Angel Condemned (26 page)

“Is this an admission of guilt?” Bree asked drily. There wasn’t time for this. She bit back the words “man up” and forced herself to be patient.

“What? No. No. Of course not. You should have seen her thirty-five years ago. She was beautiful. Smart. Witty. You young women don’t know what it was like back then, for women like Jillian, especially in the male-dominated professions like archeology. It was unheard-of.”

Bree thought about Margaret Mead, who had indeed had a tough row to hoe. And the only one who made a point of recalling Jillian was a PhD archeologist was her husband.

“Jillian always said she had to be twice as smart as a male to get exactly the same kind of consideration. You know what they say about academe anyway, right?”

“The politics are so vicious because the reward is so small?”

“I think that’s what started it. Her mania. I didn’t recognize that it was an illness at first. I blame myself for that. When she”—he cleared his throat—“started in on the male graduate students, I retaliated along much the same lines. If you know what I mean.” He stared at his hands. The waitress set a carafe of coffee on the table and then slapped menus in front of them. He looked up at her. “You wouldn’t happen to have an egg-salad sandwich.”

“Sure thing.”

“Fine for me, too,” Bree said absently. She hadn’t eaten any of the breakfast at the Hyatt. She regretted it.

“So I got help for her later than I should have. If I’d known, our marriage wouldn’t have taken the hits that it did. But we managed. We looked for the Cross for twenty-five years after we lost it. She was with me on each and every dig.”

The first discrepancy. Bree reached for her yellow pad, then thought better of it. “You lost the Cross? The newspaper article said it went overboard with Martin Schofield.”

He looked puzzled. “The news . . . Oh! You found a copy of the article about the accident. I’m impressed.”

“It’s an Internet age,” Bree said.

“Well, that’s what we thought, initially. But, ah, it turned up. It wasn’t in the box of artifacts that went overboard after all.”

The waitress set the sandwiches down. Chambers took a couple of bites.

“Where was it?”

“The Cross? Oh. Jillian was in charge of measurements, taking photos of it, the sketches,” he waved his hand airily. “Documentation’s critical when you’re doing scientific research. Turns out she still had it. Didn’t give it to poor Schofield at all.”

“But then?”

“Well, we had a volunteer with us—I told you about her yesterday. Leah. Leah Villiers. A law student, in between semesters. Very good at her job. Unusual face. Not the kind of face you forget easily. Leah was the one who reminded Jillian the Cross was still in the lab. So we locked it up, didn’t want to take a chance on losing it this time. But we did, of course.”

The sandwich was tasteless in her mouth. Bree set it down. “You said that Leah left the dig when you all broke up to come back here. Did she take the Cross?”

“Leah?” He looked astonished. “Never. She wasn’t . . . No. No, she didn’t. If you’d known her, that question just wouldn’t occur to you. It was a sneak thief, most likely. There was quite a black market for antiquities, you realize. Still is. Istanbul isn’t a third world country by any means, but there’s a great deal of poverty. So we kept an eye out, Jillian and I, every year we went back to the dig.”

Bree put her hand in her pocket and touched the pine box. “How important is the Cross?”

“Vastly important.” The weary man in front of her was transformed. For a moment, she caught a glimpse of the passion that had driven him to his profession. “All artifacts and relics of my period are important. The monetary value isn’t huge—it wouldn’t be like finding an intact Victory of Samothrace or a Nike—but it’s significant. And it doesn’t add a large amount to our understanding of the Justinian Empire—although,” he added, with an attractive air of self-mockery, “you certainly couldn’t prove it by the importance I placed on it in my publications. But it’s a piece of history. Irreplaceable.”

“You said something about it, the first time I met you in your shop. That Jillian thought it was cursed?”

“Ah, well. Poor Jillian. It was one of her obsessions. It may have driven her to . . .” He shoved his plate aside. “I’m not sure what this has to do with our current problems, Ms. Winston-Beaufort.”

Bree decided to come at him from a different angle. “What was Schofield Martin like?”

