“It’s not your fault,” he said in a failed attempt to sound calm. “I’m the one that took the effigy out of the museum. And I’m responsible for locking the doors.”
That was what bothered Peet the most. The fact was he had locked the doors. He’d made sure the entrance was secure as soon as they were in the anthropology building, and neither one of them had left before the wild chase through the parking lot. Had he not been fortunate enough to be wearing his jacket with his keys in the pocket, they would have found themselves locked out and soaked to the bone after the thief made his get away.
Lori wiped away a tear. “I should have locked up the lab before I came to your office.”
“Why would you? Nobody would have expected someone to break in.”
Even as he said it, Peet knew he should have expected a break-in. The effigy had been splashed across newspaper headlines and magazine covers across the country; an irresistible temptation for treasure seekers and black market collectors. The rare, nearly opaque Guatemalan jade, the mosaic bloom of fine Cerrillos turquoise—the effigy was likened to King Tut’s golden mask by the way it captured the public’s eye. Who wouldn’t recognize its unique and impressive value?
To add salt to the wound now wrenching Peet’s gut, the university was overly cautious about theft, a paranoia resulting from the silent but ever-looming threat of chemical terrorism. Alarm systems had been installed in computer labs, chemistry and biology labs, and of course, the archaeology lab. Even if someone broke through a window in the building, they would have had to break into the lab and then the storage room, thus triggering the security system. It would have been a Herculean task to break through three security systems and escape before law enforcement responded. That is, if Peet hadn’t been there to turn the alarms off first.
“What’s that?”
Lori’s eyes were fixed on the storage container. She crawled over to the box and peeled a narrow strip of paper from the underside of the container’s lid.
“This wasn’t here before,” she said, rising to her feet.
She handed the note over to Peet. The tape was still tacky and fresh. The paper was heavy and the bottom edge was jagged as if torn from a sheet of beige stationary, leaving only a strip containing the printed letterhead.
“Acatzalan,” he read aloud. “Sound familiar to you?”
Lori looked at the strange note. “I’ve never heard of it before,” she said. “What does it mean?”
Peet shook his head and tapped a finger at one of the two serpentine figures flanking the word. “This looks like a Mayan hieroglyph.” He pointed at two thick vertical lines standing parallel to each other on the left side of the snake-like glyphs. “I think it’s a date symbol. The Mayans used bars and dots beside the glyphs to label the days on their calendar.”
“So what’s the date?”
“I don’t know,” Peet admitted. “I only know the very basics of their calendar system from a computer program I have at home.”
Lori paused with that distant look she always had when her mind was calculating. When she looked back at him, there was a shadow of confusion on her face.
“I don’t get it, Dr. Peet.”
“I think our thief wanted us to find this,” he said.
“That doesn’t make sense. He leaves us a note, then changes his mind and tears the bottom of it off?”
“Don’t you see? This is the note. He’s giving us a day.”
“Like a ransom note? Deliver on this day or we destroy the effigy?”
“Possibly.”
“Deliver what?”
“I don’t know.”
Peet hated not knowing. He hated losing the effigy. They had to get it back and that meant doing the only thing they could do.
He tiptoed through the pillaged artifacts and escaped into the laboratory.
“Where are you going?” Lori asked, hobbling behind him.
“I’m calling the police,” he said.
“The police? Won’t they ask questions?”
“That’s the whole point.”
“I mean, won’t they ask us questions? Questions we might not want them to know the answers to?”
Peet threw her a look that challenged her ridiculous remark. She must have bumped her head harder than he’d thought.
“I mean, what about that performance review you mentioned?” she pressed.
“I can’t worry about that right now.”
He reached for the phone hanging on the wall next to the lab door. He picked up the receiver and dialed 9 just as Lori’s hand disconnected the line.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“You can’t call the cops.”
“Are you insane? If we call now there’s a chance they might catch that thief tonight!”
Lori grabbed the receiver, but Peet maintained his grip. They stood there in a hesitant tug of war.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “If the cops open an investigation, the first thing they’ll want to know is what we were doing here.”
“Then we tell them the truth.”
“And what would the truth sound like to them? A professor who’s already under suspicion for fraternizing, doing a favor for a student of the opposite sex on campus late at night. Not only that, but we just so happened to be in the lab the same night the effigy was stolen.”
“We can’t be blamed for an unfortunate series of events.”
Lori tugged on the handset. “Maybe not. But you could lose your job.”
Peet tugged back. “Better my job than the effigy.”
“I could be expelled.”
He stared into Lori’s imploring eyes. The two of them were still locked onto the receiver, Lori’s other hand lighting on his. Peet groaned inwardly. He wasn’t just caught between a rock and a hard place. He felt like he was being squashed between two granite millstones.
When he finally relinquished the handset he collapsed onto a lab stool, the weight of the night finally crashing down upon him. There was no reconciling now. It didn’t matter what he did or didn’t do. The simple truth of the matter was sooner or later Snead would learn of the effigy’s disappearance, and there was nobody to blame but himself. It was only a matter of time and Peet would find himself out of a career.
“We have to call the police, Lori. There’s no other choice.”
