The Mask of Atreus (11 page)

"The two gentlemen he was talking to during your presentation," she said slyly.

"How do you know they were Greek?"

"They looked Greek," said Shotridge. "They sounded Greek and--oh yes--Mr. Dixon said they were Greek."

Shotridge had apparently taken over in the sarcasm department.

"What else did they say?" said Deborah. There were, she was sure, no Greek names on the guest list.

"Nothing," said Shotridge. "They were talking among themselves--in Greek--and I was walking past with a tray, and Mr. Dixon asked if he could take some more for his Greek friends because they liked them so much. Best feta cheese they'd ever had, he said. They nodded and smiled and took three each. Then I left them."

"They said nothing else?"

"No," she said. "Twelve percent. That's my last offer."

"Done," said Deborah, hanging up.

It was time to talk to the police.

CHAPTER 18

Deborah crammed another finger sandwich into her mouth and rinsed it down with a sloppily poured glass of cranberry juice. She was turning to leave when Calvin Bowers came in.

"Calvin," she said, not thinking, just speaking on impulse.

"Did you like Richard?"

He frowned as his mind adjusted to the unexpected question and her use of his first name.

"I never actually met him, of course, but yes, I think so,"

he said. "Why?"

"Would you find it hard to believe that he would put the museum ahead of his own personal fortune, even in front of his reputation?"

"Not for a second," he said.

Deborah nodded. It was the right answer. She felt herself warm to him a fraction.

"Me too," she said.

For the briefest of seconds she saw the entire Greek collection, with the mask as its centerpiece, laid out in gleaming cases for the world, all downstairs in the lobby, or in a purpose-built room at the end of a long dark corridor lined with educational text and images: the finest gathering of Greek antiquities outside Athens. This, surely, was the image Richard had been chasing.

Calvin, who was watching her as if he could see the pictures in her head, nodded once.

"I see," he said. "If there's anything I can do . . ."

She smiled and, exhaling, realized that she had been holding her breath. 84

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"By the way," he added, "I'm missing some of Richard's legal correspondence. Was anything stored down here?"

"In the office," she said. "I keep most of the museum-specific stuff there. Are you looking for something in particular?"

He looked a little sheepish.

"As I said, Mr. Dixon was processing some paperwork that touched on both his personal holdings and his stake in the museum. They may have some bearing on his will. The police are going to want to see how his estate stands legally, in case it has an impact on issues of motive."

Deborah nodded, businesslike, careful to show that this gave her no consternation at all.

"That would be personal then," she said, "and should be in the residence files, not the museum's, unless it came very recently."

"How recently?"

"If it was addressed to the house, no more than a day or two," she said. "If it's personal but comes to the museum, it takes a few days. The residence has a different street number: one forty-three. The museum is one fifty-seven. They're the same building, so don't ask me why. But there are two mailboxes. I deal with the business stuff, sift out the junk and pass along what's left for his consideration. There usually isn't much, and unless I flag something, he gets to it when he gets to it. Is that a problem?"

He was still, and his eyes were narrow, but at her question he shrugged the mood off and grinned.

"I doubt it. I just hate having official papers going through the hands of anyone other than the addressee. It's the lawyer in me."

Detectives Cerniga and Keene were upstairs in the study next door to Richard's bedroom, where they were going over the guest list and the museum inventory. Deborah considered the staircase and then opted for one last precaution before she went up to speak to them. 85

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

The ladies' room beside the office was a single boxlike chamber reserved for museum staff. There was a toilet and a washbasin with liquid soap and one of those electronic hand dryers that always left her wiping her hands on her trousers. The light switch was hooked up to an extractor fan which hummed and whirred almost as loudly as the toilet flush. With that and the hand dryer going, it was amazing you could hear anything at all, so the sound of raised voices was a surprise. It took Deborah a second to realize where it was coming from. There was a vent set in the wall above the toilet, not the extractor fan, the heating and air system. At first she barely paid attention, but then something in her head noted that the voices were male, were, in fact, the voices of the detectives with whom she was about to speak. Even over the hand dryer's automatic blowing she was sure of it.
The pipe must rout directly through the study upstairs.
She had never noticed it before, but then why would she?

How often did anyone even speak aloud in that room? It was Richard's private sanctuary.

One of the voices was louder than the other. Cerniga? No, Keene.

You should ignore it,
she thought.
You've done enough
snooping.

The hand dryer died with a descending whir, and the voices got clearer.

"That's what
you
say," Keene roared. "How the hell would I know?"

A muttered response from Cerniga, inaudible, and a single bark of laughter from Keene in reply. Then Cerniga was murmuring again, but Deborah couldn't catch the words. On impulse, she reached out and snapped off the light switch. The room was plunged into total darkness and a new silence as the extractor fan stopped. Cerniga's voice, slightly metallic from the echo of the vent, coiled out softly like smoke.

"I've already told you," he said, cool but irritated. "If you have a problem with it, talk to your captain."

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"I already did that," Keene shouted back, "and you know how far it got me."

"Then that's the end of it, isn't it?" said Cerniga.

"No, it damn well isn't," said Keene. "You transferred from Henry County? I called them this morning, and no one there has ever heard of you. No one."

Deborah suddenly felt cold and uncertain in the dark. The hair on her neck was prickling again as it had when she had smelled the cologne and pipe smoke at the door to her apartment.

"Your captain gave you the order to work with me," said Cerniga. His voice was steely now, as if he was restraining a great anger. "If you have a problem with it, you should take it up with him."

"Are you even a cop?" said Keene. "I saw the look on your face when I gave you those forms. You've never filled out anything like them before. I wanna see your badge."

And then someone was pulling on the bathroom door from outside, and Deborah heard no more.

CHAPTER 19

It was Tonya.

