Checkmate (18 page)

After dropping Guido off, Ralph and I found our way to the Mint Museum's branch on Randolph Road. As we pulled onto the property, I mentally reviewed what Guido had told us just before he climbed out of the car.

In 1837 the building opened as a U.S. Mint, the first one outside of Philadelphia. It served as a mint until the Civil War, when it became a Confederate headquarters, and then eventually a U.S. military post and assay office. Following the First World War, it sat vacant for over a decade. In the 1930s it was purchased by a group of citizens to become the first art museum in North Carolina.

A couple of college-age guys were tossing a Frisbee back and forth in the sprawling, well-kept lawn bordering the parking lot.

Inside the lobby we were greeted by an octogenarian sitting behind the reception desk. She wore a badge:
HELLO! I'M A VOLUNTEER
!
H
OW MAY I HELP YOU
?

In a voice softened by the years, she told us that her name was Ethel. “And is this your first time to enjoy the exhibits here at the Mint Museum?”

“Actually,” I said, “we're here to see the curator, Ms. Sharma.”

“Oh. I'm afraid she isn't in yet, but you're welcome to wait out here until she arrives.”

“Where's your exhibit on Colonial and Revolutionary War weaponry?”

She pointed toward a sign on the counter with the entrance fees listed.

Ralph held up his creds. “We're federal agents on an investigation.”

Her eyes widened. “The stolen weapons?”

“Yes.”

“I must say, I had no idea. You're taking this very seriously.”

“Yes, we are.”

He pocketed his creds.

“And you're really with the FBI?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Are either of you profilers?”

Ralph nodded in my direction.

“You're a
real
profiler?” she asked me.

“I'm an environmental criminologist. I do use something called geographic profiling. I investigate crimes by studying their timing, location, and progression, but—”

“So, a profiler?”

“Well, not exactly. You see—”

“Yes,” Ralph said. “He's a profiler, just like on TV.”

“Really, I'm—”

Ralph chugged my shoulder. “Oh, you're too modest. Dr. Powers.”

“Wow,” Ethel enthused. “Yes. I watch all those profiling shows on television. I'm quite a fan.”

She didn't exactly strike me as the target demographic for crime dramas.

“I'll bet the doer is a male, right?” she offered
helpfully. “Caucasian, between twenty-five and thirty-five with low self-esteem?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don't know.”

“So the doer, or the perp—or wait.” She caught herself. “You're FBI? You say UNSUB, right?”

I prefer not to.

“Some of my coworkers do.”

“Let's see,” she continued, unfazed, “keeps to himself, has problems controlling his anger. Probably abused as a child—they're almost always abused as children. And tortured animals too, I'll bet. Puppies from the neighborhood. Or maybe stray cats—those are always a good choice because strays often aren't missed.”

“You're good at this, Ethel.” Ralph pulled out a business card. “If you ever get to DC and want a tour of Headquarters, give me a call.” He scribbled a phone number on the back of the card.

She beamed. “Oh, my.”

“Now.” He pointed toward the door. “Can we . . . ?”

“Oh, certainly, yes, yes. I'd suggest you start on the second level. Um . . . may I watch?”

Ralph leaned close; spoke in a private, secretive voice. “You know profilers. They need their space. Have to work alone. Enter the mind of the UNSUB. That sort of thing.”

Ethel nodded knowingly. “Just like on television.”

“Exactly.”

Give me a break.

When Ralph and I were out of earshot, I said, “Why do you do that?”

He smiled. “She let us in, didn't she?”

“I can't believe you gave her your card. Whose phone number did you put on there?”

“Margaret's.”

“Well, then, I guess I can forgive you.”

*   *   *

We found the Colonial weaponry exhibit. The museum staff had removed any placards that related to the missing items and, unless you knew what you were looking for, there wasn't any way to tell that the exhibit wasn't complete. Some artifacts were behind glass. Most were not.

We saw no surveillance cameras directed at us, so Ralph left to orient himself to the location of cameras elsewhere on this level of the museum, and just after he stepped away, my phone rang. Tessa's ringtone. I was a little surprised; a text would have been more up her alley.

I answered. “Hey. What's up?”

“I think I might have something for you.” Her voice was low and whispery. “On the whole Latin-phrase thing.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“So I don't get caught.”

“Caught?”

“Just listen: it's a painting of a skull. From what I can tell it's supposed to be there in Charlotte at the Mint Museum in the Randolph Road branch.”

“That's where I am right now.”

“I know.” She sounded slightly exasperated. “I texted Lien-hua. She told me to call you, that you'd be there.”

“Wait. Back up for a sec. What did you mean when you said you didn't want to get caught?”

“I'm in the Library of Congress's main reading room,” she said hurriedly. “You're not supposed to have cell phones in here. I'm sorta hiding behind the stacks.”

“And you're there because . . . ?”

