Lori stepped in close, placing a gentle hand on the fist clenched around Derek’s collar. “I think he’s telling the truth,” she said.
Peet was nearly floored. “What? You’re sticking up for
him
now?”
“I think there was a second person that came to steal the effigy,” she explained.
“There were
two
thieves?”
“I think so.”
Peet turned back to Derek. “Highly unlikely,” he gruffed in his face.
“Unlikely, yes,” Lori persisted. “But why would Derek tear the storage room apart if he already had what he came for? Someone else must have come in and destroyed the room looking for the effigy after Derek already took it.”
Peet looked at Lori who stared back with imploring eyes. He didn’t want to even consider such an absurd suggestion, but there was something in her expression that begged to be trusted. Reluctantly, he released Derek again and, struggling to find a calmer tone, he asked, “What did you do with the effigy?”
“That’s what I called Friedman about.” He shot John a testy glance. “But I thought you’d come alone.”
“Where is it?” Peet demanded.
Derek touched the tender ridge of his cheek. “I gave it to Shaman Gaspar.”
“Who the hell is Shaman Gaspar?”
Just then the passenger door of a nearby car opened and a woman stepped out. She was eyeing them all as she stepped forward. She was middle-aged, but nice-looking, with a pleasant shade to her complexion. Probably Mexican.
She stopped beside Derek and handed him a handkerchief, which he pressed against his bloody nose.
“Shaman Gaspar is my father,” she said.
Tezcatlipoca
“My father was the founder of a secret society called The New Age Followers of Quetzalcoatl. He’d been obsessed with Quetzalcoatl for as long as I can remember.”
Eva looked pitiful, John noted as she toyed with her half-eaten enchilada. Her eyes were heavy and sleepless. Her face weary and troubled. She was a physical representation of the jet lag threatening to settle into his bones.
The restaurant was small and quite dark at the corner table where they’d been seated. The tempting aroma of spices mingled with the steam floating over plates loaded with a variety of savory meats and tortillas smothered in a myriad of sauces, salsas and beans. Mariachi music played over the speaker hidden within a sombrero hanging in the corner above them.
John was starving and any other time he would have enjoyed the cultural flavor despite its slight enhancements to attract tourists, but today he found his corn tamale less than satisfying and the climactic music threatened to hinder the conversation. Signs of old age, he thought. But the past twenty-four hours had been trying enough. Even Anthony Peet was looking somewhat ragged in his chair. Of the three of them, Lori seemed to be fairing the best.
Oh, to be young again.
“So an effigy of Quetzalcoatl naturally caught your father’s attention,” Peet said sourly.
Eva shrugged. “I’d assume so. I stopped following all of his Quetzalcoatl nonsense a long time ago.”
“Hell yeah, the effigy caught his eye,” Derek piped in over a mouthful of the restaurant’s sorry tribute to an American hamburger. “The guy was a nut for anything associated with Quetzalcoatl. He encouraged his followers to bring him any trinkets even remotely related so he could bless them. I thought it was some sort of snake fetish myself.”
“And you had nothing to do with this secret society,” Peet blasted doubtfully at him.
John found his tone quite hypocritical considering, for reasons still unclear to him, Peet and Lori had tried to cover up Derek’s theft. They hadn’t bothered to go to the authorities, but once Derek had called with his admission, Peet seemed ready to strangle the boy at the drop of a hat. He might have followed through with it in the airport parking lot had John not interfered.
He’d always known Anthony Peet to be a rather impulsive individual, and yet, he’d also known the man to sit for hours at a dig site, patiently pecking away at the earth with a dentist’s pick. John had never known anyone so willing to react and yet so content with nothing to react to. Nevertheless, Peet’s actions had become erratic, unreliable and deeply suspect.
“I worked on the shaman’s newsletters,” Derek was saying. “That’s all. Just the newsletter.”
“Did your note come from one of your newsletters, by any chance?” Lori asked.
Derek smiled sheepishly. “Hey, it was all I had with me at the time. I left it in case someone noticed the effigy missing before I could bring it back. I just didn’t expect you guys to find it so soon.”
“There was no message on the note,” Peet said, flopping the scrap of stationary in the middle of the table.
Derek took one look at it and then flipped an arrogant hand at the torn edge. “Well, someone obviously ripped it off,” he said. “I swear I wrote my explanation on it.”
“What exactly did you write?” John asked as a little Mexican woman topped off his tall glass of water.
“‘The effigy is with Juan Gaspar,’” Derek recited.
“That’s it?”
“Something around those lines. I can’t remember exactly.”
“Why would you leave a note like that if you expected to return the effigy?” Lori asked.
“To cover my tracks in case the plan backfired.”
“Oh, it backfired, all right,” Peet snarled.
