Still As Death (16 page)

Quinn felt sorry for him and said, “I doubt it. We’ll check the tapes again. What time did you say that was?”

“I’d say six-forty, something like that.”

They told him he could go and Quinn looked down at the list. He felt his stomach pitch a little.

“We just have to do Sweeney St. George and then we’ll be done with everyone,” Ellie said. “And by that time, they should have the tapes ready to look at.”

“Okay,” Quinn said, opening the door. “You can go get her. But let’s talk to her down there.”

“Down where?”

“In the basement by the cabinet. She was the second person on the scene. I want to know if anything struck her about it. She’s had some experience with this kind of thing, and I think her impressions may be valuable. Bring her down in the elevator, though, so we don’t walk anywhere we don’t have to down there.”

It was highly irregular and he knew it. Ellie looked as though she was going to say something, then nodded and went out. He stepped out of Keane’s office and went down in the elevator, trying to get hold of himself. In the reflection of the steel doors, he could just barely make out the outline of his face. He used the hem of his shirt to wipe the sweat off his face. Christ, it was hot. There didn’t seem to be any air-conditioning in the elevator.

It had thrown him, seeing Sweeney. He’d been feeling bad about the way he’d treated her when she’d come to his house a few weeks ago, though he wasn’t sure what to do about it. Why had he been so mean to her? He’d been trying to figure that out, and the closest he could get was that he was mad at her for never calling him back. Last fall, after they’d gotten back from Concord, they’d gotten together for coffee a few times and he’d thought … What had he thought? He looked at his blurry image in the elevator door.
Be honest, Quinny
. He’d thought about asking her out, just for dinner, maybe. He’d wanted to talk to her, he’d wanted to tell her about his English class. He’d wanted to tell her about Megan, about all the words she could say. One day, walking around Cambridge, he’d seen exactly the place he wanted to take her, a little restaurant with candles on the tables and a bouquet of roses on a little table by the door. It seemed like the kind of place you could talk and nobody would mind if you closed the place down.

He’d called her to ask her about it, but she’d never called back. Then she’d shown up at his house, asking him to go and open up a cold case just to satisfy some kind of personal curiosity. It had been stupid, that thing about going out to dinner. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking.

The elevator opened in a little alcove off of the basement gallery. They were right next to the cabinet, and Quinn reminded himself to check and see if there were tapes from the elevator. The killer could have escaped that way, though he still would have had to go out the main entrance and dump the stopper.

Quinn stood by the cabinet, looking down at where the body had been. They had finished with Olga Levitch and taken her away to be carved up in a postmortem that would tell them for sure what had killed her. Quinn didn’t need to be told. She’d been killed with the stopper. Head trauma, followed by death. He could see it all clearly, the faceless figure, bent over the cabinet, the cleaning woman coming upon him, crying out, the figure turning and raising the stopper, hitting her over the head, then turning and running, dumping the
stopper in the garbage can before disappearing into the night. Something occurred to him. There must have been an accomplice with a vehicle. The chest wasn’t huge—you could put it in a bag or wrap it in a coat, but you wouldn’t want to go too far carrying it like that. He made a mental note to check with traffic enforcement, see if any vehicles had been idling outside during the evening.

“Hey,” Sweeney said, coming out of the elevator, Ellie behind her. Her long, dark skirt swished against the floor as she walked. Her arms were lightly freckled, like her face, and in the low light of the basement, her blouse was blindingly white.

He almost smiled, then remembered Ellie was there and said in a businesslike way, “I was hoping you could tell me if everything looks just the way it did when you first saw the body.”

“Sure.” She studied him for a moment, then asked, “Are you okay?”

Quinn turned around so Ellie wouldn’t see his face, and ignoring Sweeney’s question, asked her, “What struck you when you came over? Just tell me what you remember.”

She stepped toward the cabinet and said, “I remember that the blood was the first thing I saw. It would be, wouldn’t it? I mean, Jeanne had already told me something had happened to her, so I suppose I was looking for it, but as I told you, I remember that the blood was kind of running out. I guess I saw the wound and so I could see that that was where the blood was coming from.”

