NINE
“Let me see if I have this straight,” Captain Nelson was saying. “You boys steal the pendant. And the mummy. You make it look like the mummy has come back to life to cover your tracks. You two are surprised to learn that it’s not nearly as easy as it looks to try and find a buyer for a stolen pendant, especially one that is worth tens of millions of dollars. Therefore you stash the thing here. In a school. Only now the problem is that someone has stolen it from you.”
“Yes,” Jimmy all but whispered.
“And they’ve managed to get into your locker without you knowing.”
“Yes,” Jimmy said again.
“When was the last time you saw the necklace?” Vance asked. “When was the last time that you knew for certain it was there?”
“Yesterday,” Dean answered. “Jimmy and I checked on it yesterday, after school.”
“Is that true, Mister Nelson?” Principal Reezen asked.
Jimmy nodded. “Yes. We both saw it.”
Vance nodded. “That means that whoever stole it from them did it sometime between 3:30 p.m. and … and … when does the school open in the morning?”
“Doors are unlocked at 6:00 a.m.”
“When are they locked for the night?” I asked.
“There was a varsity volleyball game here last night,” Principal Reezen said. “It would have lasted until about 8. Doors would have been locked by 8:30 p.m.”
“Could someone have been able to get into Jimmy’s locker before the doors were locked?”
“Are you suggesting another student is responsible?” the principal asked.
“I’m asking if there are enough people wandering the halls during the game that someone would have noticed a locker being forced open,” Vance said.
“There were no signs of forced entry,” Principal Reezen reminded us. “Whoever accessed that locker did so by either knowing the locker’s combination or having the master key.”
“Or, they could have picked the lock,” I added.
Captain Nelson looked over at the principal.
“Don, is that possible? How easy would it be to pick the locks?”
Principal Reezen shrugged. “They’re school lockers, Jason. Each locker is secured with a standard Martyr combination lock. We’ve keyed each lock so that one key, the master key, will unlock them all.”
“Who has copies of that key?” Vance asked as he pulled out a notepad.
“I do, Rick does, and so does the school janitor.”
“Are all those keys properly secured at night?” Vance asked.
“I keep my keys with me at all times,” the principal admitted. “I know Rick does, too. I’ve made it clear to my vice principal that his job is on the line should anything happen to those keys.”
“And the janitor’s ring?”
“Locked inside a reinforced steel locker at the end of his shift each night.”
“And where’s that locker at?” Vance wanted to know. He was scribbling notes like mad.
“Inside the teacher’s lounge, next to their lockers.”
“Is he the only one who has access to it?”
Principal Reezen dropped a ring of keys on his desk.
“I’ve also got the key to that locker, if that’s what you’re asking. Are you suggesting I had something to do with the pendant’s disappearance?”
Vance shook his head. “No sir. I’m just collecting facts.”
“So, it would appear that the theft occurred sometime after 8:30 p.m. and before 6 a.m. this morning,” Captain Nelson said. He sighed and ran a hand through his thinning gray hair. “Very well. Jimmy, Dean, you’re coming with me.”
“Where are we going?” Jimmy asked fearfully.
“We’re going to the station. Detective Samuelson?”
Vance looked at his boss.
“Captain?”
“Ask your wife to meet us there.”
“Excuse me, captain?” Vance sputtered.
“You heard me. Of the three of them, someone must have told someone else. Somebody let something slip that they shouldn’t. The pendant has been stolen. Again. Someone must know something.”
I saw that Vance had visibly paled.
“Captain, look. I know it looks bad for my wife. However, I have to assure you that she had nothing to do with this.”
“I’ve changed my mind. I’ll have someone else call on your wife to bring her in. In fact, it’s late. We’ll reconvene tomorrow morning. I’ll send someone for your wife, Samuelson.”
“Great,” Vance grumbled. “It ought to be a real hoot around my house tonight.”
“Detective?” Captain Nelson called out.
Vance looked up. “Yeah?”
“I’m officially pulling you off this case.”
“What?!” Vance sputtered. “Captain, you can’t do that! This is my case!”
“And your wife has been implicated, detective. You and I both know that you need to distance yourself until this has all blown over. Do I make myself clear?”
Vance groaned and rubbed his temples.
