them.”
Drake leaned forward, reaching for one of the maze drawings. “Maybe I missed something, but last I checked, Midas was just a myth.”
Jada nodded. “Maybe. But my father always said that every legend has at least a little history at its core.”
“What are all these?” Drake asked, holding up the maze drawing.
She took it from his hand. “My dad had been doing tons of research, but his inquiries were split pretty evenly on two subjects. The first was alchemy. The other one was labyrinths.”
“What’s the connection?” Drake asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Sully said, sifting through the illustrations. “Jada dug up references this morning on some of the more famous labyrinths.”
“Sketching helps me think,” Jada said. “Most of the ancient labyrinths only exist as ruins and foundations, but archaeologists think they’ve got some of them figured out. There are diagrams. I tried drawing them, trying to find design connections, that kind of thing.”
“Any luck?” Drake asked.
Jada’s expression turned contemplative. “A little,” she said, reaching for a larger book from the coffee table. “But the biggest piece of luck was right in front of me from the second we found this book in the library, and it took me until about twenty minutes ago to realize it.”
She tapped the cover, drawing their attention to the author’s name: Maynard P. Cheney.
“You know him?” Sully asked.
“No,” Jada said. “But my father had been talking to the guy constantly in the last few weeks. Cheney is working on a new exhibit for the Museum of Natural History. Want to guess the subject?”
Drake held up the labyrinth illustration in his hand and raised his eyebrows.
“Exactly,” Jada said, nodding.
“The museum’s only a few blocks from here,” Sully said as he stood.
“Let’s go have a talk with Mr. Cheney,” Drake replied, setting the illustration aside.
Jada rose, and they both turned to look at her. She seemed confused for a moment, and then her eyes flashed with anger.
“Oh, hell no,” she said, glancing back and forth between them. “My father is dead, and this guy might help us figure out why. If you want some girl who’s going to lock the door and hide behind the sofa, then you’ve got the wrong damsel in distress.”
Sully looked like he might argue, the thought of Jada in danger making him go pale, but one look from her and he didn’t put up an argument. Drake liked her more and more.
As Jada opened the door and led the way into the hall, he glanced at Sully. “I guess she’s coming along.”
Sully gave a wan smile. “You want to try to stop her?”
Drake followed Jada out the door. “Not in the least.”
As they walked down 81st Street, Drake hung back a ways, keeping an eye on Sully and Jada but also keenly aware of their surroundings. He checked every pedestrian and every vehicle but saw no sign that they were being followed. On the way uptown, he had considered Sully’s paranoia excessive, but now he wasn’t so sure. They had only the edges of the puzzle surrounding Luka’s murder, but if he had made some huge discovery involving alchemy, that likely meant gold. Maybe a lot of gold. And there were a great many people who would do just about anything for such treasure. He scanned the windows and rooftops but realized that it had become his turn to be overly paranoid. Even if Luka’s killers-and logic suggested there was more than one, considering how much effort it required to sneak a steamer trunk with a corpse inside it onto a train platform without anyone noticing-had found out where Jada had been hiding, they could not have predicted which route Drake and Sully and Jada would take when leaving the apartment.
Still, he was worried. As they walked, he turned the whole thing over in his mind. Luka’s wife had made the introductions between her husband and her employer. Drake wasn’t sure what her position was at Phoenix Innovations, but it stood to reason that she knew at least some of the details of the secret project Henriksen wanted Luka to work on. When Luka turned him down and started working on it himself, that would have put Olivia in a difficult position. Would she have told Henriksen what her husband was up to?
Jada referred to Olivia as her “wicked stepmother.” It might be a family joke, but Drake doubted it. The question was whether Olivia Hzujak valued her job more than she did her marriage. And if she had told Henriksen what Luka had been up to, would this billionaire CEO have gone so far as to have the man murdered?
Drake didn’t know. But someone had killed Luka, and to do it in such an odd and gruesome fashion-well, the killers hadn’t tried to hide their work. On the contrary, they had virtually assured that the whole world would know of it. By now, details of the discovery of Luka’s body would be on every news channel and all over the Internet.
Something didn’t click there. If Henriksen had wanted Luka dead, would he have made such a spectacle of the crime? It seemed far too great a risk for a man with so much to lose.
Ruminating on it, he picked up his pace as Sully and Jada passed the museum on the right and reached the corner of Central Park West. They looked comfortable together, like father and daughter. Sully spent most of his time focusing on his own fortunes, so it was fascinating to watch him become so wrapped up in someone else’s. He had no children of his own, but Jada was his goddaughter, and it was pretty clear he would do anything to protect her. Even if Drake hadn’t wanted to help Jada-which he did both for her own sake and because the puzzle intrigued him-he would have been on board just because Sully had asked.
It was the one thing that Drake and Jada had in common. As of this morning, Sully was the closest thing either one of them had to family. Drake hustled up the museum steps and through the door, finding Sully and Jada waiting for him just inside.
“Anything?” Sully asked.
“Not that I saw,” Drake replied, “but I’m no detective, so what do I know?”
Sully frowned. “Nah. If they knew where Jada was, they’d have tailed us from the apartment.”
Jada looked relieved as Sully headed off toward the information desk. For a person who had learned of her father’s murder only half a day before, she was holding together well.
By the time they caught up to Sully, he already had spoken to the neatly attired man behind the desk, who had picked up a phone and was having a conversation while half turned away from them. A moment later he hung up the phone and informed them that someone from Dr. Cheney’s team would be down to fetch them momentarily. Drake fought the temptation to make a crack about anyone “fetching” them and joined Sully and Jada in standing around an enormous plant, trying not to look awkward.
An attractive young woman arrived to fetch them, introducing herself as a graduate student working with Dr. Cheney. She wore her hair up in a loose bun, artfully disarrayed, and though her dark red sweater and gray skirt were fashionable and neat, Drake thought she looked more like a movie superspy masquerading as a museum employee than an actual graduate student. She made him want to enroll in classes or become a museum curator, and though Jada and Sully asked her questions while she let them up to the second floor, Drake missed the initial bits of conversation.
“-honestly surprised that the board went along with it,” the woman said as she marched up the stairs ahead of them. “Whitney Memorial Hall has been used for special exhibits numerous times, but in this case, they actually relocated the oceanic birds exhibit to the Akeley Gallery. Most of the birds, I should say. The Akeley is a smaller space, so some had to be put into storage. In any case, it underscores how enthusiastic they are about Dr. Cheney’s work that they’re willing to go to that extent. He’s been working night and day for weeks in preparation.”
They reached the top of the stairs in a wide rotunda. Through a huge entryway behind him, Drake saw elephants, and the sight saddened him. He had seen the real thing, up close and personal and on their own territory, and encountering them here felt almost grotesque.
“I’m sorry,” he said, tearing his attention away from the elephant. “I zoned out for a second. What’s this exhibit Mr. Cheney’s working on?”
The question earned him a look of scorn from their guide. “Dr. Cheney’s exhibit is called ‘Labyrinths of the Ancient World.’ His research into historical records and the physical evidence has been groundbreaking.”
“And he’s the curator of the exhibit?” Jada asked.
