Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train (19 page)

Back in the tent, and much more comfortable now, Lacy told Henry she was fairly certain she’d just seen Todd. “Should we go out and see if we can still find him?”

“No way! What would we ask him? If he’s innocent, we’d be embarrassed, but if he’s really smuggling, we’d be killed! Maybe not right then, but as soon as possible. Plus, we’d be telling him we’re onto him.”

“Right. I wasn’t thinking.”  She crawled back to her previous spot on the sleeping bag and returned to their original topic. “How does Milo figure into this scenario?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t. But while you were gone I thought about this: Why did they wait two weeks? If they had my address book and all the numbers they needed, why not pop out here immediately?”

“You tell me.”

“I haven’t the foggiest.” Henry yawned. “Excuse me.” He scooted to the door flap and turned, exiting feet first, but before his face, like the Cheshire Cat, disappeared, he said, “Think about it, Lacy. We’ll figure this out. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Chapter Nineteen

Beyond the crest of the hill north of the camp, between the dig site and the tree-lined river valley, two men stood talking softly in Arabic. One man, small and wiry, spoke his native tongue. The other, tall, burly, and wearing a billed cap, had a pronounced American accent.

“It’s blackmail. What do we do about it?”

“Need you ask? Don’t you Americans have a saying?
Make him an offer he can’t refuse
.”

“He’s a kid.”

“So?”

“If he suspects we’re not going to pay, he’ll go straight to Hannah.”

“Then you will have to get rid of both of them.”

“Hannah? You think I’m going to tangle with Hannah? He’s a black belt.”

“You’re bigger.”

“He knows a dozen ways to kill you with a sock.”

“How could you be so stupid? You let a kid find the entire lot ten minutes after you stashed it at the bunkhouse. He must have been watching you.”

“He wasn’t watching me. I’m sure of that.”

The two men stood far enough below the crest of the hill that no one in camp would see them, even if they were out and about at this wee hour.

“And we can’t use the bunkhouse any longer.”

“We could recruit the kid to work with us. He drives the van. He could take the shipments somewhere else if we can find another spot.”

“I’ll work on that. You take care of the kid, and no mistakes this time.” This final order came in a soft, casual tone, but Todd Majewski entertained no illusions that it meant less than his own life if he screwed up again.

Chapter Twenty

Lacy woke up wet with sweat and saw that she’d kicked off her sleeping bag and tossed it aside. She lay on the bare tent floor, rocks on the ground beneath poking at her ribs. At first she thought she might be coming down with something, then realized the heat was coming from the air around her, not from within. She’d had no dinner the night before, or lunch either for that matter. Now hungry, thirsty, sweaty, and sore, she tried to decide which problem to tackle first. She hoped she hadn’t slept through breakfast. Checking the time on her iPod, she saw she had time to make it if she hurried.

At the morning buffet, she loaded her plate with fruit, yogurt, and hard rolls, nodded at Süleyman standing watch over the coffee urn, and carried her food to the back table the workers called the “grown-ups’ table.” Bob, Henry, and Paul were there drinking coffee, their paper plates and napkins in an unruly stack at one end of the table.

Bob said, “Job one today is to go to the bunkhouse and work on the finds we gave to Gülden. She’s cleaned and prepped them, but we need to decide what goes to Ankara and what we’ll keep. In case we have to leave at the end of the month, we need to be ready to move.” Bob seemed to add this last part for Lacy’s benefit. “Paul, you’re going with me, right?”

Paul looked at Lacy, his gaze wandering up her arms to her face. “Let me know when the van’s ready to leave.”

“Lucy? I think you should go, too. You haven’t yet looked at most of our artifacts.”

“Sure.” Lacy had resigned herself to answering to anything Bob called her. “But first I need to talk to the police. Apparently my good name has been besmirched, and I’m now a suspect in their investigation. I wish I knew who bumped into me the night Sierra was attacked. He could vouch for the fact that I was coming out of my tent and running
toward
the commotion. Not away from it.”

“He? Are you sure it was a he?” Paul asked.

Henry scooted his folding chair back, stood, and announced, loudly enough for the whole room to hear, “If anyone remembers bumping into Dr. Glass on the night of Sierra’s attack, please come forward. She needs to talk to you.”

Lacy glanced from table to table, hoping to see a telling expression. No more than half the workers were still there, the rest having left to begin the day’s work. “Pass the word!” she called out, and to Henry, she said, “Thanks. That was smart.”

“Sometimes the direct approach is best.”

Paul fiddled with his coffee mug. “That is, unless the police were keeping their suspicions under their hats. If so, we’ll have to tell them everyone knows now.”

