The Resurrection File (47 page)

Kenwood had done a preliminary microscopic examination of the right edge of 7QA and the left edge of 7QB. There seemed to be no question in his mind that 7QB had originally been part of 7QA; that they had been joined exactly where MacCameron and Giovanni had guessed. Further, it appeared that a modern, fairly sharp cutting tool (either a razor blade or an artist's blade) had been used to score the surface of the fragment. The fragment had then been torn at the scores into
three
pieces, yielding an irregular appearance at the torn edges. It was Kenwood's opinion that 7QA and 7QB were two of those three pieces because, when 7QA and 7QB were fitted together, it left an irregular vacant space in the upper right quarter.

Now there was no doubt: There had to be a third piece—7QC—still out there somewhere.

Will relayed the news by telephone to Jacki Johnson, who was working on the case every night from her home. Will thanked her again for the legal research she did that had been so influential in Judge Kaye's decision. A little after midnight, Will collapsed into bed at his apartment.

The next morning Will was about to leave for the day when his doorbell rang. He was greeted at the door by two FBI agents. They said they had been contacted by law enforcement agents in Nevada. They wanted to talk with Will about his alleged encounter with Abdul el Alibahd. Will had been half expecting them.

Sunday night, when Will was being taken away from Mullburn's “Utopia” by the squad of police officers, two of them had told him they would drive him to a cab stand along the Strip so he could catch a cab to the airport. On the way in, however, Will had sounded them out, giving them a few cautious details about his weekend with Alibahd's terrorists. He had assumed that the officers would stick him squarely into the category shared by bigfoot hunters and the people who complain of being medically probed by space aliens. But when the name of Warren Mullburn was implicated, their eyes had brightened up with interest.

The officers had called ahead to the airport, asked them to delay the last “red-eye” flight to Washington, D.C., and then gunned their squad car to the airport with lights flashing. As Will had jumped out of the car, the senior officer had said he would be contacting the regional office of the FBI.

It was nearly noon when the agents finished their interview with Will in his apartment. They suggested that a security detail be assigned to him, since he was now a material witness to Alibahd's own implied confession. Alibhad's words “the only dogs I kill are the kind that wear shoes, and business suits, and work on Wall Street,” were the clincher in tying him to the Wall Street bombing. This time, Will quickly agreed to the safety measures. As the two agents left they said they would also be calling the investigators about the fire at Generals' Hill.

That last comment gave Will some renewed hope that he might be cleared, once and for all, as a suspect in his house fire. But just a few hours after that, it became a full-blown reality.

Will was back at his office, poring over the MacCameron file, when he heard someone in the lobby. He glanced around the corner and couldn't believe it.

Fiona was standing there, her cheeks flushed, and a huge, dimpled grin across her face. She was holding a small box in her hands.

“Do I have a present for you!” she exclaimed.

“What are you doing here?” Will asked, confused in his delight at seeing her.

“I've been turning my condo upside-down, rummaging through garbage cans, looking under my bed, tearing my closets apart looking for it—”

“Looking for what?” Will interrupted.

“…my attic, my storage space, my briefcase. I looked everywhere. I said to myself,
Fiona, there is no way that this dear man is going to jail for this arson charge when he is obviously innocent. This is not going to happen. After everything he has done for your Da, you are not going to let this happen.”

As Will was looking Fiona in the eyes, his problems with the fire marshal's office seemed strangely far removed.

“So, I found it!” Fiona exclaimed.

“What?”

“The box. The box that came with the crystal Statue of Liberty you gave me. I knew we had to prove you had been in New York that day. The name of the shop in New York was on the box. So I called them up. I gave the people at the shop the date that you had been up there. They faxed me a receipt for the purchase of the statue. When I described you, the girl who was the sales clerk says she even remembers you being there.”

“How did you describe me?”

“I'm not telling!” she said laughing.

“Fiona, I don't know what to say. This is incredible. You are so kind.”

“The salesgirl's name and telephone number are on the fax with the sales slip.” And then she added, “Isn't God good?”

“Well…there may be something to that,” Will said.

“Of course there is!” Then she put her hand on his and said, “And Da told me about you being attacked, kidnapped, and your life being threatened. I can't begin to imagine what you've been through. There is no way I can thank you for the risks that you have taken—and for being my father's advocate, and his friend, through all of this.”

“Coming from you, that means more than you will ever know,” Will replied. For a moment there was an awkward silence as they merely smiled and nodded to each other.

“Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you with Da's legal case.”

“Oh—how is your mother?”

“Bless her heart, every day is a struggle. Everyday she slips away from us a little. But we thank God for every minute we have with her.”

Then Fiona said goodbye and left the office with a little wave. As soon as Fiona was gone Will faxed a copy of the sales receipt to the fire marshal's office, along with a letter inviting them to contact the sales clerk to verify his presence in New York earlier on the day of the fire, and alerting them to the FBI's anticipated involvement in exonerating him.

Forty-eight hours later, Will received a call from the chief arson investigator. His message was terse, but hugely welcome. “You're cleared on the fire investigation. You are no longer a suspect. Your insurance company tells us they will be in touch with you to arrange payment for your fire loss.”

After weeks of feeling like a man swimming under ice in the dead of winter, looking for an opening, Will was finally reaching the air.

Soon the insurance proceeds would be made available to him. The insurance company would start reimbursing him for his temporary housing costs. And he was cleared, finally, of the ridiculous but horrible suspicion that he had burned down his own house, and then killed his own beloved Clarence to make the whole thing look like someone else had done it.

