She was wearing a good suit, one that used to fit her perfectly. Now it strained. Only seven pounds separated her from pre- and post-pregnancy weight, but it all seemed to be in her hips and breasts. Her good shoes simply did not fit her. None of her dress shoes fit her. She made a quick call to her sister-in-law, Carolyn, who was up and sipping hot tea and reading the morning paper.
“Yeah, your feet got bigger,” Carolyn laughed. “The ligaments relax during pregnancy and your feet get a little bit bigger. Plus, they get ornery and unwilling.”
“Unwilling?” Lucy said, dress pumps clutched in her hands, her suit buttons straining over her breasts, her curly hair, still wet and uncombed, nearly standing on end with frustration.
“Yeah, unwilling. You used to squinch your feet into those horrible girl’s shoes, but you’re a mom now. So are your feet. They’re not going to put up with being squeezed. Throw out those horrid things and go get a sensible pair of low heels in a size bigger.”
Her feet did feel better. She’d found a pair of cushioned pumps with low heels in a good color in five minutes at the local shoe store. So she shouldn’t feel so nervous. She realized she was feeling very nervous about seeing people, not about her shoes. For an entire year her whole life had been her computer and her baby boy. She was feeling shy.
“I gotta start getting out more,” she muttered to herself. She smoothed her curly hair and hitched at her jacket. The Pentagon was where she had to go. She’d found a marker for Nikola Tesla in the FBI weapons database. There was no information, only the marker that stood for a classified box in the Pentagon basement files. She’d never been to the Pentagon basement. The basement, carved out during the renovation ten years ago, was now an archive. The Pentagon covered over six million square feet, which made the archive enormous. Lucy hoped there was someone who could help her look, or at least point her in the right direction.
Everyone knew about the National Archives and the Smithsonian, but few people knew about the Defense Archives. Lucy didn’t know if her CIA credentials would get her into the files. She was going to give it a try, though.
Twenty minutes later she’d worked her way through metal detectors and guards at the Pentagon. She’d been to the Pentagon many times and she knew the routine of entrance, the way the Pentagon sloped at odd angles and smelled like old, dusty paint, the way the guards checked not just badges and faces, but eyes. Her eyes were nervous but evidently not nervous enough to capture the guard’s interest. At ten thirty the largest office building in the world was stuffed with people, but most of them were at their desks. A goodly number of people walked the halls on business from one place to another, most carrying documents or notebook computers. Nearly half were dressed in civilian suits just like hers. Lucy fit right in.
She got on the elevator and pressed the down button. When the doors opened on the basement level, she walked to the staircase and headed down one last flight of stairs. She’d called a friend at the CIA and gotten directions. What she was doing was perfectly legitimate, but she still felt that any moment security guards were going to burst from a doorway and hold her at gunpoint.
When she opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, she found herself in a large room. Two desks sat facing each other, both topped with huge computer terminals. A water cooler with a blue bottle stood against one wall and a big copy machine stood against the other wall. Facing her from across the room was a vault door with a big spin lock like the helm of a pirate ship. Two men sat at the desks, both intent on their computer screens. They both looked to be of medium height. One had sandy blond hair and pale skin and the other was bald and had dark skin. Except for the hair and the color of their skin they could have been brothers, so alike were the sharp profiles of their noses and chins.
“Hold on,” the bald one said in Lucy’s general direction in a Southern accent.
“You die now,” the sandy blond one said, with satisfaction. He was hunched over his keyboard. Suddenly he sat up straight and back from his screen, wincing. “Damn!”
“Left your flank exposed,” the bald one said. He took his hands off his keyboard and massaged his fingers. He turned to Lucy and smiled. “May I help you?”
“Lucy Giometti, I’m with the DIA,” she said. “I’m an analyst and I’m doing some research and I was wondering if I could get some information from the archives.”
The two men exchanged glances. The sandy-haired one massaged his fingers and left arm and regarded her levelly.
“DIA never comes here. Usually when we get fake DIA they’re really CIA. Is that what you are?”
