The Antiquities Hunter Read online

  I gave her a “look,” letting her read the suspicion in my narrowed eyes and giving her every opportunity to open up to me about the turmoil I could see rolling off of her in waves. But she merely ducked her head and started fumbling with her purse and workout bag. She knew I didn’t believe her, but this wasn’t the time or place to push it.

  It was time to start digging, and I was going to start with her other half.

  That evening, I went to Dave. I didn’t beat around the bush either. “What’s wrong with Rose?” I asked, the moment the two of us were alone.

  We were barbecuing swordfish steaks on the seaward deck of my parents’ houseboat, which is two slips down from mine. Rose and my mom and dad had gone out on deck to set the table and lay out the spread. The kids, Luis and Letty, had gone with them, which meant at least twenty minutes of futzing, munching, and general chaos. My mom is very particular about food placement. I believe it is a Russian form of feng shui. As I had ulterior motives I’d elected to help Dave marinate the steaks.

  He looked up from his bowl of marinade with a puzzled frown wrinkling his forehead. I half expected him to say, “Nothing.” What he said was, “I don’t know. She won’t talk to me about it.”

  I could hear the Devil strapping on his ice skates. “She won’t talk to you?”

  “And before you ask, yes, I have tried to get her to open up.” He poked a finger into the marinade, then tasted it, frown deepening. He added some salt.

  Just when I thought I’d have to prompt him again, he said, “It’s got to be something work related. I’d know if it had anything to do with me or the kids.”

  Probably true. I opened my mouth to say so.

  “And before you ask—yes, Rose and I are fine. Better than fine. We’ve been great, you know?” He glanced up at me with what I am sure he thought was a look of supreme confidence, but which fell several miles short into the camp of confusion.

  I nodded. “Yeah. I know. Any ideas?”

  “I’d say maybe something went wrong with a sting, but I didn’t get a sense of that. I mean, she seemed pretty pleased with the way her last sting went. Uh, could you get the capers out of the fridge?”

  I opened the fridge, only half seeing the contents. “I know Rose would feel responsible for anything that went pear-shaped,” I said, “whether it’s within her control or not.”

  Dave shook his head. “They got the pothunters dead to rights—a whole family of them. They’ve been charged already. Maybe there’s been a new development?”

  I found the capers behind a glass container full of clear liquid and wearing a yellow sticky note in my mother’s extravagant hand. It read: Holy Water. DO NOT DRINK.

  “What about the deposition she’s got pending?” I asked. “Could she be worried about that? You know how much she hates it when these guys skate away because some big museum opens up its treasury, or assigns a low-level scapegoat.”

  Dave’s head was still shaking. “No. This is more than that. I feel it. My gut is screaming at me that something bad has happened.” He turned to look at me. “You know her job, Tink. It’s like baseball: ‘hours of interminable boredom punctuated with moments of sheer terror.’”

  “That’s war, Dave. Or flying. I forget which.” I did not comment on his use of my precious (read: obnoxious) nickname, which years of surly scowls on my part have been unable to bury.

  “Point is,” Dave said, “sometimes her job is dangerous. I mean, when she’s in the field. This family she and her team caught was armed.”

  “But that craziness has never followed her home.”

  “Maybe it has, now.”

  I could feel the panic I’d been trying to keep at bay starting to creep up out of my gut, and saw my own growing unease reflected in Dave’s eyes. I’d been hoping he’d tell me I was imagining things. Instead, I got validation.

  Shit. Deep breath, Gina.

  “Okay. Deep breath, Dave. We know Rose can take care of herself. She’s a trained agent. She’s also a damn good shot and has an epic roundhouse kick.”

  I should know, we practice together. No holds barred.

  “Look,” I went on, trying to be soothing, “maybe it’s something simpler. Maybe a rift within her unit?” My heart wasn’t in my words. Rose’s team had been together for several years in its current form, and worked like a well-oiled machine.