“We have the note,” Lori said. “Maybe we can meet the thief’s ransom and—”
“That effigy’s priceless. There’s no way we can remotely afford what he’s going to want for it.”
Lori was undeterred. “That’s to decide later. Right now, we need to figure out the date of that Mayan hieroglyph. We need to know how much time we have left.”
Clues
The address on the mailbox was faint in the glow of the headlights. It took him a moment to make it out. 4350 County Road 12. Somehow, he’d managed to find the right place, and in the dark no less.
The windows of the dilapidated trailer house were dark when he pulled in. He drove straight up to it as though he were simply returning home. It wouldn’t be hard to rouse suspicion in such a rural place and he didn’t want to take a chance after what had happened at the university.
He should have known by the ease with which he entered the anthropology building that something was bound to go wrong. The Mirrored One had led him straight to the effigy but apparently even he hadn’t expected Gaspar to beat them to it. An inconvenient delay, he told himself. That’s all it was—an inconvenient delay.
In all honesty, it was just as well that he hadn’t found the effigy at the university. He hadn’t expected its large size and given the impression of the foam molding within the artifact’s storage container, the effigy wouldn’t have fit conspicuously within the jaguar box as he’d planned. But now he found himself faced with a second shot at the effigy, and out here on a rural route, no less, where his prize wouldn’t require a disguise.
No lights came on in the trailer after he cut the engine. The
darkness fell over him like a suffocating cloud. He waited, and still there showed no life from the trailer. Perhaps Gaspar was a heavy sleeper. Given that the only thing sitting in the red dirt driveway was a rusted-out Dodge on blocks, chances were Gaspar wasn’t even home.
He got out of the car, disregarding the shredded strip of the girl’s lab coat that fell from the door, and boldly approached the trailer. The dry porch boards creaked beneath his weight. The screen door opened like air in his hands. The door was unlocked.
Inside, the place had the smell of bachelorhood and it echoed with the eerie silence of abandonment. He flipped on a light switch and one of three yellow bulbs in the kitchen fixture blinked on.
A barstool guarded the chipped counter separating the entryway from the kitchen and there he spotted an old newspaper with a picture of the effigy spread across the front page. The once-brilliant color was faded from manhandled newsprint.
Beside the paper was a notepad with a pen, and an old touch-tone telephone with its extra long cord draping off the counter in a twisted knot. He read a series of numbers written in a shaky hand across the notepad.
50093654
He stared at this a moment. It was too long to be a local phone number. Too short to be long distance. It looked like an airline confirmation number—perhaps for a hasty late night flight.
He picked up the receiver. The dial tone was strong, the volume on the phone turned to high. There was a pretty good chance that Gaspar made his flight reservations with the last call he made. If so, that might tell him where the old man went. At the very least, he’d know what airline he took.
He pressed redial.
The phone clicked through a long set of numbers. The long hesitation to connect could indicate an international number. The line rang only once.
“Agave Azul. Le puedo ayudar yo?”
Perfect! He smiled and hung up the receiver. There was no need to look for Gaspar’s trail when he’d found the destination. A faint chuckle escaped his throat.
The Mirrored One was still leading the way.
PART II
Thursday, May 17, 2012
“The feathers which grow on it are called quetzalli. They are like wide reeds: the ones which glisten, which bend. They become green, they become turquoise. They bend, they constantly bend; they glisten.”
Fray Bernardino De Sahagún, Florentine Codex
Mexico City
The morning was bright, with the stalwart sun permeating the high, wispy clouds suspended over Mexico. The air nearly crackled for moisture that would be at least another month in coming. Regardless, there was warmth, a bone-soaking warmth that Shaman Juan Joaquin Gaspar found soothing.
He paused beside a bench outside the private aircraft terminal and relieved himself of the heavy wooden box he’d been holding all night. He straightened his weary back, bracing the stiffness along his spine. The vertebrae beneath his aching hands popped back into alignment, relieving some of the pressure, and that penetrating sun melted the tension from his muscles.
The shaman wasn’t as young and limber as he used to be. He’d known that for a long time. He was firmly aware of his limitations, which was why he blamed a brief dose of insanity for driving him through the long, sleepless night. Now he was paying for it as he shielded his swollen eyes against the sun’s glare. He needed some rest.
The sliding glass doors clattered open behind him, sounding faintly distant in his aging ears. “Your ride should be here any minute, Mr. Gaspar.”
Shaman Gaspar recognized the voice. He shuffled around to find his pilot, Jim Martinez, standing behind him.
“You didn’t call one of those damned bugs, did you? Last time they cleaned me out of twenty-three dollars and a watch.”
He’d learned long ago not to carry large amounts of cash into Mexico City, and the watch he lost was cheap. But it was the aggravation of the theft that bothered him most. Now, with valuable cargo in that wooden crate on the bench, he couldn’t risk any unnecessary chances.
“I managed every detail,” Jim said. “Took me a dozen phone calls to get it too.”
“I’ll be sure the owner’s fully compensated.”
