Ninety-seven endless, agonizing minutes later, he called back. The signal was weak and his voice was breaking up badly; I didn’t know if that was because he was calling from someplace with poor signal, or because I was deep inside the concrete headquarters of the Police Nationale. “…attention,” the voice crackled. “Here’s…do if…girl back alive….”
“First I need to talk to her,” I said. “I won’t do anything until I know she’s okay.” I heard an angry breath at the other end of the line, and I feared I’d pushed him too far, but then I heard shuffling noises as the phone changed hands. “Oh, Dr. B,…sorry.” Even through all the dropouts, Miranda’s voice sounded thin and quavery; if it had been a pulse, I’d have called it “thready” and taken it as a symptom of shock. But still, the thready, shocky voice was her voice — blessedly her voice. “One of them…my hotel…paged…said you…chest pains. He had a car…hospital…with him…known better. God, I fell for the same…pulled on you…so very…”
“Oh, Miranda, I’m the one who’s sorry. I told Descartes I didn’t want to involve you, and look what I’ve done.”
“…not…fault…. Stefan’s.” Her voice shifted gears — got higher, faster, more urgent. Shaking my head in rage and pointing at the phone, I stood and jogged out of the inspector’s office and down the hallway to the building’s back door, inwardly cursing Descartes for bringing me into the concrete bunker. “Listen…Stefan…greedy…upted. Don’t let that…be interruptible…B, understand? Interruptible…key…get the bones. Do you hear…?…key…bones.”
I shoved open the door and raced outside, Descartes a few steps behind me. “Miranda, you’re breaking up really bad. Can you say that—”
“Wait, I’m not finished,” I heard her protest. Then came the sounds of scuffling and grunting, followed by the sharp smack of flesh on flesh, and the word “bastard” in Miranda’s low snarl.
“Miranda? Miranda?” I was shouting into the phone, spinning around in the parking lot, frantic with frustration and fear. Two uniformed officers, chatting beside a patrol car, stared and started toward me, but Descartes waved them off. “Miranda?”
“That’s all you get,” snapped the voice I assumed was Reverend Jonah’s, “until I have the bones.”
“Bring Miranda with you,” I demanded. “You set her free first, and I watch her walk away safely, or no deal.”
“Don’t push me. You’re playing games with her life, and her life means nothing to me.”
“But the bones do,” I reminded him. “You want those bones just as much as I want Miranda. Her safety is your only hope of getting them.”
“Bring them to the Templar chapel tonight,” he said. “Midnight.”
“No!” The thought of walking into a trap — or of finding Miranda’s body strung up the way Stefan’s had been — terrified me. What’s more, there was no hope of finding the bones that swiftly.
“What’s the matter, Doctor, does that venue disturb you?” He chuckled, and my blood ran cold. “I didn’t think a man in your line of work would be so squeamish. You disappoint me.”
“The police are probably still watching the chapel,” I said. “Anyhow, I can’t get to the bones until day after tomorrow.”
“What? What are you talking about?” His tone was sharp and suspicious. “What do you mean, you can’t get to them? Why not? Where are they?”
“Stefan and I put them in a very secure place. A Swiss bank vault. I have to go to Geneva to get them, and the bank’s closed tomorrow. Sunday. The Sabbath, Reverend.”
“You’re lying.” My heart nearly stopped when he said it. There was a pause; I thought I heard whispers. “Which bank?”
“Credit Suisse.”
“What street is it on?”
“Give me a break, Reverend. I’m supposed to help you plan my own ambush? I might be from Tennessee, but I’m not that stupid.”
“Stefan said the bones were here. He was supposed to bring them that night.”
“But he didn’t bring them,” I countered. “Why wouldn’t he have brought them if they were here?”
“I told you. Because he got greedy. We’d agreed on a million, but that night he said he’d gotten another bid, a higher bid. He said the new price was two million.”
I was stunned by the figures, but didn’t dare show it. “That’s not the way I do business, Reverend. If Stefan agreed to a million, I’ll honor that price.”
There was a pause, then more whispers. “I don’t think you understand the situation yet, Doctor.” His voice sliced into me, as cold and sharp as a straight-edge razor on a winter morning. “The new price I’m offering — the only price I’m offering — is the safe return of your assistant.” He paused to let that sink in. “If you don’t actually care about her, I suppose we could talk money instead. But that means I’ll have to kill her. And killing her would mean considerable inconvenience and risk for me. You yourself said the FBI would come after me. So if you’d rather have money than the girl, the new price is half a million.”
“You know I don’t want money,” I said. “I just want her back safe.”
“Then quit playing stupid games.”
“I’m not playing games. I’ll be back from Geneva with the bones Monday night.”
“If you’re not, she’ll die — and she’ll die a much worse death than Stefan did. And after she does, so will you. By God, you will.” With that, he hung up.
“Damn it, Inspector, why’d you put me in a cell-phone-proof building for that phone call? I missed half of what she was saying.”
“Sorry,” he shrugged. “I never have a problem using my mobile in there. It must be something about your American phone.”
“She was trying to tell me something important,” I fumed. “Something about where the bones were hidden.” Twice she’d said something about “key” and “the bones.” Piecing together the two fragmentary versions, I suspected she’d said, “the key is to get the bones.” By key, did she mean crucial, as in “it’s crucial to get the bones”? That seemed absurdly obvious; of course it was crucial to get the bones. No, she must have been talking about an actual key. She seemed to be telling me that the bones were locked in a hiding place that the key would open. But what key, what hiding place, and where? Wherever it was, the Geneva ploy had bought us thirty-six hours to find it.
Geneva hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment improvisation. Descartes and I had discussed how to stall while we looked for the bones, and the Swiss bank was the most plausible delay we could invent. We had also set other wheels in motion — a contingency plan, in case we couldn’t find the ossuary. We feared that Stefan had sent photos to the buyers, so Descartes had commissioned a local mason to create a replica of the stone ossuary; my role in the ruse was to arrange for Hugh Berryman, the anthropologist who was holding down the fort for me at UT, to overnight an old skeleton from Knoxville.
Hugh had plenty to choose from. Shelved deep beneath the university’s football stadium were roughly five thousand human skeletons: more than one thousand modern donated skeletons, plus several thousand Arikara Indian skeletons from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — bones I’d excavated from the Great Plains many years before as the Army Corps of Engineers dammed rivers, creating new reservoirs and flooding Indian burial grounds. The Arikara bones certainly weren’t two thousand years old, or even seven hundred years old — more like two hundred to three hundred — but they had a gray patina that made them look convincingly old, and they bore no dental fillings, orthopedic devices, or other traces of modernity. I’d given Hugh detailed specifications: The skeleton had to be an adult male, roughly five and a half feet tall, and free of obvious skeletal trauma — except for the gouges I instructed Hugh to inflict on the wrists, feet, and lower left ribs to simulate the wounds of Christ, or the wounds of our Jesus Doe. We were performing a bizarre sort of crucifixion — a postmortem, postdecomp crucifixion, surely the only one of its kind ever done. With this counterfeit Christ, I realized, I was joining the ranks of forgers, taking up a new trade: the trade in fake relics. With luck, the decoy skeleton would arrive in thirty-six hours, and while it might not fool a forensic anthropologist, it might fool a crazed televangelist.