Still As Death (13 page)

“How did it go?” Ian asked, giving her a peck on the cheek.

“Pretty good. He seemed really interested.”

A young guy in a splashy Hawaiian print shirt came up to them and said, “Hi, Jeanne.”

“Trevor.” She flushed, which Sweeney had never seen her do before. Jeanne wasn’t flustered by anything. “Everyone, this is Trevor Ferigni.” They did an awkward round of handshaking.

“I loved the show,” he said to Sweeney. “It was really cool.” He had a California sort of breeziness about him and an absolute confidence that you didn’t see often in students. Was he a student? He had to be. But how did he know Jeanne? Jeanne usually didn’t give male students the time of day. Sweeney had heard complaints about it, actually, and some male students had done an analysis of her grading patterns that revealed that women were something like ten times more likely than men to receive an A in her classes.

Jeanne, her fingers shredding the cocktail napkin she was holding, said, “Did the
Times
guy want to talk to me too? You told him about my upcoming exhibition, didn’t you?”

There was an awkward silence. “Oh, yeah,” Sweeney said. “I think I did mention it.”

“Oh?” Jeanne looked wildly around the room and then said, in a falsely nonchalant voice, “Maybe I’ll just go see if I can find him. I’m sure he’ll want to come.”

“Good idea,” Sweeney said. They all watched her make her way across the gallery toward the stairs, followed by Trevor. At the entrance to the galleries, she said something to him that made him leave her at the stairs and head down the hallway in the opposite direction. When she’d gone, Sweeney leaned in and said, “He left already, but I couldn’t bear to tell her.”

“Poor Jeanne,” Lacey said. “Is she getting along with Willem any better?”

“No. I think it’s getting worse. Everyone’s going to be really glad when her show is over and they don’t have to deal with each other anymore.”

“I still don’t understand why he’s letting her do it,” Lacey said.

“Someone somewhere must have ordered it,” Sweeney said. “It’s the only thing I can think.”

Toby said he had to get going, so she and Ian walked him downstairs, then came back up to chat with some of Sweeney’s colleagues for the next hour. As things started to wind down, Lacey said, “I wonder what happened to Fred. He went out to make a phone call, but that was a while ago. I think I’m ready to get going.”

“He probably just got stuck doing public relations,” Sweeney told her. “Tell you what, I’m going to visit the ladies’ room and I’ll look for him, tell him you’re ready to go.”

She didn’t see him in any of the exhibition galleries, nor could she find him near the bar. There was a line at the bathroom on the main floor and so she decided to try the restroom in the basement. She’d been down here many times before and she knew Willem had had people in and out of the gallery all night looking at the canopic chest, but as she came down the stairs she felt suddenly and absolutely alone. The cavernous basement galleries had always creeped her out a little; the stone arches provided strange, shadowy nooks and crannies, and the lack of natural light made it feel like a dungeon. The sarcophagi placed around the room didn’t help any.

She had just turned the corner when she heard a strangled sob and looked up to find Jeanne standing in front of her, staring straight at Sweeney and holding her hands out in front of her. As Sweeney’s eyes adjusted to the light, she could see that the front of Jeanne’s dress was stained with something dark.
Something’s happened
, she said to herself.
Something awful
.

Jeanne let out another sob and gestured wildly toward the back of the gallery. “Olga,” she got out. “Olga.”

Sweeney turned in the direction Jeanne was gesturing and saw a black-clad leg protruding from behind a stone pillar near the temporary exhibit where the canopic chest was being housed. “Is she hurt?” Sweeney asked Jeanne, rushing over and bending down to see if Olga was okay.

When she saw the dark blood, bright against the marble floor, she knew that Olga was not okay. It was the amount of blood, she realized, and the brightness of it, that caused her to stand up again and step back from the body. But she couldn’t help seeing Olga’s face, surprised and pale, the wound on her forehead and temple, the glistening blood, a rude spike of something white that must be bone. She noticed again the lovely cheekbones that she had never seen before, Olga’s delicate throat. And as she looked up, thinking to herself,
Jeanne’s killed her. Jeanne’s killed Olga
, she saw the open lid of the cabinet where the canopic chest was kept, and the splintered wood, and she saw the three alabaster stoppers in the shape of a baboon, a jackal, and a falcon.

