William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

Kitteredge nodded, pleased. “That’s one of the legends,” he said. “One I’m sure that Morris and Rossetti embraced.”

“So these two guys figured they’d dig up an old sword and rule the country,” Shawn said. “It sounds kind of nuts, but okay-let’s go with it. Even if they’re still alive, they’ve got to be two hundred years old by now, and too weak to lift the sword, let alone stick it into Filkins’ chest. So how can they have anything to do with this murder?”

“They don’t,” Kitteredge said. “Not directly. But there were others. It took a great deal of work to ferret this out, but I don’t believe Morris and Rosetti and those few of their Pre-Raphaelite brethren who joined in the search for Excalibur were working on their own initiative, nor did they come to the idea on their own. They were pawns of a greater force.”

“What kind of force?” Gus said.

“Call them what you will,” Kitteredge said. “The Templars. The Rosicrucians. Freemasons. Throughout history there have been shadowy forces working, and when some outsider gets a glimpse of them, they are always attributed to one group or another. I chose to call them simply the Cabal, because I have no idea with whom or what ideology they are associated.

“But rest assured, they are wealthy and they are powerful and they never go away,” Kitteredge said. “They had hoped to use Morris and Rossetti to gain the sword and possibly the nation, but they failed. That doesn’t mean they’ve stopped trying. They have a man named Polidori, who has been leading their search. He was behind Filkins’ murder. I’m sure of it. But how many people are involved and where they are hiding I have no idea.”

“And you think they’re so powerful they’ve infiltrated the Santa Barbara Police Department?” Gus said.

“It’s impossible to know their reach,” Kitteredge said.

“Wait a minute,” Shawn said. “I thought you said they found the sword.”

“I believe Morris and Rossetti did,” Kitteredge said. “And then they hid it again, rather than turn it over to the Cabal. I believe that is why Rossetti made sure his last painting stayed hidden for all these years. Because it contains clues to Excalibur’s hiding place.”

“But why kill Filkins?” Gus said.

“I can’t say for sure,” Kitteredge said solemnly. “But I believe they were sending me a message: Stay away from this picture-stay away from the sword.”

“Wouldn’t the message have been clearer if the sword had been poking through your chest?” Shawn said.

For a moment, all the animation left Kitteredge’s face. Gus realized suddenly that the professor was much older than he’d assumed, close to sixty at least. But usually there was so much energy flowing through the man it was impossible to think of him as aging, let alone aged. Now, however, Gus could see all his years weighing on him.

“It should have been me,” Kitteredge said. “I would accept death for myself before seeing an innocent killed because of my work. But I wasn’t given a choice in the matter. So all I can do now is work to avenge his death. The only way I know to do that is to find the sword and make sure it never falls into the hands of the Cabal.”

The three of them stood in silence for a long moment. Then Shawn nodded his acceptance.

“Okay, so my plan,” he said. “How we get into that gallery.”

Kitteredge looked like he was about to throw his arms around Shawn in one of his bearlike embraces. “Yes?”

Shawn walked over to the Plexiglas box housing the fertility sculpture and gave it a shove. The pedestal rocked slightly, and Shawn shoved it again. This time it tipped over and crashed to the ground.

All around them, alarm bells started ringing.

If Shawn had been disappointed that steel doors didn’t slam down on all the galleries once the alarm went off, he didn’t show it. Maybe that was because he was too busy running.

That course of action made sense for the three of them. They needed to get out of the Oceanic gallery before a squad of security guards arrived to protect the fertility figure.

But it didn’t make a lot of sense for any of the hundreds of museum visitors who were also running as fast as they could for the museum exits. After all, it wasn’t a fire alarm that had gone off, just the theft protection system. But while whoever had designed the museum’s security had installed alarms with substantially different sounds for various kinds of disasters, he’d neglected to include a way to alert the public to the distinction. To an untrained ear the bells ringing throughout the museum might be signaling a raging inferno in the nearest gallery.

And of course, even if that thought had not occurred to them individually, the sight of two young men in tuxedos shouting “Fire!” and racing toward the emergency exits certainly would have put it in many heads. Following their directions, the tourists blasted through doors wired to set off further alarms when opened.

Moving as swiftly and efficiently as any male salmon who hasn’t gotten the memo that the way upstream has been blocked by a new dam, Shawn and Gus led Kitteredge back through the centuries of European paintings until they arrived at the vestibule of the special-exhibitions gallery where The Defence of Guenevere had been installed. The entrance was blocked off by yellow-and-black crime scene tape, but there was no one standing in front of the door.

“Let’s go,” Gus said. “We’ve got to get in and out fast.”

“Fast?” Kitteredge said. “I’m going to need some time with the painting.”

“How much time?” Gus said.

“Ideally a couple of decades,” Kitteredge said. “We’re talking about the solution to a puzzle that has gone unanswered for more than a hundred years.”

“The only way you’re getting decades is if they agree to hang the picture in your cell,” Shawn said. “You’ve got three minutes, tops.”

“Three minutes!” Kitteredge said. “That’s almost worse than nothing.”

“Then we might as well leave now,” Shawn said. “Because it’s not going to take much more than three minutes to clear everyone out of this place. Then they’re going to lock it down and start going room by room to make sure nothing is missing. And since you are technically missing, you really don’t want anyone to find you here.”

Kitteredge looked helplessly to Gus, as if hoping the higher court would overturn the verdict. “If Jean-Francois Champollion had only been able to study the Rosetta Stone for three minutes, he never would have been able to work out the translations between demotic and hieroglyphics.”

“If his choice had been between looking at the stone and spending the rest of his life breaking rocks, I think we both know which way he would have gone,” Gus said.

“But we have something that Champ guy never dreamed of,” Shawn said. He dug in the roomy pocket of his rental pants and pulled out his cell phone. “As the new counter girl at Burger Town said to Gus, take a picture; it will last longer.”

Kitteredge’s face lit up in joy, and Gus was so pleased that Shawn had found a way to answer everyone’s needs that he was willing to ignore the fact that the counter girl had actually been talking to Shawn, and that she had appended an extra word to the end of her sentence that had rendered her photographic suggestion even less friendly.

With Kitteredge clutching the cell phone, they started across the vestibule, heading straight for the crime scene tape. Shawn was just reaching out to push open the glass door when a gruff voice called out from behind them.

“Hey!” the voice said. “You can’t go that way.”

The voice belonged to the uniformed police officer who had been standing guard at the gallery door. And he was marching up to them.