“Depends,” Lucy said. “What are you two party animals? The guardians of the gate? Or are you just minimum-wage security guards?”
“We’re archivists,” the bald one said with a grin. “So that makes us very much guardians. Tate Webster. Doctor Webster. Tate to my friends.”
“Randy Streeks,” the blond one said. “Doctor Streeks. No jokes about the name, please. I’m sensitive. You can call me Randy.”
“Lucy Giometti, from-another-bureau-but-I-have-to-say-DIA,” Lucy said, and held out her hand. “I’m Lucy. Nice to meet you.”
They both stood and shook her hand.
“What brings you here, Miss Lucy?” Tate asked.
“I’m trying to find the archives on a man. Nikola Tesla. Have you heard of him?”
“I’ve heard of him,” Randy said. “Yeah, he’s the guy who invented the whole missile defense program, right? Death rays, and all that. I heard he was the one who caused the huge explosion in Tungus, Siberia, in 1908. That’s him?”
“Well, I’m not sure about that,” Lucy said, blinking. Death rays? “I wanted to see his file box. I’ve got the tag number from the FBI database.”
She dug in her purse, well aware of their interest in her legs and breasts and curly hair. After a year of nothing but Ted and Hank and family, it felt pretty good to be seen as a female, not a mommy.
“Oh, yeah, and he invented AC power too,” Randy said. He stood up from his desk and took the slip of paper from Lucy’s hand. “We can find this.”
“Want to go with us?” Tate said abruptly. Randy glanced over at his friend with a slight, quickly suppressed frown.
“I’d love to,” Lucy said instantly. She held out a foot with a brand new, navy blue sensible shoe. “Look, I wore comfortable shoes.”
This seemed to tip the scales. Randy laughed and shrugged.
“Tate has a nose for bullshitters,” he said. “He’s never been wrong yet. Come with us, then, Miss Lucy. Prepare to be amazed.”
Five minutes later Tate spun the vault door shut behind Lucy. The three of them were wearing masks, jumpsuits, and booties. Tate and Randy looked like a couple of deranged surgeons. Lucy had no idea what she looked like, with her skirt crumpled on each side of the big jumpsuit and a paper hat on her unruly hair. Probably like an overweight clown.
In front of her the files began, piles of boxes that blocked her view in almost every direction. The boxes were stacked on metal shelves and the shelves were set close to one another, at a distance that would send a claustrophobe into a panic attack. She saw shelves stacked randomly as far as she could see. She knew the archives were large, but now she understood how big they really were. The air was hushed and still and she sensed the enormity of what she stood in. In Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, as a girl, she’d stood and felt the same weight in the cool air against her face.
“What are you doing?” she asked Tate. He had taken a spool of twine from a hook by the vault doorway. The twine was heavy-duty plastic cord, and one end was tied securely to the hook, which was a big steel affair bolted to the metal frame of the door.
“This is our trail of bread crumbs,” Tate said through his mask. “We wear these lovely outfits to protect the archives from us. The twine is to protect us from the archives.”
“Getting lost, you mean,” Lucy said. She looked at the maze of shelves in front of her and gave a tiny uncontrollable shiver. The air wa
s still in here, cool like a basement or a tomb, and the quiet was absolute.
“Yes, getting lost,” Randy said. He scratched at his armpit through the paper jumpsuit. He picked up a folder that sat on a small table under the hook. “Here is our raison d’être, Miss Lucy, our life’s work, I’m beginning to believe.” He flipped the notebook open and Lucy saw a geometric drawing.
“A map!” she said.
“A map,” Tate nodded. “Government types have been shoving papers in here since the twenties. Well, not here, exactly. The Pentagon basement was set up ten years ago and all the archives were sent here from different defense organizations.”
“Like Roswell,” Lucy said immediately, and bit her lips behind the mask.
“Hey, a believer!” Tate said instantly. She could see his smile behind his mask. “You don’t know how much I want to stumble over some alien mummies in here.”
“Me, I want to find the Ark of the Covenant,” Randy said. “Remember that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark? The government worker is putting the box in with a million other boxes in an archive? This is where it should be.”
