Marcus Sakey - Brilliance

Cooper stood outside, his hands in his pockets. He wondered how often Drew Peters had come here, if he’d stood in the same place. Staring at the mausoleum where his wife lay.

Geographically proximate, unchanging, undisturbed, always accessible, and perfectly safe.

It fits. But would Peters really use it like that?

One way to find out.

The door was oak, dense and heavy, mounted on massive forged hinges that looked like they might date back to the founding of the cemetery. The lock was newer, a deadbolt that looked out of place. Cooper paused, glanced around. Some distance away, an elderly woman limped down the path, a bouquet of flowers dangling from one hand. There was the sound of a lawn mower, and, more distant, a siren.

He knelt in front of the door and took a closer look at the lock. A year ago, when Cooper had needed to get through locked doors, he used a ram. Lock picking was for thieves, not DAR agents.

Then he became a thief. It hadn’t taken long to learn; once you understood the fundamentals, the rest was just a matter of practice, and he’d had time. The lock was stiff, but he had it popped inside two minutes.

Cooper gripped the iron handle and pulled. With a rusty screech, the hinges gave. The door opened slowly. Sharp sunlight spilled into the crypt. The floor was stone, thick with dust, and the air smelled stale.

Here’s another first.

He stepped inside the crypt and tugged the door closed behind him.

The bright sun vanished, but watery light filtered through the stained glass. If the light had been a sound it would have been a requiem, slow and quiet and full of loss. Cooper stood still and let his eyes adjust. The mausoleum was one room, thirty feet on a side, a bench in the center, ledges carved like bunk beds in the wall. Four high and three across, on all but the entrance wall, where the door took up one of the columns. Forty-four stone berths, all but two of them filled. Forty-two coffins, laying in orderly rest, names and dates carved beneath each one. A house for the dead. He felt a chill to think it, a primal shiver down the lizard part of his brain.

The light was too dim to make out the inscriptions, and he pulled out his datapad, uncrumpled it, and let the digital glow flood across the stone. The act felt strangely more offensive than breaking in had. Something wrong with introducing the modern world to this tomb, with using a device that couldn’t have been conceived of when this place was built.

And then he saw that he wasn’t the first to do it.

The box was about the size of a pack of matches, matte gray metal mounted just inside and above the door. No label, no LEDs glowing, nothing to reveal its purpose, but Cooper recognized it. It was government technology. Most of the box was a battery. The rest was a motion sensor and a transmitter. The thing was a long-term monitoring device, the kind you could put in a safe house for a decade and never think of again, just let it sit and watch, passive until it caught a hint of motion and broadcast its signal.

The monitor meant two things. First, that he was right in his hunch. The evidence was hidden here. The family might think to install a motion alarm in the crypt, but it wouldn’t be DAR technology.

Which led to the second thing. The moment Cooper had opened the door, the monitor would have sent a blast to the director. His phone would be ringing, his d-pad pinging, sending one message:

Someone is where you don’t want them to be.

Cooper’s heart kicked up a notch. Peters was a man with astonishing power. The moment he got the alarm, he would dispatch a team, faceless most likely, heavily-armed men and women sent hurtling to this place. And because Peters couldn’t risk a subject talking, that team would have shoot-to-kill orders.

On the upside, it does mean your brain is working. The evidence is here.

So get it and get the hell out. You’ve already lost about a minute. You’ve got…call it two more.

Shit.

He leaned in close, read the first inscription. “Tara Eaton, faithful wife, 1812–1859.” The next for her husband, Edward Eaton, buried two years later.

Cooper spun, hustled to the other end of the crypt. Bodies would have been laid to rest in the order of their deaths, which meant that Director Peters’s wife should be near the end.

The third to last, it turned out. “Elizabeth Eaton, beloved daughter, 1962–2005.” Above the inscription rested an elegant mahogany coffin, the wood still lustrous, though the top was covered with a thin layer of even dust. Cooper stared at it, struck by what he was looking at, a box with the remnants of a person in it, a woman he’d never met, mother to children who jokingly called him Uncle Nick, whom he’d tickled and wrestled and teased.

There was no time to wince over it. He started feeling his way around the coffin, fingers running over every inlaid detail, tracing the curves and edges. Tapping along the edges, feeling blindly on the sides. Nothing. He grimaced, then angled his head, and leaned in over the box, feeling the cold stone above it, the dust in his eyes and nose as he ran his hands through darkness. He checked every edge, dragged his hands through the narrow space between the coffin and the berth wall.

Nothing.

Cooper stepped back. A spiderweb stuck to his hair, and he brushed it away.

There’s one place you haven’t checked…

He flashed to a fantasy of Natalie dead, hidden away in a room like this, and him sneaking in, breaking open the box, facing what lay inside…

The thought was repellent in every way. But it was possible.

Cooper had no tools, nothing to break the top open with. He’d have to throw it around, maybe slam it against the bench until the wood splintered, the remnants of Elizabeth Eaton jarring and tossing inside. An abomination, but the only way.

Except—

Would Peters have done the same?

No. He’d have brought tools. Cracked it open just enough, but still, cracked it open.

Has it been?

—that the seal on the coffin was perfect, the lid fitting the base so smoothly it was hard to see where one ended and the other began. Not only sealed; there were no signs of tool marks. Breaking the lid open would have left a mark.

His first thought was relief.

His second was frustration. Peters hadn’t hidden what he was looking for in his dead wife’s mausoleum. He’d been wrong.

Only, no. The monitor on the wall gave it away. The evidence was here. It just wasn’t in her coffin.

Cooper stepped back, glanced at his watch. One minute left. He whirled, looked around the room. Forty-two coffins. A stone bench. He dashed to it, dropped down, checked the underside. Smooth. Same with the legs and the edges. Panic starting now. There was an iron crucifix above the door. He checked it hurriedly. Nothing.

Forty-five seconds.

It had to be here. Nothing else made sense. His gift had predicted it, the motion sensor had proved it, he just had to find it.

One of the other coffins? There were forty-one of them. No time to do even a cursory examination.

He stood in the center of the room, spinning slowly. Come on, come on. Willing his intuition to strike. Thirty seconds. He rubbed his hands together, dust flying.

Dust—

There’s no way to hide anything here without disturbing the dust.

And no way to smooth dust out evenly.

So the best thing to do is clear it off entirely. Still a tell, but a less obvious one, especially as more dust settles.

—flying.

He sprinted back to the coffins. Elizabeth was third from last. The two after read “Margaret Eaton, 1921–2006,” and “Theodore Eaton, 1918–2007.”