“You realized the stopper had been stolen immediately, right?”

“Yeah, well, there had been four of them—there are always four—and when I looked there were only three.”

“And you’re sure there wasn’t anyone here?” It had just occurred to him that the thief might have been hiding in the basement, then slipped out in the commotion after the discovery of the body.

“Pretty sure. I think I would have felt him there, if you know what I mean. But on the other hand, I was so upset that I may not have been paying attention.”

“After you saw the body, you and Ms. Ortiz both went upstairs, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“What I’m trying to figure out is if the crime scene could have been altered in any way. Does everything look the same to you?”

She stood there, and he could tell she was checking all the details off. Cabinet, splintered wood, the three stoppers in the chest. “It looks the same,” she said.

“Thanks. Now, you came downstairs to use the restroom?”

“Yeah. There was someone in the one on the main floor. I came around the corner.” She pointed to the stairs. “And Jeanne was just standing there.”

“And in your opinion, was her shock real?” He could feel Ellie behind him, disapproving. She’s a witness, he knew she was thinking. Why is he asking her to speculate about what another witness was thinking or feeling?

Sweeney met his eyes, and he could tell she knew what he was thinking. “You mean …? I think she was upset. There’s no doubt about that. Although …” She trailed off and he felt his heart speed a little.

“Yeah?”

“She was so upset, almost too upset. Do you know what I mean?” She told him about the thought that had gone through her head when she first saw Jeanne. “Maybe I’ve just become an old hand at this murder thing, but it wasn’t like she knew Olga. And it wasn’t like she really cared about Willem’s canopic chest. So why was she so upset?” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. It just seemed weird to me is all.”

He knew there were other things he should ask her, but he was too tired to think what they were. “Why don’t you get going. We’ll be in touch.”

“Okay,” she said, still studying his face. “I’ll talk to you soon?”

He nodded, trying to seem indifferent, and turned away as she
and Ellie stepped into the elevator, listening to the doors open, then shut again, and the elevator hum up through the walls.

The basement seemed huge suddenly, cavernous and silent, and he stared at the chest. What had Keane said it was made of? Alabaster. The alabaster almost glowed in the low light. Sweeney had said they put organs in it and it occurred to him that they might still be in there. The elevator hummed again and he heard the doors open and then Ellie’s footsteps behind him.

“It’s great that you already knew her.” Something in her voice made Quinn think of icy lemonade.

Quinn turned to look at her and found himself meeting her wide blue eyes, the clear suspicion on her face. He deserved it, deserved anything she’d want to say to him right now, he knew, and he wanted to apologize to her, to confess the riot of jealousy and uncertainty that had gripped him as Ian Ball told him about Sweeney moving to London. He wanted to tell her about Maura, about Megan, about everything. But of course he wouldn’t.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I want to see what’s on that tape.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Sweeney left Ian in bed with the slumbering General and walked up to Davis Square for pastry and the papers. They hadn’t gotten home until nearly midnight, and she should have used the opportunity that a Saturday morning offered and caught up on her sleep, but she’d had strange dreams all night, dreams in which she’d been running from someone or something through a series of dark rooms.

And, she remembered as she walked along in the soft heat of the early morning, she had dreamt of her father. He’d been standing in front of a house, a low, compact house made of gray wood set against a dry, orange-brown landscape. She had spoken to him, and he’d nodded at her, then disappeared inside. Suddenly they were at the Hapner, in the basement galleries, and her father was leaning over the stone sarcophagus, looking into it, rapt. When Sweeney leaned over his shoulder to look down into it, she saw a little diorama of her father and a dark-haired woman standing in a living room assembled like a stage set, fighting with each other, her father’s voice high and shrill, not the way she remembered it at all. When she turned to her father to ask him what was going on, he had smiled and nodded again and disappeared. Then she was alone in
the basement of the museum, and she knew, suddenly, terrifyingly, that she was being pursued. The galleries were dark and the artifacts in their dim glass cases mocked her as she ran, uncertain where her pursuer was.

