Warmth snuggled up against Gary Morgan's back and nibbled at his right ear. That would have been nice, if he wasn't trying to concentrate. He studied the museum case in front of him. It displayed a wide flat Zuni bowl, faded red and black geometric design, with a hole punched through the bottom. He spotted alarm sensors on the Plexiglas of the case, and the bowl seemed to be wired to its mounting. Probably sensors on that, as well. Wouldn't want the exhibit to take a walk.
The title plaque didn't mention that the damage dated to ancient times, "killing" the bowl to release its spirit before burial. And some of Dad's references suggested that the dating was off by about a century. As anthropology museums went, this place seemed a little shaky. Caroline would sneer.
The nibble turned into a nip and he flinched away. Warm breath shifted to his left ear, smelling of cinnamon and whispering sweet nothings. "Hey, lover-boy, why are you mapping all the surveillance cameras and alarm sensors?"
He sighed and turned around to stare into sardonic brown eyes under dyed purple brows and hair. Purple hair lying smooth and flat for a change, instead of rucked up into a cockatoo's crest or a line of spikes like the back-plates of a Stegosaurus. Purple eye-shadow and lipstick and fingernails, too, color-coordinated punk couture using the anthropology exhibits as a fashion runway.
Jane White — a walking refutation of the "Plain Jane" mental image her name invoked, with a nose stud as big as a cufflink and a line of three pierced earrings dangling from her right ear. That punk image included a long clinging purple skirt slit up both sides almost to her waist and a black sweater a couple of sizes too small, tight and short enough to display a belly-button ring and a Celtic knot tattoo winding around her left wrist.
Ben would approve — a girl like that, nobody ever saw the man walking by her side. Even other women stared at her. Perfect camouflage. But she noticed embarrassing things and asked awkward questions.
He kissed the tip of her nose, avoiding the stud. He never could see that thing without visualizing her with a cold, sneezing and runny nose and shredded Kleenex. Yecch. Well, a tongue stud would be worse.
He matched her whisper. "What makes you think I'm scouting security?"
"Your eyes are all over the place, instead of on me. It's enough to give a girl a complex. And you're the first guy I've ever dated who took me to the university museum rather than a dance or a movie or a nice dark dorm room." She cocked her head to one side and lifted the opposite eyebrow.
Gary shrugged. "Hey, if you go for dark dorm rooms, we can do that. I thought it'd be rushing things a bit, taking you for granted, you know. Anyway, my sister wanted me to look for something here."
They moved on to the next exhibit, a big cedar-wood box made for a Haida potlatch, with sides formed by a single plank steamed and bent and joined, painted with stylized ravens and orcas and bears, oh my. It sat on a pedestal rather than in a case, so you could examine it from all sides, but a velvet rope kept spectators beyond reach. Gary noted the pressure sensors under opposite corners and close-in IR beam detectors — the museum folks didn't want people touching it and leaving greasy fingerprints. At least the curators seemed to have the labeling correct on this one.
Jane waved a purple-nailed hand at the sensors he'd just listed. "I rest my case. And which sister was that, buddy-boy? The one who just turned thirteen, or the one who's nearly nine? I know I wasn't asking much about Native cultural artifacts at that age."
Damn! Gary's own alarm system triggered, bells and sirens and flashing strobes. "I don't recall talking about my sisters."
She smiled, her eyes narrowed. Not a malicious smile, just . . . taunting. "Newspaper archives, kiddo. Court records. Obituaries, Probate Court, trustees, guardianship, that sort of thing. Public records. All available on-line. You don't think I'd go out with a guy without Googling him?"
Sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose . . . "You mean records like divorce papers and custody fights and some juvie court stuff that shouldn't have been made public but got pulled into the mudslinging as proof of unfit parenting?"
She flinched. Gritted her teeth. Then nodded. "Oooo-kay. New ground rules — I don't hack you, you don't hack me. Whatever I got into hasn't left me with any diseases or habits that depend on illegal chemicals. And I'm not after your money — Mom and Dad kind of soured me on the concept of marriage and joint property. I was the baby King Solomon said to split in half, and neither of them said 'No!' Good enough?"