“I said, do I make myself clear, detective?” Captain Nelson repeated.
“Crystal, sir.”
“Good. You are dismissed, Mr. Samuelson. And take Mr. Anderson with you. That will be all.”
Without a word, Vance turned on his heel and strode toward the office door. He hooked an arm through mine as he neared, pulling me along with him. Sherlock was already on his feet and anxiously pulling on his leash, ready to leave.
“Dude, I’m sorry,” I managed to get out as soon as we pushed open the school doors and hit the night air. “There must be some way they can let you back on the case. You’re their best detective!”
“As much as I don’t want to admit it, the captain’s right,” Vance said. “It’s a conflict of interest. I can’t officially be on the case as long as Tori has been implicated.”
Sherlock whined as he looked at the detective. Vance squatted down and ruffled the fur behind Sherlock’s ears. A look of resolve appeared on my friend’s face. Vance looked up at me and nodded.
“But unofficially? You and I are gonna solve this thing.”
A sharp, piercing bark sounded from the lone canine present.
“You, too, pal,” Vance added, draping a friendly arm around Sherlock.
“Where do we start?” I asked as we both headed toward the car.
Tori had driven Jillian and Watson back to my place around an hour ago. As far as I was aware, they were waiting for us there. I unlocked my Jeep and lifted Sherlock into the back seat.
Vance checked his watch, “Shoot. I never realized it was so late.”
I checked my watch. Bare skin met my eyes. I forgot I hadn’t worn a watch in years, yet the habit was hard to break if anyone uttered the magic phrase what time is it?
“Whatever we’re gonna do, it’ll have to be tonight,” Vance said as he climbed in to my Jeep.
As I pulled out of the school parking lot Vance called their babysitter and asked if she’d be willing to stay even longer, which she was. Apparently, he was planning on breaking the news to Tori about her implication in the case at my house.
Peachy.
This was gonna be a long night. I remembered that none of us had had dinner yet so I placed an order with Sara’s Pizza Parlour. I glanced over at Vance as I drove and saw that he was deep in thought. I had to feel bad for the guy. I wouldn’t want my wife involved in any type of crime, either. He was probably wondering how he was going to break the news to Tori.
I parked my Jeep next to Jillian’s SUV. The lights were on in my house and I could hear some music playing. Looked like Jillian found my CD collection and had chosen some smooth jazz.
Watson met us at the door, barking excitedly. Sherlock yipped once as he ran up the steps. Tori took one look at her husband and knew—instantly—that something was wrong. Jillian was sitting on the sofa with a beer in her hand. She took one look at us and immediately set her beer down on the coffee table.
“What is it?” Jillian asked. “What’s wrong?”
Vance joined his wife on the couch and sighed heavily.
“You’re gonna have to tell her sooner or later,” I told my friend. “Might as well get it over with.”
“You might as well get what over with?” Tori asked as she turned to her husband. “Vance, what are you not telling me?”
“The captain knows about you and that darn pendant,” Vance miserably said.
“And how would he know that?” Tori demanded. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”
“Tor, I had no choice! I had to admit to my boss that I had been withholding evidence on the case. Do you have any idea how bad that is for a detective?”
“What. Did. You. Tell. Them.”
“Tori, I know you’re angry. You have every right to be. And, I’m sorry to say, it gets worse.”
“How could it get worse, Vance?” Tori wanted to know. Her voice was rising and it didn’t take a genius to see that her emotions were starting to show.
“Captain Nelson is sending someone to collect you tomorrow morning.”
“What?! Am I being arrested?”
“No,” Vance said as he took her hands in his. “They want to ask you questions about how you knew the pendant was real. They’ve got it in their heads that you let it slip to one of your students and that’s how they knew it was worth a lot of money.”
“I did no such thing,” Tori snapped, pulling her hands free from her husband’s. “Why didn’t you tell them that?”
“He did tell them that,” I added. “Over and over. He protested your innocence so much that they pulled him from the case.”
Shocked, Tori looked back at her detective husband.
“They didn’t.”
“They had no choice,” Vance admitted. “I can’t fault them for that, babe. The moment you were implicated it became a conflict of interest for me to continue to lead this investigation.”
“What am I going to do? I can’t go to jail!”
