Vengeance is Blind: Three Scott Drayco Short Mysteries (2 page)

Mabie sniffed. “If you want to see baubles
like the Hope Diamond, go the Natural History Museum. Our exhibits
are cultural, not mere superficial frivolities.”

Jonas countered, “But the Hope Diamond has a
shady past, too, just like the Lady Ambrose. Or so say legends of
the diamond’s curse. I daresay former owners like poor beheaded
Marie Antoinette would agree.”

Mabie ignored him. “Drayco, do you think
this is an inside job? You said you didn’t see signs of an
intruder.”

“The note had a local postmark. Whoever took
the instrument is very familiar with the building, security and
procedures. And there’s the matter of the key.”

Mabie put his hands over his face. “The
Board of Trustees will have my head on a platter.”

Belinda smirked. “Welcome to my world. And
Marie Antoinette’s.”

Mabie lowered his hands long enough to tug
hard on his grizzled beard. Amazingly, the man could simultaneously
tug on the beard and grit his teeth, a model of coordination. He
said, “I guess I should go meet the police and show them the way,”
then gave Drayco a withering glare. “Since you’ve been so helpful,
why don’t you stick around down here. See if you can keep anything
else from disappearing.”

Belinda looked hopefully toward Mabie as he
turned to leave, “Can I come with? I have to make some phone calls
to my employer. I’d love to put them off, but I suppose I have to
face the music.” She laughed nervously and gave a quick glance
around the room, one foot poised in front of her as if ready to
flee at the slightest sign of danger.

Jonas piped up, “I’ll stay put, if you don’t
mind. Perhaps the Lady will somehow magically reappear.” He watched
Mabie and Belinda leave, his hands still dutifully contained in the
pockets of his white lab coat. “Why did Martin call you in the
first place, Drayco? Do you specialize in stolen antiquities?”

“I have a musical past of sorts and Mabie
knew me through the friend of a friend.”

“Music, as in the violin?”

“Piano, actually.” Drayco thought of his
little Steinway sitting at home forlornly. On any given day, he was
lucky to get a half-hour to practice and sometimes tumbled out of
bed at 4:30 just so he’d have the chance.

Drayco thumped the violin case pedestal with
his fingers. “This sounds solid. No seams. Are any of the pedestals
in here hollow?”

Jonas thought for a moment. “We only use
hollow ones for lighter exhibits like Hopi pottery. Never when
there’s a heavy glass case on it, like these here.”

Drayco surveyed the soggy space, looking
from the skylights down each wall to across the various displays in
each corner. He returned to the side room where they’d crouched
earlier in the darkness and smoke. The rubber soles of his shoes
made virtually no noise on the wool-blend carpet.

He clicked the timer on his watch and paced
off the steps from the side room to the case, walking first, then
running at a moderate clip. Ten seconds might just do it.

Jonas followed, prodded him, “You mean
piano, as in performing?”

“In a former life.” Before the accident.
Before the scars. Before it became impossible to practice long
hours. “Do you play an instrument, Jonas?”

“I’ve got a tin ear. My first music teacher
said the highest compliment she could give was I’d make a great
scientist.”

Drayco smiled. “I’ve found music and science
aren’t all that far apart.”

Drayco headed to the side room and began
looking under the furniture pieces until he found what he was
looking for. It was appropriately hidden under a curio cabinet
decorated with clawed feet and a fanged mask scowling at him. The
smoke bomb was homemade, but expertly crafted, complete with timer.
He brought the item into the main hall and set it next to the
violin case.

Jonas bent over for a closer look. “Kind of
puny to cause such a ruckus, isn’t it?”

“Doesn’t have to be big. It just has to have
the right ingredients in the right amounts.”

Jonas tried to chuckle, but his heart didn’t
seem to be in it. “I wish I’d thought of something like this.
Curators don’t make a lot of money and my retirement account is
almost nonexistent. Maybe I can steal that jeweled cornet over
there. I’ve never really liked it. Too flashy.”

Drayco re-examined the empty case. There
were no drops of water inside, on the cloth or on the glass walls.
The violin was taken before the sprinklers started. Before the
forty-second mark. He took out a handkerchief and used it to open
and close the unlocked violin display case. Five seconds, if you
practiced. He was up to fifteen seconds now, leaving
thirty-five.