Rather carefully worded. "Illegal chemicals," not illegal habits. "Good enough."
Besides, he found certain illegal habits quite attractive. Some of the things she'd said in class combined with things he'd found in hacker groups to point to a shadowy figure with the unisex online name of "ambidextrous." "Ambi" never claimed anything, but it had a nasty habit of asking questions of hackers who claimed to have counted coup. Questions that suggested "ambi" had been there first and left no traces.
She nodded, shook her head, and they moved on to the next exhibit. Mayan relief, this one, it looked like it had been chopped free from a bigger piece of limestone. Classic looting job. The museum collection was a mishmash, with a lot of random stuff from a "donor" who had not been too careful about provenance. Which fit Caroline's question perfectly.
And brought him back to Jane's question. Which was legit, if unsettling. "Different sister, probably not in any records. She's a grad student in anthro out West, wants me to look for something that oral history says should have ended up here. They tried a search under NAGPRA and came up empty."
"Nag-pra?"
Hah. Found something she doesn't know. For a kid who'd spent fifteen years shuttling from one parent to the other, with detours into foster care and the street and various shelters, she sure had picked up a hefty education. Of various kinds.
"Stands for 'Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.' It provides for the tribes to recover looted bones and religious artifacts, all that cultural slavery stuff."
That earned him a pair of lifted purple eyebrows and a measuring stare. "You're an Indian? No mention of that in the records."
He held out a hand, flipped it palm up and palm down a couple of times. "She is, Naskeag. Different mother, same father. I'm probably an eighth or a quarter. Not really enough to show."
"Holy shit, a cyberspace scalp-hunter. You gonna kidnap me and keep me as a naked sex-slave in your teepee?" She didn't look like the threat bothered her much.
"Naskeags mostly did bark lodges. And we'd probably have traded you to the French for ransom. How much would your folks pay to get you back?"
She winced. "About ten cents. If either of them had it handy, exact change. Hey, let's quit banging heads. You're supposed to be sniffing at the other end."
She kept saying things like that. The first time they'd talked was after a class where the TA seemed to know less about the subject than they did. They'd discussed some machine language tricks, loopholes and back doors and general pig-headedness in some operating systems, and then she'd come out with something that loosely translated as "You're cute and I like the way your brain works. Let's find some quiet place and fuck."
He'd damn near swallowed his tongue, then stammered something about another class in fifteen minutes and arranged a date. Fact was, she scared him. Carnivorous. She was nearly as old as Caroline. Did a year or two in age make that much difference?
Sure, he'd had some late-night sex ed classes with Sue Hemming out at the abandoned Stanford quarry. That hadn't prepared him for a purple-haired Martian who didn't seem to own a bra and who, if she was wearing underpants at all, was wearing a damned small thong. Those slits in the skirt showed nothing but girl. Sue might have been an enthusiastic partner, but she waited for him to make the moves. That was sex. This was interspecies sex.
But the purple-haired alien had moved on to the next display case, masks and spears and penis-sheaths and fetishes from New Guinea. "Ethnologist's stew," is what Caroline had called the collection. And implied that some collector should have been added to the cannibal's pot.
He'd been hanging around Aunt Alice and Caroline too much. Some of this stuff made him . . . queasy, stuff that had been buried alive and left there waiting, watching, hungry. Not "killed" like that Zuni bowl. Stuff that felt nasty, like that flint Ben kept selling and stealing back.
He really ought to tell Aunt Alice about that. Recognize that "Haskells" and "Morgans" had become one big happy family. Even though Ben would shit enough bricks for a garden wall. Sideways. He'd turned the flint into an obsession.
Jane turned back, noticing his pause. She squinted at him and chewed on one purple fingernail. "Naskeag Indians, eh? Stonefort? How many Alice Haskells do you know?"
Gary blinked and waited for the cold shivers to settle down. Alien or not, cyber-outlaw or not, this girl made too many connections to let her loose around Morgan family history. "Aunt Alice? Ain't but the one. World couldn't survive another. Why?"
