Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

I had heard of Zacharius, the investigative reporter. He’d been a thorn in the side of the SFPD ever since he’d uncovered some kind of corruption involving higher-ups at the department.

“Jon Nunn,” I said. He stared at me as if trying to assess what I was all about, then gave me a loose handshake, kissed Rosemary’s cheek, and left.

I looked around the place-living room big enough to fit my apartment four times, the marble this and marble that, the cut-glass chandeliers, expensive art on the walls, the swimming pool I glimpsed through the French doors-the kind of place that would make Sarah happy. Although the woman to whom all this belonged was anything but. She sat back down on the couch after Zacharius left and was looking up at me, almost questioningly. Her face had grown thinner since our first meeting, and her eyes seemed to have grown larger, prettier.

“Who are the big boys , Rosemary?”

“Oh, you know Hank Zacharius, he’s into that stuff… he has his theories.” She paused. “So why are you here? Is there any news?”

“No, nothing.” I suddenly felt awkward at being there. “I guess I just wanted to check up on you…”

Her face reddened. “I’ve told you all I know, Detective.”

I walked over to the window and looked down at the tree-lined valley. I thought of Christopher Thomas standing where I now stood. Nothing was enough for him, the money, the wife, the power-some people’s appetites could never be satisfied. What a bastard . I wouldn’t blame her if she did kill him. Something in me stirred, the big boys… Zacharius and his clichés…

I walked back to the sofa and sat down across from her. “Rosemary, you need to level with me.”

“I have leveled with you.” She looked steadily into my eyes.

“You have to tell me whatever you know about your husband’s shady dealings.”

She wouldn’t budge. “You really need to leave right now; my lawyer told me that I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“Look, it’s probably only going to get worse after this. You’re the main suspect in his disappearance. The chance of him turning up alive is zero. You have to give me some information that’ll point the police in another direction-take the spotlight away from you. This is no time to be worrying about protecting the family name.”

She sighed. “I guess there were rumors about forgeries, about drugs. He knew about the rumors. He thought they were funny. I never took any of them seriously.”

The sky had started to darken. “What was Zacharius-?”

Rosemary looked up behind me. I turned. The maid had come in; behind her were two guys I recognized from the department-Grygera and Swanson.

“What is it?” I asked. For some reason, I had thought they’d come to talk to me, but, no, it was Rosemary they were looking at. I turned to her. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes.

Grygera said, “Rosemary Thomas, I have a warrant for your arrest.”

Joseph Arthur Kroege hated the summer. Not just the heat, but the attitude it seemed to foster, the total lack of professionalism among his museum employees. As if the warm weather were not only an excuse to play, but justification to drop all responsibility. Each year he knew half his staff would be vacationing at one European shoreline or another, although he didn’t know which and didn’t care.

The German Historical Museum of Berlin was his only concern since taking over as director nearly two decades earlier. An academic by training-and some said by nature -Kroege believed in hard work and routine.

Today, as every other day, he’d left his flat in Mitte on upper Friedrichstrasse at exactly 8:12, had taken the U-Bahn to Museumsinsel, and had arrived at the museum at nine sharp. He’d spent only six minutes, rather than his usual ten, reviewing his daily calendar when he realized the crate from America was still languishing in a basement workroom and had been for a week. That was it. Enough. Infuriating. That one of his prized objects-and one of the most popular with the museum’s visitors-should be sitting in a dank workroom galled him.

Kroege reached for his phone, then realized the museum installers were, like just about everyone else, on vacation.

The hallway leading to the basement storeroom was hot, the consequence of turning off the museum’s air-conditioning at night, an energy-saving effort that Kroege disapproved of despite the board vote, and particularly irritating at the moment with his starched white shirt already sticking to his thick upper body.

He was sorry he’d loaned the iron maiden to the American museum in the first place and would not have if the curator hadn’t persisted in a letter-writing campaign that culminated in her calling and pleading, insisting it would be the centerpiece of an exhibition devoted to savage-torture devices, and, in her polite-though-forthright manner, convincing him. Unlike most of the American curators Kroege dealt with, who acted as if they were entitled to anything and everything, Rosemary Thomas had been a velvet steamroller, as genteel as she was persuasive. And good to her word, her exhibition at the McFall Art Museum had garnered serious press, which had credited his museum with the loan, and so perhaps it had not been a bad idea, though right now he was anxious to get it back on display.

The workroom felt like a tomb, no sign or sense of a human presence among the multisized crates and art objects awaiting repair, tools strewn along a worktable, sawdust on the floor, more suspended in the hot, sticky air.

Kroege snorted with disgust. How dare his employees leave the room in such condition? He shook his head as he made his way toward the largest crate, taller than he by several feet and twice as wide.

Kroege circled the crate as if inspecting some object from outer space and stopped dead when he noticed a foot-long crack in the plywood. Had the maiden been damaged in shipping?

He plucked an electric drill from the worktable and quickly removed a dozen Sheetrock screws until one side of the panel fell open-and with that came the faint odor of rotten eggs or fruit.

Kroege, features screwed up, imagined some idiotic American workman accidentally packing his lunch along with the precious maiden.

He stared at the one exposed side. It looked fine. But he had to see if it had been damaged elsewhere.

More screws undone, more plywood tugged away, until the maiden stood in all her glory, a black iron monolith, forbidding and impressive.

Kroege pictured its insides, the iron prongs that closed on its living victims, a torture device from which the only escape was death.

He ran his hand over the hard, pebbly surface, ignoring the smell, which was stronger now, more like rotting meat than fruit or eggs, but the device itself looked fine, unscathed.

Just then he looked down and saw the liquid seeping out from the bottom.

“Was zum Teufel…?”

Kroege bent over to swipe a finger through the puddle, but never reached it, the stench so strong, so repulsive, that he immediately straightened up, fighting the urge to gag.

He stared at the iron maiden, then slowly, and with much effort, began to pry her open.

He didn’t get far.

The object inside, as big as Kroege, wrapped in heavy, opaque plastic and bound with tape and rope, tumbled out and hit the floor with a thud. Then, as its contents settled, the top of the plastic split open and a milky ooze, studded with lumps and streaked with lemony yellow and deep crimson, pooled around his shoes, while the stench filled his nose and caught in the back of his throat like burning acid and rot. When, as if hypnotized, he dared a closer look, he recognized a human skull and the black hole of a mouth that appeared to be moving.