The Mask of Atreus (35 page)

"They were done postmortem," said Cerniga, appearing from one of what were, presumably, bedrooms. "He was shot twice in the back with a shotgun at close range. Then the carving. The blood is from the shotgun hits. Trust me when I tell you he looks better this way up."

He spoke quickly, his words clipped with what she took to be anger or frustration.

"Does he look familiar to you?"

Deborah considered him. He was slim, perhaps fifty, dark skinned. His hair and mustache were both a little longer than the fashion and flecked with gray. She shook her head.

"I don't think so," she said. "Is he Greek?"

"According to his passport," said Cerniga. She wasn't certain if that was supposed to be a joke. "There are other papers with him, but nobody can read them. I'm sending them in for translation, but yeah, they're Greek."

"The documents?"

"The victims," he said. "There's another in the bedroom. Take a look at him and see if he looks familiar. A good long look, please, Miss Miller. Then come downstairs and tell me 293

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whatever you haven't already told me, and we'll try to figure out just how much trouble you are in."

He stormed past her and stomped his way downstairs, but paused halfway down to add, "If you had told me about that lab, we could have gotten this address days ago, and these two men would still be alive. You might want to give that some thought."

She stopped in her tracks as if he had slapped her hard in the face. Keene was looking at her from the other end of the hall, his eyes hard and unforgiving. Deborah looked quickly away, her face hot, her mouth open as if trying to find words to respond, as if anything she could say would be useful, true, or remotely adequate.

CHAPTER 60

The rain had stopped by the time she got home, and the roads steamed as the chorus of crickets and tree frogs began anew. Deborah got heavily out of the car and into the thick, hot, night air, the oppressive humidity dense as a Turkish bath, sapping her of what little emotional energy she had taken away from the meeting with Cerniga in Palmetto.

In truth, it hadn't really been a meeting so much as a verbal beating, a torrent of invective about her meddling amateurism, her irrational need to keep secrets from the only people who were likely to bring Richard's killers to justice, and her culpability for the deaths of the two Greeks. Keene had joined them late and, for once, he was content to listen and watch. Deborah hadn't cried, and wouldn't, but after a few lame protestations of innocence and indignation, she had sat there in silence and taken the weight of it all, knowing that there was no point in arguing, knowing--and this was far worse--that the FBI man was right. It was true that she had had good reason to be suspicious of the police and of Cerniga in particular at first, and it was also true that her suspicion of Cerniga had survived the announcement of his FBI status because he continued to withhold information from her, but these were thin justifications for her tactics. As the investigating officer he had, after all, every right to tell her as much or as little as he thought was necessary. She, on the other hand, had no such rights, had, in fact, probably done enough to get her charged with obstructing justice if they chose to prosecute her. That might well be determined by how much heat the FBI took from the Greek 295

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government for failing to protect its citizens. Privately, Deborah was fairly sure the Greek government would say little or nothing, but the fact that she would probably evade prosecution did nothing to alleviate her guilt.

"All you had to do was pick up the phone," Cerniga had roared into her face. "All you had to do was say, 'You know what, Agent Cerniga? I'll bet they took that crate to the University of Georgia to have it carbon dated.' That's all you had to do. You would have been the hero of the hour. But that wouldn't have been enough for you, would it?"

She had not been able to think of anything to say. She couldn't even come up with an explanation that would have satisfied herself. Why had she driven up to Athens without telling them? Was she doing it for Richard, unraveling the truth behind his death out of quasi-filial obligation? Maybe. A rather less dignified possibility, one that insisted itself into her head only as she was driving home, pushing into her brain like the point of a nail slowly tapped home, was that she had done it to impress Calvin. The thought left her feeling shrunken and hollow, eviscerated by shame and self-loathing.