She stopped for a second and stood watching a squirrel run across the tiny front lawn of a newly renovated triple-decker at the end of her street. It stopped every ten feet or so to look around, listening for danger.

The dream wasn’t as odd as it seemed. First of all, she and Ian had been talking about her father just a few weeks ago, so it made sense that he would show up in her dreams. And they had also talked about her father’s girlfriend, or whatever she had been, in Mexico. So that was why she’d shown up. And of course after what had happened last night, she was just working through her fear about being in the basement, about finding Jeanne and then seeing Olga’s body. Still, the dream bothered her and she wasn’t sure why.

She got a dozen crullers at her favorite bakery, along with some orange juice, and bought a
New York Times
, checking the arts section as she walked back home. There was David Milken’s review of the exhibition on an inside page, a glowing review, she was happy to note, but it was overshadowed by the larger article detailing Olga’s murder and the attempted theft of the canopic chest, and it struck her that however much a success the exhibition had been, people would always remember that Olga had been murdered at the opening. That was what murder did. It overshadowed, blanked out, erased everything normal.

Back at the apartment, she made coffee and poured herself a large glass of orange juice, splashing in some leftover champagne from the fridge to make a mimosa. Her dream had rattled her, and she decided that she needed something to steady her nerves. A mimosa was festive. She’d make Ian one too. Then she finished reading the papers while the General had his breakfast and spent a good half hour cleaning his sleek black fur before disappearing out the window for his daily rounds.

She made up a tray with the coffee and crullers and the mimosas and brought it into the bedroom, where Ian was still sleeping. She took off her jeans and got back in bed, poking Ian’s back and propping the tray up on her lap.

Then she opened the
Globe
to read its coverage of the attempted theft.

The story quoted Willem as saying that Olga had apparently prevented the theft of the invaluable object and that he was only sorry she’d had to pay with her life. Quinn was quoted too, saying that the police were interviewing witnesses and that any help the public could offer would be much appreciated. It was a classic nonanswer answer.

Sweeney knew there were security cameras in many locations around the museum, and if the cameras hadn’t caught the actual murder, they probably had caught every person who’d come through the main entrance. Sweeney was betting that Quinn already had a complete guest list. But he’d prefer to make the thief/murderer think that he didn’t have any idea who he or she was.

Ian picked up the
Globe
and read the story.

“Does it strike you as strange that someone would try to steal the chest during a show?” Sweeney asked him. “I mean, how would he or she know that a guard or someone wasn’t going to walk in at that moment?”

“Well, he solved one of the major problems that any art thief has, which is access. He didn’t have to break into the building because the building was already open.” She knew that Ian was actually quite knowledgeable about security, having had to come up with a system for securing valuables at the auction house.

“Your cop was different from how I thought he would be,” Ian said after a minute. “The way you described him, I had this image of … I don’t know. More of a
cop
, if you know what I mean.” Sweeney did know, but still she considered being offended on behalf of all cops.

Instead she said, “He’s got this nanny, this beautiful girl. From
Rwanda, I think. She was speaking French, anyway. She has this long scar down the side of her face.”

Ian put down the paper. “They used machetes.”

“Yes.”

They were silent for a moment and then Ian pulled her over to him. She breathed deeply against his chest. He smelled of bodies, of salt and coffee.

“Have you thought at all about London?”

She felt herself stiffen against him. She considered making a joke, telling him she often thought of London, but she knew it wasn’t the thing to do. Instead she said nothing, hugging him tighter as if she could squeeze away the question, as if she could take away the very air that had carried it.

He let her, squeezing her back, and her hand dropped to his hip, rubbing circles on it, and then lower, and his desire replaced his need to know.

Sweeney felt out of sorts and aimless all that weekend. Her work on the exhibition was finished and she didn’t have anything to do until January, when she’d be teaching again. She had planned it this way so that she’d have some time for research on a new book about funerary items around the world, but now she was regretting the empty months ahead of her.