“That’s why we’re going to solve this,” Vance assured her, taking her hands back. “Tonight.”
“Tonight? How?”
“We’re going to go over everything that is known about the case so far. Four heads are better than one. Perhaps together we can find something that was overlooked?”
“That’s your plan for keeping me out of jail?” Tori skeptically asked.
“Do you have a better one?” Vance countered.
“No.”
“Okay. Let’s get started. Zack, do you have something we can write on? Notebooks, notepads, etc.?”
I grinned. “I’m a writer. Of course I do.”
Fifteen minutes later we were all munching on hot pizza and taking notes on our respective notebooks.
“Okay, to get started, let’s review what we know. Jimmy Nelson and Dean Rupert learn about the pendant’s presence in Egyptian Exhibitions…”
“Jimmy Nelson,” Tori muttered. “He was the one that saw I had Googled the pendant. I noticed he was standing there only I don’t know how long he was looking. Oh, good God. I am responsible for this.”
“You didn’t force those boys to steal the necklace,” Jillian reminded her. “It’s not your fault, Tori.”
“Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum hatch a plan to steal the necklace,” Vance continued as he made a few notes in his notebook. “They figured they’d also get a good chuckle out of this whole scheme by making it look like the mummy woke up from the dead, swiped the pendant, and wandered off.
“Now this next part is speculation,” Vance said as he pulled his small, official police notebook from his back pocket. “We’re guessing that later that night Jimmy went back to the school in an attempt to sneak the pendant off the school’s campus, only his presence was discovered by Sherlock. We tracked him through the school to the band room only to lose him when he threw a chair through the window. Consequently, that’s what cut up his hands. Zack, remember the blood on his mummy costume? It was from the wounds he sustained trying to get through the broken window as fast as possible.”
“So, at this point, the necklace is still at the school, right?” I asked.
“Pendant,” Tori corrected.
“Whatever,” I grumped.
“Yes,” Vance answered. “People were being searched as they left the school. They knew that they wouldn’t be able to smuggle the pendant out of the school. Not without being caught. I can only assume it was at this time both boys realized they had bitten off more than they could chew. So now the question is, what do they do with the pendant? By his own admission the pendant is in Jimmy’s locker. Now what does he do with it? They dare not show it to anyone. The whole town was talking about the mummy and the theft.”
“I would say that it was right about then that the boys continue to fuel the rumor that the mummy had indeed come back to life and was now terrorizing the town,” I added.
Zack nodded. “Right. These two hooligans incite panic by appearing in various places around town, but only in locations where they can make a clean getaway.”
“I almost had the twerp,” I recalled. “I chased him from Gary’s Grocery all the way to the high school.”
“Thus proving we were dealing with high school kids,” Vance confirmed. “Not very bright kids at that. But, it worked to our advantage.”
“How?” Tori asked.
“Because they kept showing off,” Vance told her. He looked up at me and nodded. “They wanted to show that they were smarter than everyone else and keep the town paralyzed with fear.”
“I think they relished the attention,” Jillian softly added.
“Of that, I have no doubt,” Vance said, giving Jillian a nod of his head. “So what do they do? They wait until it starts to get dark. They get into costume and sneak into the maze using that tiny trail that could barely be called a road.”
“But how did they get a car in there without it being heard?” Jillian asked. “You know as well as I do that it’s very quiet out in that field. An engine would be easily heard.”
“That’s one of the things we need to figure out,” Vance admitted. “I’ll add it to my list.”
As if we were all in a class listening to a professor give a lecture, the three of us jotted the same thing down in our own respective notebooks.
“Now, this is where it starts to get good,” Vance said, rubbing his hands together. “Zack and I catch Jimmy and Dean in the maze. Sherlock IDs Jimmy from the school and he finally confesses to masterminding the whole operation. Jimmy admits that he and Dean stole the pendant, and the mummy, and stashed the pendant in his locker.”
“Number 151,” Vance recalled, glancing at his notebook. “Sherlock led us straight to his locker a few days after the crime took place. Now, I will admit that I’m curious. Did he take us to the locker because he smelled marijuana or was it because he somehow knew the pendant was in that locker?”
“I’d have to go with the latter explanation,” I decided. “When we left that locker, Sherlock kept looking back at it. He was reluctant to leave, as if he were trying to tell us that we were missing something. I think the pendant was still in the locker at that time.”