"Who do you think you are?" Cerniga had said. "Some kind of amateur detective sleuthing her way right past the professionals on sheer genius? Not only have your inquiries set us back and cost two men their lives, they haven't even revealed anything relevant. You think this is about archaeology?" he concluded, aghast at the absurdity of the idea. "You know, Miss Miller, for a well-educated woman you can be remarkably stupid."

His tirade still rang in her head as night fell on her silent apartment. She tried music and television to drive it out, but both seemed irreverent, disrespectful to the men who had died and to the mood she had no right to escape. Resigning herself to the silence and her own guilt, she lay for a while on her bed, staring up at the fan, feeling its breeze on her sweating skin. Then she got up, turned on the computer, and checked her e-mail. Nothing. She had half expected something 296

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from Calvin, but it was probably as well that she didn't have to deal with his remonstrations right now. He had, no doubt, every right to be baffled and hurt by the way she had closed him out on the drive back from Athens, but she had sensed what she was about to find, and it had taken priority over her budding romance. Surely he would see that?

But that wasn't strictly true either. There had been something else that had turned her back inside herself before she spoke to Cerniga and Keene: a sense that she had let Calvin too close and needed now to beat him back a little so that he couldn't stifle her with his attentions. She frowned as she thought this. Perhaps her patented self-reliance and proud isolationism, which had stood her so well from those earliest school days when she had felt herself different from the other girls, had suddenly turned on her like a trusted dog whose tail had been stood on. Twice, perhaps. Because sitting here alone in front of her computer's ambient glow, staring at her empty e-mail box, it occurred to her that the impulse to withdraw from Calvin and the impulse to keep her findings from the FBI might actually be one and the same.

And you're just figuring this out now? You know, Debs,
Cerniga was right. For an intelligent woman you can be pretty
damn stupid.

She was still thinking this when she noticed the light on her answering machine blinking slowly. She pushed the Play button and heard an unexpected but familiar voice, polished and a little stiff.

"Hello, Deborah," it said.

The voice took her back to the night this had all started, the night Richard died.

"Hello Marcus," she said, as if he was standing in front of her, pipe in hand.

"I'm sorry I missed you in Greece," said Marcus. "I was following another lead which brought me back here. Listen, Deborah, we need to talk. This thing . . ." He struggled to find the words, his voice was suddenly a little higher than before 297

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and charged with urgency. "This business we have been looking into. It's not what we thought it was at all. It's . . . I'm not sure, but . . ." He paused, and Deborah thought she heard movement in the background. "I'll call you back," he said. There was no second message.

CHAPTER 61

Deborah returned to the computer. Marcus would call back, she thought. And even if he didn't, she had probably learned as much as he had. He had decided the corpse and everything with it was fake, that their little crusade had all been for naught, and that was why he sounded so . . .

Distraught?

. . . impatient. Disappointed. She knew the feeling. The rationalization made a kind of sense, but it left her uneasy, unconvinced. She pulled up the Google home page and stared at the blinking cursor in the search field for a long moment. Then her fingers slowly tapped out six letters: "Atreus."

The screen flickered to a blank and then began slotting up the first of several thousand hits one page at a time: student projects on Greek myth, cheat sheets on ancient drama, a version of Dungeons and Dragons set in ancient Greece, even some holiday images of Mycenae. In her present mood, the sunlight and smiling faces seemed grotesque. She went back to the previous page and added other words to that already in the search field: "Agamemnon," "Tholos,"

"gold," "Schliemann" . . .

Nothing. A suggestion that she check her spelling. She tried Atreus with "ceramics," with "grave," "tomb,"

and "body," and got versions of the pages she had already seen arranged in slightly different order. She tried "Atreus"

with "1940," with "World War II," with "Sherman tank." The last two produced a different group of hits, but none of them seemed to feature the word
Atreus
at all, focusing instead on the war references. She sighed, fighting a swelling tide of apathy, and typed "Atreus, hate crime." She was waiting for the 299

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dial-up modem to pull up the results when she heard a knock at the door.

