Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Seattle? Last I checked you were my prisoner in a labyrinth in a cave on the opposite side of the planet. And also-” she turned and pretended to struggle to recall something. “Oh yes,” she said with a finger on her chin, “you have no evidence. No stolen art. No proof of who was at the scene. Nothing. Like the lamas say, your thieves were made of thin air.”

“We can place you and Lodi in Seattle, and know you left the next day, flew back to Tibet, to transfer what you stole from Dolan to Director Ming.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Because Ming stole it from the government of China. Because he had to get it back before the audit. Give me Ming and you can walk. If I find the art without you there will be no more room to negotiate,” Corbett warned.

“But you’ll never find it. You know the routine. The collection gets broken up, sent to dealers in Europe. Impossible to trace.” She shook her head and gazed at the American, seeming to notice his Tibetan clothes for the first time. It seemed to soften her somehow. “What is wrong with you?” she sighed. “You’re obsessing. Wealth gets redistributed. No one gets hurt. Dolan gets a check from his insurance company.”

“What about the girl who died?”

The smile faded from Punji’s face. “What girl? No one died.”

“The nanny. Abigail Morgan. Her body was found in the bay five days later.”

The British woman searched Corbett’s eyes for a moment. “Not a chance. No one died.”

Corbett looked at Lu, who walked in front of them. “He doesn’t speak English,” McDowell said, and grabbed a handful of Corbett’s shirt to force his gaze back to her. “Damn you, what girl?”

“She disappeared that night. She went back to the house for something and must have seen something. She was killed, thrown off a bridge.”

“Impossible.” McDowell said in a slow whisper, then looked at the wall for a long moment, at an image of a lama with his novices. “You have no evidence. Of anything. I am telling you nothing. But theoretically, if two people flew in for a job like that, they would be the kind of people interested only in the art. Just business. Theoretically,” she said, fixing Corbett with a somber look, “the alarm sensors were cut in three places, at the video feed, the house alarm box, and at the remote police alarm mounted on the fence. Theoretically, the entire Tibetan collection was taken, but only the Tibetan collection. Let’s say the backdoor lock cylinder was popped out, and the thieves wore latex gloves, leaving no fingerprints.” It was practically a confession. But she was telling him to make Corbett believe her, Shan realized, to make him understand she and Lodi were not murderers.

“Theoretically, there was a third person who wasn’t always with you,” Shan ventured.

“No way.” McDowell kept studying Corbett as she spoke. “You don’t really know she was killed there.” It was a statement, not a question. “There’s no official inquiry into a killing. If there was, the press would have gone into a frenzy over a nanny killed at the Dolan estate.”

Corbett frowned but said nothing. Shan stared at him, suddenly perplexed. The FBI agent had told him the death was why he had come to Tibet. He recalled his first conversation with Corbett. The American had stated her death as a fact connected to the robbery. But he had told Shan of the strange, accidental way he had been involved in the discovery and recovery of her body, had admitted to Shan that finding her had not been part of his robbery investigation. There had been a message, on the FBI computer. The boss found out you opened papers on the babysitter, ordered it closed. Shan had thought it was about another matter. He had not understood the word babysitter. It must mean the nanny, the college student who died. Corbett had been ordered to stop investigating the death of the young woman. Yet here he was, in the earth temple, risking his career, perhaps his life, to find an answer.

Punji McDowell looked away, took a step further into the maze. “Why did you bring the little girl?” she asked abruptly, staring into the darkness. The anger in her voice was gone, replaced with something like worry.

“Dawa was lost,” Shan said. “She came to find her Tibetan family. To hear about the old ways. She is from these hills originally. Descended from the Bumpari clan.”

McDowell sighed and offered another small, melancholy smile.

“She came to teach us how to learn about the temple,” Lokesh said, as if correcting Shan, reminding Shan of the words Surya had spoken.

“The old ways are a bit obtuse,” the British woman said. “I thought gaining entry to the temple would be the hardest part.” She eyed Shan, and switched to English. “We’re looking for the same thing. Get me to the upper chambers, where the records must be, and I’ll let you go. All of you.”

Shan studied her. “First you must tell us something. Why you made that tomb Ming found.”

McDowell’s green eyes flashed. She returned Shan’s steady gaze for a moment, then slowly smiled. “I think I like Ming better as an enemy than a partner. It was quite entertaining.”

“You had to give up the robe from Fiona.”

“I was sorry. But she understood. Cousin Fiona and I have drunk tea together many times, for many years. I told her it was for Lodi. She sent a herder on horseback to Zhoka for the bones, with a prayer to protect him. I promised when it was over I would stay with her for a week and read all her books out loud.”

“What do you mean an enemy?” Yao asked, and studied McDowell intensely. “You mean a quarrel among thieves.”

“Another mistake. I’m not a thief,” she said in a voice grown suddenly fierce.

Yao frowned and threw up his hands. “You just told us you…” He paused and noticed how Shan and McDowell stared at each other.

“Do the FBI files show any other thefts ever committed by Lodi and Miss McDowell?” Shan asked Corbett without breaking from the woman’s gaze.

“None,” the American replied. “Not even a record of a parking ticket anywhere on the planet. What’s your point?”

“She wasn’t a thief,” Shan said, his mind racing to understand what McDowell was telling them, and not telling them. “She was a courier. Someone else was there, someone else disabled the security system. Lodi and Punji just carried the collection away.”

McDowell offered a thin smile then turned away and stepped closer to the nearest wall, acting as if suddenly interested in a painting of a green deity.

“They all worked together for years,” Shan explained. “Lodi, Ming, Khan, McDowell, and someone else close to Dolan.” He turned to Corbett. “Dolan had to know the pieces Ming sold him were from the museum. He was a sophisticated collector, and Ming never would have risked it unless he was paid a fortune. Maybe there was a middleman, an art dealer somewhere, but Dolan knew he wasn’t buying reproductions. They were partners in crime against the Chinese people. But then, because Ming was in trouble, Ming urgently had to have the art back in Beijing and Dolan decided to extract a huge price for helping him. So this time there were two sides, two teams. Ming directed Lodi and Punji in taking the artifacts from Seattle, Dolan or his agent had Khan and Lu at work in Beijing, to steal what was to be Ming’s payment for the return of the artifacts.”

“Dolan wanted the fresco?” Corbett asked. “No way.”

Shan did not reply, but looked at McDowell’s back. “Everything had to be balanced, coordinated. It was why the crimes were committed at the same hour, because Ming and Dolan had grown suspicious of each other.”

“Dolan,” Corbett repeated with a chill in his voice. “He would never get his hands dirty. But he has an art dealer in Seattle.” The American fell into deep thought. “None of that makes Ming her enemy,” he said after a moment.