CHAPTER TWO
2725 Words
CHAPTER TWO
“Did you get the papers?” Veronica asked when he picked up. Most wives started with “hello.” Even strangers did that.
Sadly, she was becoming a stranger. More and more every month.
“Hello,” Daniel said, his heart sinking. He walked down the hall, eyes darting to the left and right, hoping none of the other agents passing by could see his stress. An office environment where everyone was trained to read body language made it hard to have private phone calls. Daniel headed for the bathroom.
“Hello,” Veronica replied with obvious impatience. “I asked if you got the papers.”
“Just a minute. I’m in the hallway. Hold on.”
Daniel hurried to the nearest bathroom, only to see a guy go in just in front of him.
So much for privacy.
Between the men’s and women’s room was the door to the disabled bathroom. Glancing to make sure no one was looking, he went in there and locked the door.
It was a small room with only one toilet. He sat on the lid, leaned against the handrail, and said, “Yes, I got the papers. I haven’t read them.”
“Because you’re too busy with a case,” Veronica said this like she’d said it a thousand times before. In fact, she had.
“No, it’s because I know what they say, and I don’t want to sign them.”
Deep sigh. “Look, Daniel. I can get a divorce with or without your consent. I’m trying to be nice here.”
“And I’m trying to save our marriage!”
“You’re years too late for that.”
“It’s never too late,” Daniel said, checking his watch. He had a plane to catch, and barely enough time to get home, pack, and get to the airport. Those tricky bastards hadn’t given him enough time to fight this.
“Come on, Daniel. Just sign the papers. I’ve been very generous with the alimony payments.”
She had. That wasn’t the point, though. He wanted a wife, not an ex.
“Look, honey, I know we’ve had problems, but we can work them out. We don’t want to throw away eight years—”
“Seven and a half.”
Daniel gnashed his teeth. Veronica was a math professor at Georgetown. Always precise. Always analytical. Always correcting him.
“Whatever. The point is we don’t want to throw that away.”
Another deep sigh. “I want to move on. I’m not getting any younger.”
“Yeah, about that. I talked to the adoption agency and—”
“We’ve had this conversation.”
“Yeah, but listen. They say they can get us a baby in less than a year. They say our income and my career in law enforcement means we get priority.”
“I don’t want someone else’s baby. I want my own.”
“A baby is a baby. What difference does it make?”
“Why do men always say that!”
Daniel cursed silently to himself. He had blundered. He’d said that once before and Veronica had blown up, and now he had stuck his foot in it again.
For a moment there was silence, then Veronica went on, her voice wavering.
“I’m tired of this, Daniel. I’m tired of you running off on cases all the time. I’m tired of you not getting why I want a baby. I’m tired of you being so insensitive.”
“I’m not insensitive. I’m trying to give you what you want.”
Pause. “You can’t.”
Veronica hung up.
Daniel slumped on the toilet, hanging his head.
“That wasn’t fair,” he whispered.
He sat there, staring at the floor, resisting the urge to bash his head against the wall.
Daniel glanced at his watch.
“Crap,” he muttered.
He pulled himself together and opened the door, only to find a female agent in a wheelchair on the other side.
She frowned. “This bathroom is for disabled people.”
“Well, my wife always says I’m an emotional cripple.”
The frown deepened. “I don’t appreciate that term.”
“Blame her,” he snapped. “I got a plane to catch.”
* * *
The CSI team had already come and gone from the crime scene. Now all that was left was the broken bust and a chalk outline showing where Ted Peterson had lain drowning in his own blood.
A dried pool of that blood, sickeningly large, took up much of the landing of the stairwell.
Daniel stood with a Philadelphia homicide detective and the museum director. Homicide Detective Philip Fish was a stooped older man with a sad, tired look to him. His sagging face under heavy brows had a beaten look to it, like life had bludgeoned him to the ground and, once he was there, kicked him.
In other words, he looked like Daniel felt.
The museum director, a Mr. Farnsworth (no first name offered), was a stout middle-aged man with a ruddy face and designer suit. He smelled of inherited wealth and thirty-year-old Scotch.
“So we checked on Peterson’s background,” Detective Fish told him. “He mostly kept to himself. No known enemies. No convictions or arrests. Nothing illegal found in his apartment.”
