Chapter Thirty-two

Still reeling from my encounter with Aaron King, whose real name, of course, wasn't Aaron King, I found myself at the Wharton Museum.

Danny had promised to call me immediately if anything came up, and since I hadn't received a call, I might as well keep working, right? And with Aaron still working the case in Buena Park, I thought it was best to tackle some of my paying work.

I might be undead. I might drink blood. And I might be one hell of a freaky chick, but I still needed to feed my kids and pay my bills.

Still in my van, I removed my secret stash of foundation make-up, which I often applied heavily to my face and the back of my hands. I may not show up in mirrors or on surveillance video - weird as hell, I know - but the make-up still did. And after a long night of pounding doors and breaking fingers, well, I wasn't sure how much of my make-up was still in place.

I had already been introduced to the head night security guard, whose name was Eddie. Eddie was a heavy-set Hispanic guy who seemed as cool as cool gets, and oozed a smooth confidence. The way he carried himself, you would have thought he looked a little more like George Clooney and a lot less like Chris Farley.

Then again, I always did think Chris Farley was a cutie.

We were in Eddie's office, which was just inside the main doors of the museum. His office looked a little like Mission Control, minus all the nerds in white short-sleeved, button-down dress shirts. There were ten monitors placed in and around his desk, all providing live feeds from within the museum. While we sat, he cycled through some exterior cameras and some back-room cameras. All in all, there were over twenty cameras situated throughout the small museum.

Eddie leaned back in his swivel chair, a chair that looked abused and ready to give out. I was sitting in a metal foldout chair he had grabbed from a storage closet behind him. The cold metal was almost as cold as my own flesh.

Eddie, to his credit, rarely took his eyes off the monitors. There was a Starbucks coffee sitting next to a keyboard. The keyboard had old coffee stains on it. I wondered how many keyboards Eddie had fried spilling his coffees.

"Would you mind telling me about the night the crystal sculpture was stolen?" I asked.

He shrugged defensively. "Like any other night."

I waited. Eddie stared at the monitors. Apparently that's all I was getting.

I said, "So nothing out of the ordinary?"

"Nothing other than our back-room cameras suddenly stopped working."

"Did the theft take place in the back room?"

"Wow, you're good," he said, still not looking at me. "It's no wonder they hired you."

I ignored the remark. "How long were the cameras not working?"

"Twenty-one minutes."

"Did you catch this immediately?"

He shook his head. "Both pictures were frozen in place. How they did it, we have no clue. But the image looked fine, until I noticed the timer had stopped."

"And how long until you noticed that?"

"Thirty, forty minutes."

"Long enough for the egg to be stolen."

"Yes."

"Could have happened to anyone," I said.

He squinted at me, trying to decide if I was being as big of an asshole as he was, and finally decided that I wasn't. He relaxed a little. "I guess so, yes."

"Where in the back room did the theft occur?"

He pointed to one of the images on the screen. "There. The shipping and receiving room. We had just received the collection from the artist himself."

"And does the artist know of the theft?"

"Not yet, as far as I'm aware."

"When is the exhibit set to debut?"

"One week."

"And the cameras caught nothing?"

"Not a thing."

"Was anything else stolen?"

"Just the crystal egg."

I knew the museum had insurance to cover such a loss, but there was no insurance to cover one's reputation. From what I understood, the theft would be a black eye that the museum could ill afford.

I said, "Other than security guards, does anyone else work the night shift?"

"No, although sometimes the docents and museum staff put in late hours, especially when a new exhibit is about to open."

"Were any of the museum staff working the night the sculpture was stolen?"

"Yes, but they had left hours before."

"How many security guards typically work the night shift?"

"We have four working after hours. Ten when the museum is open. We only have three working tonight."

"Why's that?"

Now Eddie looked pissed. "No clue. Thad never showed."

"What's Thad's full name?"

"Thad Perry."

"Was Thad working on the night in question?"