Three stoppers, she realized as she turned to Jeanne. Three where there had been four.

AFTERWARD, SWEENEY REALIZED that it was evidence of how upset she’d been that she didn’t even think about the fact that Quinn would eventually show up in response to the 911 call that Denny made from the phone on the main floor.

Once Willem had been located and they had told Denny to secure all the doors downstairs (Lacey displaying a sudden flair for police work and asserting that the thieves might still be in the building, or at the very least there might be a witness who had seen something) and gotten her a glass of whiskey from the bar, Jeanne calmed down enough to explain that she had gone downstairs to see if David Milken was still down there and, seeing something on the floor near the canopic chest, had gone to investigate.

She had found, she choked out, Olga, lying on her back and not moving, and she had dropped to the floor to see what had happened, not seeing the blood until it was all over her. “I kept trying to feel for her pulse,” she told them. “But I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like and I just kept getting in the blood.”

Sweeney, who had found and been comforted by Ian and then convinced everyone to gather on the main floor to wait for the police, discovered that she kept watching Jeanne’s face for any sign that
she was lying. She certainly seemed genuinely distraught and shocked, but then wouldn’t she be pretty broken up if she had had some kind of altercation with Olga? She just couldn’t get over the feeling she’d had when she’d first found Jeanne, the statement that had flashed through her head:
Jeanne’s killed Olga
. She remembered Quinn telling her that it had taken him a long time to learn that more often than not, things were as they appeared. “If I arrive at a house and there’s a dead girl there and there’s a guy standing over her with blood on his hands, that guy better have a pretty damn good reason for being there,” he’d told her. “And I can guarantee you that ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, that guy did it. But that’s not how the justice system works. The system is set up for the one-tenth of a percent of the time he didn’t do it.”

But why would Jeanne kill Olga?

Quinn wasn’t the first to arrive. He was preceded by a dozen or so uniformed cops who searched the galleries, secured the doors, and made sure no one left the building. Sweeney heard Willem explain the sequence of events to one of the cops and then pointed out Jeanne. “She found the body,” he explained. “She’s a bit on edge, but I’m sure she’ll answer your questions.” As always, he was very calm, very in control. It didn’t surprise her that a murder in his museum didn’t throw him, but Sweeney would have thought he’d be more upset about someone trying to take his new acquisition.

And then Quinn arrived. He was with a young woman Sweeney hadn’t met before, and she remembered what he’d said about breaking in a new partner. The new partner—if that’s who she was—looked too young to be a homicide detective. She was small but strong, her athlete’s body clad in jeans and a simple T-shirt, her dirty blond hair in a ponytail. Sweeney watched her check in with the cops who were already there, then wave Quinn over to talk to them. He shook hands with everybody, friendly but somber, and she wondered if he ever slipped and grinned in these situations, if he ever forgot why he was there.

“You all right?” Ian asked her, encircling her with his arm and searching her face.

“Fine.” She realized that she had never actually seen Quinn work a crime scene before. She’d never seen him in his element this way, asking questions, giving orders, taking charge from Willem, who had filled a kind of vacuum for authority that Sweeney now saw must always exist in a situation like this. The rest of them just stood around, whispering, passing what was probably bad information back and forth until it took on an air of veracity. Sweeney hadn’t told anyone about the missing stopper, but word had somehow spread that there had been an attempted robbery.

She watched Quinn’s tall form bowing gracefully toward one of the security guards, who was explaining something to him. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and the muscles of his arms moved as he gestured with his hands. She could see the long scar that moved down one bicep—she hadn’t noticed it at his house—and she couldn’t help remembering lying on that cold, concrete floor last fall, Quinn in her arms, his blood flowing onto her hands, and waiting for the police to come and get them. She shook her head, trying to clear the memory, and when she looked up, she realized that he had seen her and she looked away so he wouldn’t think she’d been staring at him.

“Do you want to sit down?” Ian asked her. “You look a bit wobbly.”