John didn’t care for his hostile tone. If he didn’t diffuse it soon, he feared another violent scene would break out in the middle of their dinner and that made for poor table manners.
“So, you weren’t a follower?” he asked, fixing his attention upon Derek.
The boy snorted, which sent crumbs of hamburger flying across the table. Peet sat back with a disgusted look, brushing the debris aside.
“I don’t get involved with snake-handling religions,” Derek said.
“Then why did you take the effigy to Gaspar?” Peet asked.
“He promised me a story if I brought it to him. I got the feeling it was going to be a big story. Career-launching, from the way he made it sound.”
“Well, was it?”
“I don’t know. He held out on me. Said he’d tell me once he finished blessing the effigy. The next time I saw him, he was dead.”
Lori paused over her plate. “Dead?”
“My father was murdered two nights ago,” Eva explained. “They found his body at some archaeological site just north of
Mexico City
.”
“
Teotihuacan
,” Derek added.
“It appears he was stabbed, and then his heart had been removed through an incision just below the ribs.”
John recoiled. There was a sudden heaviness in his stomach as he gently laid his utensils across the edge of his plate. He considered the strength it must have taken to rip out a human heart. The killer would have had to cut through the diaphragm. Then he must have been up to his elbows in blood as he bypassed the lungs underneath the rib cage. He wondered about the hands that could grip a sticky, beating heart and tear it from its cavity. The feat had to have been surgical, rehearsed.
“My God!” Lori gasped. “What happened to his heart?”
“We don’t know. It hasn’t been recovered.”
“And the effigy?” Peet asked.
“We don’t know that either.”
“There’s something else,” Derek said. “The police found a mirror on the body.”
“A mirror?” Peet asked.
Eva sighed glumly. “According to that Escaban fella, a round mirror had been placed over the incision. He called it a makeup mirror. The type you might find in a lady’s bathroom.”
“They found a mirror, but no effigy,” Peet considered out loud.
“How do we even know Mr. Gaspar brought the effigy down to
Mexico
in the first place?” Lori asked.
“The police found a wooden crate inside a pickup they think he stole,” Derek said. “The crate was empty but I think that’s what he used to smuggle the effigy down here.”
“Smuggle?” Peet asked as he used a sopapilla to sop up the last of the
mole
on his plate. “You mean he brought it down here to sell?”
Derek shook his head. “No. As highly as he regarded Quetzalcoatl, I believe he only intended to bless the effigy. Though, if I had known he was going to bring it down to
Mexico
—”
“Do the police have any leads on the killer?” John asked, pushing his empty plate aside.
“Nothing concrete,” Eva said. “They call him the Equinox Killer. They suspect anyone in the medical field—doctors, morticians, veterinarians. But Escaban said the killer’s incision was by far cleaner and more precise than anything a surgical tool could have done.”
“What could possibly be more precise than a scalpel?” Lori asked.
Derek shrugged. “Nobody seems to know. But because of the sacrificial pattern to the murder they are focusing on religious groups too. Especially ones linked with Mayan or Aztec origins.”
“Such as the New Agers,” Peet said flatly.
“Are you kidding me?” Derek blurted. “Shaman Gaspar taught only the values of Quetzalcoatl—peace, tranquility, inner harmony, that sort of thing. Frankly, it sounded like a bunch of hippy talk to me, but I can tell you one thing—his followers are not into murder and sacrifice.”
Eva rolled her eyes. “The cops think there might be some sort of cult that follows the sacrificial gods.”
“Like Xipe, maybe,” Derek continued.
John shook his head. He’d been listening carefully to the conversation, but his mind was diligently rolling over the details. “The Xipe deity only wore the skins of his sacrifices,” he said. “The murder doesn’t fit that description.”
“What do you mean?”
“It appears this was not a random killing. Mr. Gaspar was murdered for the effigy, and I believe Lori saw his killer.”
Lori pushed back in her chair in shock. Her wide eyes flashed across the table. “What are you saying?” she asked.
The details were mingling now, merging into one. They made sense. The sacrificed hearts, the mirror…
Zorro’s mask.
John focused on Lori’s astonished face. “I believe the killer is the same thief you thought you saw removing the effigy from the laboratory.”
Now it was Peet’s turn to look surprised. “You mean the thief and the killer are the same person?”
“It’s simple. Now that we know Derek got to the effigy first, it only makes sense that this guy found Derek’s note, tracked Gaspar down and finally got what he was looking for.”
A tingle of satisfaction seeped through John’s pores. It was that feeling he got whenever he managed to sleuth out the solution to a longstanding archaeological problem. A feeling of evaporating tension, assuredness and poise. It made him feel precocious. It was exactly how he felt when he solved the mysterious presence of the effigy in an Anasazi grave.