His eyes slid away from hers. As if he knew where the questions were headed. “Pretty good scholar. If he’d had a little more discipline, he could have made some decent contributions to the field. But he and Jillian got into some wild speculation about the provenance of the Cross and its ritual purpose. I’d say he was easily distracted from rigorous scholarship.”

“What sort of speculation?”

“That it had some religious significance. That it was . . . What did he call it? A key to the gate of the eighth circle of Hell, if you want to be precise. Never mind that Dante didn’t codify the nine circles until seven hundred years later.” He peered at her in exasperation. “What the heck does all that have to do with Jillian’s defense?”

“Hey!” The waitress said. She came out from around the bar at a trot. “You can’t let that dog in here.”

Sasha wound his way to the booth. He turned around, so that his hindquarters pressed into her hip, and stared out the restaurant windows. It was a glowering day, with no sun and a lot of low-lying clouds.

Caldecott pressed his pale face against the glass.

Bree raised an eyebrow and waved her hand at him. There was another shapeless figure in back of him. He was tall, whoever he was.

Bree looked down at Sasha. “Me or you?”

“Miss!” The waitress said. “The boss will have my guts for garters if you let the hound stay in here.”

“Is your boss in?” Bree asked.

Sasha lifted his lip in a silent snarl. Caldecott backed away from the window. Not backed away, she thought. He’d been engulfed by something that made him disappear.

The huge shadow moved across the window, smearing the glass with fog.

The waitress snapped her gum. “Who, the boss? No. He don’t come in until five.”

Bree, one eye on the window, dug in her pocket and found the twenty-dollar bill she kept for emergencies. She pressed it into the waitress’s hand. “My dog will be very good, I promise. And we won’t be here too much longer.”

The waitress, whose name tag read DONNA LEE, looked down at Sasha. He waved his tail and then thrust his nose under her hand. “Okay. But no peeing on my nice clean floor, buster.” She ambled back behind the bar and settled onto a stool behind the counter.

Bree turned her attention back to Chambers. “According to the newspaper article I found, Schofield Martin drowned that summer, swept away in a storm.”

“Drowned.” Chambers’s voice was hollow. “Yes.”

“The body was never recovered? The police report from the Turkish government said it was an accidental death. Do you believe that?”

“Okay,” Chamber said, with a kind of despairing cheer. “Okay. I don’t know how you found out. We tried to keep it hushed up at the university, but the poor boy committed suicide. Jillian didn’t mean anything by these little flings. They were a part of her illness. Schofield didn’t understand that. He thought she loved him. He thought they’d go away, together, and when I told him, no, no, she’s done this before, she’s had these flings before . . . The poor boy just couldn’t take it.”

The second discrepancy. “Professor Chambers.” Bree kept her voice low, but she put all the comfort and authority she could manage into it. “I don’t believe Schofield jumped off the
Indies Queen
on his own. I think he was pushed. I think Jillian pushed him.”

Chambers’s eyes were haggard. “Are you asking me to turn in my own wife?”

“No.” Bree sank back. She needed to breathe. “I’m asking you what would be best for her for the rest of her life. I’m asking you if we should consider a plea of not guilty by reason of mental incompetence. If she should be in a place where she can get some kind of treatment for her problems. Where other people, you, for example, can be safe from her.”

Sasha nudged her.

The windows overlooking the street were clear. The fog had gone. No faces pressed in to peer at them. Bree’s heart slowed; there had been something ominous about that tall figure behind Caldecott.

A second shadow darkened the glass doorway.

“Anything the matter, Athena?”

It was Hunter. He pulled the door halfway open, caught sight of her, and motioned her toward him.

“I’m fine, Allard. Look. I’ve got to go to another meeting. I’m pursuing what’s called an alternate theory to the case. It may be that I’ll turn up enough mitigating evidence to convince a jury that someone else killed Prosper White. In the meantime, I’d like you to think about your alternatives for the defense.”

“And my options are?” He lifted his hands. “She didn’t do it. She did it and didn’t mean it. Somebody else did it.”

