Effigy (9 page)

Laboratory

“Who the hell was that son-of-a-bitch!”

Lori flung the lab door open which would have collided with Peet’s face had his palm not caught it first. Her surging fury surprised him. He’d never seen her so erratic and it caught him off guard. As she hobbled into the lab, he rushed forward and compliantly helped her to the nearest stool.

“Sit down, Lori, before you hurt yourself.”

She plopped onto the stool with a huff. “Did you get the license plate on that car? It was a black car. Maybe blue. I couldn’t really tell.”

“Just settle down.”

“It was a Honda. Definitely a Honda. Or maybe a
Toyota
.”

With Lori seated, though frantic as she was, Peet peeled off the shredded remains of the gravel-specked lab coat. He brushed aside a lock of hair that had stuck to her cheek and noticed a mat of blood near the hairline.

“Don’t move,” he said. “Let me see if I can find something for that.”

Lori wasn’t listening. “It was definitely a
Toyota
.”

“It was a Ford Taurus,” he said, opening a cupboard. He found a bottle of rubbing alcohol and moved on to the roll of paper towels standing beside a lab sink.

“It doesn’t matter,” she spat. “I want to know who the hell was driving it.”

Peet poured some alcohol over a towel. “Let me see your head.”

Lori’s body trembled, whether out of excitement or just shivering from cold, Peet couldn’t tell. After all, his own damp clothes were giving him a chill. He dabbed at the cut on her head and Lori pulled back.

“What the hell?”

Peet stepped in closer. “You want that to get infected?”

Lori rolled her eyes. She looked downright pitiful. Her neatly wrapped pony tail had been reduced to a heap of limp, wet straw and there was a long scrape trailing the ridge of her left cheek. The collar of her soppy university sweater had been stretched out of proportion, while grass and mud clung to her jeans, her knees bleeding through. She’d lost a shoe and her ankle had an alarming swell to it.

He dabbed at her scalp again. “Did you get a good look at him?”

“Hell no!” she blurted sarcastically. “Everything happened so fast. And he was wearing a mask.”

“Like a ski mask?”

“No. More like Zorro’s mask. Just around his eyes.”

“That’s odd.”

Peet finished cleaning the cut and as he stepped back to inspect his handiwork, Lori snatched the towel and started wiping the street grime from her hands. Before he could stop her, she slid off the stool and hobbled toward the storage room.

“I can’t believe this,” she muttered. “I can’t freaking believe this.”

“Lori, would you sit down and rest a minute?”

She still wasn’t listening. Peet should have expected as much. It was always difficult to sidetrack her once she had something on her mind. With a resigned sigh, he followed her into the devastated storage room.

Lori was still mumbling to herself as she carefully waded through the wreckage. Peet, too, found the scene unbelievable. For a fleeting moment he tried to convince himself that it was all a terrible nightmare, but he knew himself better than that. His mind could only work with facts which left him little freedom for delusions. Lori, on the other hand, seemed more willing to give fallacy a try.

“This did
not
just happen,” she kept repeating as she waded toward the effigy’s empty storage container sitting kilter upon the shelf. She righted it and peered inside.

“I don’t believe this,” she said, shaking her head.

The fury returned to her eyes and in one swift movement she pulled the container off the shelf and flung it through the air.

“I don’t freaking
believe
this!”

“Take it easy!” Peet demanded, but his words were lost beneath the container slamming into a wall and clattering to the floor.

Lori’s momentum threw her balance over her bad foot and she too collapsed. By the time Peet reached her she had wilted against the shelving. Her face was buried into her arm and she was sobbing.

“It’s my fault, Dr. Peet,” she cried. “I didn’t lock up the storage room. I should have locked up the storage room.”

Peet wrapped an arm around her shoulders and as he did, he suddenly thought of Snead. The dean would have him fired if he caught him holding a student like this, but then again, Snead will have his job anyway, once he learned about the effigy.

“It’s not your fault,” he said in a failed attempt to sound calm. “I’m the one that took the effigy out of the museum. And I’m responsible for locking the doors.”

That was what bothered Peet the most. The fact was he
had
locked the doors. He’d made sure the entrance was secure as soon as they were in the anthropology building, and neither one of them had left before the wild chase through the parking lot. Had he not been fortunate enough to be wearing his jacket with his keys in the pocket, they would have found themselves locked out and soaked to the bone after the thief made his get away.

Lori wiped away a tear. “I should have locked up the lab before I came to your office.”

“Why would you? Nobody would have expected someone to break in.”