“That was fiction, man,” Tate said. “Roswell, Roswell was real.”
“Roswell was fiction, you freak,” Randy replied. This had the flavor of an old argument, well maintained.
“How do you expect to find Tesla’s file in this?” Lucy asked.
“Because we already found it,” Tate responded absently. He tested the knot on the twine with several sharp tugs on the line. “It’s a fairly recent file, you know. Nikola Tesla died in—what, 1943? We found it two, three years ago.”
“Looking for Roswell,” Randy said derisively.
“Gives me a reason to go on, my friend,” Tate said. “Organizing this mess is going to take more than our miserable lifetimes. Let’s go. I’m sick of this suit already.”
Tate struck off ahead and Lucy followed. Randy walked behind her because the stacks were so close together. He could have managed a brush at her breasts or her bottom at every turn but he kept a foot or so away, talking nonstop as Tate walked from stack to stack. He was a sweetheart, Lucy decided. All man and very interested, but polite.
The mask began to chafe and her skirt clung to her legs under the paper jumpsuit, but Lucy appreciated the protection as the twine unrolled behind them. Paper dust hung in the air, dust as fine as powder. Even through the mask the smell of moldy paper was pervasive.
“Did you know there really was a curse of King Tut’s tomb?” Randy asked conversationally as they passed through two stacks of dark brown boxes piled to the ceiling.
“Trying to scare me?” Lucy asked, peering in every direction she could see. Wanting to see shriveled alien feet, of course.
“Nope,” Tate said. “One of my favorite stories, too, since we’re working in a version of a pharaoh’s tomb.”
“Lots of people who were at the opening of King Tut’s tomb began to die,” Randy said behind her. “Lady Evelyn Herbert, the diggers, Arthur Mace. Over thirteen people were dead by 1929. This was the genesis of the ‘curse of the mummy.’”
“Turns out anyone who worked with mummies also got sick, sometimes fatally,” Tate continued. He stopped at a junction and consulted his map. Lucy stood waiting as patiently as Randy, trying not to think of the lights failing and leaving her in the dark. Once the thought had crossed her mind, of course, she could think of nothing else.
“Yeah, and it was only years later they discovered a spore. Sometimes it was in the mummy’s wrappings, sometimes in the paintings on the tomb walls. One woman died after touching the wall of the tomb with one finger. It’s called Aspergillus niger, and it infects the lungs, fills them with fluid, until you suffocate. Thus the mummy’s curse,” Randy finished. Tate turned left. The stacks began to look more and more disorganized, paper spilling from overpacked boxes and wrapped shut with twine instead of tape. The smell got worse, more moldy and awful.
“Smells like a mummy is in here,” Lucy said. “Either that or a cat got loose.”
Tate barked out a laugh and Randy chuckled behind her.
“Worse than cats, I’m telling you. Some of this stuff was stored in places where rain got in, mice got in, chipmunks, cats, whatever. We wear more than this paper stuff when we open a new crate, I’ll tell you.”
“So these masks will protect us from airborne spores?” Lucy asked. “Keeping us safe from the mummy’s curse?”
“We think so,” Tate said with horrible nonchalance. “Hey, here we are.” He stopped along a wall of boxes, each one taped and marked with black pen. The other side of the narrow corridor was piled high with crates, stenciled carelessly with numbers and letters that made no sense at all. At the top of the pile of boxes, Lucy saw a chain of wooden beads painted in bright colors, something that would go on an old-fashioned Christmas tree. A section of the beads were stained dark brown, a substance that looked suspiciously like very old dried blood. She instantly wanted to know the story of the beads. She craved to know.
“Aren’t those interesting?” Tate said, following her gaze.
“All of a sudden I think I wouldn’t be bored by this job,” Lucy said, looking at the bright colors of the beads.
“Treasure, yeah, the best kind,” Tate said approvingly. “I dream of breaking open the right box, someday.”
“Somewhere in this stack, right?” Randy said, stepping down the stack, fingers trailing along the boxes.
