Skin of the Wolf (10 page)

B
one-tired, Katherine Cochran hailed a cab to head for home. It almost wasn’t worth it. It was past four, and she had an 8:00 a.m. breakfast with a curator from Chicago. After which she’d have to face the decision she’d been putting off since late in the afternoon: whether to let the donors know the mask wasn’t real.

When Livia brought up her doubts, Katherine had been surprised. For even the most erudite scholar to feel so definite about a piece outside her own area was unusual. But one of the qualities that had always impressed Katherine was Livia’s sensitivity to the tiniest nuances of a work. Katherine would have taken Livia’s misgivings seriously under any circumstances, but this afternoon she hadn’t needed them, except to confirm her own. From the moment Katherine held the mask, she knew.

No, the honorable thing would be to tell the three donors their money would be wasted on the Ohtahyohnee
.
Those would not be easy conversations. Talking to Livia she’d used the phrase “eccentric collectors” but what collectors weren’t? These three had been chasing stories of the lost masks for years. When this Ohtahyohnee
had surfaced she’d done some delicate dancing to persuade them to pool
their resources to buy it for the Met. They only agreed once they realized the price would go too high for any one of them alone. That they were willing to share it with each other and the public so it wouldn’t disappear again marked the keenness of their desire. To learn it wasn’t real would break their hearts. They’d want to know how she knew, how she absolutely
knew
. They’d want her to be wrong, and what could she say?
I don’t feel a current. I don’t hear it sing. It’s a piece of wood, gentlemen. Beautifully wrought. As a work of art it deserves a place in any museum. But art is all it is.

At least Peter van Vliet wasn’t one of them. In him you had a genuine eccentric, though a serious scholar, as serious as Bradford Lane. Van Vliet had traveled most of the native lands, spent time with elders of various nations, and, he said, been taught some of the vanishing ceremonies. She believed him; he was odd but he wasn’t a blowhard. He had a bit of P. T. Barnum in him, true, but in a way that corroborated his stories: all the medicine people Katherine had met were charismatic charmers. That van Vliet shared that temperament made it more likely that he’d be allowed into the inner tribal circles he claimed to have penetrated. She and he had been trading pieces for years, van Vliet donating works he’d bought in return for ones she deemed less valuable for the Met’s collection but which he, for whatever reason, wanted. To her knowledge he hadn’t seen this Ohtahyohnee, but he’d declined to join the bidding consortium. Nor was he planning to bid against her. She wondered, belatedly, if van Vliet’s lack of interest should have raised a red flag.

She sighed. Letting her mind drift to a collector she wouldn’t have to call in the morning was one giant avoidance technique and she knew it.

When she did call, would they believe her? Would they insist she
ignore her “feelings” and bid because other authorities disagreed, other experts had authenticated the mask? If they did, would that be so bad? The Met stood to acquire what was widely accepted as one of the greatest Native treasures to come on the market in decades. No one else except Livia, who had no credentials in the area, believed it was a fake. The real one might never come to light.

Even if it was found.

She leaned back against the seat, her mind racing, as on edge as her body was exhausted. She thought about Brittany Williams, whose blood they’d spent the night carefully, clinically cleaning from precious objects. What had the girl’s final moments been like? What terror, what confusion? Katherine hoped she hadn’t suffered but from what she’d learned about the crime she thought she must have. For someone to be so full of desire and rage that they were willing to kill, how horrible; to do it with such savagery, was beyond words.

That was most of what Katherine was feeling now, as the cab rolled through near-empty streets: sorrow, helplessness, a kind of resigned horror. But another, brighter note had crept into her thinking, one she felt ashamed for caring about in the face of this tragedy but one she could not, if she were being honest, deny. For reasons of their own—and the ones they’d given sounded thin, but what would have been the point of questioning them closely?—Livia and Father Kelly seemed determined to trace the Ohtahyohnee
.
Katherine herself could not be part of that hunt; her position at the Met required a high level of discretion. Particularly from the curator of a secondary department. Oh, no one would call it that aloud, especially in this era of political correctness. No one could say the work Arts of the Americas handled wasn’t in every way—design, workmanship, materials—the equal of pieces from Renaissance Italy or Expressionist New York. But Katherine had learned in her student
years that in the art world “artist” trumped “artisan,” “attributable” trumped “anonymous,” and European trumped everybody.

