The Mask of Atreus (34 page)

"What about the human remains?" said Calvin.

"Different," said Kerem.

It took a second for Deborah to realize what he had said.

"Different how so?" said Calvin. He looked focused, his eyes bright and unblinkingly hard.

"The body doesn't come from the same period as the potsherds," said Kerem.

"How much older is it?" said Deborah, a trifle breathless. This, she had not expected.

"Oh," said Kerem, "it's not older. It's more recent."

"What?" said Deborah, staring.

"Not by much," said Kerem, "but pre-1950s."

"Are you sure?" said Calvin.

Kerem looked a little put out.

"The AMS machine detects radiocarbon decay," he said.

"It measures age based on the known decay rate of radioactive isotopes naturally present in organic material, and is accurate up to ages of fifty or sixty thousand years. Anything older than that no longer contains radiocarbon. At the other end of the spectrum is the fact that extensive nuclear testing in the 1950s significantly increased radiation levels in 284

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organic material. The difference between material which precedes those tests and that which comes during or after them is quite marked. The human remains clearly come before the atomic tests, but after the eighteenth/nineteenth century window. The body is early twentieth century, death occurring, probably, in the mid-1940s."

Deborah felt her jaw go slack. The 1940s? That made no sense at all.

"Can I see that?" said Calvin.

Kerem handed him the envelope, and he went through the pages of data quizzically.

Deborah wanted to ask Kerem if he was sure but knew that such a question was pointless and disrespectful.

"OK," she said, vaguely. "Right. Well, I guess we'll be going."

"The other results will be ready for you in a couple of weeks, probably," said Kerem. "Should I just mail them to the museum?"

"Other results?" said Deborah, still feeling slow and stupid as if she was slightly drunk.

"Your Spanish galleon," he said.

"Right," she said. "Yes. Send them to the museum."

He thanked them for their business, took the envelope from Calvin, and left them standing in the spare, pale lobby which now felt even more like a hospital waiting room.

"You OK?" said Calvin.

"Yeah," she lied. "I'm going to call Cerniga."

There was no choice. The time to play detective was long past.

"OK," said Calvin, giving her a searching look. "Probably smart. Let me swing by the bathroom while you call him. Then I guess we'll get our stuff and hit the road."

It was almost a question, as if this new sense of conclusion might make her suggest that they spend a few days in the mountains with him or something. She barely heard it, merely nodding her agreement and fumbling for her phone. 285

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So it wasn't Agamemnon. She hadn't really believed otherwise, not lately, but this was a new and alarming strangeness. It wasn't an ancient corpse unearthed after centuries underground, nor was it just a few bones taken from a convenient cemetery at the end of the nineteenth century. This was more recent and less connected to Schliemann, to the dig, to Mycenae, even to archaeology itself. Indeed, it was recent enough for a new and pressing question to dominate Deborah's thoughts as she unsteadily pushed the numbers on her phone. She had been thinking of her search for the items missing from Richard's bedroom in terms of
how
and
what
and
why
. Now all those questions were eclipsed by another:
who?

Who was the body that had lain in state behind Richard's bookcase?

And who killed him?

CHAPTER 58

"Agent Cerniga," said the voice on the line.

"Yes, this is Deborah Miller," she said. "I'm in Athens."

"You're
where
?"

"Athens, Georgia," she said. "I've just learned something you need to hear about."

"Go on."

She talked. She suggested that she'd come to test the galleon's age and had stumbled onto the test results from the Agamemnon crate by accident. Cerniga said nothing, so she barreled through, moving from point to point, making no attempt to consciously conceal anything. Even so, she did not mention that Calvin was with her, did not in fact even allude to him, and when he emerged from the building looking solemn and smiled at her, she turned away to focus on her phone call.

"What's the phone number of the CAIS lab?" said Cerniga, after listening in silence to her description of the test results.

Deborah checked her receipt for the ship prow test and read it back to him.

"They probably won't tell you more than I've already said," she added.

"I don't want more details," he said. "I want the contact address of whoever took the samples to be tested. Right now, finding the men who ordered the test is more important than the test results. Come back to Atlanta and keep your phone on."

Of course it was, she thought as she hung up. How could she have thought otherwise? This wasn't about some ancient archaeological mystery, it was about the murder of her closest 287

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friend. They were looking for a killer, not a corpse, and the fact that she had somehow forgotten left her feeling wounded, humiliated, and guilty.

Deborah drove fast, her mind trying to make sense of what she had learned so far. The new development had made her private, and though she regretted nothing of the previous night with Calvin, part of her wished he had brought his own car. She didn't want to talk. She didn't want to be playful or tender. She wanted to think, and she wasn't used to talking until she knew what she wanted to say. Usually the gap between the two could be measured in milliseconds, but right now she felt confused, uncertain, and a little afraid. She didn't want to discuss such feelings or even give them voice.

"What's wrong?" said Calvin.

She shook her head and then forced herself to say, "Nothing. Just concentrating."

"On driving, or on the test results?"

It had begun to rain. She snapped on the wipers and hunkered down in the seat.

"Both," she said. She didn't smile, and she didn't take her eyes off the road. The monosyllable was supposed to close the conversation.

"What do you think about this body?" said Calvin. She sensed that he didn't care about that so much as he did about reestablishing contact between them, but she couldn't bring herself to play along. She shrugged.

"No ideas?" he said.

"Not really."

He turned and looked out of his rain-streaked window.

"You sure you're OK?" he said. "With me, I mean."

"I'm fine, Calvin," she said, the irritation in her voice showing.
Just shut up and leave me alone
. "I'm just concentrating."

