Just when they were about to reach the summit, Derek dropped like a rock. Hugging the ground, he motioned Lori to do the same.
“What are you doing?” she demanded as she stretched across the baked earth.
“There’s somebody up there,” he whispered.
“A cop?”
“No.”
“Just one?”
He nodded.
She inched forward on her belly until she could peer over the top of the precipice. Just ahead the ground was sunken into a large I-shaped wallow—presumably the Toltec ballcourt Derek had mentioned. In the bottom of the shallow depression was the figure of a man, draped in a sweeping black trench coat and stooping over a strange black box. His face was hidden from view. He, too, seemed to be hiding from the cops.
“What’s he doing?” Derek mumbled.
They watched silently as the man swooped the black box into his arms and stepped out on the opposite side of the ballcourt. When he turned for the nearby ruins, the breeze caught the length of his coat and the sun glinted off a piece of glass hanging at his waist.
“The mirror!” Lori gasped. “That’s him!”
“Who?”
“The man I saw at the university,” she said. “The one I thought stole the effigy!”
“You mean the guy who killed Shaman Gaspar?” Derek asked, rising to his feet. “He must be carrying the effigy.”
Ever since he received Dr. Friedman’s text message, the effigy was all that he cared about. To Lori’s dismay it didn’t seem to matter to him that half their group was likely in jail for no apparent reason at all. Derek didn’t even seem to realize that the police would still be pursuing them if they knew where they were. The only thing that mattered to him was the effigy. He was obsessed with it, like a bloodhound hot on the trail.
Derek skidded downhill a few feet with the tumble of loose earth and rock, and then he scurried across the face of the slope.
“Where are we going?” Lori asked, hurrying after him.
He quickened his pace toward the gray ruin walls crowning the slope just ahead. Without hesitation, he called over his shoulder, “It’s time we get the effigy back.”
The Jaguar
When Mateo reached the Jaguar Chacmool, he was certain he’d heard footsteps behind him but when he looked, nobody was there. His senses were on high alert. He’d come to the riskiest part of the plan. Although he’d needed the AFI to clear the civilians from the site for him, he now relied on them to remain concentrated on Pyramid B. He needed that distraction just long enough…
The footsteps came again. Even if someone wasn’t following him, he would surely be spotted soon. He had to hurry.
The chacmool was gleaming in all its painted brilliance. The artist couldn’t have done a more beautiful job and the jaguar painted on the offering plate couldn’t have been more fitting. But what held Mateo’s attention now was the shoulder of the large statue, the one which the reclining figure was turned away from. There, Mateo fingered an almost undetectable blemish in the stone. The stone beneath his fingernail easily crumbled away in flakes of loose plaster that had been freshly painted to match the coloring of the statue.
Finally, the plug popped out of the hole, offering limited view into the dark interior of the statue. Despite its bulky, hefty appearance, the Jaguar Chacmool was hollow, a trick the artist used to make it lighter and easier to move on the day of its dedication.
Mateo peered into the hole. There was a pink shade to the darkness and the distinctly dry odor of forty kilograms of ANFO. The Jaguar Chacmool wasn’t hollow anymore.
* * * *
It occurred to Lori as she followed Derek through the maze of ruined walls that they weren’t just following someone with the effigy, but someone who’d killed for it. If this man murdered Shaman Gaspar, surely he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to them, and it made Lori’s breath tremble just thinking about it. What scared her the most was that Derek seemed not to have taken such considerations in mind in this reckless pursuit.
That was assuming the stranger really did have the effigy. Lori hadn’t actually seen the artifact, just a black box which she supposed might contain the effigy. She knew they were taking a chance in assuming so. If they were wrong, the only other thing that could possibly be in that box was the bomb that was mentioned at the road blockade—the bomb which, by the looks of it, the police expected to find at the pyramid on the other end of the park. Lori suddenly regretted their decision to follow the stranger.
Derek ducked behind a low, crumbling wall. “There he is,” he whispered. “Beside the chacmool.”
Lori knelt down beside him and peered over the wall. The stranger stood behind a brightly colored statue reclined across the ground. By following the slope to the ruined temple, they were no longer behind the stranger but about fifty yards to his left, and they could see his face. They could see Zorro’s mask.
Lori held her breath. There was no doubt that they’d found the thief who’d dragged her across the university parking lot. If she and Derek were caught now, they were surely dead, and the police were too far away to be of any help.
The stranger eased the strange black box onto a round plate covering the statue’s chest.
“What is it?” Lori whispered.
“I’m not sure.”
“It could be a bomb,” she whispered anxiously.
Then she saw it. Sliding off the stranger’s shoulder beneath his coat was the effigy hung from the end of a rope. The stranger untied it and held the effigy between both hands, eye level, as though appraising it for the first time. For a moment he resembled a familiar figure, square and stoic with the effigy held between his outstretched arms. He looked just like the petroglyph in
Chaco
. He looked just like The Trader.