She chewed at that nail for a bit longer. "Kid I knew, back on the streets. Hell, everybody knew her. 'Tiny Tina' we called her, 'cause she wasn't. I never knew her real name. Big girl, about my age, brain fried by street chemicals. Dead girl, judging by the police sketch in the paper. Your guardian helped find her body." Chewed some more. "A couple of months, one way or another, that could have been me."
Small town. He'd grown up thinking Naskeag Falls was the big city, but it wouldn't rate as half a suburb around Boston. If the dead kid came from Naskeag Falls, odds were that Jane would have known her. They'd have gone to the same schools, hung out on the same midnight street corners. Not that many choices.
She was staring through the wall behind him, chewing on that nail. He hadn't really looked at her hands before, but all the nails were ragged, most gnawed clear down to the quick. The purple paint hid that. One high-tension girl, under that spiky façade.
And he'd never had a course in understanding women. All the ones he knew were off the chart. Mom had been a hair-trigger volcano tangled between love and hate, Dad and Ben. Not necessarily in that order. Aunt Alice and Aunt Kate were lesbians, Caroline was . . . Caroline, a law unto herself. The most practice he had for dealing with a scared girl would be Mouse and Ellie, and Jane was most definitely not a little sister.
He started to reach out to her, and suddenly she was burrowing her nose into his chest. Shaking. So maybe the little sister subroutine would work, after all.
"How'd you get off the street and end up here?"
"Luck." Her voice came through muffled by his shirt. "A woman at the King shelter said she wouldn't let me kill myself. Clamped on to my ear and dragged me left and right and backwards until we hit computers and something clicked. Hauled me out of bed in the mornings and drove me to school, waited at the door to pick me up in the afternoons. Kicked my butt as needed. Wouldn't let me fail.
"To Mom and Dad, I was just another weapon in a thermonuclear war. Dana cared. She lasted about six months at the teen shelter before the place burned her to a crisp. Just long enough. After that, I couldn't let her down."
One of the museum guards was staring at them with a narrowed-eye half smile that said "Get a room." Gary added him to the mental map. And reminded himself that he didn't want to do anything memorable in this place. Morgan men were supposed to be invisible, and standing there with Jane plastered all over him sure attracted attention. He gently peeled her loose and moved on to a case filled with Maine split-ash and sweetgrass 'fancy' baskets, antique and modern stuff that made him smile in spite of Jane's problems. Three of the makers were named Haskell, one of them Aunt Elaine.
"Last news I saw, the police were still asking for information on that girl. You talk to them?"
"Buddy-boy, I'll walk a mile out of my way to avoid seeing a cop. I don't want them to realize I'm still alive and within reach."
Maybe Ben would like this girl. Still, Gary made a mental note to pass that name along to Caroline, who would pass it to Aunt Kate, who could point some people at Naskeag Falls street kids without naming her source.
Then Jane cocked her head at him, armor back in place and deviltry in her eyes. "So what are we trying to steal? I mean, 'locate for a totally legal Native claim?' Are we looking for Naskeag stuff?"
Or maybe Ben would tell him to run away very very fast.
"What gives you the idea we plan to steal anything?"
"The fact that you're running a map of the alarm system in your head. The fact that the museum denies holding whatever you're looking for. Even if you do find it, odds are that it's cataloged wrong. Probably labeled as Tibetan. Otherwise, it would have shown up on your legal search."
She waved at the next case, a gaudy Central Asian costume on a Kmart mannequin. "They can't let you just come along and claim that stuff is Naskeag. Anyone could claim anything was a sacred tribal artifact, demand it back under nag-pra. Big legal fight, and the Powers That Be always win that kind. Simpler to steal it."
Damn, she was quick. And she hadn't said a single word loud enough for anyone else to hear. And then she waved a hand down her body, as if she was asking how she'd look in the costume. "So what are we looking for?"