* * *

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In fact her thoughts had fastened on three things: the age of the body, the fact that the FBI had jurisdiction over hate crimes, and the death of a black World War Two tank commander who had never known his daughter. But if the person--or people--who had killed Richard and had tried to kill her in Greece knew that the crate contained not the body of Agamemnon but that of Tonya's father, a forgotten Sherman commander executed for his curiosity by a racist military policeman fifty years ago, why were they so anxious--so murderously desperate--to get hold of it?

She was startled out of her musing by the ringing of her phone: "La Cucaracha" still. Richard's joke. They had been driving in silence for over an hour and were now heading south toward the city, coming down from the wooded slopes around Red Top Mountain where the waters of Lake Allatoona flashed darkly through the rain-swept trees.

"Pass me that, will you," said Deborah, reaching across Calvin as her phone skittered out of her hand and onto the floor between his legs.

"So you
can
talk?" he remarked. It was a joke, but a brittle one.

"Just . . . thank you," she said, taking it brusquely from him and flipping it open. "Hello?"

"It's Cerniga," said the FBI agent. "Where are you?"

"Half an hour north of the perimeter. Maybe less. Why?"

"I'm going to give you directions to an address," he said.

"I want you to get down here right away. Don't go anywhere else first."

"OK. Shoot."

"You need to pull over to write this down?"

"I'll remember it," she said, pinning the phone against her shoulder with her head and using the free hand to make an impatient scribbling gesture to Calvin.

"What?" he said.

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"A pen," she mouthed, turning her face from the mouthpiece.

"OK," said Cerniga. "It's 136 Greencove Street. It's about twenty minutes south of the airport. Come off I-85 at the Palmetto exit, go left off the ramp, and go four miles to Haysbridge Road. Go left, then right onto Greencove. The house you want is the first building on the left. It's set pretty far back from the road, but you should be able to see it. It looks abandoned."

Deborah repeated each stage of the directions to Calvin, who wrote quickly and with a look of sour disapproval at being reduced to stenographer.

"What is this place?" she said. "And why do you want me there?"

"It's where the Greeks have been holed up," said Cerniga, his voice flat. "Where they have been storing the crate."

"How did you find them?" said Deborah, suddenly exuberant.

"We called the CAIS lab. They had the contact information."

"Right," said Deborah. "Of course. That's great."

"Not really," said Cerniga. "Someone beat us to it."

"Is it . . ." Deborah couldn't find the words. "Is everything OK?"

"Just get here," he said, and hung up.

CHAPTER 59

"I'm going to drop you off," she said to Calvin, still staring into the rain ahead. "Where's good?"

She felt him turn to look at her, but for a while he didn't say anything.

"Calvin?" she said, prompting.

"Did I do something wrong?" he said. "You regret last night?"

"No," she said, not sure if it was true. "I just don't think we should show up together."

"Why not?"

"Well, for one thing, you weren't asked to go."

"Nice," he snapped. "You know what, Deborah? That's fine. I have to go back to the museum later, but just drop me back at my office."

She almost protested, almost apologized, almost tried to explain that it wasn't really about him at all so much as about being seen and treated as a couple by other people in ways that made things real and therefore scary, that it was about a sense of dread about what she was about to find out at the end of this drive, but in the end she just nodded and said, "OK."

After she had dropped him off and he had stalked back to the great glass tower with only the tersest of good-byes, the city fell quickly away behind her. Once past Turner Field, the only major exit was onto I-20 and then the perimeter loop, then only signs to the airport and small towns like Fairburn, Jonesboro, and Union City whose names were unfamiliar to her. As the traffic thinned to almost nothing, and the exits 291

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spread themselves along miles of heavily wooded highway which gave no sense of place beyond the strip of asphalt and concrete itself, she began to wonder if she had missed her exit.

She considered Calvin's uneven scrawl and looked up just in time to catch the Palmetto exit sign looming overhead. She slowed, took the ramp, and followed the directions carefully as the freeway gave way to single-lane highways and open horse pasture punctuated by russet-colored barns with white timber frames. The city could have been hours away, another world entirely. Almost another time.

The house seemed to have been numbered 136 at random, there being no other visible properties on the street. As Cerniga had suggested, the building itself was set some way back from the road and was only dimly visible through the steady rain. Even so, it looked ramshackle and close to derelict. It was an old house, possibly Victorian, large and ornate with gingerbread trim and a square turret off to one side. If it was still salvageable it would probably be a spectacular home, graceful despite its immensity, elegant without being fussy. Right now it was surrounded by cars and strobed by the lights of emergency vehicles so that the house looked like the heart of the storm, its walls intermittently slashed by red and blue lightning.

All thoughts of Calvin vanished as Deborah parked the car, composed herself like a diver taking a steadying breath, and got out into the rain. Putting her head down, she ran along the uneven gravel driveway up to the house. A uniformed officer stopped her at the stoop but was clearly expecting her and stepped aside as soon as she gave her name. It seemed unlikely that anyone had lived in the house for some time. It was sparsely furnished, and what pieces there were seemed to have been abandoned, as if they hadn't made the cut when the last owner had died and the better items had been sold off. Somewhere in the house was the steady patter of running water. A ruptured pipe or a leaking roof? Probably the latter.

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"Up here."

It was Keene, leaning over the banister of a dusty staircase. Deborah pushed her wet hair back from her face and climbed the stairs, as Keene descended.

"Ah," he said, grimly satisfied, "if it isn't Her Eminence the lady museum curator."

"What is it?" she said, too apprehensive to bother sparring.

"Brace yourself," he said. "It ain't pretty."

The first body was on the landing, sprawled on his back. His shirt had been torn open and a now-familiar word etched into his chest in large, savage slashes resembling Greek letters: Atreus. Apart from the letters themselves, the flesh was pale and unmarked, but there was a large and irregular puddle of thickening blood beneath the body. Deborah put a hand against the wall to steady herself.