3 Blood Lines (9 page)

“Henry?”

He looked so dreadfully young. So dreadfully vulnerable.

She grabbed his shoulders and shook him, hard.

“Henry!”

His heart had always beat slowly; now, her ear pressed tight against his chest, she couldn’t hear it beat at all.

He couldn’t stop her from doing whatever she wanted to him. He had just put himself completely and absolutely in her hands.

Be there
. Bottom line, that was all Celluci had ever asked of her. Bottom line, that was all she’d ever asked of Celluci in return.

Be there.
Bottom line, it meant a lot more when Henry Fitzroy asked it.

“Henry, you shit.” She shoved her glasses out of the way and scrubbed her knuckles across her eyes. “What the hell can I give you to match this?”

A few moments later, she pulled herself together with a more prosaic question. “Now what? Do I leave? Or do I stay and keep watch over you all day?” A massive yawn threatened to dislocate her jaw; she hadn’t gotten much sleep during the long wait for morning. “Or do I climb in with you?”

She ran one finger lightly down his cheek. The skin felt cool and dry. It always had, but with the night to give it animation it had never felt so . . . unalive. “All right, scratch that last idea.” Not even as tired as she was could she sleep next to the body—to the absence of Henry—that the day had created. Scooping his discarded pants off the floor, she rummaged in the pockets for his keys.

“I’m going home,” she said, needing to hear herself just to offset his absolute stillness. “I’ll get some sleep and be back before dark. Don’t worry, I’ll lock up on my way out. You’ll be safe.”

The lamp by the bed switched off at the door. Vicki took one look back then extinguished the pale island of light, plunging the room into complete and utter darkness.

She had her hand on the knob and had actually begun to turn it when a sudden realization stopped her cold. “How the hell do I get out of here?” Her fingers traced the rubber seals that edged the door, blocking any possible intrusion of light. Could she leave without destroying Henry?
This is just great
. The door boomed a hollow counterpoint to her thoughts as she beat her head gently against it.
I stay to save him from suicide and end up committing murder.

Go or stay?

There’d be light spilling into the hall through the open door of his office and if she opened this door here . . . How direct did the sun have to be? How diffuse?

We should have covered this earlier, Henry.
She couldn’t believe that neither of them had considered anything past sunrise. Of course, they’d both been dealing with other things.

She couldn’t risk it. The entrance door to the condo had been locked and the security chain fastened. He was as safe in here as he ever was. He just had company.

Eyes closed—voluntary lack of sight seemed to help—she stumbled back to the bed and lay down on top of the covers as far from Henry’s inert body as she could get.

All her senses told her she was alone. Except she knew she wasn’t. The entire room had become a coffin of sorts. She could feel the darkness pressing against her, becoming a six by three by one foot box, and tried not to think of Edgar Allan Poe and premature burials.

 

“How did he die?”

“His heart stopped.” The assistant coroner peeled off his gloves. “Which, in fact, is what kills us all in the end. You want to know why he died, ask me after I’ve had him on the table for a couple of hours.”

“Thank you, Dr. Singh.”

He smiled, completely unaffected by the sarcasm. “I live to serve. Don’t keep him too long.” He paused on his way out the door and threw back, “Offhand, given the position, I’d say he was dead before he hit the floor.”

Waving an acknowledgment that he’d heard, Mike Celluci knelt by the body and frowned.

His partner, Dave Graham, leaned over his shoulder and whistled through his teeth. “Someone’s got quite the grip.”

Celluci grunted in agreement. Purple and green bruises circled the left wrist, brilliantly delineating the marks of four fingers and a thumb. The left arm lay stretching away from the body.

“He got dropped when he died,” Dave said quietly.

“That’d be my guess. Check out the face.”

“No expression.”

“Right first time. No fear; no pain; no surprise; no nothing. No record of the last few minutes of life at all.”

“Drugs?”

“Maybe. Nice jacket.” Celluci got to his feet. “Wonder why it wasn’t taken with the shoes.”

Stepping back out of the way, Dave shrugged. “Who the hell can tell these days? They took the cash but not the credit cards or ID. Even left him his transit pass.”