“To help you. So, like I was saying, I found a reference
to it in a book. There's a painting with a skull that looks like it's on a shelf. Ask for it. It's got that Latin sentence as an inscription. I think it might be what you're looking for. The date on the painting is 1480. They should know the one. Look, I gotta go, Beck's coming.”

The line went dead.

I wondered if my eighteen-year-old daughter was going to get thrown out of the Library of Congress for helping the FBI with an active investigation. It wouldn't be the strangest thing that's ever happened to her.

Ralph returned as I was putting my phone away. “That was Tessa,” I told him.

“What's up?”

“She found a painting with the Latin inscription. If the information she has is correct, it's here in the museum.”

“Well, then.” He started up the steps. “Let's see if Ms. Sharma has arrived
yet.”

When Ralph and I got back to the lobby we found the curator standing beside the reception desk, speaking with Ethel, the resident expert on profiling. “Like I was telling you,” Ethel said, “they're with the
FBI
.” When she saw me, she gazed at me with keen fascination.

The curator was a trim, meticulous-looking woman in her mid-fifties. She had wire-rimmed glasses perched carefully on her nose and wore a summery chartreuse blouse.

After introductions, she said, “I heard about what happened to our artifacts. That they were used to . . . That they were used in the commission of a crime. I want to do everything I can to help you find the person who did this.”

“Good.” I described the painting to her, referring back to what Tessa had just told me. Ms. Sharma nodded immediately.

“Yes. That piece is in our European art exhibit, but that's not currently on the floor. We rotate the exhibits, you see, to keep things fresh. Right now it's in storage. Follow me.”

On the way I asked when they had moved this painting to storage.

“Right about four weeks ago. I remember it was the day after the fireworks—so July fifth.”

“And this is the only painting that has that inscription?”

“As far as I'm aware, it's the only one that exists.”

So our guy either saw it here before it left the floor, somehow uncovered it here in storage, or, perhaps, stumbled across a reference to it like Tessa did at the Library of Congress.

It wasn't much, but it was something.

A trail through time and space.

That's what we were looking for, and now that's what was starting to emerge.

*   *   *

The modest-size climate-controlled storage room was slightly cooler than the rest of the museum. When Ms. Sharma led Ralph and me inside, she requested that we each put on some gloves that were on a table near the door. “In case you have to touch anything.”

The gloves were white and dainty and, using my phone, I discreetly snapped a photo of Ralph wearing them in case I needed to pay him back for any future Agent Powers comments.

It took Ms. Sharma less than a minute to find the artwork with the inscription.

Just as Tessa had said, it was a painting of a skull that appeared to be sitting on a small shelf.

“So, this is a wood panel painted with oil.” Ms. Sharma sounded proud of the piece. “It was painted in grisaille, that is, shades of gray, to make the skull look like a three-dimensional object.”

The shading and the way the artist had rendered light really did make the skull appear three-dimensional. I didn't know the first thing about the history of art or the
techniques used to make paintings appear 3-D, but the effect seemed remarkable for a painting from 1480.

There was no signature, no indication of who the artist might have been, and when I asked Ms. Sharma about it, she told us that his identity was unknown. “It's from a fifteenth-century Flemish master. That's all we know. The piece was donated to the museum from a private collection in 1978.”

Skulls always trouble me somewhat. It might be easier to deal with them if they didn't look like they were smiling. It's almost as if they're laughing at us, almost as if they know a joke that we, the living, don't want to know the punch line to. And in this case the punch line wasn't very funny, but was summed up in the Latin phrase that appeared beneath the skull:

Cur homo mortalis caput extruis at morieris en vertex talis sit modo calvus eris.

A plaque stored next to the painting included the official translation of the inscription, and it was remarkably close to Tessa's. It read,
WHY DO YOU, MORT
AL BEING, RAISE YOUR
HEAD? YOU WILL DIE, T
OO, AND WILL BE AS BA
LD AS THIS SKULL.

Nice work, Raven.

“Such paintings are known as
vanitas
,” Ms. Sharma explained, “from a verse in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity.'”

“May I pick it up?” I asked.

“Um . . .” Her hesitation made it clear she wasn't excited about the idea. “Yes. But please, please be careful.”

I gently picked it up, and when I flipped it over Ms. Sharma gasped.

A phone number was written in black marker on the back of the painting's wood panel: 783-4745.

“Who . . . who would have done that?” Ms. Sharma said, aghast that someone had damaged the piece.

Ralph pulled out his cell and tapped in the number.

I answered the stunned curator, “We're going to do all we can to find out.”

My friend spoke for a moment on the phone, introducing himself as a federal agent, then shook his head and hung up. “Doesn't sound like the woman with that phone number has any idea about a painting. I'll have Voss's guys follow up.”

“We're going to need to process this at the Lab,” I told Ms. Sharma. “Ralph?”

“I'll get a team over here.”

It's not about the number. It's about something else.

The spellings.

The codes.

