Alex Archer - The Pretender's Gambit

Taking the booties, Annja quickly pulled them on, then added the disposable gloves. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” Kai’s face turned serious and all humor left his eyes. “All kidding aside, what you’re gonna see is pretty bad.”

“I’ll be all right. Thank you.” Annja couldn’t remember all the violence she’d seen since she’d inherited Joan of Arc’s sword and changed her life. She didn’t regret taking up the sword, though. She’d gotten to help a lot of people, but more than that she’d gotten to see a lot of things that had been lost to history forever. The deaths were going to happen, and she’d stopped more from taking place. The trade-off was worth it.

Skirting the bloody footprints and the evidence markers beside them, she walked down the hallway to join Bart. They’d been friends for years and she’d enjoyed his company. He was one of the few people who wasn’t an archaeologist or a television fanboy who could listen to her for hours. She returned the favor when he needed a sounding board about a case.

“Did I get you out of bed?” Bart asked.

The smell of death lingered in the apartment behind Bart, an odor that Annja had grown far too familiar with. She breathed more shallowly.

“I was up working.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Authenticating a couple of Mayan pieces for a collector.”

“Sounds boring. Everybody’s got a Mayan piece tucked away somewhere.”

“I was also binge watching Dr. Who on Netflix.”

A small smile twisted Bart’s lips and Annja was glad to lighten his mood. He took his work seriously, and he didn’t take too much time off from it. That was one of the things they had in common.

“Where are you in the Whoinverse?”

“Still missing David Tennant.”

“Aren’t we all.” Bart’s eyes narrowed as they neared the door. “I wish you didn’t have to see this. The ME’s office is backlogged tonight, so they couldn’t make it out here to get the body, otherwise I’d have the deceased moved before I called you in. But I want to proceed with this as soon as I can because I don’t want whoever did this to get away.”

“It’ll be okay.”

Bart hesitated just a second, then turned and ushered her into apartment 4F. The door around the lock had been broken. Pieces of the locking mechanism hung shattered. Other pieces had fallen onto the floor.

* * *

THE ROOM HELD crime-scene techs and Detective Joe Broadhurst, Bart’s current partner, and there was precious little room left over. Broadhurst was in his midforties, thin and fit. He had dark hair and dark eyes, a neatly trimmed goatee that—just for a moment—made Annja think of Garin Braden.

“Professor Creed.” Broadhurst smiled politely and nodded at Annja.

“Detective Broadhurst.”

“I would say it’s good to see you. Instead, I’m just going to apologize I’m seeing you again under these circumstances.”

Annja nodded and turned her attention to the room. The living area was small and neatly kept for the most part. “An older man lives here by himself?”

“Yes.” Broadhurst seemed a little surprised. “Somebody told you?”

Annja pointed to the foil remains of the TV dinner sitting on the coffee table. “Single guy.” She pointed to the small television in the corner. It was an older set, not a flatscreen. “Older guy who listens to the television more than he watches it.” She pointed at the wall where a single black-and-white photograph of a young man and woman hung. “I’m presuming that’s the guy at a much younger age. He lives alone or there would be more photographs.” She touched the green easy chair that had seen better days and an equally battered, nonmatching couch. “And better furniture that wouldn’t be so dusty.”

Broadhurst smiled a little more. “You could be a cop.”

“She’s better than a cop,” Bart said. “She’s going to be able to help us with the elephant.”

“Elephant?” Annja asked. “You’ve got an elephant in here somewhere? Now that would be a surprise. But if you’ve got an elephant in here, I’m sure that would have broken the lease. Maybe the floor.”

Bart gestured to the back of the apartment. “This is where it gets bad.”

* * *

“HIS NAME WAS Maurice Benyovszky,” Broadhurst said. “According to a couple of the neighbors, he ran a small mail-order business out of his home. He sounds like a little old guy trying to get by. From the looks of the apartment, unless he’s got a safe deposit box stuffed full of money somewhere, Benyovszky wasn’t getting rich.”

The dead man was in his seventies at least, and he might still have looked like the black-and-white picture in the living room if someone hadn’t beaten his face into pulp. Dressed in a faded red house robe and pajamas, the old man lay crumpled on the floor in front of a large desk covered with knick-knacks, a computer and a digital camera. Paper bags covered his hands, put there by the crime-scene techs to preserve evidence. He might have been five feet tall and weighed a hundred and ten pounds.

Blood stained the back wall and curtains over the room’s window and the ceiling in a surprisingly straight line.

“His killer beat him to death with what was probably a hammer of some kind.” Bart’s voice was calm and hollow, his professional tone when he was talking about a case. “We haven’t found the murder weapon yet, but that’s what we’re looking for. The cast-off blood tells us where the killer and his accomplice were standing.”

“There were two of them?” After the initial shock of seeing the body, Annja’s mind slipped into problem-solving mode.

“Yeah. The killer—” Bart pointed to large, bloody footprints that were far larger than the dead man would have made “—and the accomplice.” He indicated a second set of footprints that were smaller, yet still larger than the victim’s.

“Nobody saw anything?” Even though this was the metro area and early in the morning, Annja still struggled to believe no one had come to the old man’s aid. He’d had time to yell for help.

“Not till one of the neighbors came through and found the lock on the apartment door shattered. Then there was the blood in the hallway. He decided not to come in or announce himself, got back to his own apartment and called us. This is what we found.”

“When?”

“About twelve forty-five. When we found out about the elephant, I wanted to call you.”

“Where’s the elephant?” Annja asked.

Bart crossed the room over to the computer. “Here.”

Walking around the dead man, Annja joined Bart at the computer. He moved the mouse and the monitor came out of hibernation, clearing to reveal a photograph of a white jade elephant. The image gave no indication of how large the piece was, but it was exquisitely rendered with a lot of careful detail.

Taken from a side view, the elephant had its trunk curled in and sharp sheaths that covered its tusks. A thick rectangle lay across its back from its neck to its tail and hung down to almost the rounded stomach. Atop its back, a pair of warriors rode in a covered basket. One of the warriors held a spear. The other held a bow with an arrow nocked. A skullcap covered the elephant’s head. On the skullcap, a flowering plant stood out in worn relief.

Annja’s interest flared up at once and she leaned closer to the screen. “The elephant looks Persian or Indian.”

“How do you know that?” Broadhurst asked.

Bart said nothing, just took out his field notebook and started taking down information.

“The ears,” Annja replied. “Indian elephants have smaller ears than African elephants.”

“Maybe the guy who made this just liked small-eared elephants.” Broadhurst shrugged. “Maybe large ears were harder to make.”