Vance nodded. “I would agree. So, now that we caught the perpetrators, we’re told where the pendant had been stashed, only guess what? The pendant wasn’t there.”
“Do you believe the boys when they said they didn’t know where it went?” Tori asked.
Vance shrugged. “It’s hard to say.”
“I’ll say it,” I announced. “I happened to be looking straight at Jimmy when the principal announced there was nothing in the locker. The look on the kid’s face was priceless. There was someone who truly thought the pendant was in that locker. Both of them did.”
“So how was it stolen?” Tori asked. “How did someone else figure out where the pendant was?”
Vance shrugged and held up his hands in an I-don’t-know gesture. He picked up his notebook and added some more notes. The rest of us did the same. Vance finished writing and looked up at us.
“Alright, that’s two things for the list. Does anyone else have anything to add?”
I cleared my throat. “I’ll say. You’re forgetting about Ammar Fadil.”
Vance snapped his fingers. “You’re right. I totally forgot about him. Okay, we also need to figure out how it’s humanly possible to turn a body into a mummified person in less than a day.”
“It’s not,” Tori vowed. “No matter how you look at it, you can’t rush the laws of physics. Certain things take a very specific amount of time to accomplish. There’s simply no way for a body to become mummified in such a short amount of time.”
“Then how?” Vance demanded. “You tell me how it’s possible.”
I made a ‘T’ out of my hands and held them up for everyone to see.
“Ok, wait a minute. Let’s look at this logically. If what Tori says is true, and I’m inclined to believe her since we heard Dr. Tarik say the very same thing a few days ago, a human corpse takes somewhere around 35-70 days to become a mummy. There are no shortcuts, so that can only mean it was done by the usual way.”
“But there wasn’t enough time!” Vance protested. “We saw the assistant on the night of the heist, remember? That was only a few days ago.”
“That’s right,” I confirmed. “That would mean that the body isn’t Ammar Fadil.”
“Dr. Tarik would disagree with you,” Vance pointed out. “As would modern science. While we don’t yet have the complete results from the lab, thus far the DNA recovered from the mummified body is pointing to one person: the assistant. It has to be Ammar Fadil.”
“What if it isn’t?” I asked, warming up. “Could it be someone else? You said it yourself. The DNA analysis hasn’t been completed. Preliminary results can still be wrong.”
“Look, Zack,” Vance said, as he set the small notebook down and reached for his beer, “you can’t fool a DNA test. The only way that body couldn’t be Ammar Fadil was if … was if…”
“…if he had a twin?” Jillian quietly suggested. “Is that what you were going to say, Vance?”
“I was going to suggest another family member, like his father,” I said, “but a twin would work. Do twins have the same DNA?”
“I believe I can answer that,” Tori said, raising a hand. “I’ve done genetic studies before. A typical person has about a hundred new mutations in their DNA. Spread that out over six million base pairs and you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. Give it enough time and someone, somewhere, might be able to come up with a way for scientists to be able to tell identical twins’ DNA apart. To answer your question, Zack, technically no, but as far as forensic science is concerned, yes. There is no way to tell the DNA apart. Not yet, anyway.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked, looking around the room. “Are you telling me that, forensically speaking, the mummified body could be Ammar’s twin? Then what happened to Ammar?”
Vance was silent as he considered. He then pulled his cell from his pocket, placed a call, quickly terminated said call, and then looked over at Tori.
“I can’t call the station about this. I’m off the case. That would have been bad. Tor, tell me something. Last year, at Christmas. What was the name of your friend we ran into at the mall in Medford?”
“Connie?”
“No, not Connie. She was short, had black hair, and had a tattoo on her right shoulder.”
“Oh. Susan? What about her?”
“What’s her last name?” Vance asked. He had returned his attention to his phone and was scrolling through the many numbers in his phone’s address book.
“Williams. You want to call Susan? Why?”
“Not Susan but her husband, Jeremy. I know I’ve got them in my address book but I must not have punched in their last name. I can’t find them anywhere.”
“That’s because Susan’s husband is Jessie,” Tori pointed out.
“Right. Jessie.”
“What do you want to talk to Jessie Williams for?”
