Jaxon took out a handkerchief and touching as little of the chess piece as possible, dropped it into another zip-lock baggie. “Looks expensive. Neither of you ordered it, right?”
Marlene shook her head. But Karp said, “It’s carved by a guy named Torres. Apparently, it is very, very expensive and each piece is hand carved.” He explained how he had come by his sudden knowledge. He bit his lip before adding, “I think we’re being told that Kane has selected another target.”
“You think Kane sent this to you?” Jaxon asked.
Karp nodded. “Yeah, it’s looking that way.” He told them about the two black chess pieces that had been found in his office. “First, I thought it might be a couple of my guys misplaced them. Then I asked my receptionist about it. She said they’d appeared on her desk on two different mornings and, thinking the same thing I did, put them in my office so they could be given back to their rightful owner.”
“She working for Kane, too, maybe?” Jaxon said.
“Nah, if she’s anything more than she appears to be-an uptight, efficient, widowed receptionist-then I’m Winston Churchill,” Karp said. “She’s going to check with the janitorial company that cleans the office. No, I think this is part of Kane’s little game-first the black bishop and Fey is killed; then week before last, the black knight, and the target is Flanagan, the dirty cop. I should say that Lucy thinks it’s not Kane sending us these pieces, but someone close enough to him to know his plans and is sending these as some sort of coded message. But I think Kane’s telling us he’s about to make his move and is challenging us to counter him.”
“So who’s the white bishop?” Marlene asked.
“Good question,” Karp replied. “If the type of piece has something to do with occupation and which side of the fence you sit-bishops for church people, knights for cops, white for good, black for bad-then one of the ‘good guys’ with the church.”
“What about Father Dugan?” Marlene said. “He and Alejandro were the ones who uncovered the ‘No Prosecution’ files and gave them to you.”
“That’s a possibility,” Karp said. “I’ll call Bill Denton and ask him to assign some guys to Dugan. Where is he now?”
“St. Malachy’s Church on West Forty-ninth,” Marlene said. “The Actors’ Chapel.”
Karp picked up the telephone and placed a call to his friend Denton, the brother of the current mayor of New York and recently appointed chief of police for the NYPD. When Denton answered, Karp quickly explained what had happened and asked for the extra set of eyes on the priest. “Thanks, Bill,” he said. “Let’s talk over lunch one of these days soon.” He hung up the telephone and turned back to Jaxon. “You want to send somebody by to pick up the other pieces. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand their significance and they’ve been handled, but maybe your people can still find something of value.”
Jaxon nodded. “We might even be able to piece the newspaper Kane used to pack the box and find out where it’s from. But what if this chess piece doesn’t represent Dugan? What if it’s just white for good and black for bad, in which case, the white bishop could be someone else?”
“You know, I may have seen someone suspicious watching the loft the past couple of days,” Marlene said. “I just happened to be looking down across Grand and noticed a couple of guys, looked Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. I hate to stereotype, but they were paying a lot of attention to what’s going on here.”
“The guys selling the purses!” Zak crowed and punched his brother on the arm. “I told you.”
“You thought they were federal agents,” Giancarlo replied, punching back.
“I never said that,” Zak contended. “I said they’re watching the loft. I didn’t say if they were feds or terrorists.”
“So you saw them, too,” their mother interjected. “They were certainly more interested in watching the loft than selling purses, especially after the boys got home from school. I was about to go visit them when that poor bicycle guy delivered the package and got jumped.”
“Well, if you see them again, sic the cops on them,” Jaxon said.
“Oh, I’ll sic more than that.” Marlene smiled and scratched Gilgamesh behind his ears.
14
The next afternoon Karp was still mulling over the chess pieces-the two from his office had been picked up at eight sharp-when Mrs. Milquetost buzzed him. “Mr. Karp, Mr. Guma is here with another…gentleman. Shall I tell them you’re too busy to see them now?” she asked hopefully.
“That’s okay, Mrs. Milquetost, he’ll probably just outwait me; he doesn’t have much else to do,” he replied. “Send him in.”
A moment later, Ray Guma walked in the door. “Hey, thanks for all the support with Eva Braun out there.”
“You deserve it,” Karp said, then spotted the man behind Guma and grinned as he stood up. “Well, hello, Jack. I heard Ray had been talking to your group but didn’t know you were in town.”
“Top secret…worried about the paparazzi, you know,” Jack Swanburg replied with a chuckle. “A handsome face like this drives the girls wild, and if they knew I was here, I’d never get any work done.”
Karp laughed. While Swanburg was one of the preeminent forensic pathologists in the country, he was no Tom Cruise in the looks department. In fact, he looked a lot more like Santa Claus on holiday with his white beard, twinkling blue eyes, and a pronounced round belly that-Karp suspected-probably shook like the proverbial bowl full of jelly. The gut was covered with a bright yellow aloha shirt and red suspenders holding up a pair of baggy cargo shorts that exposed hairy white legs that obviously rarely saw the sun. The pipe that hung perpetually from his mouth, even when he wasn’t smoking, completed the jolly old elf picture, and Karp half expected him to break out in a “ho ho ho.”
Swanburg had appeared as an expert witness more than a thousand times to testify about the cause of death in homicide cases. It should have been enough morbidity for any one man. However, he also had what he called a “hobby” as the president of 221B Baker Street, Inc., a loose affiliation of scientists who volunteered to help police solve difficult homicide cases by combining their expertise into what their literature described as a “many- headed Sherlock Holmes.”
In fact, the name of the group-221B Baker Street-was a reference to their fictional hero, the master of deduction and the herald of the real-life collaboration of science and police work. Holmes was said to live at 221B Baker Street in London. Many of the group’s members were forensic scientists, whose work-such as forensic anthropology or blood-splatter analysis-was regularly used by police agencies. But most of the others made a living in other scientific endeavors, such as geology and entomology, not normally associated with crimes but applicable in the right situations.
Karp had first heard of the group from Marlene, who’d met one of the members, Charlotte Gates, a forensic anthropologist from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Gates had been called in to exhume the clandestine graves of Indian boys murdered by the demonic priest Hans Lichner; she’d been the first to discover the rosary beads.
Karp had met Swanburg when he needed a forensics expert to testify in the Coney Island Four case. The old man had essentially dismantled the rapists’ version of events.
When Guma presented the Stavros case to the bureau chiefs and questions were raised about the need to find the victim’s body, Karp recalled that 221B Baker Street’s specialty was locating hidden graves of murder victims. When the meeting was over, he’d suggested that Guma give them a call.
Like most law professionals, Guma was leery of amateur sleuths who wanted to play detective.
There, the tables were turned. He was asked to present his evidence, as well as his theory on where the body might be located. This time, he was the one peppered with questions by the two dozen 221B members in the auditorium at a local sheriff’s office.
