The Project (9 page)

Luke thought about that for a moment. “Nah. The only things we touched were the books, and hundreds of people touched those in the bucket brigade.”

“They wouldn’t have our fingerprints on record anyway,” Tommy said with a sigh of relief. “So I think we’re safe.”

They’d have mine
, Luke thought, but didn’t say so. In order to get their visa, his whole family had been fingerprinted at the U.S. consulate in New Zealand. And then again at immigration in Los Angeles. He tried to think of anything he might have touched in the library but could think of nothing that wouldn’t have been touched by thousands of library users.

“Luke.” A cheerful voice came from behind him, and he jumped. It was Claudia. “And I’ve forgotten your friend’s name.”

“Tommy,” Luke said, turning around to face her.

“I’d like you to meet someone,” she said brightly. “This is Mr. James Mullins from New York. He’s a book enthusiast and has his own wonderful collection of rare books. He heard about the fantastic job you all did rescuing the collection from the basement before the flood and came down here personally to thank everyone. As it was your idea for the
bucket brigade, I thought he’d especially like to meet you.”

Luke knew the name, and he knew the face, but he forced his own face to remain calm.

James Mullins was the name of the man who had once offered two million dollars for a copy of
Leonardo’s River
. You couldn’t forget something like that. Nor could you ever forget his face. The protruding jaw and the snoutlike nose. The deep-set black eyes and the ears that seemed impossibly high on the sides of his head and unnaturally pointed. James Mullins was Dog-Face.

“Hello, Luke,” he said. “I hear you did a wonderful job last week. Many of these books are irreplaceable, and it’s thanks to people like you that they were saved.” He held out a bony paw for Luke to shake.

Luke took it, conscious of his breathing. “Yeah, no worries,” he said. “It was my pleasure to help.”

“You too, Tommy,” Mullins said, shaking his hand also. “A job well done.”

“You bet,” Tommy said with an embarrassed smile. He didn’t seem too concerned about Mullins, and Luke remembered that Tommy hadn’t seen Mullins’s face that night in the library.

“What happened upstairs?” Luke asked. “What’s with all the police?”

Claudia shook her head and shuddered a little as if she couldn’t possibly believe that anyone could treat treasured books so cruelly. “Vandals,” she said. “Can you believe it? Someone broke in here during the floods and trashed our rare book collection—the books we carried upstairs! Fortunately,
there’s not much damage, but it’s going to take us a long time to get all the books sorted into the right piles so they can be put back in the storerooms.”

“Let us know if we can help,” Luke said.

“Thank you, Luke,” she said. “But it’s really a job for the librarians now. A big job, too.”

Claudia and Mullins excused themselves and went off to meet someone else. Luke watched them walk away.

“Why are you looking at him like that?” Tommy asked.

Luke told him.

“T
hey’re up on the second level,” Tommy said, “having a look at the damage.” His eyes were glued to a pair of miniature binoculars.

“That’s a joke,” Luke said. “He
caused
the damage.”

They were on the second floor of the communications center, across the road from the library, peering in through the windows of the library.

“Okay, now they’re heading back down to the first floor,” Tommy said. “I’ve lost them behind the wall—no, wait, they’re coming down the bottom of the stairs.”

A thought struck Luke and he said, “You don’t reckon Claudia Smith is involved in this, do you?”

“The librarian lady?” Tommy said. “Can’t see why.”

“What are they doing now?” Luke asked.

“He’s shaking her hand—looks like he’s getting ready to leave.”

“Let’s go,” Luke said. “Try and follow him, find out what he’s up to.”

They raced down the stairs and were on their bikes on the street as Mullins emerged. They acted casual and were careful to keep a parked car between them and the library.

Mullins got into the backseat of a large silver car, which immediately signaled and pulled out.

Luke and Tommy took off after them.

Iowa City is actually a small town, especially the downtown area, which is arranged in neat rectangular blocks with lots of traffic lights. Tommy knew all the shortcuts and the alleyways and the diagonal pathways that cut across the city blocks, so Luke was pretty sure they could keep up with the car, unless it got on a highway and headed out of town.