A hand fell on Lacy’s shoulder. Süleyman had slipped up behind her. “It was me. I was the one who ran into you. I fell on top of your tent.”

* * *

Lacy brought her laptop to the big tent where she could get Internet access. Paul had promised to fetch her when the van was leaving for the dorm and had trekked off to Four Bars Hill to call the gendarmerie. He would tell them Lacy was back and ask whether they wanted to interview her here, at the dorm, or at their station. Lacy suggested it might be better if they came here so they could also talk to Süleyman.

Now that she’d found her credit card numbers she could check online to see if anyone was using them. Milo had told her to do this, but it made her nervous to think someone could be charging Gucci bags and Jimmy Choo shoes to her card. That thought reminded her of Joan Friedman’s new puppy, Jimmy Chew Shoes. She found three emails from Joan in her inbox, but, first things first, decided not to open them until the credit cards were squared away. She breathed a large sigh of relief when she saw no new charges, then immediately clicked on the links for reporting stolen/missing cards. Huge load off her mind!

She found fifty-three new messages in her inbox. Deleting the spam, she looked carefully at each sender’s address before hitting the delete key lest she accidently delete a new message from Goldenboy360. Todd Majewski was the site’s tech guru as well as its photographer, and Lacy would’ve liked to show him the first message, now in her “Saved Mail” folder, had Todd not been under a cloud of suspicion himself. She’d love to know if anything more could be revealed about Goldenboy360 and if his message had left a cybertrail in the ether of space, or whatever.

She Googled Milo Dakin and found a listing on Amazon for a book on Istanbul during World War II by W. M. Dakin. One book. Ranking: 7,327,108. Not exactly a best-seller. Except for that one item, he managed to stay under the Internet’s radar. What had she expected? Googling her own name brought up pages and pages of junk, references to talks she’d made, comments posted by students, links to her college’s website. So how did Milo manage to remain so obscure? Simple. As a wannabe spy, obscurity was his middle name and the nature of his game.

She wrote a long message to Joan, filling in the blanks she had, in her haste, omitted earlier. Although Lacy’s parents lived in California, far from Joan in Virginia, her mother sometimes emailed Joan for more details on Lacy’s life—details Lacy left out on purpose to avoid the theatrics that always followed. She assured Joan she would tell all to her father as soon as he returned from vacation. Then she could send the more or less unexpurgated version to her dad’s office, safe from the prying eyes of her mom.

She surfed websites for some of the phone numbers she lost when her cell phone was taken in Istanbul. On the Borac
ık carpet site, she found a number for Elbert MacSweeney. She wrote down numbers for the hotel in Istanbul that still held her luggage in storage, for the Pera Palace Hotel, and for the gendarmerie from whom she expected a visit soon. She pulled out the ph
one Milo had given her and entered these numbers into its contacts.

“Police are here. They want to talk to you.” Henry Jones stood at the open entrance, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun.

“Tell them to come in.”

“They want you to come out. They’re sitting at the lunch table under the trees.” He stayed put until she joined him. “The main man is Captain Kemal and his junior officer is Sergeant Osman.”

When she walked out of the big tent, the hot air hit her as if she’d opened a pottery kiln. Even with the low humidity, the air felt like a hundred degrees already—yet it was only mid-morning. She found the two officers where Henry had told her they’d be, but they had a third person with them, a bilingual woman wearing western dress whose job was to help with translations as necessary. Lacy pulled a chair to the shadier side of the table.

“The first thing I heard was a scream, about three in the morning. A little after three, I believe it was. I jumped up and crawled out of my tent on my hands and knees.”

“You crawled?” Captain Kemal, a tall man with a beaky nose, frowned. His large eyes drooped downward on the outer corners, making his face look as if it were melting.

“My tent is small. You have to crawl in and out.”

“Show us your tent.” The sergeant, shorter and younger than his superior, stood. The three followed Lacy through the camp to her little blue tent.

“That’s our kitchen, over there,” she said, pointing. “The smell of bread baking wakes me up every morning. Süleyman, our cook, sleeps there,” she said, indicating the old battered tent between her own and the kitchen with its lean-to sides and corrugated tin overhang. At their request, Lacy reenacted her emergence from the tent and the collision with an unseen runner followed by her plunge to the hard ground, beaten bare by other hands and feet. “That’s when I scraped my leg. I didn’t notice it until one of you pointed it out in our interview a couple of hours later.”

“Did not notice it? For two hours?”

“We were all frightened and confused and worried about Sierra. We didn’t know at that time if she was alive or not. Plus, poor little Madison was in a state of shock. Her teeth were chattering and she didn’t look good at all. My legs were the last thing on my mind.”

The officers dropped that line of questioning and went for the heart. “What was your relationship with Sierra Blue?”

