The Mask of Atreus Read online

  Cerniga’s voice brought her back to the moment. She blinked.

  “Ceremonial?” she said, momentarily baffled. “There’s a tomahawk in one of the cases downstairs…”

  “No,” he said. “I mean a weapon with a slim blade, like a dagger or a sword.”

  She stood there for a second, her mouth slightly open, as she realized what he was talking about, then flushed.

  “Right,” she said. “Of course. No. There’s nothing like that here. Sorry.”

  She didn’t know why she said sorry. She could tell her hand was shaking slightly. Cerniga was checking his notes.

  “Rough night for old guys in the ATL,” said the cop who had called himself Keene. He flashed a hard grin at Cerniga.

  “I’m sorry?” said Deborah.

  “Second homicide tonight,” said Keene, shrugging. “The other was, like, a block away. Another old guy.”

  He said it like he was commenting on a sandwich.

  “Are they connected?” said Deborah, still bemused as much by his glibness as by what he was saying.

  “Nah,” he said. “Totally different MO.”

  “You told the officer outside that you had never seen this room behind the bookcase before, is that right?” said Cerniga, looking up from his book.

  “Yes,” said Deborah.

  “You just stumbled on it tonight,” said Keene, “by chance?”

  There was something in his eyes she didn’t like, something cocky and suspicious.

  “Not by chance,” she said. “I had been looking for Richard—Mr. Dixon—and came in here. I picked up this piece of pottery, and I saw a trace of oil at the foot of the bookcase…”

  She held out the fragment of ceramic she had been nursing absently since the whole nightmare had started, and caught herself as the two detectives stared.

  “Sorry,” she said, feeling yet again like she had done something amazingly idiotic. “I should have given it to the first policeman who arrived. Or left it where it was maybe…”

  “Ya think?” said Keene with heavy sarcasm.

  “Where did you pick that up?” said Cerniga. He looked irritated.

  Deborah pointed.

  “Great!” Keene snarled. “So the crime scene is contaminated!”

  “What is it?” said Cerniga, brushing his colleague’s indignation aside.

  “I’m sorry?” said Deborah.

  “The piece of pottery,” he replied. “What is it?”

  “A fragment of a vase or pot,” she said, turning away from Keene. “It looks old, but it could be fake. Maybe Greek. Mycenaean.”

  “Greek?” said Cerniga. He sounded… what? Impressed? Intrigued? Something.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” said Keene.

  “Over there. I think.”

  She pointed into the corner of the room where the other fragments lay scattered.

  “Is it worth anything?” said Cerniga.

  “Depends whether it’s real,” Deborah answered. “Old, I mean. If it’s fake, it’s worthless. If it’s real… different story.”

  “Even though it would have to be stuck back together?” said Cerniga.

  “Everything this old has to be stuck back together. So long as it’s done properly, it would still be valuable.”

  “How much?” said Keene, cutting in like a dance partner in hobnail boots.

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Take a shot.”

  “I’d need to see it assembled. It would depend on the shape and size—”

  “I said ‘take a shot.’ What is this, the freaking Antiques Roadshow?”

  “Thousands,” she said, shrugging. “Tens of thousands. Maybe more.”

  “For this?” said Keene, looking suddenly baffled and impressed.

  “For the whole pot, maybe,” said Deborah. “If it’s real, it’s Mycenaean.”

  “Mycenaean?”

  “From Bronze Age Mycenae in ancient Greece.”

  “How old is Bronze Age?” said Cerniga.

  “Three thousand to about twelve hundred b.c.,” said Deborah. “Or thereabouts.”

  For a second the two detectives stared at the fragment in Keene’s hand with something like reverence, and Deborah, ever the curator, smiled in spite of herself.

  “So… the rest of this stuff?” said Cerniga, sweeping a hand over the display cases. “It’s all Bronze Age? It’s all Mycen…?”

