Pirate Vishnu (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery) (10 page)

“I need a snack break,” I said.

“Not without me. You can’t drop a pirate bombshell and not think it through without me. Let me get Sarah to cover for me.”

I slung my messenger bag over my shoulder while Tamarind went to talk to one of her colleagues. She came back a minute later with a sour expression on her face.

“I can’t take another break yet,” Tamarind said. “Sometimes I don’t know how I ended up working for the Man.” She scrunched up her face in silent protest.

“Back soon,” I promised.

Walking out of the library, I headed down the few steps in the direction of my favorite campus coffee house. As I walked I noticed someone walking alongside me. A man with a black hooded sweatshirt took slow strides a few feet away. His hood was pulled over his head in spite of the warm day. His gait wavered, like he was nervous or high.

I hurried my pace, and the man fell back. I was just being paranoid because of everything that was going on. Even though it was summer, there were still people around campus. And this was San Francisco. Some of them were bound to be strange.

I relaxed. It was the wrong thing to do. As soon as I turned to look the other way, the man knocked into me. He slammed into my shoulder, knocking me to the ground.

“Hey!” I yelled, pain shooting up through my elbow and tail bone.

The man held out his arm. It wasn’t an attempt to help me up. I felt a sharp tug across my body. He was after my bag.

I had my bag slung across my body, so although the sharp tug caught me off guard, my attacker didn’t manage to pull the bag away.

Ready for his second attempt, I bent my knees from my prostrate position, planting my feet flat on the ground, and took firm hold of the strap of my bag. As he gave a second tug, my body lifted up along with the bag slung over my body. I pushed with my leg as he pulled, and we stood directly in front of each other. That’s when I saw his face. Or rather, the lack thereof. A stocking was pulled over his head, obscuring his appearance.

Like most people, this man stood quite a bit taller than me. Between the pantyhose distorting his features and the bulky sweatshirt covering much of his body, that’s about all I could tell.

Before I could cry out again, he gave another sharp yank to the strap of my bag, higher this time. It pulled across my back, yanking me sideways and knocking the breath out of me. The strap caught under my arm. He didn’t loosen his grip.

None of the few people walking by on the far side of the quad seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention to us. I was on my own. I spun on my heel to face away from the attempted thief. I lowered my center of gravity and heaved.

It’s easier to throw someone over you than you’d imagine. As a small person, it’s one of the most important things I’ve learned. The man tumbled over me with ease, landing on his back. He was even lighter than I’d imagined. My assailant groaned as he hit the concrete.

I didn’t think, but acted on instinct from years of training. When you attend a self-defense or martial arts class where they send one big guy after another at you, you learn to react. But what they don’t teach you is to think about your possessions along with your physical self. The man had kept hold of my bag as he twisted over me. As I flipped him over me, my bag went with him.

As soon as I realized what I’d done, I lunged forward. The man rolled away with my bag.

My right palm skidded across the concrete in my desperate forward grasp, leaving skin behind. I landed on my elbow. The mugger didn’t look back. As pain throbbed in my hand and elbow, he jumped up and sprinted away.

All I could do was watch as he disappeared around the side of the building—and along with him, my laptop and Anand’s map.

Chapter 14

I paced the hallway of the police station, silently cursing my lack of forethought. I
knew
that Steven had been killed over that treasure, and I had the map he believed led to the treasure. I’d had a false sense of security because I was at my university, a place I felt safe.

Though Steven’s death happening right after he came to see me could have been a coincidence, another, completely separate act of violence related to this treasure couldn’t be. I found it hard to believe the mugger had been after the academic research notes I’d pieced together for the paper I was working on—even though I have to say my theory about the organization of economic, political, and military factions was rather brilliant. And I never buy the latest phone or computer gadgets, yet the mugger had been hanging around the library waiting for me
specifically
. The only thing that made sense was that he was after the treasure map. What would he have done if I hadn’t stupidly lost hold of the bag? I didn’t want to think about it.

Even though the mugging had to be about the map, the attacker had gotten something far more important to my normal life: my laptop. I’m good at backing up my files, but I’d been distracted from the moment Steven came to see me. Besides hitting “save” regularly, I couldn’t remember if I’d backed up any of that full day’s work on my cloud server. As soon as I was done at the police station, I could use my office desktop computer to check for my latest backup. I took a deep breath and hoped for the best.

Even if my research paper was safe, there was something I had no chance of recovering. I’d backed up the treasure map with a photo—but hadn’t counted on my phone being stolen. I swore.

I wasn’t sure which loss I was more upset about at that moment. My paper on the British East India Company and the Battle of Plassey was so close to being done. The paper had been accepted by a prestigious academic journal, but they’d requested revisions that they were waiting for. The last handwritten notes I’d taken were tucked into my bag as well. I knew I could recreate the work, but it would take time, which I didn’t have. The editors were waiting, and the semester would be starting soon. I’d worked hard to get here, and I needed this paper to have a shot at tenure against Naveen. I couldn’t afford to have my work set back.

I wasn’t usually such a negative person, but I couldn’t think of a single thing that was going right at the moment. First Lane, now all of this. My stomach rumbled again. I’d never gotten that snack, so now on top of everything else, I was starving. I hated being hungry.

While I waited to talk to someone, I came up with a silver lining, albeit a small one. I’d left my pirate discovery research at the library. Whoever now had the map didn’t also have more information about Anand. As far as I knew, I was the only one who’d made the connection that Uncle Anand was Pirate Vishnu.

The police officer who took my statement gave me some antiseptic and gauze for the concrete scrape on the ball of my hand and elbow. He looked all of twenty-two years old, but was a nice guy.