Even as he said it, Peet knew
he
should have expected a break-in. The effigy had been splashed across newspaper headlines and magazine covers across the country; an irresistible temptation for treasure seekers and black market collectors. The rare, nearly opaque Guatemalan jade, the mosaic bloom of fine Cerrillos turquoise—the effigy was likened to King Tut’s golden mask by the way it captured the public’s eye. Who wouldn’t recognize its unique and impressive value?

To add salt to the wound now wrenching Peet’s gut, the university was overly cautious about theft, a paranoia resulting from the silent but ever-looming threat of chemical terrorism. Alarm systems had been installed in computer labs, chemistry and biology labs, and of course, the archaeology lab. Even if someone broke through a window in the building, they would have had to break into the lab and then the storage room, thus triggering the security system. It would have been a Herculean task to break through three security systems and escape before law enforcement responded. That is, if Peet hadn’t been there to turn the alarms off first.

“What’s that?”

Lori’s eyes were fixed on the storage container. She crawled over to the box and peeled a narrow strip of paper from the underside of the container’s lid.

“This wasn’t here before,” she said, rising to her feet.

She handed the note over to Peet. The tape was still tacky and fresh. The paper was heavy and the bottom edge was jagged as if torn from a sheet of beige stationary, leaving only a strip containing the printed letterhead.

“Acatzalan,” he read aloud. “Sound familiar to you?”

Lori looked at the strange note. “I’ve never heard of it before,” she said. “What does it mean?”

Peet shook his head and tapped a finger at one of the two serpentine figures flanking the word. “This looks like a Mayan hieroglyph.” He pointed at two thick vertical lines standing parallel to each other on the left side of the snake-like glyphs. “I think it’s a date symbol. The Mayans used bars and dots beside the glyphs to label the days on their calendar.”

“So what’s the date?”

“I don’t know,” Peet admitted. “I only know the very basics of their calendar system from a computer program I have at home.”

Lori paused with that distant look she always had when her mind was calculating. When she looked back at him, there was a shadow of confusion on her face.

“I don’t get it, Dr. Peet.”

“I think our thief wanted us to find this,” he said.

“That doesn’t make sense. He leaves us a note, then changes his mind and tears the bottom of it off?”

“Don’t you see? This
is
the note. He’s giving us a day.”

“Like a ransom note? Deliver on this day or we destroy the effigy?”

“Possibly.”

“Deliver what?”

“I don’t know.”

Peet hated not knowing. He hated losing the effigy. They had to get it back and that meant doing the only thing they could do.

He tiptoed through the pillaged artifacts and escaped into the laboratory.

“Where are you going?” Lori asked, hobbling behind him.

“I’m calling the police,” he said.

“The police? Won’t they ask questions?”

“That’s the whole point.”

“I mean, won’t they ask
us
questions? Questions we might not want them to know the answers to?”

Peet threw her a look that challenged her ridiculous remark. She must have bumped her head harder than he’d thought.

“I mean, what about that performance review you mentioned?” she pressed.

“I can’t worry about that right now.”

He reached for the phone hanging on the wall next to the lab door. He picked up the receiver and dialed 9 just as Lori’s hand disconnected the line.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“You can’t call the cops.”

“Are you insane? If we call now there’s a chance they might catch that thief tonight!”

Lori grabbed the receiver, but Peet maintained his grip. They stood there in a hesitant tug of war.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “If the cops open an investigation, the first thing they’ll want to know is what we were doing here.”

“Then we tell them the truth.”

“And what would the truth sound like to them? A professor who’s already under suspicion for fraternizing, doing a favor for a student of the opposite sex on campus late at night. Not only that, but we just so happened to be in the lab the same night the effigy was stolen.”

“We can’t be blamed for an unfortunate series of events.”

Lori tugged on the handset. “Maybe not. But you could lose your job.”

Peet tugged back. “Better my job than the effigy.”

“I could be expelled.”

He stared into Lori’s imploring eyes. The two of them were still locked onto the receiver, Lori’s other hand lighting on his. Peet groaned inwardly. He wasn’t just caught between a rock and a hard place. He felt like he was being squashed between two granite millstones.

When he finally relinquished the handset he collapsed onto a lab stool, the weight of the night finally crashing down upon him. There was no reconciling now. It didn’t matter what he did or didn’t do. The simple truth of the matter was sooner or later Snead would learn of the effigy’s disappearance, and there was nobody to blame but himself. It was only a matter of time and Peet would find himself out of a career.

“We have to call the police, Lori. There’s no other choice.”