  Dave’s hands had stilled, marinade utterly forgotten. He looked at me again, his brow unfurrowing just a bit. “Maybe someone else on the team is having problems and she just can’t talk about it.”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “And there’s the new supervisor, Ellen Robb,” Dave said, half to himself.

  “Rose likes Ellen,” I protested. “She has nothing but good things to say about her.”

  “Yes, but Greg doesn’t like her at all. Thinks she’s too much of a Washington-style bureaucrat.”

  Greg Sheffield was a senior member of Rose’s unit. He’d been in the field almost twice as long as Rose had and very likely, I suspected, thought the supervisory job should have gone to him instead of an outsider. Meaning there were political tensions afoot.

  This information was ear-tickling. Rose has a myriad sterling qualities, two of which are a strong sense of responsibility and a penchant for consensus-building. Disunity appalls her. When we were teenagers, she used to come over and smooth things out between Mom and me. I don’t know how we would’ve gotten through my fourteenth summer if not for Rose. She’s almost two years older than I am, which somehow inclined Mom to respect her as an adult.

  Greg and Rose had worked together for years. The fact that he didn’t care for the new boss could be significant. If this was causing so much tension that it was affecting the team—or so much that Greg asked for a transfer, it would seem to Rose as if her second family was being torn apart.

  I finally handed Dave the capers, along with my insights about Greg and the effect his disenchantment with Ellen might have on the team. As he considered this, his brow smoothed out a bit more.

  “You know, I’ll bet you’re right. I hope you’re right anyway. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.” He grinned at me. “You should be a psychologist . . . or a psychic.”

  I grimaced. “I’m just my mother’s daughter.”

  “Ah. So now, you vill admit it?” said Mom from the doorway, in her best “moose and squirrel” accent. She regarded me down the length of her impressive nose, her dark eyes glinting with wry humor.

  We laughed. I relaxed (a bit). Dave relaxed. I left it at that.

  Tomorrow, I’d casually ask Mom about the holy water, and Rose about Greg and Ellen and any pistol-packing pothunters her team might have encountered. Mom would stonewall me, as she always does (“Oh, just a little class project of mine.”), and Rose would spill the beans. I was willing to bank on it. I was taking no more bullshit.

  I lay down to sleep with the sound of water lapping at the keel of my houseboat. Far and away, there was an underscore of pounding surf, like a mother’s heartbeat. Somewhere along the path to sleep, I stumbled into a world in which the heartbeat became my own, and the hiss of surf became the hiss of traffic. There were odors here too—oil, wet concrete, something frying.

  Sight was slow to register. I was swaddled in moist, cool darkness that clung to my skin. My eyes finally caught up with my other senses and informed me that I was in an alley. Before me was the opening to the street. Neon flashed blue, then red on the glistening concrete, and infused the mist with color—hot then cold. On my left and right were brick walls that seemed to go up into infinity. There was graffiti on them.

  Behind me was darkness; I instinctively edged away toward the untrustworthy light.

  That’s when a voice spoke my name. It was a man’s voice, crooning sweet slime. I knew it well. It filled me with disgust and desperation.

  I ran.

  In dreams one always runs when desperate, usually in the wrong direction. I did that now, bolting from the spastic light
into the darkness. I suddenly and inexplicably knew I was seeking something or someone. I had no idea what or whom. As soon as this goal established itself in my mind, the alley morphed into one of those games in which computer-generated scenery flashed by at surreal speed. The CG maze shunted me here and there; walls melted and coalesced and went on in the nightmare approximation of forever—which according to dream research is measured in seconds.

  I grew increasingly desperate. I gasped for breath. There was a pain in my chest.

  “You don’t even know where you’re going, do you?” asked my invisible man.

  His voice came to me as if his lips were literally pressed to my ear—as they had been before in waking life. Every nerve in my body twitched in harmony and I leapt almost to wakefulness. But I couldn’t seem to emerge from this world, and when I returned to the alley, it was to find a chain-link fence blocking my path.

