Ghoul Interrupted (34 page)

“Stop teaching my bird to say such inappropriate things!” I shrieked. I was on my last nerve with Gilley at the moment.

“I couldn’t help it!” he protested, rubbing his head. “I was bored and a Hooters commercial came on.”

“Hooters!” Doc mimicked, dancing around in a circle on his perch. “Hoot-hoot-hooooters!”

I moved menacingly toward Gilley again, but Heath interceded. “Okay, then!” he said, putting his arm across my shoulders and gently pulling me back. “How about if everybody takes a second to calm down?”

I let Heath maneuver me back toward my seat, but I narrowed my eyes at Gil and made a slashing motion across my neck.

Gil stuck his tongue out at me, but I knew he’d at least think before he taught Doc anything else. Of course, then he’d think again and teach Doc something awful anyway, but at least he’d likely give it a rest for a while.

Once I was safely back in my seat, Heath turned to Gil and said, “You found the professor?”

Gil nodded enthusiastically. I figured he was trying to keep Heath, at least, on his good side.

“Do you have an address?” Heath asked next.

Gilley handed him a slip of paper, eyed me, and wisely said, “I’ll wait here while you guys go check it out.”

Heath and I loaded back into his Durango and I navigated while he drove back toward town. When we entered a neighborhood near Santa Fe University, I pointed to a small gray adobe house with tinted windows. “That’s it,” I said.

Heath pulled into the driveway and we got out, noticing only as we crested the top step of the porch that it was littered with newspapers. “Uh-oh,” I whispered.

Heath rang the doorbell and knocked on the door. No one answered. I moved over to peer in through a window, bracing myself for what I might see, but the interior seemed to be in order.

“Let’s go around back,” I told him.

We moved to the back door and Heath tried the knob. No surprise it was locked tight. I cupped my hands and looked in through the kitchen window to view a fairly orderly kitchen, except for the table, which was cluttered with papers and files.

“Hey,” Heath whispered.

I turned and was surprised to find him holding open the door. “There was a key in here,” he said, holding up one of those fake rocks with a hidden compartment that hides a key.

“Dude! We can’t go in there!”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll go in. You stay here.”

My jaw dropped. “Don’t!” I told him. “Heath! That’s breaking and entering!”

He looked at me steadily. “Em, if we don’t start getting some answers here, more of my family members are going to end up dead or in the hospital. I’m taking the risk, okay?”

With that, he disappeared inside the house. I wavered maybe ten seconds before I swore under my breath and followed after him.

I found him sitting at the table sifting through a small pile of papers. Looking up, he said, “Nice of you to join me, Bonnie.”

“Yeah, well, I figure if you get caught, I’m still gonna go down as an accessory, Clyde.”

Heath winked at me and focused again on the pile of papers.

“What’cha got there?” I asked, stepping close.

“Not sure,” he muttered, handing me a few of them to look over.

I eyed the papers curiously. They seemed to be appraisals for various pieces of art that had incurred some damage, because printed on the page was a photo of an object and a detail of the damage, then a figure below that labeled
Purchase Price
.

The odd thing was that written in red pen below
that
was another figure, substantially higher than the purchase price.

“What do you think it means?” I asked, showing Heath one of the slips and pointing to the higher figure in red.

“All of these are Native American pieces,” Heath said, barely glancing up from the stack he was sorting through. “And they all have minimal damage, according to Bissell.”

I looked again at the paper in front of me, which did indeed detail that an Anasazi figurine had sustained only a nick on the bottom. It even had a “repair” estimate figure quoted beside the photo, which was only twenty dollars. But the new value that had been assigned the figurine was substantially less than the number in red. And a note on the page suggested that the figurine had been purchased for well below the value at the bottom of the page.

I looked up from the paper and started to put the pieces together. “Heath,” I said.

“Yeah?” he replied, his voice distracted as he continued to sort through the sheets he was holding.

“What if this Professor Bissell was running some sort of racket with Wyatt and Daryl?”