“Tesla,” Tate said. “Help us look. But don’t let go of the twine, please.”
“Not on your life,” Lucy said fervently.
19
Special Investigations Bureau, Colorado Springs, Colorado
“Bad news, team,” Harben said, his hands folded together. He’d appeared between their desks while they were both at their computer screens, and as usual, Eileen didn’t see him coming.
“Don’t tell me,” Eileen began, and Harben raised his hand slightly. She shut up like he’d thrown a switch.
“Durland changed his verdict to suicide.”
“They got to him,” Eileen said quietly, swallowing past acid in her throat.
“Mitchell must have leaned on someone,” Harben said. “I am very disappointed. I don’t believe Leetsdale was a suicide.”
“So what do we do?” Eileen asked. She glanced at Rosen. His face was dark and his lips were pressed tight together. He was absolutely furious.
“Look at Krista Lewis. That is a murder and we have an arrangement with Sheriff Gonzalez. That’s the only link we have open. Sorry.” He turned and walked back to his office.
“We’ll have to prove he killed Krista to get to Leetsdale.”
“That might be difficult,” Rosen said. He had been looking through the autopsy report on Krista Lewis.
“What is it?” Eileen asked. She was beginning to think about lunch before Harben came by. The office was still at a post-snowstorm roar. The light outside, tending toward noon, was blindingly bright with reflected snow. The snow was already melting rapidly, which would make driving after dark an incredible hazard.
“Looks like the time-of-death of Lewis’s body was revised by the Pueblo coroner. The Alamosa coroner put her in a twelve-hour time slot, but the Pueblo office revised upward at the autopsy.”
“The Alamosa coroner didn’t do an autopsy?” Eileen asked.
“He doesn’t handle murder very often. He didn’t want to screw it up, so he did the prelims and sent the evidence and the body on to Pueblo. Good people there.”
“Good coroner in Alamosa,” Eileen commented. A good decision. So much evidence could be lost in a botched autopsy that a conviction could be lost as well.
“Anyway, the Pueblo coroner said that she might have been dead more than twelve hours, given the state of the body and the location.”
“The sand dunes,” Eileen said. She was thinking of latitude 37.47.50 and longitude 105.33.20. Was that spot where Krista had met her death? The light outside seemed even more blinding for a moment.
Eileen realized she was developing a headache. From hunger, perhaps.
“Maybe we should have a talk with Jacob Mitchell,” Eileen said. “Really find out his alibi for Krista’s murder. Maybe my little incident as well.”
“If Harben will let us,” Rosen said doubtfully. He turned to her and held up the autopsy report. Then he set it down. Then he picked it up again.
“What is it?” Eileen asked. Rosen was never unsure. He certainly never hesitated to speak his opinion, if he had one.
“It’s just that there’s another person involved,” Rosen said slowly. “Whose alibi might not cover the twenty-four-hour period of Krista’s murder time.”
Eileen heard a rushing sound, as though a large airplane had passed over the building. She realized it was her heart, pounding sickly and heavily against her temples. Spears of light from the windows seemed to strike into her eyes. She took her hands from her keyboard and touched her temples lightly, to steady herself.
“I see,” she said. “Alan Baxter.”
“I can’t believe it,” Rosen said. “I don’t believe it. But—”
“Of course we know it could be true,” Eileen said sharply. “Murderers can look like anybody. Just because he seems like a nice person doesn’t mean he’s not our murderer.”
Rosen rustled the autopsy papers in his hands, then set them down at his desk and smoothed them awkwardly with his hands.
“This would disconnect our two homicides,” he said slowly. “Which would complicate our story.”
“But they could be disconnected,” Eileen said. “Perhaps we can’t tie this all together because it isn’t tied together.”
“So we should talk to Alan Baxter again,” Rosen said. Eileen looked directly at him and saw distress in his eyes. She had no idea how she would handle the reverse situation. Discussing a person’s father as a potential murderer was difficult enough without the person being a cop, and your partner.
“I’m okay, you know,” she said.
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