“A
treasure map
?” he said. “
Really
? You want me to write that in the list of items stolen?”

I guess I had my answer about whether I should have gone to the police with what I knew about Steven Healy.

Since the mugger had also gotten my phone, the policeman let me use a phone at the station to cancel my credit cards, ATM card, and phone. I even got in a call to Tamarind at the library to tell her why I hadn’t returned.

I kept my keys in my jeans pocket—otherwise they always find their way to the very bottom of my bag—so at least I had my car and house keys. My injured elbow stiffened as I fished my keys out of my pocket on the way to my car. The pain from my hand and elbow was fully kicking in now that my adrenaline had worn off. I’d broken my arm the previous year, and even though it healed cleanly, it made me nervous when I got an arm injury.

I knew I should have gone home, taken some painkillers, and put ice on my elbow. But there was no way I was going home yet.

On the ground floor of the history department building, I was too anxious to wait for the elevator. I ran past the group of faculty chatting in the hallway and bounded up the stairs, praying that I’d remembered to back up my files the previous afternoon. I did most of my work on my laptop, since I could  bring it with me between home, office, and the library, so I rarely used the office computer provided by the university. But the desktop computer was networked, so I’d be able to see if I’d dropped my files into the remote backup after my day of work before Steven Healy had interrupted me.

I was only a little bit out of breath when I reached my floor. I burst through the stairwell door near my office. A petite woman around my age gave a start as I did so. She jumped up from where she was crouched in front of my office door. It looked like she’d been about to slip a folded piece of paper underneath it.

“Can I help you?” I asked. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. I didn’t think I knew her, but…

“This is your office?” she asked. Her eyes were red and her eye makeup smeared.

“That’s right.”

“I needed to see you,” she said. She clutched the folded note tightly in her hand. “I’m Christine Healy.”

That’s why I recognized her. She was Steven Healy’s daughter-in-law. She looked nothing like the perfectly made-up woman photographed in the news the previous year. Her rich brown hair was pulled back into a messy pony tail, and she hadn’t made any attempt to fix her running makeup.

“I tried calling first,” she said, “but I couldn’t reach you, and it’s important I talk with you.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. Why did Christine Healy need to see me? I hoped it wasn’t to retrieve the map.

She acknowledged it with a small nod.

“I was going to return his map—” I began.

“No, no,” Christine said, waving off the suggestion. “We don’t care about that. You can keep his awful map. God knows it’s brought us enough grief already.”

“Well, about that—”

“It’s my husband, Connor,” she said, urgency in her polished voice. “He knows his father went to see you right before he was killed. There’s something you need to understand about Connor. He’s not a bad man. But he’s…
unstable.”

“You think he killed his own father?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you go to the police with this—”

“No, it’s not that,” she said, reaching out to grip my uninjured hand. “I worry about what he’ll do if this miserable treasure becomes a story in the news. I’m trying to keep Connor away from the newspapers by keeping them out of the house, but he can read whatever he wants online…”

“What is it you wanted to see me about?” I asked, confused by her rambling. “If it’s not about getting the map back—”

“Oh, I suppose it is about the map, in a way,” Christine said, keeping a cold hand firmly grasped around mine. “I know you’re a historian, good at looking into things like the map Steven brought to you. I only hope that whatever you do with the map, you won’t make a big deal about it to those media vultures. We had some trouble with them in the past… I don’t know if Connor could handle it if this attention carries on much longer.”

“You don’t have to worry about me going to the press,” I said. “I was trying to tell you a moment ago—the map was stolen.”

Christine gasped. She let go of my hand and took a few steps back. “What do you mean it was stolen? He just gave it to you.”

I held up my bandaged hand. “I was mugged.”

“Oh, no,” Christine said. She stumbled backward until the hallway wall stopped her.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No. I mean yes.” She shook her head and tried to smile as she forced a little laugh. “I’m on edge from everything that’s happened to our family, that’s all. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

Without a backward glance at me, Christine Healy ran down the hallway and out of sight.

What was that about? She was frightened, but of
what
?

I told myself my brain would be more functional when I was safely back at home with ice on my aching elbow.

Slipping into my office, I turned on my computer and tapped my foot anxiously. It wasn’t a slow machine, but every second felt like minutes.

I groaned as I checked my files. I’d made my last backup two days before.

I closed my eyes and thought back to the knock on my door that had started this mess. I remembered that I’d closed my laptop after hitting “save,” and then promptly forgotten all about my own work. I hadn’t followed my usual routine since the moment Steven Healy walked through my door.

As I headed for home, my emotions turned from pity to anger. I swung by a cell phone store, but without a credit card they told me they couldn’t give me a new phone. I could have gotten a prepaid one with a new number, but how would anyone reach me? I couldn’t call them either, since I didn’t know their phone numbers. That’s what phones were for. I drove the rest of the way home and walked warily up the stairs to my apartment.

I wish I could have said I knew something was amiss as soon as I stepped through the door. But honestly, I was exhausted. I doubt I would have noticed if a pack of monkeys was raging a war in the corner of the apartment.

I kicked off my shoes and walked to the kitchen to get some ice for my elbow. The only thing I needed to do was clear my overstimulated mind of everything that was going on around me. Well, taking some painkillers and eating would have been nice, too, but both meant venturing back out into the world, which I was in no mood to do. It was only a little over an hour before I had to be at the Tandoori Palace. Juan would feed me something delicious to cheer me up. I opened the freezer door and let the cold air wash over me.

It wasn’t until I heard the voice from only a few feet away that I realized I wasn’t alone in my apartment.