Castro Directive (22 page)

"That's not all. Andrews said you haven't spoken to your father in years. Not until recently, when you expressed interest in the crystal skull."

Color rushed into her cheeks. " That's a goddamn lie. We get along fine." Her fingers raked through her hair. "Don't you see what Andrews is doing? He's trying to stick this theft of the skull and Loften's murder on me, just like he stuck my father with the replica fraud."

"Then why did Bill confirm the thing about you and your father?" The question hung there, thick, ugly. He was hoping that by confronting her, she would tell him the whole story, not just her edited version.

"Bill told you I haven't spoken to my father in years?" She sounded incredulous.

"Well, not exactly. But I sensed he was confirming it."

"That's hardly the same thing." She glanced at him, then dropped her gaze again, staring into her wine. Her fingers tapped nervously against the glass. "But there were several years when Dad and I didn't talk."

"Why not?"

"When I entered the field, I rebelled against him." Her voice was calmer now, as she acknowledged that Andrews's comment was not completely fallacious. "See, he has a mystical bent. It's really the force behind his work. I tried to forget all of that and take a strict, empirical approach to everything, and it was like a wedge between us."

Pierce sipped his wine, then set his glass aside. "Why didn't you say that before?"

"Because that's the past." She looked up; her eyes were pinched with fatigue. "Things changed after my marriage fell apart. I spent a few months in Guatemala doing fieldwork, and we reconciled. Part of it was that Dad introduced me to a Mayan man who understood the Tzolkin—the sacred calendar—far better than I did. It was through him that I began to come to know its true significance, and what Dad is all about."

"And what's that?"

Her fingers absently touched a pendant through the fabric of her blouse. He saw a glint of light between two button holes and realized it was the same crystal she'd worn when he'd met her as Monica. "Basically, he sees the Mayan culture as alive. He's penetrated the hidden part that's linked with the ancient past."

He nodded, but kept his eye on the pendant. He hadn't thought about Monica's crystal since that night. Now, however, he was curious.

"Could I see that?"

She looked surprised. "What?"

"The crystal."

She lifted it from her blouse and held it out to him. "You told me about the power of crystals that night we met. I thought that was just Monica. Was that Elise talking, too?"

She shrugged and looked down at the pendant. "Elise thinks that crystal power exists, yes."

"I thought you were a scientist. How do you explain this so-called power?"

Elise asked if he wanted more wine, then refilled their glasses. "You want to hear more about my thoughts on crystals? Is that what you're saying?"

"Yeah, I would." There might be a connection between Elise's interest in so-called crystal power and the skull, he thought. At this point, he was willing to try anything.

He sat down, and with the crystal pendant now dangling on the outside of her blouse, Elise started talking. Quartz, she explained, consisted of silicon dioxide, the very substance of the human nervous system. When you squeezed quartz or struck it, the crystal discharged piezoelectricity—electricity produced by pressure. A few scientists thought that a similar process took place when sound or even thought waves struck quartz. The crystal resonated the energy.

He wasn't sure he followed her. "So can scientists measure this energy that comes from quartz?"

She shook her head. "Not the kind of energy that's generated by sound or thought. At least, not yet. If it exists, which I think it does, it's a subtle, higher energy. Maybe it emanates from another dimension, a higher plane."

It sounded like mumbo jumbo. "So this is sort of like a spiritual thing."

"You could call it that, but the word spiritual has a religious connotation. To me, religion carries the baggage of dogma, restrictions. And worst of all, arrogance and divisiveness. My religion's better than yours. Right? Unfortunately, a lot of people who are fed up with religion decide there's nothing worth believing in that they can't immediately perceive. They become completely materialistic and cynical. I don't like religion, but I do believe in a universal force and life beyond this existence."

"For a lot of people, religion is their only hope."

"Lambs on their way to the slaughter," she said softly.

"So how does your crystal work? What do you do?"

"You can concentrate on a message, anything you want to achieve, and repeat it while you hold the crystal. The idea is that the crystal works like a subliminal tape, sending you positive reinforcement of your message."

She paused, scrutinizing him as if she hoped his thoughts would appear on his face. "Does that sound crazy to you? It certainly does to Steve. He didn't want to hear about it."

"Give me an example."

"Okay. For the past few weeks, I've been concentrating on the idea that I would find the twin crystal skull."

Now we're getting somewhere, he thought. "And?"

"No, I haven't found it—but let me finish. One day while I was focusing on the thought, I sensed the image of a man. I couldn't see his face, because he was looking away from me. But I knew that the man would play a role in finding it, and that I would meet him. Very soon."

Pierce remained silent, waiting for her to continue.

"The next day Bill played me the Loften tape, and I heard about you, the private investigator. I didn't think much of it until the murder and theft of the skull. That was when I decided to follow you, to see who you were."

Pierce took a final swallow of his wine. "You saying you think I'm going to find the other skull, not the one I'm looking for?" He nearly laughed out loud. "C'mon."

Elise ran her fingers over the stack of newspapers on the table. "The day after I met you I focused on the question of whether you were the person I was supposed to meet."

"And?"

"I'd just gotten home. I'd barely spent two minutes on the thought when I heard a knock on the door. It was you."

Maybe she was deranged, but functional most of the time, he thought. Maybe she was just trying a strange form of flattery on him with an intent to manipulate him. Or hell, maybe she really believed this stuff. Sure, strange things happened from time to time, but he had to agree with the statisticians, the scientists of probability, that it would be weird if coincidences never occurred. But he wasn't going to argue with her premise that his appearance at her house was highly meaningful.

