Hero Under Cover. Suzanne Brockmann
you want to subject yourself to a solid forty-five minutes of complaining, I wouldn’t. I give you my permission to use the ‘scatterbrained employee didn’t give me the message’ excuse for the next time he catches up with you.”
Annie smiled. “Thanks. Did Ben Sullivan want me to call him back?”
“He said something about going out of town,” Cara said, glancing back at the phone message slip. “Who is he? How do you know him? Come on, fill me in. Height, weight, marital status?”
“As far as I know, he’s single,” Annie said, then smiled. “But he’s also seventy-five years old, so get that matchmaking gleam out of your eyes.”
Cara made a face in disappointment.
“Ben’s an old friend of my parents.” Annie leaned back in her chair, breathing deeply. “I don’t think I’ve seen him since, wow, since I was about fifteen. Apparently, he was talking to Mom and Dad recently, and they told him about me—you know, that I opened this lab a few years ago. When the offer to buy came in on this death mask, he requested that I do the necessary authentication.”
“Instead of Golden,” Cara said.
Annie grinned. “Instead of Golden.” She sat forward, stretching her arms over her head. “Anyone else call?”
Cara nodded. “Yeah. I saved the best message for last. It came in on the answering machine. Let me play it for you.”
Cara slid off the table, handing Annie the message slips, then pushed the message button on the machine. The tape rewound quickly, then a voice spoke.
It was odd, all whispery and strange, as if the caller had deliberately tried to disguise his voice. “The mask you have gained possession of does not belong to the world of the living. It is the property of Stands Against the Storm. Deliver it at once to his people, or be prepared to face his evil spirit’s rage. The doors to the twilight world are opened wide, and Stands Against the Storm will take you back with him.”
There was a click as the line was disconnected. Cara punched one of the buttons on the machine and the tape stopped running. “So, okay.” She grinned. “Which one of your weirdo friends left that message? And who the heck is Stands Against the Storm?”
But Annie wasn’t laughing. Swearing softly under her breath, she stood up, hoisted the crate containing the death mask off her desk and went down the hall toward the lab. Cara followed, her grin fading.
“What?” Cara asked, watching as Annie locked the front door. “What’s the matter?”
“We’ve got to put this in the safe,” Annie said, gesturing to the package in her arms.
“Annie, who was that on the tape?” Cara asked, eyes narrowing.
“Some crackpot,” Annie said, heading back to the sturdy vault that sat directly in the middle of the house, surrounded by the lab in the front and the office in the rear. It was secure, impenetrable. She would feel a lot better after she locked the gold death mask inside.
“If it was just some crackpot,” Cara demanded, “why did you rush across the room and lock the door?”
Annie opened the innocuous-looking closet door to reveal the combination lock of the big safe. She spun the red dial several times before entering the numbers. “Because it would be foolish not to take precautions, crackpot or not.” She looked up at her assistant. “You must not have had a chance to read the background info I left you on this project.”
Cara shrugged expansively. “I cannot tell a lie. I had about an hour of free time last night, and I spent it watching ‘Quantum Leap’ instead of reading about nineteenth-century Indian chiefs.”
Setting the package on the top shelf of the vault, Annie swung the door shut, locking it securely. “Native Americans, not Indians,” she corrected Cara. “In a nutshell, the artifact we’re testing for authenticity is supposedly a gold casting of a death mask of a Navaho named Stands Against the Storm. He was one of the greatest Native American leaders. He was a brilliant man who truly understood Western culture. He tried to help the white leaders understand his own people as thoroughly.”
Cara followed her back into the office. “How come I’ve never heard of him?” she asked. “I mean, everyone knows Sitting Bull and Geronimo. Why not this guy?”
Annie sat down behind her desk, frowning at the chaos on its surface. Why was it that paperwork seemed to multiply whenever she went away for a few days? “Sitting Bull and Geronimo were warriors,” she said. “Stands Against the Storm was a man of peace. He didn’t get as much press as the war party leaders, but not from lack of trying. In fact, he was in England, trying to drum up support for his people among the British, when he died.” She shook her head. “His death was a major blow to the Navaho cause.”
“If Stands Against the Storm was such a peaceful guy,” Cara said, “then why would he have an evil spirit?”
“The Navaho believe that when people die, they become ghosts or spirits,” Annie said. “It doesn’t matter how nice or kind a person was during his life. When he dies, he becomes malevolent and he gets back at all the people who did him wrong during his lifetime. Chances are, the nicer the guy was, the more evil his spirit would be—the more he’d have to avenge. You know, nice guys finish last and all that.”
“But if Stands Against the Storm died in England,” Cara said, “then how could his spirit come after you? Assuming for the sake of this discussion that the Navaho are right about this spirit stuff,” she added.
“Death is a major problem for the Navaho,” Annie said. She smiled. “Actually, I can’t think of too many cultures that look forward to death, but the Navaho really don’t like it. In fact, if someone dies inside a house, even today, that house will sometimes be abandoned. See, the Navaho believe that the place a person dies in, and the things he touches before dying or even after he’s dead, can contain his bad spirit. Making a death mask would be a real invitation to disaster. The Navaho would never make something like a death mask. But it was the custom at the time in England, you know, to make a mold of the dead person’s face and then cast a mask from it to get a likeness. I guess Stands Against the Storm was something of a celebrity—and certainly a curiosity, a Red Indian from the Wild West—so when he died, they made a death mask.”
Annie looked over at the answering machine. What she couldn’t figure out was how it had become public knowledge that she was working on authenticating Stands Against the Storm’s death mask. Unless Ben Sullivan, or Steven Marshall, the purchaser, had leaked something….
“Hey, Annie?”
She met Cara’s worried brown eyes. “It just occurred to me,” the taller woman said. “That message on the answering machine is basically a…Well, it’s a death threat.”
“It was just some nut.” Annie shrugged it off. “Besides, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“You gotta admit, it’s creepy,” Cara said. “Maybe we should, I don’t know…Call the police?”
Annie groaned, dropping her head onto her arms on the desk top. “No more police, no more FBI, no way. I’d much rather be haunted by the spirit of Stands Against the Storm.”
ANNIE SAT UP IN BED, WIDE-EYED in the darkness as the burglar alarm shrieked.
Her heart pounded from being awakened so suddenly. She clicked on the light and grabbed her robe. Oh, Christmas! This damned alarm was going to raise the entire neighborhood.
She ran down the stairs two at a time and turned on the lights in the foyer as she crossed toward the alarm-system control panel.
Oh my God, thought Annie. It wasn’t a malfunction! The alarm schematic showed a breach in the system on the first floor. A window in the lab was marked as the intruder’s point of entry.
Suddenly she was very glad for the shrieking alarm. Across the street, she could see the neighbors’ lights go