"No."

"Has he ever not shown up before?"

"Never."

"So you would call this unusual behavior?"

"Extremely."

"May I have a list of the names and numbers to all four security guards working that night?"

Eddie nodded once and slowly eased forward. He tapped a few keys at his keyboard, somehow avoiding knocking his coffee over in the process. This time. He wrote down four names and four phone numbers on a mini-sized pad of legal paper. He handed me the paper. His name was on the list.

"At the time of the theft, where were you?"

Eddie looked at me long and hard. I wasn't getting a guilty hit from Eddie. But I was getting a hostile one. He said, "I was here, manning the desk."

"The whole night?"

"Yes," he said, "the whole night."

"What about bathroom breaks?"

He jabbed a thumb behind him toward the small storage room. A storage room that, I saw, doubled as a small bathroom. "I take my potty breaks in there."

"Who on this list is working tonight?"

"Just Joey."

"I'd like to talk to Joey."

"Of course."

"Were any other private investigators hired to work the case?" I asked.

He nodded. "You and two other private dicks."

He grinned and flicked his gaze toward my crotch. He enjoyed being crude in my presence. I wondered if he would enjoy being dropped into a Jacuzzi from a fourth story balcony.

Crudeness aside, it made sense to hire more than one detective. People did it all the time. When a customer found a human finger in a bowl of Wendy's chili, Wendy's hired over ten private eyes to break the case, which one of them finally did. The finger belonged to one of the customer's friends, a finger he had lost in an industrial accident. The friends then cooked up a scheme, no pun intended, and it might have worked if not for the tenacity of one detective, and the foresight of Wendy's to hire a slew of them.

"Has anyone made any headway?" I asked.

He flicked his gaze at me sideways. Cool as cool gets. "The egg is still missing if that answers your question."

"Oh, most definitely. I'd like to see the back room now."

He reached inside his desk and handed me a generic security badge. "It's a temporary badge. Swipe it, then key in '0000'. And I'll send Joey over, too."

He showed me on the monitors where to find the back room. I thanked him for his time. Eddie nodded once.

Too cool to nod twice.

Chapter Thirty-three

I could almost feel Eddie watching me as I worked my way through the museum, past exhibits called Native American Art and Ancient Art of China. I wondered what my butt looked like on camera. Probably cute. Maybe a little bubbly, since my daughter called me bubble butt sometimes.

I made my way through the Spirits and Headhunters collections, stopping briefly to ogle at a half dozen shrunken heads.

Real, honest-to-God shrunken heads.

And they call me a monster.

I moved through another room, and entered the Mayan exhibit, complete with a stone sarcophagus and beautifully adorned stelae covered in hieroglyphs. The room was particularly alive with zigzagging light...and much bigger balls of light. I knew now what these bigger balls of light were.

Spirits.

The balls seemed to orient on me. Sometimes they grew bigger and sometimes smaller. Sometimes they hovered just above the floor or shot up to the far corners of the room. One or two of them followed behind me.

They were silent, almost curious.

But they could see me. I felt it. I sensed it. Eyes were on me. Unseen eyes. And it wasn't Eddie ogling me from the Command Center.

And if the ghosts could see me, what else could they see?

Perhaps a crime?

I thought about that as I found the back door. I swiped the security card and entered the cryptic "0000" code and found myself in a spacious room. Spacious and dark.

I was about to flip on a light switch when one of the balls of light that had been following me slipped under the closed door and hovered before me.

I was standing off to the side of the door, partially facing a vast room with shelves and storage everywhere. I knew that most museums only displayed a small fraction of their exhibits, and that most pieces were in special storage within the museum, usually in basements. The Wharton, it appeared, didn't have a basement, and allotted this vast room for storage.

The room was pitch black, but that didn't stop me from seeing deep within it, and what I could see were various glass-walled bays that were probably temperature controlled. The bays contained what appeared to be rolling racks of paintings. No doubt very expensive paintings.

