All he knows is that you have some sheets of paper that are in ancient Greek and you came to see me about them. You didn’t tell him about the scroll itself, if I understand you.”
“That’s correct.”
“Okay, good. After you leave, I’m going to call him and tell him that the papers you brought me to look at were nothing of importance, but thanks for the referral anyway.”
Jina pictured the scroll in her freezer.
Unattended.
“How much do you think it’s worth?”
Twister wrinkled her forehead.
“Obviously just the gold alone is worth a small fortune,” she said. “What makes it priceless, though, is the historical significance. If it really is what it purports to be, this is undoubtedly one of the most significant archeological finds in the last two thousand years. More importantly, it might even lead to the discovery of the five burial sites. Now that would be almost unthinkable.”
“How could the scroll lead to the sites?” Jina said. “Without the starting points, the metes and bounds descriptions are useless. The critical part of the secret died when Cleopatra died.”
Twister stood up and paced.
Then she looked at Jina and said, “Maybe yes and maybe no. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the starting points might have existed someplace in writing, in a second scroll perhaps, a scroll that only listed the starting points but not the metes and bounds descriptions.”
“So what you’re saying is that maybe all the information is there, but it’s split into two separate scrolls.”
Twister nodded.
“It’s a possibility. Remember, this is all just wild speculation.”
“I wonder where the second scroll would be.”
A pigeon landed on the windowsill.
Twister shoed it away.
“If we knew where the first scroll was discovered, that might provide a clue as to where the second one is, if indeed there is such a thing,” Twister said. “Do you know where the one you have was found?”
No.
She didn’t.
“Find out,” Twister said. “I assume it was in Alexandria somewhere, but it may have been somewhere along the Mediterranean coast or even up the Nile.”
19
Day One
July 15
Tuesday Afternoon
As the detective got comfortable in a chair, Wilde stole a glance out the window to see if cop cars were below. None were. “I’m going to show you something that no one outside the homicide department has ever seen,” Raven said.
“Okay.”
Raven reached into his suit pocket, pulled out a half-dozen photographs and slid them across the desk.
They depicted a woman.
A naked woman.
A naked woman with her hands tied behind her back.
Dead.
Brutally dead with a bloody slit throat.
That wasn’t the strange part though.
Words had been carved in her stomach.
Wilde tried to read them but couldn’t.
“They say, Next time follow instructions,” Raven said. “The victim’s name is Jessica Dent. She was killed eighteen months ago. We never figured out who did it.”
Wilde put the photos on the desk face down.
“Why are you showing me these?”
Raven pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket, tapped two out, handed one to Wilde and lit them up with a silver lighter.
“In May of last year, I got a telephone call out of the blue,” Raven said. “It was a man’s voice, one I didn’t recognize. He was talking through a handkerchief or something like that, disguising it. He said, You will die on Friday. Then he hung up.”
“You will die on Friday?”
“Right, You will die on Friday,” Raven said. “Those were the exact words. The call came on a Tuesday.”
Wilde blew smoke.
“So what’d you do?”
“My first instinct was that someone was just fucking with me,” Raven said. “When word got around the department, though, people started to get pissed that a threat like that would be levied against one of their kind. They took the matter seriously and resolved to catch the guy.”
Wilde nodded.
“Sounds reasonable,” he said. “It might have been a joke but you never know.”
“Anyway, we pulled all the cases I’d been working on for the last five years and went through them, looking for someone who was pissed enough to kill me, maybe a relative of someone I arrested, or someone in the family of a murder victim where the killer never got caught, that kind of thing.”
“What’d you find?”
“We found a few things worth further investigation,” Raven said. “We didn’t have much time to run them down, however. As Friday approached, our plan changed. We decided to just wait and see if someone actually made an attempt to kill me and catch him in the act.”
“Okay.”
The radio was playing lightly in the background.
It was a hillbilly song.
Wilde flicked it off.
“Judging by the fact that you’re sitting in my chair, I’m going to guess that the guy wasn’t successful.”
“You’d be wrong,” Raven said.
“Huh?”
“On Wednesday of that week, a woman went missing,” Raven said. “Her name was Jessica Dent. The homicide department didn’t even know about it. Why would we? It wasn’t a case in our purview. Anyway, Friday rolled around and the guy called me at home after dark. He told me to go to the phone booth at 15th and Curtis and wait for a call. He also said, Here’s the important
part. Come alone. Don’t try any tricks. Don’t try to catch me.”
“Yeah, right,” Wilde said. “Fat chance of that.”
“Exactly,” Raven said. “We got four cops in plain clothes to flank the area. The thinking was that the guy was going to call me and give me directions to go somewhere. The guys would follow me wherever I went, laying low and keeping a distance, of course.”
“Good plan,” Wilde said.
Raven took one last drag on the Marlboro and mashed the butt in the ashtray.
“Actually it wasn’t,” he said. “The phone never rang. Jessica Dent’s body showed up next to the BNSF tracks on the north edge of the city Saturday morning. What was carved in her stomach—Next time follow directions—was obviously directed at me.”
“Damn.”
“Right, damn,” Raven said. “We ran down the leads we pulled up earlier in the week but none of them panned out. Jessica Dent turned into a cold case. I’ve thought about her every day since it happened.”
Raven walked to the windows, looked down and said, “I love Larimer Street.”
Wilde grinned.
“That’s because half your work comes from here.”
Raven shrugged.
“You may be right,” he said. “Here’s the reason I’m here. An hour ago, I got a call from my friend. It was the exact same voice as before with the exact same words, You will die on Friday.”
“So he’s playing his game again.”
“Right,” Raven said. “I haven’t told anyone in the department and I don’t intend to. The only person I’m telling is you. What I want you to do is find out who he is.”
Raven pulled an envelope out of his suit pocket and set it on the desk.
“That’s a thousand dollars.”
Wilde looked at it.
A thousand dollars.
That was three months salary.
“From your own pocket?”