Vance found the entry and tapped the number. Once it was ringing, he finally looked up at Tori.
“Because Jessie Williams works at the FBI. He owes me a favor. It’s time to collect.”
“You’ve got friends in the FBI?” I asked, impressed. “Not bad, pal. Not bad at all.”
“He’s … hello? I’d like to speak to special agent Jessie Williams, please. That’s right, he’s out of the Medford, Oregon, office. Hmm? What’s that? Oh. Detective Vance Samuelson, Pomme Valley Police Department. Yes, ma’am. I’m in Oregon, too. Thank you. I’ll wait.”
“I thought you had a direct number to him?” Tori asked.
“That makes two of us,” Vance grumbled. “The last time I did this I got straight through to him. They must have changed their phone system. Maybe they changed their … hello? Jessie? It’s Vance Samuelson, PVPD. How’s it goin’, buddy? Listen, I need to call in that favor you owe me. I need a background check for one Ammar Fadil. He’s an assistant curator at a traveling show called Egyptian Exhibitions. I need to know about Ammar’s family. Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc. I need to know if there’s any connection to PV. You will? That’s great. Thanks, pal. Yes, that’s still my cell number. I look forward to your call. Thanks again.” Vance hung up and looked at each of us. “We should have some answers shortly.”
“If it turns out Ammar has a twin,” I slowly began, “what does that tell us? Who killed his brother? How did he end up in a corn field?”
“I would say that someone definitely went to a lot of trouble to get that necklace,” Vance mused. He polished off his beer and leaned back on the couch.
“If I didn’t know any better,” I said as I finished my own beer, “I’d say those two punks messed up someone else’s plans.”
Vance looked at me, his eyes opening wide.
“Say that again, Zack.”
“What? The part about the kids messing up someone else’s plans?”
“Yeah. That’s it. I think you hit the nail on the head. In fact, it makes total sense. I think I’ve got this figured out.”
“We’re all ears, pal,” I told my friend.
Jillian placed her hand over mine. A split second later Watson jumped up onto the couch with us and settled herself directly between me and Jillian. She turned to regard Jillian with an expression that almost said, Behave yourself around my daddy. I almost choked.
Vance regarded Watson with a bemused expression on his face. “I’m gonna go grab another beer. Do you mind?”
I shook my head. “Help yourself.”
“I think someone is jealous,” Vance decided, once he returned.
“She’s a dog,” I pointed out. “How could a dog be jealous?”
Jillian stroked the silky fur on the back of Watson’s neck.
“Don’t you worry about your daddy,” Jillian assured the little corgi. “I would never hurt him.”
Watson turned to gaze up into Jillian’s eyes. She licked her hand in response. I also noticed that she had sighed happily, indicating she wasn’t planning on going anywhere anytime soon.
“As I was saying,” Vance said, trying again, “I have a theory. I think what we have here are two separate crimes, only the first happened before the second could be played out.”
“You’re thinking someone has been planning on stealing the pendant for quite some time now,” I guessed.
“Nothing screams out premeditation like mummifying a body,” Vance agreed.
“I want to hear Vance’s theory,” Jillian announced. “All of it, from start to finish.”
Vance took another pull on his beer, managed to close his mouth before the belch could escape, and then pulled his notebooks closer.
“Okay, here goes. I’m thinking our friend Ammar, who is employed by an organization responsible for setting up a mobile display of Egyptian artifacts, decided he was tired of making peanuts. My guess is that he somehow learned about the plan to transport that pendant across the United States by being presented as just another trinket in a show that has nothing but replicas of the real thing.”
“With you so far,” I said. Jillian promptly shushed me.
“Now, Ammar starts making plans. He…”
“How could he have possibly made plans that far ahead to steal Nekhbet’s Pendant from PV?” Tori asked, perplexed. “Their visit here was a last minute decision. At least that’s what Dr. Tarik told me.”
“Let’s assume what you say is true,” Vance told his wife. “Let’s say the mastermind behind all of this didn’t know about this stop in PV. In fact I’m willing to bet he didn’t have a clue. However, with that being said, I’d say Ammar discovered he had the perfect opportunity to pull it off.”
“Here in PV?” I skeptically asked. “How?”
