“Catch him!” Julia cried as Alex raced up behind her. He moved to get around to the door.
“Not Paul, Felix,” she cried, groping desperately for the fragile mummy as he dangled half off the table.
And they heard the snick of the bolt shooting home.
“WHAT THE HELL did you think you were doing?” Julia had never been so furious in her life. She didn’t know she could get so angry.
She stared at Alex. “I don’t even know where to start. I’m so mad right now, I can’t think straight.”
Felix was back in place, though much the worse for wear. And the door was absolutely, indubitably locked.
“Calm down, Julia. We’ve got the statue.”
“We’ve got the statue?” Her voice rose. “We’ve done irreparable harm to an Eighteenth Dynasty mummy, damaged I don’t know how many artifacts, gotten locked in again. And all you can say is that we’ve got the statue? You promised me, you promised me that you wouldn’t break in there,” she said furiously. “But no, you had to do it. You had to be the one. Alex the golden boy cracks the case, only he loses the crook while he’s at it.”
“I didn’t plan for Paul to get away.” Irritation flared in Alex’s voice.
“Were you there for the conversations we had yesterday?” she raged. “Let’s get the authorities in here, I said and you agreed. You agreed. And then the minute I fall asleep, you’re in here breaking into the desk.” Unable to stand still, she paced away.
“Look, I didn’t intend to break into the desk. I just went in there to look around.”
“And the drawer fell open by itself. Well, how about that?” Her voice was scathing. “You know, I must have been out of my mind to buy into your act. I know what you’re like, Alex, I know it. And I let myself fantasize that somehow everything was different. Well, it’s not. You go carting off and do things without any regard for the consequences. It’s all about you and what you want. You don’t use your head. You never have.”
“Did it ever occur to you to ask why I broke into the desk?” He stepped forward, looking as angry as she. “He wasn’t just forging, Julia. He was making the forgeries to sub into our inventory and selling off the originals.”
Shock stopped her for a moment and then fury bubbled up again. “And you couldn’t be bothered to tell me?”
“When did I have time? Paul came in right when I figured it out. He was taking the statue to Heidelberg to deliver it to the Sphinx, that’s what the phone numbers meant. Not prices, delivery dates. I had to do something,” he snapped. “If I hadn’t, I’ll tell you what would have happened—you and I would have gone to security, and by the time we managed to convince someone to listen to us, Paul would have been long gone. And the museum would have lost an Old Kingdom statue. I did what I thought I had to do.”
“And I hope you’re happy with the way it worked out,” she said bitterly, looking at the door.
22
Monday, May 9, 8:00 a.m.
ALLARD SQUINTED into the morning sun, wishing for his sunglasses, wishing for the cloak of darkness. Darkness was his home. Darkness was his safety. But then, his foes knew that. They had given him no chance of escape, but kept him bound and under guard throughout the long day and the longer night.
He dismissed the pain in his aching shoulders. It did not matter. What mattered was finding the opportunity. What mattered was gaining control of the situation.
And then they would be sorry.
The vehicle stopped at the bank. With the muzzle of a gun pressed to his ribs, he slid out the door to the pavement, where the tall one was waiting. To passersby, he knew, nothing appeared amiss as he approached the front door of the bank, flanked by his escort.
They thought they had control. It did not matter. He would bide his time and he would seize his moment, and slip through their fingers.
First Bank of Manhattan, the letters were engraved deep into the marble facade of the building. Mighty pillars flanked the entrance, giving the illusion of strength, security. And inside, the White Star.
If they thought he was giving her over to them, they were mad.
In the lobby, he stopped. “Very well. I will go into the vault and retrieve the package. You will wait for me here.”
The muzzle of the gun dug into his ribs. “We will go with you.”
Allard smiled faintly. “As you wish.”
The blonde was at the service desk, and he smiled as he approached her. “So we meet again, Caroline.” He pulled out his wallet with its access card.
She beamed. “Why hello, Mr. Allen.”
“Good morning. I wish to enter my safe-deposit box.” He showed her his card and his identification. “My friends will come with me.”
She bit her lip. “Oh, I’m sorry, we can’t do that,” she said. As he’d expected. “If they’re not on the contract, they’ll have to wait here.”
He clicked his tongue and resisted the urge to gloat. “Alas, my friends, you must wait.” It was the opportunity he’d been counting on. They would wait and he would slip out the back door. It was one of his specialties. A chance to elude them, a chance to survive.
A chance to escape with the White Star.
“There is no exception?” the stocky one demanded, an edge in his voice.
“Well…” The clerk glanced over at the tellers.
“Do not worry, chérie, we don’t mind,” Allard said to her kindly.
It was his undoing.
“I suppose we can find one way around it,” she told him, eager to please. “We can amend the contract to list them, as well, then change it back. If you want to.”
“That would be most kind of you,” the stocky one said before Allard could reply. “Let me give you my identification.”
And Allard’s pulse began to thud in his ears.
FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME, Alex checked his watch. He sat in a lab chair by the door, staring at the heavy oak door, with its glossy black knob. Waiting in silence.
Waiting for release.
