The Dangerous Transmission (7 page)

“It was Nick,” he told the Hardys. “He's on his way. I'm going to run to the flat and pick up a raven for him.”

“Stuffed, right?” Joe said, grinning.

“Indeed,” Jax confirmed. “It's an extra one for the exhibition. Nick will be surprised when he sees it. I told him I wouldn't get it done in time.”

“I'm coming with you,” Frank said. “I want to get some heat on this shoulder. I brought some sports salve that'll do the job.”

“Hold our table,” Jax said. “We'll probably be back before Nick gets here.”

“I'll even save a chair for the raven,” Joe said.

When Frank and Jax got to the flat, Jax went into his taxidermy shop and Frank went upstairs. His shoulder was really aching, so he headed right for
the guest bedroom. He got the tube of medicine from his sports bag and rubbed the cream into his shoulder.

A rush of heat flooded his aching rotator cuff and radiated around his shoulder and up the side of his neck. For a second it felt like his skin was on fire. Then the feeling settled into a comfortable and soothing warmth. He tried a few flexes and was pleased that his arm was loosening up.

He pulled on a fresh shirt and headed back down to the taxidermy shop.

Just walking in the back door of the shop was an eerie experience. The only light came from a few tiny bulbs glowing in a couple of display cases, and from the streetlight beams through the shop windows.

Hairy hides hung from hooks, a drawer of glass eyes stared up at him, and noses and ears poked out of cotton batting. Shadows of animal parts played across the walls like a freaky sci-fi film.

Frank couldn't tell which felt stronger: the radiating heat in his shoulder or the cold chills everywhere else.

He heard a rustling noise in the front room of the shop, and then a click. “Jax?” he called out, walking toward the front.

The moment he stepped into the room, the cold chills won out. Jax lay on the floor, a huge blue-black raven across his chest. Neither was moving.

8 The Cavity

“Jax!” Frank yelled. “Jax—say something!”

Frank smacked the stuffed raven away. It flew off Jax's chest and slid on its back across the wood floor.

An involuntary shudder rippled down Frank's spine as he reached for Jax's pulse. His own heart was beating so fast that he couldn't feel his friend's at first. Finally he felt the rhythm of Jax's heartbeat. It was faint, but it was there. Frank knew he didn't need to use CPR.

He looked closely at his friend's face. Jax's eyes were closed, and his mouth was slightly open. There was a pink mark on his right temple.

Frank went to the shop phone and dialed the emergency number that was stuck to the receiver.
It was like dialing 911 in America. He gave the dispatcher the address of the flat and told her Jax's condition. Then he hung up and called Officer Somerset.

The policeman was not in, but Frank left a message saying there had been a forced break-in at the taxidermy shop, Jax had been injured and taken to the hospital, and Frank didn't know what had happened.

He went back to his friend, who was lying on the floor. The large welt on Jax's temple had billowed up from the skin's surface and was now a darker red. “Jax!” he called again. “Can you hear me? Wake up, man.”

Ideas and images flooded his mind. He noticed an old-fashioned blackboard on the wall. On it, someone—probably Jax—had drawn a diagram of a fish with white chalk.

Frank took the chalk from the ledge and drew marks around Jax's body on the floor. He made the marks very faint so that they wouldn't attract the attention of the ambulance crew that was on its way.

Beads of sweat broke out on Frank's face as he drew the outline. “This is just for the record,” he mumbled to himself. “For
our
investigation. Jax is alive—and he's staying alive.”

At last he heard the welcome two-tone siren of the ambulance. The vehicle skidded to a stop in the
lane outside the shop. Two emergency medical technicians jumped out. One grabbed a medical bag from the back of the ambulance. The other carried in a gurney.

Frank rushed to unlock the door. It opened easily, and he realized that the antique lock had been broken.

While the EMTs assessed Jax's vital signs, one of them asked Frank what had happened. He told them honestly that he didn't know. He showed them the jimmied lock and explained that there had been recent burglaries in the area.