“Think about it,” Vance urged me. “They knew they were going to pull off this robbery of the necklace.”
“Pendant,” Tori corrected.
Vance grinned and shook his head.
“Pendant. Whatever. They knew it was going to be difficult to pull off the heist in a big-name city. Pomme Valley presented too tempting of a locale to pass up. So Ammar began preparations to steal the pendant, only…”
“Someone beat him to it,” Jillian added. She nodded her head. “That’s impressive, Vance.”
“Oh, don’t praise him,” Tori moaned. “His head’s already big enough.”
“I heard that,” Vance said, not bothering to look up from his notes. “Continuing on. Now Ammar is in trouble. All his carefully laid out plans are for naught. After months of planning, he ended up with not a darn thing.”
“How does this help us?” I asked. “Where does that leave us?”
“I’m getting to it,” Vance answered. “Keep your panties on. Now. Let’s switch gears for just a moment to young Mr. Nelson and his counterpart, Dean Rupert. Jimmy Nelson just happens to discover that one of the items in the Egyptian show setting up in the school happens to be worth lots of money. What’s a young teenager to do when tempted with that much money?”
“Not all high school kids think like that,” Tori scolded, throwing her husband a frown.
“But they should still know right from wrong,” I pointed out. “Nobody held a gun to their heads and forced them to steal the necklace.”
“Pendant,” Tori corrected.
“Whatever,” I grinned.
“Thanks, Zack,” Vance said. “That’s the point I was trying to make. Kids should know when NOT to make a bad decision. Anyway, back to the point. Two kids are tempted enough to do something about it. So they hatch a plan to steal the pendant,” Vance threw a look at Tori, who returned his look with a grin. “They make it look like a mummy is the culprit and have a little fun terrorizing the town in the process.”
“Only the boys don’t have the pendant,” Tori reminded him.
Vance tapped his small notebook, “It’s next on my list. So, the boys pull off the heist, stash the loot in one of their lockers, and then try to figure out what to do with it now that they’ve got it. Trying to fence stolen goods isn’t as easy as the movies make it look.”
“But now someone else has the pendant,” Jillian said.
Vance nodded. “Right. Somehow one of those boys let it slip to someone else that they were the ones who pulled off the heist. Somehow someone else figured it out.”
“Let’s say someone did,” I said, drawing everyone’s attention. “How would they know where to find the pendant? How would they even know where to look?”
“It’s not too hard to figure out that the first place to look for stolen goods, if you suspected a student, would be their locker. Someone managed to open Jimmy’s locker, search through it undetected, take the pendant, and then put everything back the way it was.”
“The only other person to do that would be Ammar,” I pointed out. “Do you think he has the fortitude to pull that off?”
Jillian leaned forward to whisper in my ear.
“Nice word, Zachary. And I do, by the way. It sounds like he’s been making these plans for a while.”
I patted her hand, “True.”
Watson woofed a warning. Jillian smiled, scratched behind the corgi’s ears, and settled back against the sofa. Watson returned to her nap.
“Zack, you can’t possibly think that Ammar is innocent, can you?” Vance sputtered. “I mean, aren’t you the writer? Isn’t that supposed to mean you have an active imagination?”
“I never said I was a mystery writer,” I pointed out.
“What type of writer are you?” Tori asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say which genre you write in. I’ll have to look up some of your books.”
Uh-oh! I needed a subject change and I needed one now! Thankfully I was saved by an incoming call on Vance’s cell.
“Detective Samuelson. Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for calling me back. I…”
“His name is Jessie!” Tori hissed at him.
“Jessie. Sorry ’bout that. It’s been a long day. What do you have for me? Okay … uh huh. Wow, really? Talk about an unlucky family. How long ago? Okay. I … what? He did? I’ll be damned. That’s definitely good news for me. Okay, Jessie. Thank you very much.”
Vance pocketed his cell and looked at the three of us. He held up a finger—signaling us to wait—and picked up his notebook. He began writing furiously. For two solid minutes Vance mumbled to himself and transferred his thoughts to paper. Tori finally cleared her throat.
“Care to share? We’re all dying over here.”
“Just a minute,” Vance mumbled as he hastily scribbled notes down on his pad. Finished, he looked up. “Okay, Jessie had a veritable treasure trove of information. Get this. Ammar Fadil comes from a large family. A large unlucky family.”