“He was a quiet man,” Museum Director Farnsworth said. “Not very educated, so this job was a bit lost on him, but he was a reliable employee. Everybody liked him.”
“What about his Internet history?” Daniel asked the Philly homicide detective.
“Cybercrime is searching through his Internet history right now,” Detective Fish replied. “I doubt we’ll find anything though, judging from what his friends and neighbors say.”
The museum director shook his head. “You won’t find anything. He was such a quiet man. Fred wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Ted,” Daniel corrected, and turned back to the detective. “CSI get anything?”
The detective shrugged. “This is a public venue. That bannister over there is covered in prints. We also retrieved plenty of hair and skin samples. Unless we nab a suspect, all those samples won’t do much good, and any halfway decent defense lawyer would just say the guy visited the museum.”
Daniel grunted. That was always a problem with murders in public places. “What about the door where he came in?”
“We had some luck there. The lawn he crossed had just been watered, so he got a bit of dirt on the soles of his boots. We got a print at the doorstep. Also, a couple of flakes of clay. CSI isn’t clear if he had been working with clay or had been walking through a place with clay like a dried streambed. They’ll know more once they’d put it through the lab.”
“Well, that’s something at least.” Daniel turned to the director. “Mr. Farnsworth, are you sure nothing was stolen?”
“Quite sure. We did a complete inventory. The only thing that was broken was this bust, which is of no real value. It’s a plaster bust made in the 1930s by an art student, who donated it to the museum. It’s of Edward Gibbon. He was the author of—”
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve read it.”
Mr. Farnsworth looked surprised. Daniel tried to hide his irritation. Why did everyone think people from law enforcement were semiliterate?
Daniel took a slow turn around the broken bust, taking care not to step on the giant scab that was once the lifeblood of poor Ted Peterson.
“So this bust isn’t valuable,” Daniel said.
“Not in any real sense,” the director said. “In fact, of all the objets d’art in the museum, the murderer chose the least valuable one to destroy.”
Daniel flicked him an annoyed glance. Daniel might have been educated, but he didn’t like the kind of people who used foreign terms like “objets d’art” in casual conversation. It made him feel like kicking them in the testicoli, as his partner would say.
Or ex-partner, as the FBI thought she was.
They had another think coming.
Something odd caught his eye. Two of the larger pieces showed there had been a hollow space inside the bust.
He squatted down to get a better look.
“This bust was hollow,” Daniel said.
Mr. Farnsworth shrugged. “Plaster busts are often hollow. It’s a brittle material and making it hollow with a bit of wiring or other armature in the interior strengthens the matrix.”
“There’s no armature on the inside.”
“That isn’t always required. It’s life sized, and only the bust. A full statue would require it.”
Daniel studied it for a moment longer, leaning in closer. There was a small dot on the smooth side of one portion of the hollow, shiny and green, barely a quarter of an inch in diameter.
“What’s that?” Daniel asked.
“No idea,” Detective Fish said, peering over his shoulder.
Museum Director Farnsworth, unable to think of something clever, said nothing.
“We’ll take it to the lab,” the detective said. “Hey, there’s another.”
He pointed to another fragment that had an identical dot.
Daniel gave the detective an appreciative nod, then moved around the bust, studying it from all angles, especially the remains of the cyst that had been inside it, and found several more identical dots.
“That’s unusual,” Farnsworth murmured.
“What?” Daniel asked.
The museum director pointed to the base of the bust, which had broken into two halves.
“There’s no hole in the base. When a plaster bust has a hollow core, there’s always a hole in the base. The artist works the plaster around a shaped core stuck to a working surface, and that leaves a hole in the base that cannot be seen when the bust is standing upright.”
Daniel, squatting near the base, absentmindedly tapped his thumb against his knee. He felt that delicious prickle of excitement he always got when he had discovered something significant.
“So whoever made this bust didn’t want anyone to know it was hollow. And I’ll bet my left nut that the little stains I spotted were made by whatever was inside. Seems to me your murderer knew something about your collection you didn’t.”
Farnsworth looked insulted.
Daniel stood. “Looks like we’re done here.”