Jonas watched him in silence, before
curiosity apparently got the better of him. “If you don’t mind my
asking, what exactly are you doing?”

“Time can be friend or foe to a
thief—dependent on circumstances, planning and luck. But in a
precision strike like this, timing is critical.”

“Then you think the thief is long gone and
off to sell the violin by now?”

“I’m not at all convinced he’s going to sell
it.” Drayco paced around the room methodically, over to the display
case with the exotic flutes. They were all quite exquisite, one
made of gold, one of glass, another made from buffalo horn.

Despite Jonas’s assertions, Drayco wanted to
check for hollow pedestals. But the flute case wouldn’t work
anyway—too far from the violin exhibit. He headed back to the empty
violin case, then over to a display of balalaikas and lutes. Again,
too far. He was looking at about twenty-five seconds, the
all-important gap.

There was a wall much closer to the violin
case. It didn’t have any displays, but Drayco saw an ordinary air
duct near the baseboard, centered in plain sight. It was covered
with a painted steel grate—the metallic sound during the chaos had
occurred approximately thirty seconds after the smoke started.

Drayco strode over to the duct. Probably
deep enough. And if you didn’t care whether you hurt the violin or
not, a dirty cramped space like this would more than suffice.

Jonas joined him, hovering over Drayco, who
was on hands and knees. “Looks too small for a thief to escape,
don’t you think? Unless he’s an equatorial pygmy.”

Drayco took out his Leatherman and opened
the screwdriver. The screws in the grate weren’t tight and came out
readily, leaving the front to plop onto the floor. He carefully
folded his long frame even lower to the ground, maneuvering a hand
into the duct and wrapping his fingers around what felt like a
fret. As he pulled the Strad gently out of its hiding place, an air
filter mask was pulled along with it and tumbled at his side.

“Extraordinary!” Jonas drew even closer as
Drayco held the Strad up to the light. “However did you know?”

“As I said, timing was the key.” Drayco
cradled the Strad in his arm. He’d never held one before. It was
surprisingly lightweight, about a pound, or $125,000 an ounce, by
Belinda’s estimate. As he ran one finger slowly across the violin’s
surface, not even touching the strings, he imagined he heard “La
Gitana” playing again.

Drayco added, “Smoke bomb goes off via
timer, mask goes on. The thief arrives at the case, opens it,
removes the violin—about fifteen seconds total. Twenty-five seconds
to open the vent with its intentionally-loose screws, then insert
the violin and push the grate back into place. That leaves ten
seconds to return to the starting point, before Mabie heads off in
search of the sprinkler valve.”

He looked from the Strad, the lights
glinting off the warm reddish-amber veneer, to Jonas, whose
unblinking eyes were riveted on the instrument as if hypnotized.
“Why did you do it, Jonas? I don’t believe this has anything
whatsoever to do with your retirement account.”

Jonas swallowed several times, then sneered,
“You think I did this? I’m a curator. I take care of artifacts, I
don’t steal them. Maybe it was taken by the devil himself, he seems
to be in the thick of things these days. As you say, it’ll probably
end up in the hands of some rich lawyer. Another symbol of the
pestilence in our society.”

“That’s the second time you’ve used that
word.”

“What?”

“Pestilence. Common in the Bible but not in
everyday usage. Yet, in the threatening note, which Mabie said he’d
shown only to me and no one else, it references ‘the pestilence of
Lucifer.’”

Drayco’s skin and hair had dried out after
the sprinkler drenching, so he doubted the beads of water forming
on Jonas’s forehead were sprinkler souvenirs. And a small vein in
Jonas’s temple was bulging, where it hadn’t been before.

Drayco continued, “A museum curator, who
does restoration work like you, must have some background in
chemistry, classes in conservation science—perhaps enough of a
background to fashion a crude smoke bomb?”

Jonas had begun to resemble a time bomb
himself, muscles tightly wound, jaw clenched. When he finally
exploded, it was more like a controlled burn—low, intense,
inflamed.

“That damned Nazi violin.” His contorted
face resembled the mask on the curio cabinet, as his whole body
shook. “Oh so sweetly it plays, the experts say. Ask my
grandparents and my uncle how sweetly that violin played for them.
They were marched to the gas chamber at Auschwitz, as every swipe
of that bow over those strings brought them closer, step by step,
to annihilation. The Nazis put more value on a piece of wood than a
human life. It’s every bit a pestilence. A pestilence in our
collective human soul. And that violin is its hateful progeny.”

