Daniel shook his head again. Bad policy. Never foul your own nest. Sooner or later, it's gonna bite you.
He stood up, eyes roving, pistol sights roving, that twitchy adrenaline making every screaming gull into a siren, the foghorn out on the Morgan's Point buoy a hooting alarm. An alarm someone might be calling in right now, whoever had set this up to smear mud on the Morgan name. And he couldn't hit the phone to beat them to it. He had to remember he was dead.
Daniel retreated into the darkness of the crypt, rushing through the complicated dance of resetting the gate interlocks and then the rear stone slab. Resetting everything, crash-dive priority.
Cops could be out there on the grounds in ten minutes or so. Cops could see the cameras if they looked, and cops were good at looking. Cops would be calling Alice for a key, wanting to go through the surveillance output, trying to find out who left that body. Bad scene if Dan showed up on the tape.
He had to change some parameters on the video system, set it to wipe the record after a day, edit the tape already running. And backdate the log to show the system setup changes dated to while Gary was still around to make them. All while under the gun.
Well, Ben had designed the system to allow that kind of high-pressure diddling. Part of thinking ahead.
And then he had to find out more about who or what lived in the Pratt tunnels. Someone there wanted to stir up trouble for Morgans, someone there knew about Morgans and seals, someone there knew Dan was still alive and that Morgans still used this place and watched the monitors, even with Gary off to school. Dan calmed his anger. He couldn't strike back yet — he didn't know enough. Time to sit and watch and make plans, spider time.
"Measure three times and cut once." That was Kate Rowley's take on making sure before you did something that couldn't be undone. He'd heard it a hundred times.
Calm, that was the prescription for now. Calm and fast, no mistakes, followed by calm and plotting and waiting. He gritted his teeth and swallowed. Morgans had centuries of experience with plans and patience.
Patience followed by blazing cannons and cutlasses red with blood.
Chapter Eleven
Gary rubbed his forehead and then his eyes, yawned, and pushed the printout away. His head throbbed, and he wished for the hundredth time that Jane hadn't printed the whole damned inventory dump in single-spaced ten-point Arial Narrow. She'd wanted to save paper.
They'd already run searches on the file for known tribal names, including spelling variants, and for keywords such as "kachina" or "doll" or "fetish" or "idol." That had taken about five minutes total on her IBM laptop, mostly meat-brain cycles thinking up new guesses and tossing out obvious junk hits like baskets or pots. No go. Now they had to bring human search-routines to bear, intuitive jumps or simply the ability to spot typos.
Right now, his ability to spot typos had dropped to zilch. Teeny tiny words kept running in front of his eyes. And they weren't the right words, either. They were words from the previous page or two.
Give her Ben's sermon on false economy. An extra ream of paper would have cost, what, two bucks? Three? Add another dollar for the ink?
But then, he didn't know how close she skated to the edge, living on a flock of minor scholarships filched from dust-bunnies hiding under the desks of the financial aid office. Her grades weren't good enough for a full ride. Not good enough except in computer courses, stuff she cared enough about to even attend class. So three or four bucks might be her food budget for the week.
Or her rent. She'd furnished this apartment from the dump and the furnishings fit the place, two musty rooms in the cellar of a rooming house built in the early 'twenties, with the shared use of plumbing and kitchen upstairs. From the smell of things, you got a second chance at the sewage once it had been flushed. Probably a leaking pipe in the walls or under the concrete floor.
If the place caught fire, you climbed a short stepladder, busted a window sealed shut by a couple of generations of paint, and crawled out through the splinters. Damned good thing both of them were thin.
For her, thin was an understatement. When she stretched out naked on her mattress, her ribs looked like a picket fence. Not anorexia, not stylish voluntary thin — when he was paying, she ate everything in sight. Hungry thin.
She stirred, over at the wooden door slab on milk crates that served her for a desk. "What's an obeah?"
"Obeah? Hmm. I think that's African witchcraft. Could mean the witch, as well."
"Accession number TX-1937-B-275. You think they've got a witch stored away in Mason G-53? Hope they feed her every week or so."
Her finger pointed about halfway down the page in front of her. He leafed through his matching stack, sorting dead storage from the active research collection and the stuff the museum had on public display. "Mason" would be the dead storage, artifacts nobody had asked to examine in at least ten years — ranks upon ranks of shelving and bins, subbasement under the Memorial Gym, archaeologist's junk sifted out of the trash-heaps of prehistory. The TX numbers would be near the end of the list.
And according to the catalog code, TX-1937 would be "Texas, collected in 1937." The year would be close, late 1930s, but Caroline had said the kachina had disappeared from Arizona. He'd been searching New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado listings as well, because the reservations covered that whole Four Corners area. Even allowing a few slips in record-keeping, Texas was a whole state further off. Past the Apache and Pueblo reservations. Damned sloppy, if that was Caroline's quarry.
There it was.
