“And your point is?”
“Where’s Ozan’s supersecret decoder badge?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“His Saint Christopher medal. If he was one of these so-called guardians, wouldn’t he have one, too?”
“Missing doesn’t mean nonexistent,” Batty said. “He could have kept it somewhere else, like Gabriela did.”
“Or your whole theory could be hogwash.”
“Then how the hell did I know about Ozan in the first place?”
“That’s a good question. How did you know?”
The thought Batty had had a moment ago flickered through his mind again, but continued to elude him.
“How do I know any of it?” he said. “I’m a fanatic. I’ve had a massive interest in this stuff ever since I was a kid. But after Rebecca was taken, I became obsessed with it-just like she was. Spent every spare moment of my time in libraries and private vaults.”
“And you believe everything you read?”
“Of course not. But I found a reference to Custodes Sacri and the Saint Christopher medal in a footnote of a book about secret societies, and that led me to explore further.”
“That still doesn’t explain how you knew about him.”
“I tried to locate one of the medallions. I put out some feelers and was contacted by a collector in Jerusalem who claimed he’d seen one. That an antiquities dealer had shown it to him but refused to sell it.”
“Ozan.”
Batty nodded. “The collector knew about the guardians and told me he was convinced that Ozan was one of them.”
“And you never contacted him?”
“He wouldn’t return my calls. After a while I gave up. It was only a peripheral interest anyway. It didn’t really have anything to do with what happened to Rebecca.”
“Yet here we are.”
“Yet here we are,” Batty said. “And if you want proof I know what I’m talking about, what about the crime-scene photos? I can guarantee you’ll find that same mark beneath Ozan’s body.”
Callahan nodded. “I’m not a strong believer in coincidence, so I don’t doubt it. But the photos aren’t in the file yet. And if the symbol is there, all it tells us is that we’re dealing with the same killer. All the rest is speculation.”
“You’re wrong,” Batty told her. “And I’ll prove it to you once we get into that crime scene.”
“We?”
“We’re a team now, remember?”
Callahan seemed amused by this. “In the loosest sense of the word, maybe.”
“Trust me, without my help you’ll have a hard time getting down to where the body was found. You try going in there in the dead of night and even if you get past the alarms, there’s still the security staff to contend with. And they don’t look friendly.”
“I’m not exactly a novice, you know.”
“I don’t doubt that. But why do this the hard way when there’s an easier alternative?”
Callahan leveled her gaze at him. “All right,” she said. “For the sake of argument, let’s pretend I’m listening.”
Batty took two tickets from his pocket and held them up. “Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Broussard are scheduled to attend an auction at eight o’clock sharp tonight, compliments of the Children’s Relief Foundation.”
He could see that she was intrigued by the idea.
“Not bad,” she said. “That gets us through the door without a fuss, but then what?”
“A simple distraction,” Batty told her. “The simplest kind of all. But if we’re gonna do this thing right, we’ll have to go shopping first.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Why?”
“The auction’s black tie. And I need a tux.”
Despite pouring over the antiquities catalogues whenever he could, Batty was more of an admirer of art than a collector, so he’d never been to a real live auction before. And the closest he’d ever come to wearing a tuxedo was back at Terrebonne High, when Angela McGee turned down his invitation to the senior prom, thus sparing him the humiliation of dressing like a blue velvet penguin.
Whoever had invented the tuxedo, he decided, had definitely been a sadist. Probably the same guy who invented the bra and the corset. The tux he’d rented this afternoon felt half a size too small, and the tie Mrs. Broussard had so kindly agreed to strangle her husband with was cutting into his neck like a dog taking to a particularly juicy bone.
Batty was convinced that Callahan was a bit of a sadist, too.
She was also quite a looker tonight. The black strapless gown she’d chosen hugged all the right places in just the right ways, and he wouldn’t be a man if he didn’t take notice. She sat next to him in the middle of the Garanti auction room, and he was fairly certain that she was not suffering the indignity of wearing either a corset or a bra.
Considering the size of the building, the auction room was small and intimate, no more than three hundred people of various persuasions crammed into it, sitting on stiff-backed chairs, dressed in their finest, including enough jewelry to cover half the U.S. deficit.
This was one healthy crowd.
Callahan had expressed doubts about Mr. Broussard blending in-but Batty thought he’d cleaned up pretty well. He’d even allowed her to apply a little CoverGirl to his bruises-the same stuff she was using to doctor the circles under her eyes-and if you didn’t look too hard, you might consider him handsome.
“I have one hundred thousand lira,” the auctioneer said into a microphone.
On the table next to him was a vase with a missing piece that was several centuries old. A relic, they’d been told, of the late Ottoman Empire.
“Do I have one-twenty?”
A man two rows ahead of Batty gave a subtle flick of the fingers and the auctioneer nodded.
“One hundred twenty thousand lira from the gentleman in forty-seven J. The bid now stands at one hundred twenty thousand. Do I hear-”
“One seventy-five,” a voice called out.
Although Batty had witnessed some spirited bidding in the last half hour, the crowd seemed subdued. The night’s festivities had begun in the lobby with a short, emotional memorial to Koray Ozan, who, according to the auctioneer, would have wanted them to carry on.
So carry on they did, their enthusiasm tempered by grief. Ozan had been a popular and well-loved figure in the city, a reformed smuggler and black marketeer who had turned his life around and donated millions to charity. This only convinced Batty that the collector he’d spoken to had been right. Missing medallion or not, Ozan had been a perfect candidate for Custodes Sacri.
“One hundred seventy-five thousand lira,” the auctioneer said. “The bid is now one hundred seventy-five thousand. Do we have two hundred?”
Callahan touched Batty’s knee and in her best Louisiana accent-which wasn’t half bad-said, “Excuse me, darling, but I need to go visit the little girls’ room.”
This was their signal.
She rose and slipped past him, and he watched her glide up the aisle, lost for a moment in the graceful fluidity of movement. He was seeing her in a whole new light tonight. She stopped briefly to ask one of the auction house ushers for directions to the restroom, then a finger was pointed, pleasantries exchanged, and Callahan pushed through the doors and turned right.
As the doors closed again, Batty returned his attention to the bidding war. It was up to two hundred twenty-five thousand now, and it seemed the value of the vase in question was about to double before everyone’s eyes.
He waited. Knew what was coming.
He’d shown Callahan a sketch indicating that she had three easily accessible choices ahead of her, one of which was conveniently located near the restrooms, and not in the immediate view of any of the guards.
It was a simple but effective distraction. One of Batty’s favorites from his days back at Jefferson Junior High.
Less than a minute later, the building’s fire alarm started to ring.
After tripping the alarm, Callahan had hustled into the ladies room.