“That’s right, Professor Chambers. Those are the options in the state of Georgia.” She got up, and put her hand on Sasha’s collar. “Take a few minutes and go sign those documents Mrs. Billingsley has, will you? We’ll be in touch later in the day.”

“I’ve lost her,” Chambers said. “Jillian. She’s gone, isn’t she? Whatever happens next, she’s gone.”

Outside the Pirate’s Cove, Hunter leaned against the wall, his arms crossed. The bearded face of a pirate on the restaurant poster leered over his shoulder. “You were meeting with Chambers in there?”

“Yes.”

He touched her cheek. “You look sad.”

“It
is
sad. They’ve been married for thirty-some years. His whole life’s come down around his ears in the last eight months. And he’s lying to me.” She sighed. “Has Jillian been booked for a psych-eval?”

“Today and tomorrow. They put her in the Sampson Clinic. You’re not thinking of using the insanity defense?”

She looked at the street. Savannah in February was blessedly free of tourists, and the sidewalks were open. “Let’s walk a bit.” She tucked her hand under his arm, and they started south, to the heart of the old city. Sasha wandered ahead of them, his head up, as if searching for something. Or watching. “What’s the department think?”

“For God’s sake, Bree. We arrested her. She stabbed Prosper White.”

“Let me amend that. What do
you
think?”

“I interviewed her when they brought her in. But I can’t—”

She nudged him. “Of course you can. You know I’ll have access to the intake interview tapes if the case comes to trial. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me, shall I? I didn’t meet her the day White was killed. You had her and Allard hauled off to the station first thing. But I did get a chance to see the surveillance tapes . . .”

“The surveillance tapes?” He stopped and faced her. “Those were entered in evidence yesterday. How did your office get hold of them so fast?”

“Copies from the museum,” Bree said promptly.

“Copies?”

“Listen.” She tugged him forward again. They had reached Oglethorpe Square. “You’ve seen them, too. It was she, not Allard, who appeared to be the organizer of the protest. And she seemed . . . what’s the phrase . . . oriented times three; that’s it. She knew who she was and what had happened when you questioned her?”

“She did.”

“Have you stopped by the City of Light charity yet?”

“I sent McKenna.”

“I’ll bet you a lunch at Huey’s that Jillian recruited the homeless people. She needed the crowd to get the TV people out there. Right? And again, Hunter, I don’t need to remind you that I’ll find this stuff out in discovery anyway.”

“Okay, yes, you’re right. The demonstration appeared to be Jillian’s idea. The director of the center is a nice old guy named Foster. Not the brightest light in the chandelier but what you’d call a good soul. Jillian convinced him that there’d been a grave injustice done to her and her husband. She’s done a lot of volunteer work with the charity, taking the patrons, clients, whatever they call them, out for picnics, to doctor’s appointments, things like that. The morning of the murder, she handed out twenty-dollar bills left and right to the center residents. Before Foster knew what was happening, they were on the bus headed to the Frazier.”

“Twenty-dollar bills?” That was interesting. Allard was broke.

Wasn’t he?

The third discrepancy.

She put a firm hand on her speculations. First things first. Were the Chamberses lying to her? It wouldn’t be the first time a client lied, nor the last. What she needed was evidence. And Petru was the best there was at gathering that.

Except Petru wasn’t available. Maybe she could petition Goldstein to get her staff back. She paid her staff, didn’t she? If she paid them, didn’t she have some discretion about how her own employees spent their time?

“You with me here, Bree?”

“Sorry. Yes. Just thinking about the system.”

“That’ll drive you crazier than Jillian Chambers.”

Bree stopped before the statue of James Ogelthorpe and sat down on the wrought iron bench in front of it. “When you arrested Jillian yesterday, you saw what I saw, didn’t you. A badly disoriented woman. A distraught husband. A history of . . . What’s her illness, again? You’ve gotten at least a verbal description of the diagnosis by phone from the university medical center, haven’t you?”

“Bipolar disorder. They called it manic-depressive illness back when she was first diagnosed.”

“Could she go from organized thinking to disorganized thinking overnight? Was she taking her medications?”

“I don’t know the answer to either of those questions. I’m a cop, not a shrink.”