The ball of light crackled with energy. Yes, I could almost hear it now, a steady hum, too low for most people to hear. The hair on my arms was standing on end and I realized that the the ball of light was trying to draw energy from me.

So how much energy did an ice-cold vampire have?

I didn't know, but the ball of light began taking on shape and as it did so, my mouth dropped open. And the more it took on shape, the more my mouth dropped open.

It seemed to pull in the surrounding particles of light, gathering them together the way cotton candy collects around a twirling stick.

The particles of light blended with the ball of light, which began to take on shape. A human shape. And when my mouth had dropped fully open, the vague figure of a tall, thin man stood fully before me.

And, if I wasn't mistaken, he bowed slightly.

Chapter Thirty-four

I almost bowed back, but stopped myself.

The hair along my arms was standing on end, and I saw why. A part of his crackling, frenetic, human-like essence had reached out to me. It reminded me of a white blood cell attacking a virus. I wasn't sure what was happening, until it hit me: he was drawing energy from me.

Amazing.

He wasn't a composed whole. A few times some of the light energy that composed his body seemed to disperse and scatter like frightened fish, only to reform again into the tall, thin man standing before me.

The entity tilted his head slightly to one side, and as he did so, a brief image flashed into my thoughts. The image was of a kindly old man and his wife. They were standing in front of a small building, smiling happily. I had, of course, seen pictures of this same building, especially during the past few days. It was the original 7,000 square foot site of the Wharton Museum. In the picture, was the same old couple, smiling happily.

The Whartons.

Next, a single word appeared in my thoughts. Honestly, I didn't know if I thought it or heard it. Either way, it appeared just inside my eardrum:

"Come."

* * *

With that, the entity that I now thought of as Mr. Wharton drifted away. As he drifted away, he lost some of his shape and looked, more than anything, like a floating, glowing amoeba.

He wanted me to follow him. That much I was certain of.

I obliged, following the amorphous ball of energy deeper into the back room, past rows and shelves of Native American art, African art and Chinese art. In fact, dozens and dozens of rows. The majority of the shelves were filled with wooden and clay sculptures, weapons that still looked like they could seriously do some harm, and what had to be priceless jewelry. The jewelry was behind glass cases, as were some of the more delicate pieces. Not surprisingly, Mr. Wharton seemed to know his way.

We past the small shipping and receiving room, which was lined with metal tables and boxes of all shapes and sizes. Some looked like they were going, and no doubt some still needed to be received. What were in those boxes was anyone's guess.

He led me deeper. Or, rather, the glowing ball of light led me deeper, as it had now lost all human shape. It was dimmer back here, and there was only a single security camera a few rows down. Eddie would have a hard time seeing me. No doubt he was wondering what the hell I was doing back here. I was wondering, too.

Mr. Wharton hung a left. And by hanging a left, I mean the ball of light that was the ghostly imprint of Mr. Wharton, went through some shelves and entered a side corridor. I hung the left the old-fashioned way.

He continued on, and so did I.

The camera, I saw, did not reach down this side corridor, which meant that Mr. Wharton and I were alone. And at the far end of the corridor was a massive storage freezer that looked vaguely like a coffin.

I wasn't sure what the museum would need such a storage freezer for, until I remembered the shrunken heads outside. No doubt the museum kept anything biological in cold storage. At least, that's what I would do if I had a collection of shrunken heads.

Crackling and spitting energy and doing his best impression of a human torch, Mr. Wharton materialized again. He stood next to the freezer.

As I approached, Mr. Wharton actually stepped aside to give me access.

Ghostly etiquette. Nice.

I reached down and slowly opened the lid. Cool air rushed out, and the stench of frozen meat. And when the swirling mist had subsided, a very dead face was looking up at me from the depths of the freezer. Wearing a museum guard uniform. I think I had just found Thad, the missing guard.

Two dead bodies in two days.

I was on a roll.