Heath lowered the papers, giving me his full attention. “You mean like getting them to slightly damage some of the artwork they moved in order for the owners to submit a claim to Art Treasure’s so that after they collected the insurance money, Bissell could offer them a chance to sell the damaged goods at a reduced market rate, repair it, and resell it as undamaged on the black market?”

I grinned. “Yeah. Pretty much exactly that. But what if Bissell also encouraged Wyatt and Daryl to go hunting for buried treasure too?”

“Then he’d have quite a racket going, wouldn’t he?” Heath said, glaring at the surroundings before handing me another one of the papers.

I gasped when I saw it. “The black hawk vessel!” I said, seeing the photo match perfectly the image of it I’d seen in the imprint I’d been sucked into back at the cave. “So it wasn’t destroyed when the demon escaped!”

“I don’t know how he got his hands on it,” Heath said angrily. “But from the picture you can tell that the top of the pot has been broken off.”

I squinted at the photo. Sure enough, the lid of the clay pot appeared to have been broken off. Bissell’s notes indicated the pot sustained only minimal damage, and he estimated its price tag in the thirty- to fifty-thousand-dollar range. “Whoa!” I exclaimed. “Is he kidding with this figure?”

“He’s not,” Heath said. “Relics like that go for a lot of money. It’s why we keep the location of our burial grounds a closely guarded secret and send out regular patrols along our back roads, but as you can tell, we’re not always successful stopping the grave robbers.”

Something clicked in my head when Heath said that, but with so many synapses firing at once, I found it hard to focus on the thought, especially when I watched Heath get up and move into the other rooms. I’d sort of hoped we’d be going soon. I badly wanted to get out of there, afraid that Heath’s SUV in the driveway would call attention to us if we lingered and Bissell’s neighbors knew he wasn’t home.

“I think we should go,” I said loudly when Heath disappeared down a hallway.

“In one sec,” I heard him say from the interior. “If the vessel’s here, I want to find it.”

I followed after him, preparing to talk him into leaving quickly, but came up short when I found him in what was obviously Bissell’s bedroom. “Whoa,” I said.

Heath stood just inside the doorway, allowing me a good view of the interior. Dresser drawers were pulled open and some of the clothing was spilling over the sides. The closet door was also open and several empty hangers hung on the rod and also cluttered the floor. On the bed was a small suitcase, which was open and empty.

“Somebody left in a hurry,” I said.

Heath walked over to an answering machine with a blinking red light on the nightstand. I would’ve made fun of it if the situation weren’t so tense; I mean, who still has an answering machine?

Heath hit the PLAY button and we both listened to the first message. “Bissell?” said an anxious male voice. “Dude! Where the hell are you? I’m at the storage unit, man. You gotta get here soon, okay? I’m freaking out! I think he knows we have the pot, Professor! I think he was at my apartment!”

The time stamp indicated that the message had been left the same day Heath, Gilley, and I had flown into Santa Fe.

Another message began, and again that same anxious male voice came through the recorder. “You son of a bitch!” he began. “I been waiting for you for three hours! I know you fuckin’ left me out here to hang, so you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna call that cop and tell him what I know and then I’m gonna point the finger at you! I’ll have him meet me right here at this storage unit, and I ain’t leaving till he gets a load a what you been up to!” With that, the line went dead.

There were a few more messages after that: one from Brad, the owner of the moving company, asking Bissell to return his call, and one from a girl who identified herself as Jenny, asking him to call her back because they hadn’t heard from him on a few of their appraisals and the clients were getting anxious.

“That sounds like Pigtails,” I said, pointing to the machine.

Heath grunted and hit the END button. With a sigh he said, “I don’t think the vessel’s here.”

“That’s my guess too,” I said. “I bet he either took it or hid it in the storage unit Wyatt was talking about.” There was no doubt in my mind the caller was Wyatt. His partner Daryl would have already been dead, and really, who else could it have been?

“So, where
is
Wyatt?” Heath wondered.

I shook my head. I had no idea what’d become of him. I almost asked Heath to play the message again, because there was something on the message that was wiggling around in my mind, but Heath was already focused on something else and he had his cell out, motioning for me to follow him out of the room.

