Altar of Bones (22 page)

Bitsy, a calico sometimes too brave for her own good, came right out at the sound of Zoe’s voice. Barney, big and black and fat, wouldn’t budge and hissed at her when she reached for him.

She had to resort to the cream cheese. Barney was a sucker for cream cheese and he had the potbelly to prove it.

The crinkle of the tinfoil wrap did the trick. His whiskers emerged first, followed by the enormous rest of him. He waddled over to lick a dab of the cheese off her finger, in between meows to let her know what he thought of this fine state of affairs.

Zoe sat on the floor and gathered her babies into her lap. She buried her face in their warm fur.

When her heart had finally quieted, she looked around her loft. Whoever had done this had not only searched the place, he’d savaged it. Shattered china, split sacks of flour and sugar, broken wine bottles, ripped cushions. The lock on her door was the best out there and it was the only thing that hadn’t been broken. It had been picked.

A professional then, of some sort, but one who’d been angry. Angry enough to take it out on her things.

She scratched Barney under his chin. “What did he look like, babe? Did he have a long brown ponytail? Do you think you could pick him out of a mug—”

Out beyond the open door, a board creaked. She’d climbed up and down those stairs every day for five years. It was the fourth flight, third tread.

Barney heard it, too. He leaped out of her arms and shot back under the bed, Bitsy right behind him.

Zoe quickly and quietly got to her feet and picked up her satchel where she’d dropped it on the floor. She eased open the zipper, took out her gun, released the safety. She reached for the padded envelop nearby and slid it under the bed. Barney hissed.

She went to the door, thought about closing it, then didn’t. She flicked off the lights instead.

She pressed her back against the wall, holding her gun two-fisted, barrel pointed up, and waited, her heart beating fast and hard.

A shadow crossed the threshold first, followed by the silhouette of a man. Zoe pressed the gun muzzle into his head, right behind his ear.

“Don’t even breathe.”

T
HE SILHOUETTE
didn’t move, but he did breathe, a sharp intake that ended with her name. “Zoe? It’s me.”

Zoe pulled back the gun as her own breath whooshed out of her and she sagged against the wall. After a moment, she reached behind her and turned on the lights.

Inspector Sean Mackey stepped farther into the loft, his hands spread, half-raised in the air. His chest heaved with the adrenaline shooting through his system. “Dammit, woman. Are you nuts? I could’ve shot you.”

“Yeah? You were the one with the muzzle of a Glock pressed against your ear.”

“So will you put it away, for Christ’s sake?”

Zoe looked down and saw she still had the gun pointed at his heart. “Sorry. I’m a little jumpy here.”

“No shit.” Mackey lowered his hands as he looked around him. “Jesus. What happened? It looks like a bomb went off.”

“I’m guessing it was the ponytailed guy looking for the altar of bones—whatever that is. What are you doing back here anyway? I thought you were on your way to Homicide.”

“I came to tell you that I’ve radioed for a patrol car to give you a lift. In case that asshole decides to come after you again. Now I’m thinking after we do the sketch and go through the mug books, you oughta spend the night in a hotel somewhere.”

“I’ll be okay. I doubt he’s coming back—for one thing he already knows that what he’s looking for isn’t here. And I got a bar I can put across the door on the inside. The only way anyone can get through that is with a battering ram…. Mack, I really, really have to take a shower.”

He waved a hand. “Okay, okay. I’m going. The patrol car should be here in five minutes tops, but I’m going to stick around outside until it gets here, just in case. And I’m sending the lab guys to go over this place with a fine-tooth comb.”

After the door closed behind him, Zoe lowered the iron-reinforced bar and latched it into place. She watched out the window until she saw Mackey emerge and go to lean against a lamppost to wait for the patrol car. Feeling safe now, for the moment at least, she dropped to her knees and wriggled under the bed, feeling for the padded envelope.

She couldn’t find her scissors in the mess, so she used a steak knife to slice carefully through the glued-down flap. She wet a towel and wiped flour, sugar, and some unidentifiable brown, gooey stuff off her flea-market table, and if the lab guys didn’t like it, they could lump it. She found one chair that wasn’t in splinters, pulled it up to the table, and sat down.

Barney and Bitsy joined her, purring and rubbing against her arms and generally getting in the way. For a moment longer she simply held the envelope in her hand. She felt excited and she wanted to cry. Her grandmother had left this in her mailbox not long before she was murdered, Zoe was sure of it.

She opened the envelope and emptied its contents carefully onto the table: a postcard, a key, and a couple of folded-up pieces of lined tablet paper.

The postcard, worn at the edges and bent in one corner, was of a famous medieval tapestry, one of those with a unicorn. She turned it over.

It wasn’t addressed, but in the space for the message her grandmother, or someone, had written what looked like a poem in Russian:

Blood flows into the sea

The sea touches the sky

From the sky falls the ice

Fire melts the ice

A storm drowns the fire

And rages through the night

But blood flows on into the sea

              Without end
.

It didn’t quite scan like a poem; it was odd all the way around. The words were simple, they conjured up clear images in her mind, but she couldn’t make sense out of the whole. She read it twice more. Got nothing.

The small print at the top of the postcard identified the tapestry as
The Lady and the Unicorn:
À
mon seul désir
. Musée de Cluny, Paris, France. She flipped it back over. A woman stood in front of a tent with her maid-servant beside her, holding open a casket. A unicorn lay on the ground next to her. But there was nothing in the tapestry of flowing blood or falling ice or a raging storm.

She tucked the postcard back into the padded envelope and picked up the key.

It looked old. No, beyond old—it looked as ancient as the beginning of time and felt heavy, like bronze. And strangely warm in her hand, as if it still held captive the fire from the forge that had fashioned it. One end was in the shape of a griffin, an animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. But the key’s teeth were particularly strange—like Ferengi teeth, jagged and angled in a crazy way. Zoe couldn’t imagine what kind of lock such a key would fit into.

She put the key back into the envelope with the postcard, then picked up the sheets of notebook paper and unfolded them. It was a letter, also written in Cyrillic, the words ragged and shaky.

Here, Zoe saw, were a few words had been heavily crossed out, before the letter went on.

Then at the bottom, the words darker, sharper, as if fear had made her grandmother press the pen deeper into the paper: