is the staff entrance you were talking about?”
She blinked, lifted her gaze from the dying Dr. Cheney, and looked at him. “Back there,” she said, glancing the way they’d come. “Through the Minotaur’s alcove. It’s the dark area on the left as you-”
But Drake had stopped listening. He remembered. They had just passed it, probably only a second or two before the killer had gone into that darkness. He might even have been hiding there in the shadows, waiting as they went by so as not to make any noise.
“Stay with her,” he told Sully.
Sully nodded, though he didn’t look happy about it.
Drake ran through the passage in a crouch, standing as he emerged in the corridor. He heard Jada following, wished she would wait with Sully, but didn’t take the time to argue with her. A couple of hours with the adult Jada Hzujak and he knew she wasn’t the sort of woman who was going to sit idly by when it came time for action.
They raced through two turns of the labyrinth, retracing their steps, and came to the Minotaur’s alcove. Drake didn’t slow, plunging into the darkness, hands in front of him. He stumbled over loose cables on the floor but caught himself on the wall at the rear of the alcove.
“Watch your step, Jada,” he said, his eyes adjusting as he found a doorknob and twisted it, bursting through into a narrow, dimly lit corridor that looked nothing like the interior of the labyrinth.
Sound equipment and a workbench blocked the way to the right, so they went left, hurtling down the narrow hall created by the hollow backs of the labyrinth’s walls. Plywood and two-by-fours and bare bulbs made him think of being backstage in a theater.
What the hell am I doing? Drake thought. Luka had been murdered, and now Dr. Cheney, who apparently had helped him in his labyrinth research, was dying. Whatever Luka had discovered, someone didn’t want anybody talking about it. If the killers thought that Jada’s father might have shared his secrets with her, she would be a target as well, just as she had feared, and yet here they were chasing after one of the very people who would want her dead.
The corridor cut diagonally to the right, and he followed it. It zigzagged in between turns in the labyrinth, a hidden space, a maze within the maze. He could hear Jada’s footfalls right behind him, her breathing so close that he practically could feel it, and he knew they were being foolish taking this risk. But he also knew that she wanted answers and would never stop just to save herself.
The maze ended abruptly. The walls on either side cut away, the halls of the labyrinth turning, but their narrow corridor arrived at a pair of double metal doors with an exit sign glowing above them and a warning placard stating the door was for the use of staff only.
Drake slammed through the door and found himself on a stairwell landing. Jada skidded to a halt beside him, looking first up and then down.
“Which way?” she asked, her hazel eyes alight with fierce determination, her magenta bangs framing her face.
“No way to tell,” Drake said. “And we’d be fools to try guessing. We’ve gotta get back to Sully and get out of here.”
“What?” Jada snapped, turning on him. “Dr. Cheney’s our one lead, and he’s back there dying. If we catch this guy, we could make him tell us-”
Drake shook his head. “We’re not gonna catch him. He’s got a head start, and we don’t know where he is or what he looks like. Whether he went up or down, by now he’s mixed in with employees or with visitors and is on his way out of this place. Best thing to do right now is get you the hell out of here.”
Jada’s eyes narrowed. “You think I’m in danger?”
“You were hiding out in a friend’s apartment because you thought you were in danger,” Drake reminded her. “It’s just that now I believe you.”
“Nice,” Jada said. “Didn’t you used to be charming?”
“Yeah. Strangely, I’m not in the mood today.”
Jada’s flinty exterior gave way, and for a moment he saw the pain and vulnerability beneath.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s move.”
She ran back down the sawdust-smelling corridor. Drake followed, wondering where it would all lead. He and Sully weren’t bodyguards or private detectives, and they sure as hell weren’t cops. This wasn’t a job for them, but Sully would never see it that way, and Drake had the feeling that he himself was already in too deep to walk away.
Jada had left the door to the Minotaur’s alcove partway open, but when they went back through it, Drake closed it tightly and wiped the knobs on both sides, his mind racing ahead. The police would be there any minute, and then all their options would be taken away from them. Whatever happened after that would be decided by the detectives running the case.
They ducked and went through the low-ceilinged passage, emerging just a few feet from where two security guards stood by Dr. Maynard Cheney’s body, one of them on his cell phone, reporting the crime, and the other just scratching his head in dismay.
When Drake and Jada came in, the guards turned and one of them reached for the Taser at his side.
“Whoa!” Drake said, putting his hands up. “We’re with them, pal.”
The guards looked over to Sully and the graduate student, who sat against the wall a short way down the corridor.
“It’s okay,” the woman said. “They were with me when I found him.”
The guards ignored Drake and Jada after that. They looked quite shaken, and Drake thought they would be very relieved when the police arrived.
He glanced over at the body. Dr. Cheney lay in the same position, still bleeding, flesh turning paler as the blood drained from him. The man’s chest had ceased to rise and fall. One glance at the graduate student’s red- rimmed eyes and her tears and the way Sully held her-self-conscious and awkward at the intimacy of her grief and the comfort he offered-and it was clear no ambulance would be needed. Not that Drake had needed confirmation. The moment he had seen the extent of Cheney’s wounds, he had known the man’s fate was sealed.
“Uncle Vic,” Jada said softly, her eyes beginning to well up at the sight of the dead man. “We need to go.”
Sully gave a shake of his head, cautioning them to be wary of what they said around the guards. He leaned in and spoke to the graduate student in gentle tones Drake rarely had heard from him.
“Gretchen,” he said quietly, “tell them what you told me. And quickly, please. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Apparently the graduate student had a name, and Drake thought it fit her well. Drake and Jada drew nearer, and he glanced over his shoulder to make sure the guards weren’t making any effort to overhear them.
Gretchen looked at Jada. “You’re Luka Hzujak’s daughter?”
Jada nodded.
“And he’s really dead?”
Jada took a deep breath, wiping away a tear, visibly fighting her grief. “Yeah. Murdered. And whoever killed him probably killed Dr. Cheney, too.”
“What’s the connection, Gretchen?” Drake asked quietly, glancing again at the guards, wondering how long before the police pulled up in front of the museum. “Jada’s father was studying labyrinths. He made some kind of discovery, figured out some kind of mystery that had him excited.”
“I don’t know everything,” Gretchen said. “It’s just-my God, it’s just history. But I know that Maynard told Professor Hzujak about a connection he’d found between the labyrinthine tomb from Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty and the labyrinth of Knossos-the one with the Minotaur-”
“I thought that was just a legend,” Drake interrupted.
“So did I,” Gretchen said, nodding. “But the historical record says there was something being shown there in the first century A.D. It’s accepted that the labyrinth of Knossos existed, but the question is how much of the story is real and how much is myth.
“Maynard thought he had found part of the answer. The museum is running an archaeological dig near the City of Crocodiles in Egypt right now-my brother Ian is one of the managers on the project-and they’ve found some amazing things.”
“My father was in Egypt just a few weeks ago,” Jada said in a hushed voice.