The air still smelled faintly of acetone and alcohol, even though Julia had started up the fume hoods to suck up the worst of the vapors. After the meltdown, they’d worked for a couple of hours to clean up the spills and put the shelf back in order. It was amazing, Alex reflected, how much two people could accomplish without a word, when they were sufficiently motivated.
One of the tables held a little pile of the artifacts that had been scattered when Paul had overturned the shelf. Most had survived.
Too bad the same couldn’t be said for whatever had been between them.
How the hell had everything gone south so completely? Alex wondered in disgust as he and Julia waited side by side like strangers. One moment, all had been well in his life. The next, everything had gone to hell in a handbasket.
But it really hadn’t been well. That had been an illusion. He’d thought that Julia had finally decided to believe in him, that she’d finally looked at him and really seen. She accused him of posing, but the pose was hers. When things had gotten toughest, the facade of an open mind that she’d put on had been ripped away and she’d gone back to her easy assumptions.
How did you build a relationship with someone who didn’t believe in you? he wondered wearily. The answer was, you didn’t. It was impossible. Reality was, they’d never really had a chance to begin with. The knowledge should have made him feel better.
Instead, he felt like hell.
The sound of footsteps in the hallway broke into his thoughts. Instinct had both of them shifting to stare at one another; the events of the past four hours had them turning back to the door.
The brisk slap of shoes on marble came to a stop before the lab door. “What the…?” someone muttered. Alex listened tensely as the key outside rattled in what had become a tiresome ritual. Then, the door opened and a pretty woman with short brown hair stood blinking at them.
“Julia? Alex? What are you doing here?”
THE OVERHEAD LIGHT GLARED off the white walls an
d white floor of the vault, off the metal banks of safe-deposit boxes with their keyholes like staring eyes. And Allard stood, key in hand. It was impossible that this was what it had come to.
Impossible, now, that he had to relinquish the White Star.
Renouf’s men stood vigilant. There was no chance of escape, he thought, here where a bullet would ricochet endlessly off the case-hardened steel. This was not the place to try. Instead, he turned his key and heard the metallic click that released his box.
The cramped little privacy room held only a table and two chairs. With the door closed, it was nearly suffocating. Allard remembered standing at a pet-shop window as a boy, watching a mouse that had been dropped into a cobra’s clear glass enclosure for feeding. As soon as its feet had hit the sand and stone, the mouse had tensed, not recognizing the scent perhaps, but knowing instinctually that something was very wrong. And Jean had stared as the mouse scurried around the end of the cage, realizing its peril.
Realizing there was no way out.
Trembling with fear, the mouse had darted from corner to corner, increasingly frantic as the cobra coiled and slid its hooded head ever closer.
Moving in for the kill.
Absurde. Such thoughts would not help. He was not La Souris Noire, the dark mouse, but the cobra, biding its time, in control.
Keeping that thought in mind, he set the box on the table and sat. The stocky one settled in a chair; the tall one leaned against the door, watching impassively.
Allard laid his hands on the top panel of the box. It was necessary, he reminded himself. Preservation at all costs. If he must give her up to survive, then he must give her up. There were, after all, other prizes.
His goal now was to walk away alive.
He swallowed and opened the panel, expecting to see the brown wood grain of the museum container.
And the blood drained from his face.
The blank steel of the box gleamed, smooth and featureless under the overhead lights. It was formed without a seam, with no cracks, he could see. He could see because there was no wooden cube inside to interrupt his view. There was no museum container.
The box was empty.
The White Star was gone.
JULIA SAT IN THE INTERVIEW ROOM at the police precinct, unbearably weary. She and Alex had gone straight from the conservation lab to security, telling the story first to underling after underling as they’d waited for the department head to arrive.
Yes, the amulet she’d signed for was gone. No, they had no idea who might have taken it. Yes, it was very old and valuable. Yes, there was every indication Paul Wingate had forged one or more pieces from the museum inventory. Yes, it was possible he had stolen items. No, she had no idea how many pieces might be involved. Yes, she realized they should not have tampered with evidence.
This last, with a glare at Alex.
They’d gone round and round until the department head had come in at nine. At that point, they’d begun it all over again. Julia knew they’d turned a corner when the head had agreed to follow them down to the lab and see the evidence himself.
And now, finally, she sat in the interview room at the local police precinct. She’d let Alex go first; it was her turn now.
Alex…Equal parts fury and loss sloshed about within her, and over it all, a thick layer of self-recrimination. How much of a fool could she be? How could she have believed in him, fallen for the act? And how, when she’d tried to be so smart, could she have gotten in so deep in just three days?
A week before, she’d come back from skydiving resolved to clean up her life. Instead, she’d made more of a mess of it than ever.
So why did she still miss him so much?
The door opened, jarring her from her thoughts. A tall detective in a moss-colored button-down and khakis came in. “Ms. Covington? Sam Mason,” he said, holding out his hand.
Julia shook it, frowning at him. With his sandy-brown hair and gray eyes, he seemed familiar, but for the life of her she couldn’t say why.
He gave her a quizzical look. “Is there a problem?”
“Have we ever met?” she asked.