  “Mycenaean. It looks like it, but…”

  “But what?” said Keene, as if he thought she was being professionally pedantic, splitting hairs instead of cutting straight to it.

  “I don’t see how they can be real,” said Deborah. “People would know about it. People would have seen it before. You don’t just stumble on collections like this.”

  “But if it is real,” said Cerniga, “what would it be worth?”

  “Millions. Billions,” she said. “I couldn’t begin to put a price on a collection this important.”

  A long silence descended on the room as the two detectives turned from her and considered the gold, bronze, and ceramic artifacts gleaming dully in the soft lights. It was a moment of reverence, like sitting alone in temple between services as she had done once years after her father had died, a moment overwritten with memory and bafflement and sadness.

  Could it all just be about money? Is that why Richard died?

  “What about this word?” said Cerniga, snapping her back to the present as he held up the pad of paper—now bagged in polyethylene—from Richard’s nightstand. “Atreus. Does that mean anything to you? Anything personal or business-related connected to Mr. Dixon?”

  Deborah shook her head.

  “Only legends,” she said.

  CHAPTER 11

  They sent her home at five forty-five in the morning, telling her they’d need to speak to her again after she had gotten some sleep. She gave them her home number and said she’d be in the museum all afternoon. For the second time that night she went out into the parking lot to get her car. Nothing about the two moments felt remotely similar.

  Richard. God, she just didn’t know what she would do when the reality of his death really wormed its way into her mind. At the moment there was only a sudden blankness in her heart, like some part of herself had been taken, torn away so fast that she didn’t know what to feel. It would come, searing, burning, scarring, but right now there was only a hole, a void, albeit one which would eventually overflow with feeling.

  And after that?

  How would she deal with the business of life, of running the museum, of carrying on as if everything was normal? That would almost be worse. Right now she never wanted to get to that point, a moment when she could think through her job without thinking of the man who had given it to her. To get past her grief would require some forgetting, and that seemed disloyal, unforgivable.

  It was still dark when she pulled into the condo development off Juniper. She parked by the old white dogwood and walked down to her front door, barely aware of the chirping crickets and the heavy, wet air. Her apartment was through a narrow passage with a wrought-iron gate, unroofed except for the twining wisteria. She registered a fragrance in the air as she opened her porch gate but was in the dim, brick-lined hallway standing at her apartment door with her keys suspended inches away from the lock before she began to process it. Not floral: spice like some exotic liqueur or cologne, and something else behind it: a dull but sweet tang of pipe tobacco that reminded her forcefully of her father.

  Wait.

  Deborah stood quite still. She inhaled again, cautiously, as if the scent itself might be poisonous, and caught it all again, sharper and clearer this time. Deborah didn’t smoke and could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had worn perfume of any kind in the last six months. It was more often than she wore makeup, but not by much. She had intended to wear both for the fund-raiser tonight, but in between calming Richard, pacifying Tonya, and goading the caterers, she had not been able to get home, and had f
inished up wearing neither.

  There was one other downstairs apartment on this narrow, vine-hung passage. It belonged to Mrs. Reynolds, a widow who had, to Deborah’s knowledge, never left or entered the building after dark, and seemed to insist that her visitors keep the same hours.

  She inserted the key into the lock with slow precision, conscious now of a tension in her spine. The thick Atlanta air seemed denser than ever, and the cricket hum echoed shrill in the darkened hallway. She turned the key slowly, quietly, waiting for its familiar clunk and the sudden seeming weightlessness of the door as it was freed from the lock mechanism. Then the door was opening onto the darkness of her living room.

  Wait.

  She did not go in. She stood where she was and breathed in.

  She caught the lingering aromas of last night’s dinner, the pasta she had left spoiling on the stove, smelling of garlic and basil. What else? The familiar hothouse sweetness of a room full of plants closed to the outside air for an entire Georgia summer day. And? A hint of cologne or aftershave, and stale tobacco smoke.

  Run.