He remembered Redington talking about the myth of the reunion of the skulls and recalled what he'd read about it while at lunch with Tina. "You said your father told you the Noster Mundus emblem has a crystal skull on it."

She nodded.

"I saw it in a book on secret societies. It's got two crystal skulls, one on either side of a scroll."

"Dad had heard about it, but I don't think he'd ever seen the emblem. He said it was something recent."

"That's not all. There's a Latin word below the scroll. It's jungere. It means join or bind together."

He realized now that it didn't refer to uniting the world, as Tina had suggested; it meant reuniting the skulls, and he told Elise as much.

"Nick, that's the key to Noster Mundus. Andrews must have perverted the organization so it would serve as a vehicle for his goal of getting the skulls. Or actually he probably set it up with that goal in mind and everything else was just a cover."

"But why?"

"It's obvious. He wants to be the one to fulfill the myth. He's obsessed by it."

Pierce nodded, suddenly not sure what he believed. He knew that people with unlimited amounts of money sometimes pursued odd obsessions, but he found it difficult to accept the idea that Andrews would kill and steal to achieve a goal.

"What about your father? Is he also obsessed by the myth?"

"Not in the same sense." Her eyes locked with his. "A long time ago Dad told me why he'd never sell the skull. He said that when the God of Death deserts him, it will mean his own death."

T
he rows of six-foot-high royal palms seemed to run on forever behind his father's nursery. Thor remembered planting palm seedlings here as a kid; those trees, wherever they stood, must be twenty-five, thirty feet high, he thought. He also remembered walks like this one between the rows, when he'd carried a fishing rod and had been headed for the canal.

"Never seen so many goddamn palm trees," Gore muttered as he walked behind Thor. "How far's the canal, anyhow?"

"Not much further."

"Orange groves make more sense."

"What?"

"I'm used to seeing orange groves around Tampa. At least you get oranges. But what good is a grove of palm trees?"

Thor turned as Gore swatted a palm frond with his fishing rod. "This isn't a grove, Jim. It's a nursery. These trees are going to be sold. So take it easy on the fronds."

"Sure. Myself I'd rather have an orange tree in my yard."

Fruit trees were fine, but palm trees had aesthetic appeal. Aesthetics, however, had never been one of Gore's strong points. Thor heard him swat another frond with his rod. "I said take it easy, Jim."

"What's the big deal?"

"My father owns this nursery. That's what. I grew up here."

"Well, why didn't you say so? Okay, now I get it. I mean, I was wondering why you wanted to come out here instead of fish by the road."

They reached the canal a couple of minutes later, attached floating popper lures from Thor's tackle box, and cast their lines. "I love bass fishing," Gore said.

Thor didn't answer. He slowly reeled in his line, jerking the rod lightly so the lure danced across the surface. After a few casts, he opened the box again. "Think I'm going to try something else."

He unsnapped the lure, opened the tackle box, and set it into an empty tray. He reached down to the bottom of the box, moved aside a couple of stringers, and slipped his fingers around the handle of a snub-nosed .38.

"Hey, I got a strike," Gore said. "I got him."

"Good." Thor walked over to Gore as he reeled in the fish and the rod arched toward the water. "Jesus, he's a fighter," Gore said excitedly. "He ain't getting away, either."

Thor aimed the .38 at the back of his head. "Neither are you."

He fired, and Gore's body jerked like the popper lure, then fell forward, tumbling over the canal bank, and splashed into the water. Thor climbed down the bank, recovered the rod and reel, and landed a three-pound bass. Then he pushed Gore's body into the deeper water and watched as it slowly drifted and sank.

He tossed the .38 into the canal. Even if it was found it would never be linked to him. He took one more look at Gore as the body vanished from sight. At least he'd died doing something he liked. That was more than most people could expect.

V
isiting a morgue was not an auspicious way to start the week, Pierce thought as he followed Neil Bellinger down a flight of stairs along a poorly lit hallway. Bellinger softly hummed a tune and walked with a swagger. He was as upbeat as ever, evidently oblivious to the darker side of his profession, the side that had burned out Fuego. Pierce rubbed his arms; the air-conditioning was frigid. But he was tired, and the chill kept him alert.

He'd lain awake in bed last night for a couple of hours, rehashing his talk with Elise, looking at it from every angle. He'd tossed about, lying first on one side then the other, on his back, on his stomach, his back again. Finally he'd gotten up and started a book Fuego had given him a couple of weeks ago called
The Watcher
, about a man who confused illusion with reality. Sometime after three he finally fell asleep.

Bellinger woke him up at eight with the news and asked him to get to the morgue as soon as possible. He'd showered, dressed, gulped one cup of coffee, and was downtown by eight-thirty.

They stopped at an office and conferred with the weekend morgue attendant, a short, thin man with thick spectacles and a white lab coat. Pierce glanced at his own reflection in the open glass door. His hooded eyes were surrounded by circles. Zombie eyes. He looked as tired as he felt.

The attendant squinted over Bellinger's shoulder at Pierce, then picked up a clipboard from his desk and led the way down the hall. They passed a room dominated by an aluminum autopsy table; a microphone hung over it for the coroner to dictate his findings. The place gave Pierce the creeps.

The attendant pushed through the double doors of the morgue, and they moved into a long room with ice blue walls. Shiny metal drawers climbed the walls. Pierce drank in the noxious odor of formaldehyde, and his stomach heaved. He put a hand to his mouth, tasted an acid mix of bile and coffee.

"Let's see here," murmured the attendant as he perused the clipboard, holding it a couple of inches from his nose.