While he stepped away to make the call, I set down the painting and went online on my phone to pull up the site that allows you to translate phone numbers into words. I plugged in the numbers but didn't recognize any of the words that they brought up. Some contained the words “Sue,” “dish,” or “fish” but nothing recognizable beyond that.

Lacey could run them.

Did he write it on here while it was on display?

“Is this painting protected by glass when it's being exhibited?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

Okay, so he marked it up while it was back here.

But how did he access this room?

I studied the ceiling, the walls. No visible security cameras.

“Are there any surveillance cameras in here?” I asked Ms. Sharma.

She shook her head. “No. Maybe we should have more, we just never thought that . . .” She was staring at the painting, her face blanched. “But there is one near where this piece is displayed while it's on the floor. Maybe that'll help?”

“Maybe.”

So, if someone were to come in here, what route would he have taken?

I left the room. The hallway passed two doors on the way back to the lobby.

Trying the first, I found that it was a small bathroom with no windows, no way to slip into or out of the building.

The second doorway led to the employee break room.

Ralph returned. “Some of the local ERT guys are on their way over. I'll have the Lab get started on handwriting analysis too, see if it matches those numbers written in the book we found at Cole's place.”

“Good.” It would be tough to match such a short sample, but it was worth a shot.

Our team had reviewed the museum's video footage and nothing indicated that any of the patrons who visited the building on the day the weaponry was stolen had taken it.

Yet it was gone.

An employee?

A volunteer?

July 5th . . .

“Is there another entrance to the building?” I asked Ms. Sharma.

She shook her head. “Nothing besides emergency-exit doors—but alarms go off if those are opened.”

This just doesn't make sense.

“What time did you realize the weaponry had been stolen?”

“It wasn't until the end of the day, when we were doing a final walk-through to make sure no guests were still in the building. I need to contact our board of directors. You don't think there might be more pieces that have been vitiated?”

“It's possible.”

Needless to say, that did not encourage her.

Someone got those weapons out of this building and someone wrote that phone number on the back of the painting.

“Do you get tour groups through here?” Ralph asked.

“Sure. All the time.”

“What about on the day the items were stolen?”

“I'd have to check.”

“You don't know a guy named Lombardi by any chance?” he said. “Does history tours of the city? Guido Lombardi?”

She shook her head. “I don't know that name. Should I?”

I turned to Ralph. “Find him.”

“On it.” A moment later I heard him talking with the police dispatcher.

No, it can't be Guido. That would be too easy. Things never turn out to be that easy.

If the offender wasn't one of the museum guests and it wasn't one of the staff then it had to be . . .

The video that the team looked at only covered operational hour
s.

I asked Ms. Sharma, “What about beforehand? Before the doors opened? Were there any shipments that day? Deliveries? Moving things to or from storage?”

“I'm not sure, but that is when it would happen. We don't allow any deliveries during business hours. We don't want it to disrupt the experience of our guests.”

While Ralph spoke with dispatch, I entered the employee break room to have a look around.

A couple of vending machines—one for snacks, the other for soda—and a small table surrounded by three chairs. A counter. Sink. Microwave. A coffeemaker that needed cleaning. Federal health safety codes and employment-policy statements were posted prominently on the walls beside flyers announcing upcoming functions and events at the museum's two branches.

No security cameras, which, taking into consideration privacy concerns for staff, was not that much of a surprise.

We were on the first floor, but there was an elevator at the end of a short hallway. It was conveniently located to take deliveries up from the storage room to the museum's other levels.

“I'd like a list of all your volunteers and employees,” I said to Ms. Sharma. “Anyone who might use this room.”

“I really don't think this could have been done by any one of our staff.”

“Well, we're going to need to eliminate that possibility. Do your board members have access to these rooms?”

“Well, yes, but they are our
board members
.”

“I'll need their names as well. You have a volunteer working the front desk today—why is that? Why a volunteer?”

“We try to invite as much participation from our community partners and volunteers as we can. Do you really think other pieces might be damaged?”

“We'll have to check to make sure.”

I closed my eyes and pictured the layout of the building, the parking lot outside, the location of the security cameras, the footage I'd seen the other day of people entering and leaving the facility. “I'd like to see the footage of the employees arriving before the museum opened that day.”

Ralph came into the room. “Lombardi never showed up at the Chamber of Commerce. I need to take off to help coordinate the search for him.”

“I'm going to stay here and check out the surveillance video prior to when the doors opened for the public, see if there's anything there that'll help us out.”

“We're gonna need another car.”

“Yes,” I said, “we are.”

“Alright, look, I'll have someone pick me up and I'll get the paperwork started to requisition the Field Office to get me a vehicle. You keep the rental. I'll locate Guido. As soon as we find him, I'll give you a call.”

“Right.”

I went to Ms. Sharma's office to pull up the surveillance-camera footage from before the museum opened on July 23rd, the day the artifacts disappeared.