“Unlucky in what way?” I asked.
“Both his brother and his father are missing.”
“Well, now we know he has a brother,” I said.
“Jessie says that the Fadil family had ten children. He didn’t know if any of them were twins but when you have that many kids, I’d say there would be a high chance of the family having one set. Maybe two.”
“You said a brother and the father are missing,” Tori reminded him. “What happened? Did he say?”
“The father disappeared while looking for the missing son,” Vance said, reading his notes. “When the son went missing, the father took it upon himself to look for him since the local police weren’t much help.”
“The police weren’t much help?” I repeated, amazed. “Since when? Isn’t it their job?”
“Police departments in other countries might not be as thorough as we are here in the States,” Vance told me.
“How long ago did the brother disappear?” Jillian asked.
Vance consulted his notes.
“Two months.”
“Two months?” Tori repeated, growing excited. “That time frame would fit with how long it’d take to turn a body into a mummy! And wow, I really shouldn’t get that excited about that. Sorry.”
Jillian stifled a giggle. Sherlock, who had been curled up by my feet, suddenly rose, stretched, and then jumped onto the couch to settle on the other side of Jillian. Within moments, the tri-color corgi had resumed his nap.
“The mummified body has gotta be Ammar’s brother,” Vance continued after he smiled at the corgis. “The time frame fits the facts.”
“What nationality is the Fadil family?” I asked.
“Egyptian,” Vance said. “Why?”
“Does the family still live in Egypt?”
Vance nodded. “Cairo. What about it?”
“How did they get a mummified body all the way from Cairo to here?” I asked. “It’s not like PV was the first stop on their American tour. How did they conceal the body for that long?”
“That’s an easy one,” Tori said as she looked my way. “They are already taking around an Egyptian sarcophagus with them. They’ve already got one authentic mummy. I’d say that either that sarcophagus has a false bottom or else Ammar was the one responsible for caring for the real mummy. If he was the only person who was opening and closing that casket then he’d be able to conceal the fact that Egyptian Exhibitions was carrying around not one but two mummies.”
Vance’s cell rang.
“Hello? Oh, hey, Jessie. What’s up? He what? Are you sure it’s him? Okay, thanks for letting me know. Yeah, it does help my investigation. Thanks again.”
“What?” I prompted. “What was that all about?”
“Jessie wanted to let me know he came across an Egyptian police report. He didn’t know why it wasn’t tied to the report on the rest of the family. Ammar’s father was found dead last month.”
“Oh, that poor family,” Jillian softly. “I feel bad for the mother.”
“You said something about good news,” I remembered. “What was that all about?”
Vance snapped his fingers.
“Thanks for reminding me!” He turned to Tori and took her hands in his. “What would you say if I told you that you were not responsible for bringing Egyptian Exhibitions to PV?”
“But I was!” Tori protested. “I alone sent them daily emails. I alone nagged them until they finally agreed to listen to my petition. Trust me, I’m the reason they stopped in PV.”
“Except you weren’t,” Vance argued. “Jessie was able to access the Fadil family’s phone records. Guess what? Someone in that family has been in touch with someone here in the United States.”
“Not surprising,” I decided. “Why is that good news?”
“Because the number that was dialed was located here in Oregon and it was within the last month.”
My eyebrows shot up.
“Umm, which part?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Pomme Valley,” Vance proudly announced. “Someone in the Fadil family, and I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out it was Ammar, had called a PV number several times.”
“Do we know who it was?” Tori asked, growing excited once more.
Vance nodded. “We do. It’s a cell phone number and it is currently registered to one Victor Preston.”
I shrugged. “Does anyone know who that is? I don’t.”
“Nor do I,” Jillian admitted.
“Have either of you heard of the Square L convenience store?” Vance asked.
All of us were nodding.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s in the grocery store parking lot.”
“The Square L is Preston’s store.”
“That’s a wee bit on the suspicious side,” I decided.
“Oh, it gets better,” Vance assured me. He flipped a few pages in his notebook and turned it around so that we could see the chicken scratch he called handwriting. He excitedly tapped the page. “Guess who has a part time job at that store?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Dean Rupert,” Vance smugly said.