  She turned on her heel without closing the door, moving quickly back to the green Toyota. She pointed her key ring. The car’s side lights blinked once, and the locks popped. She broke into a run.

  Someone was in her apartment.

  She yanked the door open, slid in, bashing her knee on the doorframe as she did so, and pushed the keys into the ignition. With one quick turn, the locks snapped back into place and the car began to hum with energy.

  Thank God.

  Deborah flicked on her headlights and swung the car a few feet so that they fell across the path and onto the iron gate to her home. The splash of light brought the night into startling color, as the lush greens of the camellia and the earth red of the bricks leapt out of the blackness. And the white of a man’s hand, gripping the wrought iron.

  It was there for a second or less, then it released the metal and vanished back into the leaf-shrouded passage. The gate juddered slightly on its hinge and then became quite still.

  Deborah reversed the car out, dialing her cell phone at the same time.

  CHAPTER 12

  Deborah was waved toward the museum doors by a policeman in a squad car, its lights strobing. She went inside, taking deep, steadying breaths, trying to recover her composure before she had to start explaining.

  They were waiting for her in the downstairs lobby beside the T. rex and the lady-snake ship prow. She had expected more uniforms, but the two detectives were still there. So was Tonya. Keene looked up at her as she came in, red-faced and irritated.

  “You smelled someone in your apartment?” he said, underlining the word. At least they had everything she had told the dispatcher. She didn’t feel like retelling the story.

  “I could tell someone was there, yes,” she said. She looked at Tonya. It wasn’t clear if she was still being questioned or not. The black woman turned sharply away, giving Deborah the back of her braided, graying hair, but not before she had given her a look that said quite plainly, Precious missy wants her privacy? Fine by me.

  “Any chance of a cup of coffee?” said Keene to Tonya.

  The maid stiffened. Deborah braced herself for a tirade, but it didn’t come. Instead Tonya merely shrugged.

  “Don’t guess you’ll let me do much else around here today,” she said. “You want cream and sugar?”

  Deborah raised an eyebrow. Cerniga turned to the odious dragon-lady ship prow.

  “That’s quite a thing,” said Cerniga, looking up at it, his voice neutral.

  “Isn’t it just,” said Deborah. Then, relenting a little, she added, “Richard wanted it properly restored. I think it looks like the cover of a Whitesnake album.”

  “I like it,” Cerniga decided, grinning and fishing his notebook from an inside pocket.

  “Ten bucks and it’s yours,” said Deborah, sitting at her desk. “I guess I have to tell you about the person at my apartment?”

  “Not really,” said Cerniga. “Unless you have something to add to the report you gave over the phone.”

  “Oh,” said Deborah, deflated. “I guess not.”

  “You didn’t see him?”

  “Just his hand on the gate.”

  “White?”

  “Yes.”

  Cerniga drummed a ballpoint on the edge of his notebook.

  “Let’s talk some more about the museum,” he said, “in the office?”

  She led him back past the information desk and restrooms to the bookstore (it was really a gift shop, but Richard had insisted that most of the “gifts” were books) and the office which adjoined it. There was a pair of desks with computers, a printer, two telephones, and a bookcase. The rest of the room was dominated by an oval conference table in polished mahogany and eight chairs. They sat at one end as Keene came in, muttering inaudibly to one of the uniforms outside. He didn’t look at Deborah.

  “There’s not much to tell,” said Deborah, watching Keene’s sour consideration of the office walls, his eyes sliding off the posters of pre-Columbian art and local photography exhibits like a minister flicking through Playboy. “Richard was a local benefactor of the arts and education—”

  Keene snorted. Deborah gave him a look.

  “Something stuck in my throat,” said Keene, waving it away with a mirthless smile.

  “Having always valued the arts, culture, education, and the like,” said Deborah carefully, “he decided to open a small museum. Admission was free. The collection was… erratic.”

  “Erotic?” said Keene, smirking.

  “Erratic,” said Deborah.