But then Quinn was standing right in front of them. “I should have known you’d be here,” he said, grinning just a little, though only Sweeney knew that it was a grin.

She tried not to smile too broadly, and she saw something else in his face—a twist of his eyebrows, the slight incline of his head, an apology for how he’d behaved at his house, she thought.

“Did you really find the body?” There was a thin mist of perspiration on his forehead and she could smell him, his sweat, his spicy deodorant, his laundry detergent. The scent was familiar to her now, and she realized she would have known him by it, or at the very least
she would have thought of him if she’d passed someone else on the street who used the same deodorant or soap or whatever it was.

“No. But I guess I was second on the scene.” She became aware of Ian standing next to her and turned to him. “This is Ian Ball. Tim Quinn. Detective Tim Quinn.”

“Do you work at the museum as well?”

Ian looked at Sweeney and then back at Quinn, and said, “No, I just came to cheer Sweeney on.” They shook hands and she saw Quinn search Ian’s face.

There was an awkward silence and then Quinn said, “Did you see the victim earlier tonight? We’re trying to get our time line down.”

“She was doing coat check,” Sweeney said. “We saw her when we arrived at four.” She checked her watch. It was now eight-thirty. She had found Jeanne standing in the basement around seven. “I saw her at a couple different points in the evening, talking to people, helping out.” The last time had been when she’d seen Olga talking to Fred. What time had that been? “I saw her up here in the gallery around six, I’d say. And I didn’t see her again until … well, until Jeanne found the body.” She thought of something. “But when I knelt down, to see if she was still alive, the blood was still running from her wound. Pretty fast. That means it hadn’t been long, doesn’t it? How long does it take blood to clot?”

“Not long,” Quinn said. “Thanks. That’s a good reference point for us. All right, I’d better get started. You’ll all have to stay here for a while. We’ll need to interview everyone.” He turned to Sweeney. “Did you know her? The guy over there who’s the head of the museum said she was Russian or something.”

“Yeah. I think that’s right. Though I think she’d been in the country for a while.”

“That thing down there … the …”

“The canopic chest?”

“Yeah. Mr. Keane said it was Egyptian. That they used it for putting bodies in or something.”

“Not bodies. Internal organs. The liver, the lungs, the stomach, and the intestines.” She enjoyed the look of disgust that came over his face.

“And would something like that be worth a lot of money?”

“A fair bit,” Ian said.

“Really? Well, there you go.” He winked at them and headed over to where the young woman was taking down information from everyone who’d been left at the museum. There were some who worked at the museum, along with a few colleagues from Sweeney’s department, a few stragglers whom she didn’t recognize. Suddenly she found herself scrutinizing everyone. There was a tall guy in a dark suit who seemed vaguely sinister to Sweeney, but perhaps he just had one of those unfortunate faces.

Sweeney knew they’d have to ask everyone where they had been during the time leading up to Jeanne’s discovery of the body. She and Ian and Lacey had been talking upstairs, of course. Who else had been in the room? She tried to remember. There had been a group of people she didn’t know standing over by the entrance to her exhibit. She remembered that one of the women had been wearing a long embroidered coat and now she caught sight of the coat across the room, along with the two men and the blond woman the woman in the coat had been talking to. Then there’d been a group of five other members of the History of Art Department. That made another nine, and they had all been on the third floor when she’d gone downstairs. Then, of course, there had been someone in the bathroom on the main floor. Oh, and she remembered being introduced to three members of the Women’s Studies Department who had come too. She saw them standing with Jeanne.

She assumed that whoever had tried to steal the canopic chest was long gone, but Quinn was going to have to find out if anyone had seen anything. As far as she knew, she and Jeanne were the only ones who had gone downstairs to the basement, though of course Willem had been taking people down and showing them the chest.
And there was Fred. Where had Fred gone? Lacey had said he’d gone to make a phone call.

She felt like she’d gotten to know Fred well over the past few months, but when she thought about it, she knew almost nothing about him other than the fact that, like her, he’d gotten his graduate degree at the university. She knew he and Lacey had a daughter in college and a grown son who lived in Seattle, and that he took photographs in addition to studying them. But beyond that, she didn’t know much at all.