backseat.
The plainclothes cop eyed us, nodded. He wore silver-rimmed glasses on a tired face. Crew Cut introduced him as Sergeant Schenck.
“Where to?” Schenck asked.
Jake started to give directions to his apartment in Beit Hanina. I cut him off.
“A hospital.”
“I’m fine,” Jake protested. Weakly.
“Take us to an ER.” My tone suggested not an inch of wiggle room.
“You’re staying at the American Colony, Dr. Brennan?” Schenck.
The boys had been thorough.
“Yes.”
Schenck made a U-turn onto the blacktop.
During the ride, Jake stayed awake, but grew passive. At my request, Schenck radioed ahead to the ER.
When Schenck pulled up, two orderlies swept Jake from the car, strapped him to a gurney, and whisked him away for CTs or MRIs or whatever techno-wizardry is brought to bear in cases of head trauma.
Schenck and Crew Cut handed me a form. I signed. They sped off.
A nurse pumped me for information on Jake. I supplied what I could. I signed other forms. I learned I was at Hadassah Hospital, on the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, just a few minutes north of the Israel National Police Headquarters.
Paperwork completed, I took a seat in the waiting area, prepared for a long stay. I’d been there ten minutes when a tall man in aviator shades pushed through the double doors.
I felt, what? Relief? Gratitude? Embarrassment?
Drawing close, Ryan slid the aviators onto his head.
“You good, soldier?” The electric blues were filled with concern.
“Dandy.”
“Offense run scrimmages on your face?”
“I slipped in a tomb.”
“I hate it when that happens.” Ryan’s mouth did that twitchy thing it does when I’m looking like hell.
“Don’t say it,” I warned.
My hair was sweaty from climbing in and out of the Kidron. My face was scraped and swollen from my tunnel dive. My jacket was smeared with paw prints. I was dirt-speckled, bramble-scratched, and my jeans and fingernails were caked with enough crypt mud to plaster a hut.
Ryan dropped into the chair beside me.
“What went down out there?”
I told him about the tomb and the jackal, and about the incoming rounds from the Hevrat Kadisha.
“Jake lost consciousness?”
“Briefly.” I left out details of the runaway truck.
“Probably a mild concussion.”
“Probably.”
“Where’s Max?”
I told him.
“Better hope these guys follow their own dictates and let the dead lie.”
I explained Jake’s theory that the James ossuary had been looted from this tomb, making the place the Jesus family crypt.
“This hypothesis is based on carvings on old boxes?”
“Jake claims to have more proof at his lab. Says it’s dynamite.”
A woman arrived with an infant. The infant was crying. The woman eyed me, kept walking, and took a seat in the farthest bank of chairs.
“I saw something, Ryan.” With one thumbnail, I dug mud from under the other. “When I was in the lower chamber.”
“Something?”
I described what I’d spotted through the hole created when the rock fell out.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded.
Across the room the baby was picking up steam. The mother rose and began pacing the floor.
I thought of Katy. I remembered the night she spiked a temperature of 105, and the emergency-room run with Pete. Suddenly, I missed my daughter very much.
“How did you know we were here?” I asked, dragging my thoughts back to the present.
“Schenck’s major crimes. He knew Friedman was working Kaplan, and that I’d come to Israel with some female American anthropologist. Schenck put two and two together and dimed Friedman.”
“Any news on that front?”
“Kaplan’s denying he copped the necklace.”
“That’s it?”
“Not quite.”
24
“TURNS OUT THE ACCUSED, THAT WOULD BEKAPLAN, AND THEwronged, that would be Litvak, go way back.”
“Kaplan is a friend of the shopkeeper he robbed?”
“Distant cousin and sometime supplier. Kaplan provides Litvak with the occasional, how did Litvak phrase it? Item of curiosity.”
“Litvak deals in antiquities?”
Ryan nodded.
“Illegal?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not.”
“Litvak and Kaplan had had words just prior to the disappearance of the necklace.”
“Words over what?”
“Kaplan promised something and failed to deliver. Litvak was pissed. Things got heated. Kaplan stormed out.”
“Palming the necklace on his way.”
Ryan nodded. “Litvak was so peeved he called the cops.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Litvak’s not the sharpest knife in the set. And a bit of a hothead.”
The infant was cranking up for a personal best. The woman walked by, patting its back.
Ryan and I smiled them past.
“What was Kaplan supposed to have delivered to Litvak?” I asked when mother and child had moved off.
“An item of curiosity.”
I rolled my eyes. It hurt.
Ryan folded his shades and slid them into his shirt pocket. Leaning back, he stretched his legs and laced his fingers on top of his stomach.
“A gen-oo-ine Masada relic.”
I was about to say something clever like, “No shit!” when the triage nurse entered the waiting area and strode our way. Ryan and I stood.
“Mr. Drum has suffered a mild concussion. Dr. Epstein has decided to keep him overnight.”
“You’re admitting him?”