Before Drayco had a chance to respond, Jonas
thrust a hand into his pocket and hissed, “It’s the devil’s violin.
Don’t you understand? It must be destroyed.” He whipped out a
multitool like Drayco’s, only this one had a razor-sharp pair of
pliers that popped out with one flick of the other man’s wrist.
Jonas lunged, and the pliers sliced painfully through Drayco’s skin
but were stopped by the side of the violin.

Drayco fell over from the impact,
instinctively cushioning the Strad as he landed on his back. Jonas
stood over him, holding the tool poised in his uplifted hand, eyes
like a rabid dog with pupils dilated, his breathing hard and
rasped. The sound of approaching voices made him pause for a
second. The hand with the pliers quivered like he was going to
strike again, but then he dropped his hand and ran from the
room.

Mabie, Belinda, and two police officers
strolled in, stopping short as Drayco hauled himself up. Mabie ran
over and grabbed the Strad, overjoyed. As Drayco wrapped his
handkerchief around his arm, Mabie clucked at the sight of specks
of blood on the violin and carefully wiped them off with his
shirt.

Belinda was almost giddy. “I’m glad I waited
to call the boss after all. Looks like my neck is safe from the
chopping block.” She looked around. “Where’s Jonas?”

Drayco replied, “Fleeing, I would imagine.”
He nodded his head toward the hall where Jonas had disappeared. The
police officers, taking the hint, ran after him.

“Jonas was behind this?” Mabie shook his
head. “Well, I’ll be. And to think I trusted Jonas with our most
prized collections. I hope they throw the book at him.”

Belinda was all too quick to agree. “I saw
in the newspaper the other day where some lowlife got twenty years
for grand larceny after he pinched an Impressionist painting. Jonas
needs to be put behind bars where he can’t steal again and make
problems for people like me.” She added halfheartedly, “And the
museum, naturally.”

Both Belinda and Mabie were stroking the
Strad, unable to take their hands off it. No questions about Jonas
or his motivations, no concern whatsoever for his welfare. How long
had Jonas worked here? Fifteen years?

Drayco looked at the blood beginning to soak
through the handkerchief on his arm, then back in the direction
Jonas had fled. Maybe Jonas was right. Maybe this was the devil’s
violin, attracted to blood and human suffering. And tomorrow it
would go on tour and be played again. He hoped the Lafleur Quartet
had good life insurance.

A command performance in front of an alleged
killer hadn’t figured high on Scott Drayco’s “To Do” list when he
woke up this morning with a temperature of 101. He sat in his car
in front of the jail waiting to see if the cocktail of codeine
cough syrup, ibuprofen and guarana would kick in. The sleet-laced
winds pushing him against the car as he struggled to climb out
didn’t help matters.

Once safely inside the building, Drayco
signed his name in the ledger, under the police sergeant’s watchful
eye, and handed over his ID. The duty guard buzzed Drayco and the
sergeant through metal doors, and they headed down the empty
hallway. Only the sergeant’s raspy breathing and his booted
footfalls punctuated the otherwise silent promenade.

Drayco was grateful for the lack of
conversation. It gave him time to re-run the mental tape of the
phone call from his former FBI partner, Mark Sargosian, which had
jarred him out of sound sleep a mere six hours ago. Sargosian
dropped the mini-bombshell that the man accused of sexually
assaulting and murdering a nineteen-year-old male dancer and
suspected of similar crimes against five others—the same man who’d
hardly uttered a word since his arrest—broke his silence long
enough to say he’d talk. But only to Scott Drayco. The suspect’s
court-appointed attorney had been apoplectic and threatened to
resign, but the prisoner insisted.

The suspect’s name was Andrew Wyse. Drayco
hadn’t heard of him before he saw the name on TV, and the name
itself was ordinary enough. Serial killers often had ordinary
names—John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles
Manson—and now, Andrew Wyse. After Drayco got the call from
Sargosian, he’d done his research and knew more about Wyse than he
wanted to know, including a disturbing personal link that bound him
and Wyse together.