  I hooked my fingers through the cold mesh and gave the fence a shake. Anyone whose dream path has ever ended at a chain-link fence does this. Then Rose appeared on the other side of the fence, her dark eyes huge and mute.

  “What’s wrong, Rose?” I asked, and the invisible man mimicked: “What’s wrong, Rose?”

  Rose’s eyes were focused on a point over my head. Her mouth opened in a soundless scream and she ran. I wanted to turn, to see what she saw, but I was afraid to look, so I instinctively felt my pockets.

  No mingei, no obereg. Nothing.

  My pockets were empty.

  I turned and ran.

  The alley vanished. I was running through sand, and the sound of traffic faded back into the roar of surf. I thought I was chasing Rose, but I wasn’t sure. There was a shadow on the beach in front of me; that was what I pursued—a shadow.

  He was here too. “You don’t get it, Tinkerbell,” he said. “You never do get it.”

  I was in the surf then, up to my ankles, my knees, my thighs, my hips, pushing against the current. The waves would soon be over my head.

  Why was I doing this?

  “Stupid Gina. My stupid little monkey,” he said, and I could no longer see or hear or even breathe.

  I woke on a single sharp gasp of air, surprised to find my clothes plastered to my body.

  My mind accepted a quick succession of realities—I’d drowned; I’d sleepwalked to the beach; I’d sprung a leak; I’d awakened from a nightmare in a cold sweat. The houseboat rocked gently; water sighed beneath it and lapped comfortingly at the keel. I sighed too.

  It was so tempting to rationalize—yeah, it must be tension with Greg and the new boss; she’ll tell me when she’s ready. Or it’s someone else on the team who has a dire problem, and loyal, loyal Rose feels she can’t discuss it, even with her closest companions. I knew all this was false. I had never known Rose to hold back anything. This behavior went against all the years we had known each other. Rose, a creature of habit and as much a control freak as anyone I know, had disarranged her habits, both ephemeral and deep, to accommodate something. She was, as my invisible taunter pointed out, in some sort of serious trouble, and I had been, once again, slow on the uptake.

  I already knew how dangerous that could be.

  Chapter 2

  Six Honest Serving-Men

  Our Monday morning routine didn’t offer me any decent opportunities to force disclosure until we were treading away among the machinery on our final cooldown. Then, the improbable happened—the gym emptied out. I chose this moment to nudge.

  “Rose,” I said, “Dave’s worried about you.”

  “What?” She looked up at me from where she had been staring at the empty space between the calorie display and the little TV screen.

  “He’s afraid there’s something dire happening at work. And that that something has got you behaving strangely.”

  She looked down at the lights blinking rhythmically on the machine’s console. “There’s nothing wrong at work.”

  While my mind was swirling with shotgun-wielding pothunters, I tried an easier angle. “How’s Greg taking the new boss?”

  She gave me a weird look. “Why do you ask?”

  “Dave says Greg doesn’t like her.”

  “He’s a professional. He’s adjusting. Everything will be—” She broke off suddenly and looked at me. “Okay, fine. It’s bothering me, okay? Probably more than it bothers Greg. You flushed me out. Happy?” Her tone had daggers in it and her body was rigid, knuckles white as they gripped the treadmill handlebar.

  “I would be, if that was anywhere close to the truth.”

  “Tink, really.”

  “Don’t forget who you’re talking to, Rose. What’s really bothering you?”

  “I told you: I’m worried about Greg. Really, it’s not even that big a deal.”

  “Then why did we join the local sex-and-suntan club?”

  “What?”

  My making a connection between the two things took her by surprise, but before I could pounce, the room filled with a gaggle of perky senior citizens and their über-perky aerobics instructor.

  Damn. Cut off at the pass.

  We were fresh from the shower when the locker room cleared. Time for my one-woman blitzkrieg.

  “Why are we here, Rose?” I asked. “I hate these places. You hate these places. You miss our runs as much as I do. Why are you not talking to me about whatever it is? What are you afraid of?” Before she could wriggle away, I added, “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of—I’m afraid of something happening to you while I just stand around looking stupid.”

  Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. We just stood there—two wet, naked women staring at each other while water dripped from our hair and bodies to soak into the stained blue indoor-outdoor carpeting.

  Finally, she lowered her eyes and shook her head. “It’s crazy,” she said, and I smelled a confession. “I think . . . I think someone’s stalking me.” She sat down as if the words were a physical weight she was grappling with.

  My scalp tingled and I felt a cold breeze from last night’s dream. “Someone? Who?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never gotten a close look at him.”

  I sat down next to her, my war stance evaporating. “Him. A man? You’re sure?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure of anything, Gina. There’s a car I see in my rearview mirror more often than coincidence should allow. A guy who seems to be hovering . . .”

  “Have you told anybody? Your boss?”

  She shook her head and stood to begin toweling her yard-o-hair. “No. I’m not sure, Tink. One minute I’m certain I’m being followed, the next I think I’m suggestible and paranoid and imagining everything.”

  I didn’t point out that she had never been suggestible or paranoid before and started toweling my own collar-length mop. “And you’ve changed your routines for imagination’s sake?”

  She slumped onto one of the benches at the center of the room. “While you were working that case in Santa Cruz for two weeks, I jogged alone. It was in the first couple of days that I noticed the car. It seemed to be everywhere. Of course, it’s a Honda—burgundy, mid-aughties, California plates.”

  “Dime a dozen,” I clichéd.

  “Exactly.”

  “Distinguishing marks?”

  “None.”

  “Plates?”

  “Never gets close enough for me to make out more than the first two letters: KL.”

  “You’ve never seen the guy out of the car?”

  “Once. If it’s the same car. One day when I was down on the beach, I looked up at the parking lot and there was a burgundy Honda with this guy sitting on the hood watching the beach through binoculars.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Like I could tell from that distance?”

  I kept my narrowed eyes on her face.

  She closed her eyes. “Dark hair, I think. He was wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses. Uh . . . well-tanned or dark-skinned. Slender. Tallish.”

  “Ish?”

&
nbsp; “Around five-ten, five-eleven.”

  A titan in my little universe. “If you are being stalked, you need to tell someone. Besides me. Preferably your boss . . . or the police.”

  “And if I’m not, I look like I’m paranoid. Not good for my professional credibility.”

  I suddenly felt much less impotent than I had about two minutes earlier. “All right. The first thing we need to do is establish the existence and identity of the stalker.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “We, Rose. We.”

  She smiled. The first genuine Rose Delgado smile I’d seen for weeks. “How?”

  I pulled my lucky Caddie wire out of the side pocket of my gym bag and twisted it around my wrist. “We turn the tables on him.”

  Kipling had it that he kept “six honest serving-men” who taught him all he knew. Their names were, “What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.” These “names” are permanently affixed in all caps along the top of the whiteboard that is situated perfectly for my height on the wall behind the desk in my office.

  Too antsy to sit down, and nursing cups of strong coffee, Rose and I moved my office chairs out of the way and stood on either side of my desk, facing the board. The chairs in my office are easily its most decorative feature, and are quintessentially Japanese black lacquer affairs with red silk cushions I’d added myself. I’d picked up a whole set at Pier 1, free of charge, because the original cushions had gotten slashed when the store was vandalized. They were a sort of thank-you gift added to my fee for tracking down the vandals when the understaffed local PD had been unable to spare the time. Their siblings were installed around the dining table on my houseboat.

  I pulled a pack of sticky notes out of my desk drawer and set them on the desktop, then laid my stainless steel and gold Parker T-Ball Jotter to the right of the pad o’ stickies, and my now jumbled knot of lucky Cadillac taillight wire on the left. With this ritual complete, I said, “Let’s start with the initial ‘who.’”

  Rose perched on the edge of the desk and watched as I picked up the Parker, clicked it open and wrote Rose Delgado, NPS agent on the topmost sticky note. I tore it off the pack and stuck it on the whiteboard under the word Who.