The car stopped at the intersection of East Washington Street and indicated a right turn, toward the city center. Luke and Tommy cut up the sidewalk opposite the library and arrived on Capitol Street, outside the Old Capitol Town Center, before the car arrived at the lights. The car went straight ahead.

“We’ll have to race around the back way,” Tommy yelled, taking off in that direction.

“No time,” Luke shouted back. “Let’s go through the mall!”

“You can’t ride …,” Tommy started, then gave up and followed him.

Luke skidded up to the automatic doors to the mall, and they slid open. Then he stamped on the pedals and shot through into the main thoroughfare.

There were people everywhere, but Luke didn’t care. He was in a hurry.

Shoppers jumped out of their way as they raced right
through the center of the mall. One lady screamed, although they were nowhere near her at the time.

A man standing at the pizza counter, a big tray of pizza slices in his hands, turned right into Luke’s path. He spun out of Luke’s way just in time, the tray flipping and the slices of pizza flying into the air. Luke looked back to see him manage to catch the pizza slices with the tray as they started to drop—all except one slice, which flew toward a couple sharing a romantic moment at one of the food court tables. They leaned toward each other, and the girl closed her eyes for a kiss, but instead she got a face full of super supreme.

A beefy security guard patrolling the far side of the mall saw them coming and moved directly into Luke’s path, holding up his hands to grab him as he neared.

Luke dodged past a lady drinking from a large plastic water bottle and snatched it out of her hands. He hurled it at the security guard, shouting, “Catch!”

The guard caught the bottle, then watched helplessly as Tommy and Luke sped past him to the doors on the far side of the mall.

A college student holding a Starbucks cup was opening one of the automatic doors. He saw them coming and whipped out of the way with a huge grin and a whoop of excitement.

They shot out onto Clinton Street just in time to see the car turn right, heading straight for them. Luke ducked his head and did his best to lose himself in a crowd of pedestrians until the car had driven past them and turned onto East Burlington Street.

“This way!” Tommy cried, and sped off into an alleyway, pedaling furiously.

Workers were unloading cardboard boxes from a van in the alleyway, but there was just enough room to slip past, with only a slight scrape of Luke’s handgrip against the brick wall of the alley.

The silver car passed in front of them as they neared the end, and Luke slid to a halt alongside Tommy at the mouth of the alley.

The car pulled into the loading zone outside the Central Hotel and stopped. A large, bulky man got out of the passenger’s side and trotted into the hotel. Mullins stayed in the car.

Luke and Tommy waited, watching, trying to keep out of sight. Eventually, the man emerged from the hotel and got back into the car, which accelerated smoothly away and caught the next green light, turning left.

“Through the hotel!” Tommy yelled. They headed straight for the automatic doors of the hotel lobby, which opened to let them through. They went right in front of the startled reception staff and out through the automatic doors at the other end.

The silver car shot past the end of the pedestrian mall as they emerged, heading north on Linn Street. They took off down Dubuque, through the water fountain, surprising a group of students who were sitting in the lotus position with their hands, palms upward, on their knees.

Ducking and diving through pathways and alleys, they managed to keep up with the car for about five minutes but
lost it as it sped through a couple of green traffic lights along Gilbert Street. It didn’t matter, though, because by that time Luke had a good idea where it was going. They took a shortcut through Fairchild, and when they pulled onto Dodge Street, he knew that he was right.

The silver car was sitting outside a house.

An old three-story creepy
Psycho
house.

Luke’s house.

T
hey waited for Mullins to leave, unsure whether to call the police.

After a while, Luke’s mother came out with Mullins, smiling. She shook his hand, and he kissed her on the cheek, which made Luke shudder. She waved as the car pulled away.

“Shall we follow him?” Tommy asked.

Luke shook his head. The car was already almost out of sight, turning the corner. “We know where he’s staying now,” he said. “We can pick up the trail there later. I want to get home and find out what’s going on.”