“Who do you think murdered Fred?” Farnsworth asked.
Daniel glared at him. “His name was Ted.” Farnsworth blinked and gave an almost imperceptible shrug. Daniel turned his back on him.
While Detective Fish bagged the fragments of the bust, Daniel moved through the museum, retracing the security guard’s steps. He walked a set path through the museum that the director had told Daniel about, so he most likely had passed through the Italian Renaissance room last, and before that the Great Hall.
Daniel had looked at some photos of the hall on the Internet while waiting to board his flight, but that didn’t prepare him for the soaring roof with its intricately painted arches of gold and blue Celtic knotwork, its collection of medieval armaments, and its stunning stained-glass windows shining in the bright sunlight of a cloudless spring afternoon.
The place was probably crowded on a normal day, but since the museum had been closed because of the murder, he had the room all to himself. It was quiet here. Peaceful. Poor Ted Peterson probably loved wandering through these halls at night. The detective said his apartment was filled with history and art books. Despite what that asshole director thought, Daniel figured Ted probably knew about every object in this place.
Had he known the bust of Edward Gibbon was hollow?
Probably not. There was no way to tell just by looking at it from the outside. And Daniel bet whatever was hidden in the cyst hadn’t rattled when the bust was moved, assuming it ever was moved since its donation more than a century ago. There were enough points of contact on the inside of the cyst that the object was probably stuck in place. Probably no one associated with the museum would have known anything was hidden inside.
So how had the murderer known?
And why kill the security guard? The killer hadn’t alerted Peterson when he broke into the building, or the murder would have taken place downstairs. Instead, the most likely scenario was that the killer broke the bust to retrieve whatever was inside, and Peterson came running.
So Ted Peterson hadn’t known the killer had broken into the museum until that moment. The killer must have known there was a security guard on the premises, though. He had come too well prepared not to. He had known the layout and known the security system. This old building, with all its rooms and stairs, offered dozens of hiding places. The killer could have waited as Peterson had passed by one his rounds, waited until Peterson was at the other end of the building, and then smashed the bust. Peterson might have not even heard, and even if he did, the killer could have been long gone by the time the security guard showed up.
There was no reason to kill the security guard at all, which meant the killer wanted to kill him.
So which was more important—stealing whatever was inside that bust or killing the man who guarded it? Or were they two halves of the same goal?
The break-in at the Cloisters had been similar. In that situation, there had been two security guards, one on the grounds and one inside. The killer had waited until the outside security guard had been on the other end of the property before moving in. Then he had disabled the cameras, picked the lock, and disabled the security system.
After that, the killer’s movements were unclear, but ended in breaking into a display case holding an ivory figurine, snapping the figurine in half, and then killing the security guard close by. Probably when the guard heard the noise and came to investigate.
Interestingly, both guards at the Cloisters carried walkie talkies. The interior guard hadn’t radioed to his coworker, meaning he didn’t have time to. Once again, the killer had been in a large building with plenty of places to hide and had waited until the guard was close before killing him. He could have avoided the guard entirely, but instead chose to add murder to destruction of property.
Why?
Daniel opened his briefcase and pulled out the report from the Cloisters, flipping to the photos of the ivory figurine. It showed a Virgin Mary holding a baby Jesus, snapped in half, probably by smacking it against the base of the display case. The description written by the investigator at the scene said it dated to the fourteenth century.
That would make it valuable, although tricky to sell since it was easily identifiable. Of course, in the seamy underbelly of the antiquities market there were plenty of customers willing to buy stolen artifacts for their private collections.
But the killer hadn’t stolen it. He had broken it. He had broken an all-but-worthless plaster bust too.
When Daniel turned the page to the next photo, his eyes bugged.
There was a hole in the bottom of the figurine.
It didn’t look very big, but it looked drilled rather than the result of breakage. What was that doing there?
Two museum objects with holes inside broken by the same killer. That was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. He was looking for something.
But the hole in the Virgin Mary figurine looked tiny, less than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Could you really hide something in there, and keep it hidden?
Daniel had no answer to that. All those European tours Mom had taken him on and his undergraduate degree weren’t enough for him to cough up solutions to this riddle.
He needed to find an expert.
- Writer