  “Oh,” said Keene. “Too bad.”

  Deborah turned to Cerniga.

  “He displayed all kinds of stuff,” she said. “Odds and ends from all over the place displayed in old-fashioned cases pretty much at random. Anyway. When he retired he decided to make more of the place. He set up a board of trustees and hired a curator—”

  “You,” said Cerniga.

  “Not the first time,” she said. “I am the third. I’ve only been here three years.”

  “And you came here from…?”

  “I did my graduate work here,” said Deborah. “But I’m from Boston originally and went to school in New York.” “Yeah, you sound like you’re from someplace like that,” said Keene, emphasizing his own Southern drawl in case she might have missed it. “I figured it was just education.”

  Deborah didn’t know what to say. Keene resented her, and though she was used to that, she usually had to earn it. The policeman just didn’t like her, hadn’t liked her since the moment he met her.

  “I’ve been trying to expand and focus the collection ever since,” she said, trying to concentrate on the matter at hand. “That was part of what last night was about, actually. A fund-raiser. We are planning to bring in a collection of Celtic antiquities—”

  “That’s fascinating,” said Keene with total disdain. “How about you give us a guest list from last night’s little shindig.” “We were wondering,” Cerniga explained, slightly apologetic, “if one of the people who was here for the fund-raiser stayed behind, or came back later.”

  Deborah took a second to process what he was saying: no one cared that Richard was dead. They cared that he was murdered.

  She opened a desk drawer and pulled out the RSVP list. “This has everyone who said they were coming,” she said. “I can’t be sure that they were all actually here, though I could probably go through it and confirm most of them myself. There were a few I didn’t know, and it’s possible that Richard invited some others who aren’t on the list.”

  That was Richard all over. Bring her in to get everything organized, then upset her system on a whim… It always exasperated her and made her smile.

  “What about staff?” said Keene.

  “Tonya was here,” said Deborah, “and a couple of our volunteers. The caterers had their own people.”

  “How many?”

  “Three
food servers, two barmen,” said Deborah.

  “What time did they leave?”

  “Tonya left early,” said Deborah. “Nine-ish, I think. She was just staying to see everything got under way properly. The volunteers were here another hour or so. The caterers left around eleven fifteen,” she added. “All the guests were gone by midnight.”

  “And you were the last to leave?” said Keene.

  “Yes.”

  There was a tap at the door, and Tonya poked her head around, smiling sheepishly. She had two mugs of coffee in her hands, which she raised as a request to come in. Cerniga waved her through and cleared spaces on the desk for the cups. She set them down and pushed them toward the cops. She did not meet Deborah’s eyes or offer her anything. For a second Deborah considered requesting something, a full English breakfast, perhaps… It might be worth it just to see the look on Tonya’s face.

  Ah yes. Humor. Your usual hidey-hole…

  When Tonya had gone, Keene turned to Deborah and unfolded a piece of paper that looked like it had been sent by fax.

  “You ever seen anything like this?” he said.

  As Deborah swiveled to look at it, she caught a look on Cerniga’s face, a flash of irritation and a moment of indecision. In the end he just frowned and looked quickly away, but she was sure he was angry with Keene for showing the picture.

  It was a knife, she supposed, though it was long and slender like a sword, with a cruciform hilt that arced down slightly from the blade. Thrust deeply into a body, the ends of the hilt, what she thought were called quillons, would dig into the flesh on either side of the stab wound.

  …leaving little symmetrical bruises…

  The knife in the picture was sheathed in what looked like black leather, the top and tip of the scabbard were trimmed with bright metal, and hung from a length of chain designed to suspend it at a belt. It was an elegant but lethal-looking weapon, though that wasn’t all that made it remarkable. On top of the black handle was a metal disk engraved or stamped with a familiar symbol.

  “Is that a swastika?” she said.

  “I take it, it doesn’t look familiar?” said Cerniga, turning back toward her and reaching for the fax. His face was blank.