Carefully stepping around both the chalk lines and the bits of broken glass on the floor, the two men made their way over to the sink. Where the stainless steel had been previously scored, the acid poured into it had eaten into the metal. A vague ammonia smell still drifted up from the drain.

“No sign of what he dumped . . .”

Celluci snorted. “Or of who dumped it. Kevin!” The ident man looked up from his position at the side of the corpse. “I want prints lifted off the glass.”

“Off the glass?” Only the base and the section of the neck protected by the screw-on cap had survived in anything large enough to even be considered pieces. “Shall I cure the common cold while I’m at it?”

“Suit yourself, but I want those prints first. Harper!”

The constable who’d been staring into the coffin started and jerked around. “Detective?”

“Get someone in here to drain the trap . . . the curved pipe under the sink,” he added when Harper looked blank. “There’s water in it, maybe enough to dilute the acid and give us some indication of what was dumped. Where’s the guy who found the body?”

“Uh, in the departmental offices. His name’s . . .” Harper frowned and glanced down at his notes. “. . . Raymond Thompson. He’s a researcher, been here about a year and a half. Some of the rest of the staff have arrived and they’re in there, too. My partner’s with them.”

“The offices are?”

“End of the hall on the right.”

Celluci nodded and started for the door. “We’re finished with the body. As soon as all and sundry have got their pound of flesh, you can get it out of here.”

“Charming as always,” Dave murmured, grinning. He followed his partner out into the hall and asked, “How come you know so much about plumbing?”

“My father was a plumber.”

“Yeah? You bastard, you never told me you were independently wealthy.”

“Didn’t want you borrowing money.” Celluci jerked his head back toward the workroom. “What do you think?”

“The good doctor interrupted an intruder?”

“And the janitor they pulled out of here yesterday?”

“I thought you said he saw a mummy and had a heart attack.”

“So what happened to the mummy?”

Dave’s forehead furrowed. The coffin had definitely been empty and, while the workroom was crowded with all kinds of ancient junk, he’d bet his last loonie that there hadn’t been a body tucked into a back comer. “The intruder walked off with it? Dr. Rax broke it into chunks, poured acid over it and washed it down the sink? It came to life and is lurching about the city?” He caught sight of Celluci’s expression and laughed. “You’ve been working too hard, buddy.”

“Maybe.” Celluci pushed open the door marked Department of Egyptology a little more forcefully than necessary.
Maybe not
.

Besides the uniformed police constable, there were half a dozen people sitting in the large outer office, all exhibiting various forms of shock and/or disbelief. Two of them were crying quietly, a half empty box of tissues on the desk between them. Two were arguing, their voices a constant background drone. One sat, his head buried in his hands. Dr. Shane, her expression wavering between grief and anger, stood as the detectives came into the room and walked toward them.

“I’m Dr. Rachel Shane, the assistant curator. What’s going on? No, wait . . .” Her hand went up before either of them could speak. “That’s a stupid question. I know what’s going on.” She took a deep breath. “What’s going to happen now?”

Celluci showed her his badge—from the corner of his eye he saw Dave do the same—and continued to hold it out while she focused first on it and then back on him. “Detective-Sergeant Celluci. My partner, Detective-Sergeant Graham. We’d like to ask Raymond Thompson a few questions.”

The young man with his head in his hands jerked erect, eyes wide and face pale.

“We’d like to leave Dr. Rax’s office as it is for the moment,” Celluci continued, carefully using the matter-of-fact tones most people found calming. “Dr. Shane . . . ?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Use mine.” She gestured at the door, then laced her fingers together so tightly the tips darkened under the pressure.

“Thank you.”

She started a little at the warmth in his voice, then visibly relaxed. Not for the first time, Dave marveled at Celluci’s ability to load
“I know you’re hurting, but we’re counting on you. If you fall apart, they’ll all go.
” onto two small words.

Raymond Thompson was a tall, thin, intense man who couldn’t seem to hold still; he kept a foot or a hand or his head constantly moving. He’d come in early to do catch up on a little of the work the sarcophagus had disrupted and found Dr. Rax sprawled on the floor of the workroom. “I didn’t touch him or anything else except the phone. I called 911, said I’d found a body, and went into the hall to wait. Christ, this is so . . . so . . . I mean, hell, did somebody kill him?”