To have suggested Bradford Lane’s name to Livia was a serious breach of protocol. But though Katherine had to keep her distance from the hunt for the true Ohtahyohnee, it brought her an electric thrill of excitement to think that Livia and Father Kelly might find it.

Still, she hadn’t been entirely truthful with Livia. As the cab neared her block she took out her cell phone. On the second ring her call was answered. “Morse, of course.”

“Hi, Ted. It’s Katherine.”

“The kachinas are here.” In his usual breathless flurry, the wood restorer went on, “I just started. I just got off the phone with Estelle. Unless one of you gorgeous women is going to bring me coffee, leave me alone and let me work.”

“I would if you weren’t in Brooklyn.”

“You would not. Katherine? That young woman—it’s terrible what happened to her. I’m so sorry.”

“It is terrible. It’s hard to believe. You only read about these things, you know? They happen in other people’s lives.”

“I guess, not always.” An uncharacteristic pause; then, “So, is this it? For the damaged wood pieces, I mean?”

“Of course, Morse. If there were other pieces, you think Estelle would have sent them to anyone but you?”

“That’s lucky, I guess.”

“Ah. You’re wondering about the Ohtahyohnee
.
”

“Well, no one’s talking about anything else.”

“It’s just fine. Have you seen it?”

“No. I was going to come up when it’s on display. Now, if these kachinas have any chance of being ready for the auction I really do need to get to work.”

“If you think you’ll have them tomorrow midday, I’ll come pick them up.”

“They’ll be done by then, but I can have them delivered. You must be up to your ears this week.”

“No, I’ll come. Estelle would feel better, I think. And there’s something else I want to talk to you about.”

D
etective Matthew Framingham threw his pen down and rubbed his face. Nearly 5:00 a.m. He’d stayed in the squad room hoping for forensics on the Sotheby’s vic but so far, nothing. The ME was digging bullets out of a gangbanger when Brittany Williams was delivered, and though the rich-and-powerful thing bumped her to the head of the line, they weren’t about to push aside an open corpse. She’d be next, instead of next week, but it would still be hours.

Framingham’s partner, Charlotte Hamilton, had gone home to sleep. “Jesus, Matt. A shift and a half already, not even our rotation, I’m dying here. We hit the heights, it’s enough for now.” Hitting the heights had involved rousting three of Brittany’s ex-boyfriends out of bed. All three turned out to have alibis, though, two of whom they’d also rousted out of the suspects’ beds. Whether the alibis were solid would require checking, but that was slow work. “Let Ostrander and Sun chase their tails for a while,” Hamilton said. “I’ll meet you back here at eight.”

In retrospect, it had been a good idea. Hamilton, nine years his senior on the Job and three in Homicide, had a lot of good ideas. She was sharp-eyed, quick, and relentless as a headache. Framingham
didn’t mind admitting she’d taught him a lot in the two months since his transfer. Any cop paying attention could learn from her, but the attitude in the squad room about being her partner was pretty much
better you than me
. That was because she had a short fuse and when it was lit she got up in your face. Framingham understood, though. All the Pocahontas shit. Long black hair, long legs, high cheekbones—she was one headband short of a corny image of an Indian princess. Which she’d told him Indians didn’t even really have. Growing up in New York, she’d learned to fight that battle in schoolyards. Framingham, a skinny, studious kid with, until he’d trained himself out of it, his expat parents’ Brit accent, frankly admired her for it.

Her refusal to be put into that Indian box, though, explained what he considered her major flaw: her absolute denial, her positive mockery, of the idea that powers beyond the obvious might be at work sometimes, in some places. Indian stuff, shamans and medicine men and the Great Spirit, she wouldn’t even talk about. Okay, fine; that was her business and all that conjured up was Johnny Depp with that thing on his head. But Roswell, the grassy knoll, spy satellites? Different category entirely. Last year the NSA admitted to collecting citizens’ phone data, something Framingham had been warning people about for years. Hamilton gave him that one, but it didn’t do anything to bring her around. She wouldn’t concede the slightest possibility of any theory you couldn’t outright prove, wouldn’t consider ETs, a sixth sense, any paranormal phenomena whatsoever. Or conspiracies, even, and really, who had suffered more from lying, treacherous governments than her people?