“We're going to report this call to the police,” she said.

“I've already done that,” Frank assured her. “You can check with Officer Somerset.”

It took only a few minutes for the EMTs to check Jax and get him loaded onto a gurney. Then they flipped the spring that dropped the wheeled legs of the bed. They were so preoccupied with their job that they didn't notice the pale chalk line left on the floor when they raised Jax's bed.

The EMTs rolled the gurney out of the shop. Frank followed closely behind. Jax was still unconscious. The medics told Frank the address of the hospital and pushed the gurney into the ambulance. Then they sped off with lights blazing and siren whooping.

Frank raced back into the shop and turned on all
the lights. Then he carefully examined the floor where Jax had been lying. Little by little, he spread out his search to include the path from the door, and compared it to the location of Jax's body.

He felt the creepy sensation of dozens of eyes watching him as he moved among the stuffed creatures that inhabited the shop. As in the storage room above, the eyes seemed to follow him as he searched.

The lighting in the store wasn't good, and the floor was distorted by weird shadows. “Probably helps sales to have it dim and spooky in here,” Frank whispered. He took out his penlight and aimed the beam at the floor around the chalked image of his friend.

He widened the circle farther and farther until he reached the door with its broken lock. But he found nothing—no clue to the person who had broken in and attacked Jax.

Frank wasn't willing to give up yet. Beads of sweat crept down his back. He was determined to find out what happened to Jax.

He'd learned from countless previous investigations that a second search can often solve the case, so he decided to reverse his search. This time he would begin at the door and move back to the chalk line.

He moved the penlight beam into the dark corners around the door and the adjacent display cases. This time he moved the light slowly, inch by
inch. And this time he saw something. A sudden sparkle like a micro-firework shot up into the penlight beam as it passed by—then it disappeared. Frank edged the light back, and there it was again. A shimmer.

Frank grabbed a chamois cloth from the top of one of the display cases. Then he crouched down and reached for whatever was glittering, shielding his fingerprints with the chamois.

What he found was a small round plastic case. It was about half the size of the container that holds a roll of film.

He opened his hand to look more closely at the object that was nestled in the cloth. Inside the clear plastic case was a powder that looked like sand but emitted the rainbow colors of a crystal prism in the light.

He moved the penlight beam back and forth across the case. The powder changed colors like a hologram. The bottom of the case was stamped with an odd symbol. It looked like a
V.

Frank wrapped up the case and dropped it in his pocket. Then he turned off the shop lights and closed the front door. Because he could no longer lock it, he pushed a heavy display case against the door.

Except for the case of powder in his pocket and the chalk outline on the floor, he tried to leave the room exactly as he'd found it. Finally, before he
left, he took one last look around and then exited the same way he had come in: through the back door of the taxidermy shop.

He didn't look forward to his next move. As he walked up the staircase to the second floor, he thought of his brief conversation with the EMTs about the break-in.

What if the person who broke in tonight wasn't just your run-of-the-mill local burglar?
Frank thought. He felt the sudden thump of his pulse pumping through his neck.
What if he wasn't just looking for preserved animals and birds—or even money? Maybe he was looking for something with much more value. . . .

He went into the kitchen. On a hook in the pantry were spare keys to all the locks on both floors of Jax's property. He had showed them to the Hardys when they first arrived. Frank grabbed the key to the medical suite.

He hurried out of the living quarters and into the suite. He walked through the reception area and the treatment rooms. Everything looked okay. Then he got to the lab, and his stomach knotted into a ball. Someone had gone through everything in a hurry. There wasn't a lot of damage; the instruments and machines seemed untouched. But drawers were hanging open and had been emptied. Cupboard doors were ajar, and what had been on shelves was now on the floor.

Frank walked into Jax's office. More of the same. “Whoever went through these rooms was not out to cause damage,” Frank whispered, “and wasn't just looking for something expensive to steal. This thief was after something specific.”