The pilot turned back to the terminal with a look of uncertainty. Gaspar could almost read his thoughts—a sudden, last minute trip, mysterious cargo but no luggage, a pickup. This wasn’t Gaspar’s style and Jim had made his inconvenienced displeasure obvious from the moment Gaspar demanded a flight. The protests ranged anywhere from needing longer notice to clear flight plans and customs, to a defiant, “where do you expect me to find a pickup in Mexico?” all to which Gaspar acknowledged with a simple, “I’m ready when you are,” and “oh, by the way, I need a big pickup.”
Gaspar made sure his pilot was well paid for his trouble. It would make for an expensive trip, but the New Age fund could cover where his meager life’s savings fell short. The additional expenses would be worth all the trouble and Gaspar was already receiving dividends. Not only did Jim promptly make the flight into Mexico, he smoothly convinced the customs officials to ignore the crate in Gaspar’s lap.
Jim disappeared into the terminal and Gaspar finally eased himself onto the bench. He took up the crate, and although it was heavy and awkward, he cradled it in his lap once more. The closeness and security of it there felt comforting, even though it had nearly put Gaspar’s legs to sleep by the time a boxy, old pickup peeled off from the distant flow of traffic.
As the Ramcharger drew closer, he took in its rugged details: the faded paint two-toned with dirt and primer, the single mud flap flopping beneath a rusted fender, a rock chip scar with a tentacle that spread across the entire length of the windshield. But most importantly, the pickup had a grill guard, dented but sturdy.
Gaspar relaxed. Jim had yet to let him down. Now, he looked forward to a good, heavy flauta to fill his growling stomach. And then, he’d sleep the heat of the day away in that big comfortable bed awaiting him at the Agave Azul.
Night would return soon enough.
Zedilla
The morning was as bright as he’d ever seen when Diego stopped at the coffee stall a few blocks down from headquarters. The air was warm and there was no wind. The day was perfectly primed for a siesta afternoon, but Diego already knew that wasn’t going to happen, not when he had another day of mind-numbing interrogations to look forward to.
Diego was tired. His shoulders felt as heavy as his eyelids and there was a soreness in his upper arms. He cursed himself. He’d become soft since those days with the PJF, so soft that he was feeling the effects of only one night in the farmhouse. In his prime he would have worked a suspect over through the night and then some and still have the energy to laugh it off over a bottle of Mescal. He wondered how worse he’d feel this morning if his suspect hadn’t been a New Age weakling, and the idea that he himself had become weak was aggravating.
The barista in the coffee stall knew how he liked his café de olla—stiff black with a hefty dose of cinnamon—and she had it made by the time he approached the counter. He left his money beside the jar of confectionaries like he always did, and walked out with one name pouring through his mind.
Acatzalan.
Who was Acatzalan? It wasn’t a name he’d heard before. None of the fifty-three arrested New Agers had ever mentioned this person. Could he be a New Age leader from another chapter? Was he Citlalpol’s superior? Diego had asked him that last night but as his luck would have it, Sanchez passed out before offering any further information.
Might Acatzalan be the Equinox Killer?
Diego had pondered over the question several times since he tossed Sanchez back in his cell and each time his mind returned to the American they’d stopped at the roadblock during the investigation in Teotihuacan two months ago. The boy had been the first to mention anything about the equinox but strangely enough, he wasn’t among the fifty-three arrested later that day. Had Diego known then what he knew now, he’d have arrested the kid on the spot. But at the time the equinox
meant nothing to him and he’d promptly turned the gringo away.
The missing identity of that American had been plaguing Diego’s mind ever since they learned of the equinox’s significance. Now, that nameless face taunted his thoughts. Was he Acatzalan? Had Diego unknowingly turned the Equinox Killer away from the scene of the crime?
Diego had already checked the local car agencies for customers who’d rented silver Chryslers during the week of March 21st. He ended up with a two-page list of names and addresses that, once all other nationalities were removed, was whittled down to thirteen Americans. Only two of them were among the New Agers that were arrested, leaving him with eleven guesses. And even if the American’s name was among those still on the list, that still wouldn’t prove he was the Equinox Killer.
The list was practically useless. It was a crap shoot, but at least it was a shot.
Diego took a sip of his coffee as he continued along the street. He hadn’t yet swallowed the heat when he felt something hard press into his side.
“Buenos días, Armando,” a menacing voice growled low behind his ear.
The gun nudged a rib—a warning not to turn around.
“Get in the car.”
A dark-tinted Lincoln waited in a no parking zone nearby. As if on cue, the back door opened to an ominously dark interior. Diego was shoved inside where he found himself wedged between the gunman and a second who silently but swiftly wound a cord around his neck and drew it tight.
Diego reached for his throat but the gunman pulled his hands away. He heard his own air sucking down his throat, his lungs pulling for every ounce, and his lap was on fire from twenty-two ounces of spilled cinnamon coffee.
The car began to move.
“Agent Diego, mi amigo.”
A well-dressed man turned in the front passenger seat to face him. He was a small man. What is it with small men this week? His thinning black hair was oiled back, his toothy grin just as greasy. A blood-red carnation sprouted from his lapel.
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