Hamilton’s disdain for the paranormal wasn’t affected by her own flashes of intuition. Framingham could tell when they happened, and they were another reason other detectives avoided
partnering with her. On some cases, not all but some, she’d get bitten by an idea and want to head off in a direction the evidence couldn’t justify. It made the captain grit his teeth and it had gotten her into hot water more than once, but it also cleared cases that had the whole squad room sitting around with their thumbs up their butts. Framingham had tried to get her to explain why she made the leaps she did, but she just snapped at him to get back to work.

She played down her intuition, he figured, because she was an Indian and a woman: she had to be Spock, steer clear of anything that smacked of what she called “woo-woo” so she’d be taken seriously. Okay. But Framingham didn’t. Most of the cases they caught were straight-up homicides. A woman popped her husband’s hottie, a dealer caught it from a turf-war rival, why would Framingham try to make those out to be anything they weren’t? But a corporate whistle-blower found with a suicide note, a pistol in his hand, and
two
gunshots in his head? Sixteen people in a Brooklyn neighborhood passing out after a “fiery streak” in the sky, and one of them dying of a “heart attack” while unconscious? Hamilton wouldn’t admit the slimmest chance that all might not be as it seemed in those kinds of situations.

This Sotheby’s case, it was another one. Stalker? Enraged lover? Yeah, maybe. But even the ME was unsettled by the size and shape of the wounds, their obvious ferocity and their ragged edges. He’d suggested they might have been made by an artifact the killer grabbed in the holding room, a serrated bone knife or something. They hadn’t come up with anything, though, and the Sotheby’s Specialist said nothing was missing and nothing like that was in this auction, anyway. Of course, you couldn’t discount the possibility that she might have been involved herself, and taken away whatever it was.

The other thing they hadn’t found, which Framingham thought
was interesting but Hamilton shrugged off, was any record of anyone carding himself in at the door after working hours, any reports from Security of unusual sounds or unexpected lights anywhere in the building. The one thing they
had
found was what Framingham could swear were skid marks on the slate of the roof terrace, the kinds of streaks you’d make if you landed there after a leap. A long leap, across Seventy-first Street. He’d gone up to the roof of the medical building opposite to take a look; that roof was asphalt, not easy to read by flashlight, but damned if he hadn’t seen what looked to him like a matching set of marks, the kind of digging-in ones you’d make when you were pushing off. Hamilton laughed. She might have bought a zip line if they’d found signs of grappling hooks to catch the cable—stranger things had happened in New York—but Framingham wasn’t thinking that was it.

He was thinking, someone had made that leap, for the purpose of killing Brittany Williams. He had no idea what the motive was, but he suspected it had little to do with love. And he did have this idea: the someone wasn’t human.

T
homas Kelly’s footsteps made no sound as he walked through the dark, gigantic room. A library of some kind, but not the one he’d meant to come to. There was information he desperately needed. Could he find it here, though he didn’t know how this place worked, what the system was? He looked for a member of the staff but saw only indistinct figures moving through the stacks or hunched in carrels. When he tried to speak he found he had no voice. He tried again, to no effect. His panic mounted; then a bell rang and someone spoke to him.

“Hello? Thomas? It’s Livia. Hello? Are you there or is this voice mail?”

“What? Hello. Hello. No, it’s me. Where am I?”

“Don’t you mean, ‘Where are
you
?’ Meaning me? I don’t know where you are. You said you were going home to bed.”

Thomas, slowly waking, looked around. The murky library faded, replaced by his small, plain room in the Jesuit residence in Chelsea. A winter dawn leaked in around the window shade and the clock read 7:30. His hand held his cell phone. “Yes, you’re right, it’s me and I’m here. Where are you?”

“In the Bronx, in a tree.”

“What?”

“I went back to my hotel, changed, and came up here to keep an eye on Mr. Lane.”

“From a tree?”

“I told you, I was what you’d call a tomboy. He lives in a large house with grounds. I wanted to be able to see if anyone came near.”

“Did anyone?”

“No. Michael was probably right about his brother needing to rest before he goes out again.”

It occurred to Thomas that anyone eavesdropping on this conversation would assume it was in code.

“Did you sleep?” Livia asked. “Can you come up here?”

“Into the tree?”

“Don’t be silly. I want to talk to Mr. Lane as early as possible and if I were with a priest I think I’d have a better shot at not getting thrown out.”

“Ah. You want my calm, clerical presence.”

“Correct.” She gave him the address. “We’ll call him when you get here. The hour should be decent by then. But Thomas? Not too calm. Before you come up, have some coffee.”