She checked her watch. Ten thirty. Let it not be Cerniga or, worse, Keene.

Calvin,
she thought, relief struggling with shame and anxiety as his name came to mind. She pressed her eye to the peephole and took a step back, frowning. It was Tonya.

CHAPTER 62

It was strange to see Tonya in her apartment, Deborah thought, as the two women sat at the kitchen table and shared a glass of the wine Tonya had brought with her. They had really only talked properly once before, and that had been thousands of miles away in a small Greek village. It barely seemed possible.

"Agent Cerniga came back to the museum this afternoon,"

she said. "Told me what happened. From the look on Keene's face I figured you could use a drink."

Deborah smiled her thanks, but it was a wan smile. "That man really doesn't like me," she said. "Keene, I mean."

"If it's any consolation," said Tonya, "I don't think he's too fond of me either."

"What were you doing at the museum?" said Deborah. "I thought you quit."

"Gotta work out my contract," she said, grinning. "Anyway, I haven't lined up another job yet. I really only quit to show the Feds we weren't friends, but I may have to ask you to give me a second chance. If the police charge me with interfering with their inquiries, I'll have to declare it when I apply for another job. If the
AJC
wants me as an investigator, that might actually help, but since they're more likely to want me to go back to being a food critic--and a junior one at that--I doubt they'll want any felonies on my record. Shit,"

she said, "I never thought I'd finish up cleaning toilets for real."

"It's not for real," said Deborah. "It's just--"

"Till I get something better, yeah," she said. "That's what 301

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my mom used to say." She shrugged, then developed a roguish grin. "But I want to hear about your little overnight with Mr. Calvin Bowers, attorney at law."

Deborah gaped.

"Cerniga told you about that?" she said, not wanting to discuss it.

"Hell, no," said Tonya. "No one did, till now. I was just guessing."

"Never trust a reporter," Deborah said.

"How about a maid? Come on, girl, I want details."

"We had a nice evening," said Deborah.

"I'll bet you did. Still wearing lipstick, I see."

"Did you come here to give me grooming tips or to hear my news?"

"What news?" Tonya said with mock suspicion, as if she was being distracted from the hunt.

"The test results on the corpse," said Deborah. Her voice sounded slow and sad in her own ears. Tonya was trying to blow off any idea that Deborah was responsible for the deaths of the two Greeks, but it wasn't helping. The truth floated unseen between them, making Deborah feel distant and separate as if she was at the end of a long, dank tunnel.

"You found it?" said Tonya.

"No, but I got to see the results of the carbon dating."

"Is it what we thought?"

"Kind of. The ceramics and probably the gold, are nineteenth century. The body is later. Mid-forties."

Tonya set down her drink very carefully. "You think it's my father?"

"I don't know."

"But what do you think?"

"I guess it's possible," said Deborah, too tired and depressed to argue. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to me--"

"That would explain why the Feds are involved," said Tonya, getting to her feet, a flush of excitement breaking out through her eyes. "It was a hate crime."

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"I don't know," said Deborah, shaking her head. "I don't see why people would be so anxious to get hold of the body, even if there was evidence of how he died. I know the military don't like to have such things exposed, but it's pretty old news now. I doubt it would be considered that big a deal."

Tonya gave her a swift, affronted look.

"I'm sorry," said Deborah. "I just think--"

"What if the guy who killed him," Tonya cut in, "the military policeman--if that was who it was--became a big shot in later life, or was the
father
of a big shot. That might make it a big deal. Somebody is trying to protect the killer or his family."

"Maybe," said Deborah. She had never felt so weary and humiliated, but Tonya, caught up in her own story, didn't seem to see it.

"You don't think so?" said Tonya.

It was a challenge and one Deborah didn't feel like facing.

"I guess it's possible," she said.

"But you don't think so."

Tonya wouldn't let it go. She wanted nothing less than wholehearted encouragement and wasn't getting it.