Frank crossed to the file cabinet. It was near the wall, but not as close to the wall as Jax usually kept it. He slid the file cabinet farther from the wall, as Jax had done when he'd showed them his secret hiding place for the Molar Mike. “There's the heating grate,” Frank whispered. He crouched down and pulled the grate open. Behind the grate was the safe door.

His hands felt clammy. He rubbed his palms against his jeans.

Frank punched into the keybad the sequence of numbers Jax had shown them. With a barely audible click, the safe door opened slightly.

He crooked his finger around the edge of the door and pulled. “Just as I'd thought,” he whispered, staring at the black emptiness inside. “Nothing.”

9 Ground Under the Underground

Frank shut the door to the empty safe, closed the grate over the safe door, and pushed the file cabinet back against the wall. The safe was completely hidden again.

He quickly checked the rest of the office. Then he went into the lab and looked around there. He was careful not to move anything in case the police might need to gather fingerprints later. He found nothing out of place since the last time he'd been there, just after the press conference.

Frank felt a sudden urgency to get to Joe and tell him what had happened. Quickly he closed up the medical suite and left the flat. He raced up the lane and around the corner to the Black Belt.

“Hey, there you are,” Joe said, as Frank hurried
up to the table. “I'd decided it was time to come get you guys. What took you so long? Where's Jax?”

“Probably in X-ray,” Frank said in a low voice. He dropped into a chair and told Joe what had happened.

Joe stood up so quickly that he knocked his chair over backward. He plopped a few Euro dollars on the table to pay for his lemon drink. “Let's go,” he said. He pulled out an Underground map and plotted out the route they'd use to get to the hospital.

“There's more,” Frank said, just after they stepped outside. He pulled Joe to a stop. “The Molar Mike is gone. The safe was empty.”

“Empty?” Joe repeated.

“The tooth, the test results—everything is gone,” Frank said.

“Someone broke in to steal the Molar Mike, and Jax must have surprised him,” Joe concluded. “So the thief knocked him out.”

“Sounds right to me,” Frank said. “But we can't be sure until we talk to Jax.”

“What do you mean?” Joe asked.

“The safe was locked, and the file cabinet was in place,” Frank reminded his brother. “It looked like everything else was secure. Maybe Jax moved the tooth to another secure place and just didn't have a chance to tell us.”

“So we don't call the police on this yet?” Joe finally concluded.

“I called Officer Somerset from the flat to report the break-in and Jax's accident,” Frank said. “But since there's an outside chance Jax moved the tooth himself, I didn't mention the empty safe. We can't know what happened there for sure until Jax is conscious again.”

Outside the Black Belt, the air was gray and wet. Frank realized he had been so preoccupied with what had happened at the flat that he hadn't even noticed the fog until now.

They could see only a few feet in front of them. People walking toward them seemed to suddenly materialize, as if they'd been silently squeezed out of the soupy mist.

“Turn around, guys—you're going the wrong way. The Black Belt's behind you.” They heard Nick's familiar voice ahead of them before they actually saw him. And then,
bam!
There he was, a yard away.

“Jax has been hurt,” Joe said, forcing his words through the fog. “We're on our way to the hospital now.”

“Whoa—I'll go with you,” Nick said, quickly reversing direction and falling into step with the Hardys. “What happened?” he asked as they took the steps to the Underground two and three at a time.

“We don't know,” Frank said. He decided to respect Jax's privacy and not to say any more until
he talked to his old friend. Frank knew that Joe would pick up on his strategy.

The three of them were quiet on the ride to their first connection. While they stood waiting for the second train, Joe finally spoke. “Jax says you were speaking to some school group tonight?”

“Sort of,” Nick said. “It's a private group that works with underprivileged youth. I talked about the history of the Tower. They seemed to like it. How about you two? How'd you spend your day? How did Jax's press conference go?”

“Pretty straightforward, until the end,” Frank said. “You'll read about it in the papers tomorrow, I'm sure.” He told Nick about Geoffrey Halstead's appearance.