“I don’t think so, no.” His voice was matter-of-fact, his gaze flat and impassive. “I’m one of the officers investigating the Stanhope Auction House robbery. I understand you have some information that might help. You want to tell me about it?”
“A woman brought an amulet into the museum last Friday. A Marissa Suarez.”
“Do you have her contact information?”
Julia blinked. “In my office. I can get it for you tomorrow. She wanted to see if I could identify the amulet. She had a suspicion that it might be the White Star, one of the items—”
“I’m familiar with the White Star,” he interrupted. “Did Ms. Suarez say how she obtained the object?”
“I think she’d better tell you that part of the story,” Julia returned calmly. “I can tell you that I determined conclusively that the amulet she brought me was indeed the White Star.”
He studied her. “Do you get that kind of thing often in your line of work, people off the street coming in to ask you to identify objects?”
Julia almost smiled. “More often than you would think, though usually with less interesting results. In this case, though, she was referred. By the sister of one of my colleagues,” she elaborated. “Alex Spencer.”
“The guy who’s here with you.”
“He’s not with me,” Julia corrected tersely.
Mason watched her a moment with those gray eyes. “My mistake. So why don’t you tell me about what happened this weekend?”
There wasn’t, Julia thought, enough time in the world…
ALEX SHIFTED on the hard chair in the waiting area at the precinct. He’d finished giving his statement. “You’re free to go,” they’d told him. If he’d left then, he’d be at home by now, crashed out on his bed, dead to the world.
Instead, he was sitting here staring at scarred walls the color of a manila folder and trying to find a comfortable position on the world’s hardest chair. Instead, he was here waiting for Julia out of some perverse chivalric code that said they were in this together and she shouldn’t have to walk out alone.
A sentiment she likely wouldn’t thank him for.
“You putz, Spencer,” he muttered to himself. How was it that after all that happened, he was still hung up on her? Didn’t a smart guy get it after a while? Didn’t a smart guy give up? But he couldn’t quite make himself do it. He couldn’t quite give up that last little hope.
He’d wait for her and see what happened. If they were still in détente, then that was it. Enough. She’d go off to Heidelberg and he’d go off to Club Pickup and find himself a woman who appreciated him for a change.
And consign Julia Covington to his past, where she belonged.
“SO DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA why Wingate might have started up this whole scheme?” Detective Mason asked.
Julia sipped some of the water he’d gotten for her and sighed. “Conservation is kind of a strange profession. It seems really glamorous and exciting when you see it on an A&E doc—” She hesitated. He didn’t exactly look like the A&E type. “When you see it on television,” she amended. “But in reality, it’s hard, low-profile work. If you’re a conservator, you’re in service to the collection. If you do a perfect job, your contribution is invisible.”
“And you think he’s looking for something more.”
“Paul’s a complex guy. He’s got a huge ego, for one thing. Status really matters to him. I kind of get the impression he got into this career expecting a really different life than it turned out to be, and he’s angry. He lobbied to be appointed a director a couple of years ago. When he got turned down, he was impossible to work with for a good six months. He’s never been the same since.”
“So status, more than money.”
“Do you ever see a theft motive entirely independent of money, Detective?” she inquired, amused. “Conservators don’t get paid particul
arly well, so I’m sure the financial rewards came into it, as well.”
Mason gave a brisk nod. “Well, we’ll do what we can. You understand, I’ve got people looking for him, but it’s not like he’s a murderer. And a guy like this might very well have planned for getting caught eventually.”
“You think he’s gone,” she said, looking at him steadily.
“I think it’s a possibility. We’ll do what we can. At this point, we don’t know that his alleged forgeries extended beyond the statue that you and Mr. Spencer discovered. And, of course, there’s the matter of corrupted evidence. Officially, I should remind you that amateur detective work is bad news. Even if we find Wingate, I’m not at all sure how much of the material you’ve unearthed will be admissible in court. Mr. Spencer should never have broken into the office or the desk.”
“If it hadn’t been for Alex, Paul Wingate would have gotten away with stealing a half-million-dollar statue,” Julia said tartly. And flushed. Where the hell, she wondered, had that come from? “Under the circumstances,” she continued more moderately, “we did what we thought was best.”
“I understand. That was on the record. Off the record, I think you two did a hell of a job.” For the first time, she saw a flicker of humor in Mason’s eyes.
“Bunnie Bernaldo,” Julia said suddenly.
He gave her a puzzled look. “What?”
“That’s where I know you from. Last month, at one of her parties. You were with Cass Richards.”
And a bright smile lit up his face, utterly confounding her. “I still am,” he assured her. “I still am.”
“AND IF YOU THINK of anything else or hear of anything else, please call me right away,” Sam Mason finished as he escorted Julia to the door that led to the waiting area and shook her hand. “Thanks for coming in. Please thank Mr. Spencer for me, too.”
Julia opened her mouth to say she probably couldn’t do that, but the detective was already gone. She started down the hall. Three o’clock, she thought, glancing at the clock on the wall. She’d worn the better part of the day away sitting in offices, telling her tale. Now, finally, she was free to go home. She could brush her teeth, she thought, take a shower, do all the things that she’d fantasized about over the weekend.
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