“There it is!” Derek gasped, squirming to get a better look.
His admiration apparently fulfilled, the stranger finally placed the effigy next to the box on the chacmool.
“He’s going to blow it up!” Lori said, forcing control over a sudden jolt of apprehension.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Derek mumbled.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, but I need that effigy to save my ass.”
“
Your
ass?”
Derek glanced at her with a wry smile. “Come on. You didn’t think I was looking for it for archaeology’s sake, did you? We’ll be heroes when we bring the effigy back to campus. Imagine the publicity you’ll get for finding the same artifact twice! And for once I won’t be writing about it. I’ll be the story!”
Lori scowled. “You won’t be a hero. Not when they find out you stole the effigy in the first place.”
“They won’t know that. Not when all evidence points to Quickie Peet.”
Lori was stunned.
“What?”
Derek rocked back on his heels with that arrogant smile of his smeared across his face. “Don’t you see, Lori? Everything’s played out perfectly. Peet all but handed the effigy over to me that night he took it out of the museum.”
Lori could hardly believe what she was hearing, but her heart sank as she realized he was right. A check on the museum’s security system would surely reveal Dr. Peet’s personal identification code—the last code to have been entered the night of the theft. More than likely, Dr. Peet was already under suspicion.
“Now, as he rots away in some forgotten pit in
Teotihuacan
, nobody will know any different,” Derek boasted. “It’ll look like he left town
with
the effigy instead of looking for it. With circumstances like these, who needs the
Faculty Roast
to set him up?”
Lori gasped. “
You
wrote that article about Dr. Peet?”
Derek’s smile only widened.
“Why, Derek?”
He shifted to take a quick peek at the stranger who was now fumbling with something over the statue. “I had to get Peet out of the picture,” he said, ducking back behind the wall. “Do you know how hard it is to get a date with someone whose attention is completely monopolized by her professor?”
Lori felt her blood rising to a boil. “I already told you—it’s not like that.”
Derek crossed his arms. “Come on, Lori. I’ve heard the way the girls talk about Peet. Are you going to tell me you’re not the least bit attracted to him?”
Lori was speechless.
“That’s what I thought. But now with John and Eva locked away in some Mexican prison and Peet securely out of the way, we can pin the theft on him and the only people who’ll know any different are you and me.”
“You won’t get away with twisting the truth.”
Derek shrugged. “I prefer to call it story selection. Any number of stories can be created from a single event. Truths are determined by the facts you choose to present, or omit.”
Dr. Peet’s voice suddenly rang in Lori’s ears.
I didn’t know she was a student
.
Stunned, her mind was suddenly compiling facts of its own. The spring exhibits in the museum were always held in March. Dr. Peet’s prior performance review had taken place in May, and given the cross-stitched keepsake she spotted in his house, the wedding was in June.
It had all happened in the year 2000, between March and May. That didn’t leave much time for a professor to alter grades based on favors, much less for a graduating student who never sat in his class. With the pieces suddenly falling into place, Dr. Peet’s history didn’t appear to be very criminal at all, and given he survived the performance review that year, the school board must have agreed.
“Dr. Peet doesn’t fraternize,” she said. “You just made all that up to revenge a bad grade.”
Derek shrugged. “It’s all a matter of arranging the facts.”
It took every bit of restraint to keep Lori from slapping him. If they hadn’t just stalked a murderer to the ends of a desolate Toltec ruin, she would have gladly given him a piece of her mind. The problem was, she was so flustered that she wasn’t sure which piece she wanted to let go first.
“So how about it, Lori? You ready to go down into history together?”
“I don’t want to be associated with you
anywhere
,” she said. “I’m not going along with this.”
Derek’s smile vanished and just as quickly his eyes flashed daggers of steel. To her surprise, he lunged for her, pinning her against the cobbled ruins with his fingers squeezing into her throat.
“You will play along,” he hissed. “Otherwise I’ll say you and Peet were in on the theft together. It’ll be your word against mine and with everyone knowing how closely the two of you work together, who’s to doubt me? It wouldn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination for anyone to believe
you’re
the student banging Quickie Peet.”
Lori squirmed beneath his grip. “Derek, please!” she gasped.
His grip tightened, cutting off her air. “And if that doesn’t work, then some accident might have to happen to you, Lori. Either way, I’m not losing the journalism career I’ve worked my ass off for. Now, are you with me?”
Lori’s heart was pounding. She’d never seen Derek so desperately ruthless. She’d never known him capable of such deception. As his strength bore down upon her she realized she’d never really known him at all. And in that dire moment her thoughts flickered back to Dr. Peet. She was wrong to abandon him in the observatory cave. She hadn’t been betrayed by her professor, she’d been deceived by Derek and now she wondered how she could have ever questioned Dr. Peet.