A second later, I overheard him say, “Hey Gil, I need for you to find a storage unit registered to Professor Bissell.” There was a pause, then, “Yeah, I know that’s gonna be hard . . . but next to impossible? If there’s anyone that can do it, buddy, you can. . . .”

I grinned. Heath knew exactly how to get Gilley to work on something: Ply him with flattery. “What’s that?” he asked, reaching the back door and holding it open for me. “You already got it?”

I took the key from his hand and relocked the door while Heath tapped the address into his phone. “Thanks, bud,” Heath said. “I owe you one.”

We arrived at the U-Haul storage facility just five minutes later. Bissell had chosen something close to home at least.

Heath led the way to the unit Gil had pegged as Bissell’s, and we were a little surprised to find it unlocked. Heath pulled at the latch on the bottom of the door, and it rose easily, revealing an empty room, save for a few remnants of packing paper.

It was my turn to call Gilley. “Did you find it?” he asked the moment he answered my call.

“Yes. But it’s empty.”

“Figures,” Gil said. “What do you think was in it?”

“A whole lot of valuables,” I said. “But that’s not why I’m calling. Can you maybe get a trace on Professor Bissell? We’re pretty sure he’s left town, and when we go to the police, we’d like to point them in the right direction.”

I heard Gilley’s fingers flying across the keyboard again. “I’ve already run his credit report,” Gil said. “He has a credit card with Santa Fe University Credit Union.”

I stared at the floor. “And you’re telling me this because . . . ?”

“Credit union systems are easier to hack into than the big banks,” Gil told me. “I can run a trace on his credit card and see where he’s gone.”

I stifled a chuckle. “It is a really good thing you aren’t a criminal, Gil.”

“For everybody,” he agreed. “Here it is. Bissell purchased a ticket through American Airlines ten days ago. That was the last purchase he made with that credit card.”

“Does it say where he went?”

“Hang on,” Gilley said impatiently. “I have to hack a different system for that.”

I waited and in a moment Gil said, “He left two days after he purchased the ticket, headed for Buenos Aires.”

My brow furrowed. “What day was that?”

“The seventeenth,” Gil said.

I thought back to Bissell’s answering machine. The time stamp on Wyatt’s message had been the eighteenth. Something wasn’t adding up. “Gil, can you hang on a minute?”

“Sure.”

I put the phone to my chest and said to Heath, “Gil says Bissell left the country on the seventeenth.”

“Son of a bitch,” Heath swore. “He probably took the art with him. Did Gil find out where?”

Heath was missing the point. “Argentina. But that’s not what’s bugging me. There’s something off here.”

“What do you mean?”

I walked over to the storage unit and closed the door. I stared at the latch, which was missing any form of a lock. “If Bissell left in a hurry, do you really think he’d risk trying to smuggle the black market artifacts out of the country too?”

Heath shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, I know I’d probably give it a shot if the pieces were valuable enough.”

“Okay,” I said, pointing to the bare latch. “So, you mean to tell me that Wyatt comes here and waits for three hours for Bissell to show up, which we already know he doesn’t, because he’s left the country the day before, and in the three hours Wyatt’s waiting for him, he doesn’t notice the lock is gone from the storage unit and that all he has to do is pull the door up and take a look inside to figure out that Bissell has ditched him?”

Heath squinted at the latch. “What if it was still locked when Wyatt was here?” he suggested. “Maybe Wyatt managed to break into it and steal the contents himself?”

I pointed to the somewhat crowded facility. There were lots of students around and security cameras everywhere. We’d been able to enter the building because we’d come between the hours of eight and five, but after that, the sign out front said you’d need a key card to enter. “So he somehow manages to break into this unit without anyone noticing? I don’t think so.”

“What’s your point, M. J.?” Heath finally asked.

“If Wyatt didn’t take the art, then who did? I mean, we know that Daryl’s dead, and Wyatt somehow survived the demon escaping from the vessel, but someone’s got to be controlling the demon right now, and it sure doesn’t seem like it’s the professor—we know he’s flown the coop—and from that voice message, it sure as hell doesn’t sound like the demon has control over Wyatt.”