"I'm sorry," she said, not sounding so till she registered something in Deborah's ashen face. "I didn't see the light under the door so I assumed . . . Are you OK? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"It's OK," said Deborah. "I was just . . . I'm a little tired. It's been a rough couple of days. I think I'm going to . . ."

But she didn't know what she was going to do. She waved a hand vaguely and tried to smile, but the concern in Tonya's face said she wasn't pulling it off.

"You need something?"

"No, really."

"You want me to get the cops down . . . ?"

"No,"
said Deborah, more urgently than she had meant. "I mean . . . No. It's fine. I'll talk to you later."

And then she was walking away, down the hall, away from the staircase up to Richard's study, and down to the museum. Her pace quickened with her resolve, and by the time she was passing those ghastly specimens of Victorian taxidermy, she was almost running. She ducked into the museum office, opened the safe, and removed her passport. In two minutes she was in the lobby with the T. rex and the dragon-lady ship prow. In four she was in her car and driving away. Her cell phone was switched off, and she left it like that. She just needed to go home or at least back to her hotel. Get some sleep. Clear her head.

That won't change what you heard through the vent.
That was true enough, she thought as she pulled through the lights at Buford Highway and moved toward the interstate, 88

A. J. Hartley

but maybe what she had heard would somehow make sense if she could put a little distance between herself and the museum with its strange treasures. She just needed a little time to herself.

As she turned onto I-85 heading south toward midtown, she was startled by a squeal of tires on the road behind her. She checked her mirror in time to see a dark van tear through the signal at the top of the ramp and come pelting down after her.

Atlanta drivers,
she thought.
Always ready to risk life and
limb to get home five minutes early.

She stayed in the right lane to give him room, and wondered where to go. She had instinctively begun to head home, moving away from the Holiday Inn, which was too close to the museum. Too close to Cerniga and Keene.

Maybe I'll just drive around for an hour. Or go and walk
in Piedmont Park. Yes. Follow the route home, park on Ju-
niper, and take a walk round the lake.

The idea gave her a sense of purpose, and she relaxed a fraction, slipping into her familiar mode as she let the flow of the traffic siphon off her anxiety. Her conscious mind, calmer now, returned to the conversation she had overheard in the bathroom. Could she have misheard? It was possible, she supposed, but she was prepared to bet she hadn't. Could it have been some kind of private joke? Less likely still. So Keene suspected that Cerniga--the man in charge of the investigation into Richard's death--was not actually a cop at all? How was that possible? What did it mean?

Coming around the Grady Curve she was still in the inside lane with a sheer concrete wall to her right, and the less conscious part of her brain which was focused on the driving interrupted her other thoughts with a nod toward a familiar sign: Right Lane Ends, 1500 Feet.

She checked her wing mirror and began to move left, swerving back sharply when she saw a truck, which had been nestling in her blind spot.

Pay attention!

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She shrugged all other considerations off and gripped the steering wheel tighter.

The truck to her left was still there, apparently oblivious to the fact she had almost hit him. She sped up to ease past, but the truck (now that she got a look at it, it was actually a van) matched her speed.

Typical.

"Go ahead, then, you macho idiot," she muttered, slowing down to let him go. She didn't have enough road to argue the point, and the Atlanta traffic moved at unforgiving speeds. Without a hard shoulder and with only a concrete wall to her right, there was no room for error.

The van slowed with her, its front end keeping perfect pace with hers. Deborah turned to give the driver a steely glare, but the windows of the van were heavily tinted, and she couldn't see in.

Van?

Two things struck her in rapid succession. This was the same van which had burned rubber trying to stay up with her when she had first come onto the interstate. The driver to her left was not just some road-raging moron playing high-speed chicken.

Lane Ends 1000 Feet, said the sign overhead. Merge Left.

"I'm trying to," she said.

She turned on her signal and blew her horn. He didn't move. She didn't expect him to. He had followed her from the museum and had boxed her in on purpose. She accelerated to fifty, then sixty miles an hour. Ahead she could see the lane turn into a narrow wedge marked by orange cones which lined a dog-legged concrete wall that kicked into her path. The van beside her accelerated and inched fractionally over the line into her lane. He was squeezing her in. To her right the dark mass of the wall swelled suddenly. She was running out of room. Through her mounting panic, Deborah glimpsed one thing with absolute certainty: if he didn't move and she hit the wall ahead at this speed, the collision would kill her.

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Lane Ends 500 Feet.

She braked hard, so hard in fact that the rear of the Toyota slewed slightly, and part of her tail caught the cement apron beside her with a sudden bang, followed by a singing screech of metal. For a split second the van beside her seemed to pull ahead, but then it was braking too, slowing down to hem her in.

She was down to twenty-five miles an hour, but the wall ahead was looming large.

Fine,
she thought,
I'll stop completely.
But then what? What if he stops too? What if he gets out?

For the briefest instant she saw Richard's body lying there on the floor, so pale, so old. Whoever had done that to him had been without mercy.

She fixed her eyes on the concrete wall ahead and slammed the accelerator to the floor.

CHAPTER 20

It was an insane thing to do. It was, she thought as the solid gray mass hurtled toward her, reckless, suicidal. It was also the last thing the van driver had expected, and by the time he realized what she was doing and gunned his engine to pen her in, she was ten yards ahead of him and sliding left as the wall came to meet her. She clipped the corner in a juddering cascade of glass, but the car barely slowed, and she fishtailed out into the traffic in a chorus of honking horns and screeching brakes.
That was insane! You could have been killed.

"If I had stopped, I would have been."

That shut the other voice up. For the moment. She settled into the middle lane, feeling her breathing return to normal. As she began making apologetic waves with one hand and the drivers around her raged at her, she twisted her rearview mirror in time to see the black van hooking off the next exit ramp and out of sight.