“Oh, there you are,” his mother said as they ran up the steps to the front door. “You just missed Mr. Mullins.”

“Really?” Luke said. “We met him earlier at the library. What did he want?”

“He left you this,” his mother said, handing him an envelope with the Central Hotel logo on it. “He said it was a
reward for your actions. Said you had helped save the library or something like that. You never told us anything about that!”

Luke shrugged. “There wasn’t much to tell, and there were a lot of people helping, not just us.”

He opened the envelope. Inside was a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. He would have been excited if he hadn’t known the truth about the generous Mr. Mullins.

“What about Tommy? He helped, too.”

“Yes, yes,” his mother said, “I expect there will be a little surprise for you when you get home as well, Tommy. I gave him your address.”

Tommy and Luke looked at each other in horror.

“What’s the matter, boys?” his mother asked. “You don’t seem very excited.”

I
owa City is full of libraries. The university libraries, the public library, the medical library, the hospital library, the science library, and on it goes. Libraries are full of books.

And books are full of clues, if you know where to look.

Luke didn’t, but Tommy did, although he had to do some convincing.

“I hate reading,” Luke said, shaking his head. “I’d rather be outside doing something useful.”

They had ridden straight from Luke’s house to the public library in the pedestrian mall.

“Dude, get over yourself,” Tommy said. “Mullins is up to something, and it has to do with that book. We need information, and the best place to start is right here.”

Luke looked up at the sandstone-colored walls of the library. The main doors glowered at him like the entrance to a dark, creepy cave full of dangerous creatures.

“How ’bout I go and stake out the hotel,” he said. “You can do the research.”

“It would take too long,” Tommy said. “We both need to do it.”

“Okay, okay,” Luke said, still staring at the gaping mouth of the library.

“Don’t think of it as reading or research,” Tommy said. “It’s detective work. We are looking for vital clues. It’s Operation Mullins.”

When Tommy put it that way, it didn’t sound so bad.

“Okay, let’s rip into it,” Luke said.

Inside, Luke was sure prim-faced librarians wearing long dresses and wire-framed glasses would stare disapprovingly at him, but in fact they were greeted warmly by a college student behind the reception desk who answered a couple of questions from Tommy and pointed them to the second floor.

Up against the wall near the stairs was a wooden stand holding the local and national newspapers. He glanced at it and stopped so suddenly that Tommy banged into him.

“What are you doing?” Tommy muttered, but Luke was too busy reading the
Iowa City Press Citizen
.

Like all small-town newspapers, it reported on everything that might possibly interest the people of the city, from a car accident on Clinton Street to a local councilor’s dozing off at a meeting. An article in the bottom right corner of the front page was about the break-in at the library. The police, it seemed, had managed to lift a set of fingerprints from the wall near the vandalized books and were following up on this lead.

Luke remembered touching one of the walls to steady himself and hoped it wasn’t his fingerprints they had found. He had a horrible feeling it was.

“I made a list,” Tommy said, pulling a small electronic organizer out of his pocket as they walked up the stairs to the second floor. “The book is the key to this whole mystery, right?”

“You’re not wrong,” Luke agreed.

“So we need to learn as much as possible about the book. How did it get to the library in the first place? Who was this Benfer guy who wrote it? Why does it have the da Vinci picture on the front cover? That kind of stuff.”

“Okay.”

“And we need to find out what we can about Mullins. Who is he? How did he make all his money? Anything that might be useful.”

“Okay,” Luke said again. “I’ll start with the history of the library, see what turns up.”

Tommy said, “I’ll research—I mean
investigate
—the
Vitruvian Man
. Then we can compare notes.”

It was cool on the second floor of the library, even with the sun pouring in through the high glass windows.

Luke found an empty cubicle, then went to one of the library computer stations. He started by typing in “Franklin Library.” That was where
Leonardo’s River
was supposed to have been kept. A little while later, he was back at the cubicle with a stack of books in his arms. He set them down and looked at them for a while; then, with a large sigh, he settled down to start reading.