Will also felt better about the Reichstad lawsuit. Jacki was a skilled lawyer, and the value of her help on the case was immeasurable. Just as important, Will liked the feeling of working again with his former associate and friend. Will was also beginning to be more optimistic about the outcome of the case. Bill Kenwood's conclusions that 7QA and 7QB had been parts of the same fragment upped the chances that 7QA was one of the fragments possessed by Richard Hunter before his death. It also supported MacCameron's allegations in his magazine article that Reichstad
was scientifically sloppy in rushing to judgment about the meaning of 7QA without having all of the other evidence in front of him.

On the other hand, Dr. Giovanni's findings about 7QA and 7QB were less than stellar. She called Will the next morning after her examination of the fragments.

Yes, she affirmed that she could testify that Riechstand was unprofessional in rendering opinions about 7QA when it should have been obvious to him there were critical parts of the fragment which had been torn away—and which were still missing when he published his findings.

However, while Giovanni
did
believe that 7QB had been part of 7QA before Azid had torn it apart, the wording of 7QB actually
supported
Reichstad's conclusions on the essential point. Taken together, 7QA and 7QB did seem to unequivocally support Reichstad's opinion that Jesus was still buried somewhere, and that he did not rise from the grave on the third day. In fact, 7QB seemed to give a description of the actual place of Jesus' tomb—a location completely different than either the Garden Tomb, or the tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the two possible sites of the place of Jesus' burial according to traditional Christian thought.

All in all, Will thought that the chances of clearing Angus MacCameron at trial from any liability for damages due to defamation or libel were now about fifty-fifty. Still, those odds were a lot better than where they had been at the beginning of the case.

As for the bizarre turn of events involving Alibahd and his band of oceangoing terrorists, and the threatening encounter with Warren Mullburn, Will now felt safer, knowing that he was under twenty-four-hour FBI protection.

Occasionally he found himself wandering over to the window to make sure the black, unmarked SUV with the agents was still outside his building. Will was checking on his security team when he received a call from Tiny Heftland.

Tiny had been able to talk with the Israeli police about the death of Harim Azid in Bethlehem. They said that the Palestinian police in Bethlehem had bungled the investigation. Further, the Israelis had seen clear, though subtle, evidence that Azid had been tortured. They noted small electrical burns around several of his body cavities. None of that information had made its way into the report filed by the Palestinian police.

Even more importantly, Tiny said the Israeli police had bent over backwards in promising cooperation when they learned that he was working for Will Chambers on the Reichstad lawsuit.

“Say, do you have some kind of pull over there in Israel?” Tiny asked.

“None whatsoever,” Will said, wondering over their eagerness to help.

“But here's the icing on the cake,” Tiny added excitedly. “The government over there is willing to
voluntarily
fly to the U.S. the two Israeli police officers who were at the scene of Azid's death, so they can appear at the trial. You simply have to agree to reimburse Israel for the transportation costs.”

Will quickly cross-checked their names against the names Tiny had given him earlier—the ones he'd listed as potential trial witnesses in his written disclosures filed at the time of their pretrial hearing. They matched. Failure to disclose them would likely have resulted in Judge Kaye barring their testimony.

“There's one more mystery witness,” Will said to his investigator. “According to the police, there is a wandering desert Bedouin out there somewhere by the name of Muhammad el Juma, a member of the Taamireh tribe. He's the guy MacCameron said that Hunter had mentioned. He found the original fragment in the cave near the Dead Sea. Amazingly, his family carried this thing around the desert for some fifty years. Something happened to make him decide to sell it to Azid, who was some kind of shirttail relative of his. Then he seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. I don't know what he would have to say. But I'm sure this Bedouin could be a key witness. Up to now I thought that locating him would be impossible. However, I hear you telling me that the Israelis are anxious to help—for whatever reason—and so, well, I'm thinking about something.”

“What?” Tiny asked.

“Is your passport up to date?”

“Sure.”

“I want you to go over to Jerusalem and meet with the head of the Israeli police. Explain who we are searching for—and why. See if, between the police and any of your old contacts, you can't locate this guy.”

“Well, there's another possibility,” Tiny said.

“What's that?”

“We might be too late. Maybe the bad guys got to this Bedouin. Maybe he's sleeping the big sleep.”

“Well,” Will responded, “then we had better know that too.”

After Will hung up with Tiny he called Angus MacCameron. Fiona answered and said he was napping, but she would wake him. After a few minutes he came to the phone.

“Angus, this is Will. When was the last contact you had with Judith Hunter, Richard Hunter's sister, over in England?”

“Just her note to me, along with 7QB.”

“How about with the British Museum?”

“Oh my,” MacCameron replied, pausing to think, “a long time ago. I contacted them after Richard's death. And then again, after Reichstad published his findings about 7QA in his archaeology journal.”

“What did you ask them?”

“Just whether they knew about any written antiquities that Hunter might have been working on at the time of his death—and if so, where they might be.”

“What did they say?”

“They didn't have a clue. Hunter never talked to them about it. He showed up unexpectedly in London one day, fresh from Jerusalem. Did some work in his office. Then left and flew right back to Jerusalem. According to his secretary, he said he was going back to his field office to ‘fetch one last thing.' Of course, he never returned. As soon as he got back to Jerusalem, he was murdered. Will, I believe he was returning for 7QA, which he must have hidden back there. But as soon as he returned and located it, he was attacked. That's why Reichstad only got his hands on 7QA. I think Hunter had already taken 7QB back to London, and planned to have his sister mail it to me if he felt threatened. Then he left it under the sofa, where it stayed until she discovered it.”