“We don’t know yet, Mr. Thompson.” Dave Graham perched on the edge of the desk, one foot swinging lazily. “We’d appreciate it if you could remember how the workroom looked. Did it appear to be the way you’d last seen it?”

“I didn’t really look at it. I mean, jeez, my boss was lying dead on the floor!”

“But after you saw the body, you must have taken a quick look around. Just to make sure there was no one else there.”

“Well, yeah . . .”

“And the workroom . . . ?”

The younger man bit his lip, trying to remember, trying to see past the sprawled corpse of a man he’d both liked and respected. “There was glass on the floor,” he said slowly, “and the plastic had been pulled off the new coffin—looks like Eighteenth Dynasty in a Sixteenth Dynasty sarcophagus, really strange—but nothing seemed to be missing. I mean, we had a pretty valuable faience and gold pectoral out on the counter being restored and it was still there.”

Dave raised a brow. “Faience? Pectoral?”

“Faience is, well, a kind of ceramic and a pectoral is a . . .” long fingers sketched incomprehensible designs in the air. “Well, I guess you could think of it as a fat necklace.”

“More than historically valuable?”

Ray Thompson shrugged. “More than half of it is better than eighteen karat gold.”

Celluci turned from the window where he’d been watching traffic go by on Queen’s Park Road, content to let his partner ask the questions. Whatever the reasons were behind the death of Dr. Rax, he was willing to bet robbery hadn’t been a motive. “What about the mummy?”

“There never was one.”

“Oh?” He took a step forward. “I talked to one of the officers on the scene yesterday morning as they were carrying that janitor out of the building. She told me he’d seen a mummy and had a heart attack. Essentially, died of fright.”

“Thought
he saw a mummy. Someone had popped an empty coffin back into a stone box and resealed it. We thought we were getting a new piece of history and all we got was air.” Ray’s laugh was short and bitter. “Maybe that’s what killed Dr. Rax; scientific disappointment.”

“So there wasn’t a mummy?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Trust me, Detective, I’d have noticed.”

Celluci caught a speaking glance from his partner and, scowling, closed his lips around what he’d been about to say. For the moment, he was willing to believe he’d misunderstood Trembley’s explanation.

The rest of the department had even less to offer. They’d all liked Dr. Rax. Sure, occasionally he disagreed with his colleagues, but get twelve Egyptologists in a room and they’d have a dozen different opinions. No, there never had been a mummy. Professional jealousy?

Dr. Shane sighed and pushed her hair back off her forehead. “He was the curator of an underfunded department in a provincial museum. A good job, even a prestigious job compared to many but not one worth killing over.”

“I suppose as his assistant curator you’re next in line for the position.” The words were an observation only, carefully nonweighted.

“I suppose I am. Damn him anyway, I’m the only person I can think of who hates paperwork more than he did.” She pressed her fists against her mouth and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “Oh, God . . .” A moment later she looked up, lashes in damp clumps. “I’m sorry. I’m not usually a watering pot.”

“It’s been an unusual kind of a day,” Celluci said gently, handing her a tissue. “Dave, why don’t you tell the others that anyone who wants to go home, can. But point out that once the lab people are done, we’ll need a complete inventory of that workroom. Maybe some’ll stay. The sooner we know for sure if anything’s missing the better.”

Dr. Shane blew her nose as Dave left. “You’re pretty high-handed with my staff, Detective.”

“Sorry. If you’d rather tell them yourself . . . ?”

“No, that’s all right. You’re doing fine.”
I bet when he was eighteen he looked like Michelangelo’s David.
She closed her eyes again.
God, I don’t believe this. Elias is dead and I’m sitting here thinking about how good-looking this cop is.

“Dr. Shane? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She opened her eyes again and managed a watery smile. “Really.”

Celluci nodded. He couldn’t help but notice that Dr. Rachel Shane had a very attractive smile, even twisted as it was with grief. He wondered how it would look when she actually had something to smile about.