Gary shrugged. "Not Naskeag stuff. Think of it as a doll about as long as my forearm, should look dirty and ragged. Pretty crude, but that's the way it's supposed to look. Caroline described it as a dressed-up coyote turd with stringy hair. Wood body, blurry face like a week-old drowned corpse, wearing a dirty cotton dress and some kind of woven cape. Natural dyes, brown and gray and black."
"Yuck. Sounds like a real beauty. This is important?"
Keep moving, keep casual. Don't attract attention. He moved on to another display, Inuit walrus ivory carvings. "She says it is. It's a religious thing, not really a god but a power. Something or someone that helps drive out ghosts and angry spirits, a guardian of the underworld. You'd have to get her to explain it, and I don't think she will. Says it's too secret. She wouldn't even tell me which tribe. Southwestern, though."
"Dead people, eh? Never had any problem with them. It's the living ones that give me trouble. Once they're dead, they've always stayed dead. Nice, that way."
That sounded like she'd tried it once or twice already. Hacking truce or not, he'd better check for unsolved corpses in her wake. Not that Morgans had any problem with killing folks that needed killing. He'd broken a man's neck a few months back, a slimeball who'd kidnapped Ellie and Mouse. Gary had been sneaking into the Pratt tunnels to free his sisters and this guard had stepped right into a Kempo takedown. Served him right.
Gary had pretty much gotten over the shakes by now. But if Jane had killed anyone, he wanted to have some idea why.
"Caroline told me that these people have a problem with ghosts. 'Traditionals' won't live in a house where someone died — they'll abandon it, let it fall down — even thieves won't go inside to steal things. They burn a dead man's clothing, saddle, bedding, anything personal the spirit might latch onto and guard. Even good people turn nasty when they die, become jealous of the living. They want to take over living bodies, want to get warm again. Skinwalkers."
"Ugh. Your people believe that, too?"
They moved on, to another Inuit exhibit, sealskin parkas and pants and boots, walrus-hide ropes attached to ivory-barbed harpoons, bits and pieces of subsistence life laid out for the white folks to ogle. "My people? Our family tradition is Welsh — I only found out about the Naskeag connection last spring. I know the Naskeags believe in magic, in witches and the power of wind and stone and flowing water. Only ghosts I've heard about are friendly ones, guardian spirits. If you play nice, they play nice."
And that was the last exhibit. No dirty ragged ugly doll in sight. Which meant his map of the security had been a waste of time. As a rule, Morgans didn't steal from museums — private stuff was usually easier to take and sell. Gary knew of special cases, like "Priam's Treasure," but that had been a commission job. And according to Ben, the damned Greek billionaire had gone and died before he paid and took delivery.
But he thought Jane wouldn't turn out to be a waste of time. He slipped an arm around her warmth, letting his hand slide down to bare skin at her middle. She snuggled against his side. "Well, you listed a dance or a movie or a dark dorm room. What's your preference?"
"So you're giving up on this fetish or idol or whatever? Dead end?"
"Not giving up, not yet. Caroline is pretty sure it came here. And it isn't an idol. She made that quite clear. It is the power, not something that represents the power. That's why the tribe needs it back. Or some group within the tribe. She wouldn't tell me more. Secrets, like I said. No names."
Jane cocked her head again, squinting in that way she had when her inner computer was running a search program. "Deep dark tribal secret, eh? If they tried a legal claim, we should be able to hack the records, at least find out who's looking. But we've been through the whole place, and I haven't seen anything like that. It's ugly enough, damned sure we'd have noticed it."
Gary nodded sideways at a set of blank double doors, leading off one end of the hall. "Storerooms, offices, workshops, a couple of conservation labs. In places like this, over ninety percent of the collection is in storage. Caroline didn't think her little dolly would be on display. It isn't 'pretty.' Next move, we search the catalog. Not by names, by descriptions. Odds are, it's called something else. Mislabeled, like you said."
She grinned back at him, eyes narrowed like a stalking cat. "Don't tell me, let me guess. The catalog's electronic, right? Searchable database, but you need a username and password so only the anthro-geeks can play with it?" She licked purple lips. "Sounds like a soft target. Forget the dance or dorm room. How'd you like to come over to my apartment and meet my pet computer?"
Bingo!