“I hardly knew her.” Lacy expected this question. “She came to pick me up at the train station on my first day here, and we talked on the drive back. That’s the only conversation of any length I’ve ever had with her, and it was strictly about the work at the camp.”

Captain Kemal said, “You didn’t mention the fact that you’d just seen a man fly off the train and get killed?”

Lacy felt blood rising into her face. In case she had any doubt, they hadn’t forgotten she was the woman who’d come to see them the previous Sunday. “I did, but Sierra sort of changed the subject. And that suited me just fine because I didn’t really want to talk about it. Not yet. Not until I’d had time to sort it out in my own mind.”

* * *

Paul trudged toward the top of Four Bars Hill for the second time in less than an hour. The sweat trickling down his back and neck tickled like mosquitoes and kept him swatting for no good reason. On his first trip, he’d called the gendarmerie station and they’d responded quickly. They were talking to Süleyman now. This trip was to call Gülden, still at the dorm, and tell her to put all the finds with color on them out on the workbench.

Halfway up the hill he met Bob coming down. “Just on the phone with Alan again. No change in the old man’s condition. It’s beginning to look like a permanent coma. Question is, when will they turn off the machines?”

“Who’s left to make that decision?” Paul asked, swiping his forehead with the back of his arm. “His son is dead. His only two grandchildren are dead. His daughter-in-law’s incompetent.”

“Family lawyers, maybe. I don’t know.” Bob turned his head to one side and squinted through sweat-soaked eyelashes. His eyes were red from the salt. “They had a memorial service for Max yesterday, just folks from Foundation offices and the museum. Alan said it didn’t seem right, not having anything, but since no one from the family was capable of taking the initiative, they did it themselves. All very low-key to keep the press out. The autopsy results are in. Looks like it was heart failure, but that’s what they always say when they don’t know. No evidence of foulplay, though.”

“Right. Basically what we expected.”

Bob didn’t answer. Instead he looked past Paul’s shoulder. “What the hell are they coming up here for?”

Paul turned and saw the two green uniforms and a woman in western dress approaching. “Is everything all right?” he asked them. “Did you find out what you need to know?”

“No. Not at all! Things are worse than ever.”

Introducing herself, the translator took over in what sounded to Paul like a Bostonian accent. “Dr. Glass explained her version of what happened after she heard the scream. It made sense. Then Süleyman Güler told us it was he who had bumped into her and fell into her tent, knocking it askew.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Then your photographer, Todd Majewski, came up and confessed to the very same thing. He told us he was running toward the commotion when he tripped over a girl—he’s certain it was Dr. Glass—knocked her down and nearly flattened her tent.”

Paul didn’t know what to say. Bob looked at him, frowning, a trickle of perspiration coursing down the bridge of his nose.

Captain Kemal said, “One or both of them are lying.”

“Both of them, probably,” added Sergeant Osman.

“Pretty woman in trouble, needs an alibi. More than enough men willing to say whatever it takes to rescue her.”

“They should have talked to each other before they talked to us.”

Paul said, “Let me talk to both of them. I’ll find out who is lying. I think I know already.”

“Who?”

“Let me hold off on my opinions until I talk to them. I’ll come to your station this afternoon—or tomorrow at the latest.”

“We need to get this mess cleared up,” Bob Mueller said. “We have a lot to do here, and we’re running out of time to do it.”

“It cannot be helped,” Kemal said, his sharp tone conveying irritation. “You are the ones who called us, remember? We cannot stop an investigation into what appears to be attempted murder just because you find our presence—“

“Inconvenient!” The interpreter finished his sentence for him, her own voice duplicating the impatience she heard in his.

Paul dipped two fingers in his shirt pocket and felt the warm gold of the earring. Knowing the police were on their way, he’d taken it from the safe in his tent. This was as good a time as any to hand it over to authorities, he decided. The longer he kept it hidden, the more likely the dig was to get embroiled in accusations of smuggling. These officers wouldn’t lose the item, he was sure, but they probably wouldn’t know what to do with it, either. Whatever they did, he wanted it out of his hands. He hadn’t, however, intended to hand it over to them in the presence of Bob Mueller. His hand rose from his pocket, empty.

He looked at Bob, still ranting about how they were running out of time, and Paul knew he had to do it. The police were ready to leave. His fingers returned to the shirt pocket. “I want you to take custody of this,” he said. “It’s old, it’s valuable, and it’s stolen. It doesn’t belong here.”

Mueller snatched the earring from the policeman’s hand. “It
does
belong here!” He looked as if he were about to hit Paul with his fist. Sputtering something unintelligible, he closed his fist around the earring and ground the knuckles of both hands into his own forehead.