Authors: Douglas Preston
The Codex (2 page)
He heard, at the edges of consciousness, the competent voice of Doreen answering the phone. Her crisp vowels floated in through the open door: “Hold on, excuse me, could you speak a little slower? I’ll get you the sergeant—”
Barnaby drowned out the conversation with a noisy sip of coffee and extended his foot to his office door, giving it a little nudge shut. Blessed silence returned. He waited. And then it came: the knock.
Damn that phone call.
Barnaby placed his coffee on the desk and rose slightly from his slouched position. “Yes?”
Sergeant Harry Fenton opened the door, a keen look on his face. Fenton was never one to like a slow day. The look was enough to tell Barnaby that something big had just come down.
“Hutch?”
“Hmmm?”
Fenton went on, breathlessly. “The Broadbent place was robbed. I got one of the sons on the phone now.”
Hutch Barnaby didn’t move a muscle. “Robbed of what?”
“Everything.” Fenton’s black eyes glittered with relish.
Barnaby sipped his coffee, sipped again, and then lowered his chair to the floor with a small clunk. Damn.
As Barnaby and Fenton drove out the Old Santa Fe Trail, Fenton talked about the robbery. The collection, he’d heard, was worth half a billion. If the truth were anything close to that, Fenton said, it would be front-page-New-York-Times. He, Fenton, on the front page of the Times. Can you imagine that?
Barnaby could not imagine it. But he said nothing. He was used to Fenton’s enthusiasms. He stopped at the end of the winding driveway that led up to the Broadbent aerie. Fenton climbed out the other side, his face shining with anticipation, his head forward, his huge hatchet nose leading the way. As they walked up the road, Hutch scanned the ground. He could see the blurred tracks of a semi, coming and going. They had come in bold as brass. So either Broadbent was away or they had killed him—more likely the latter. They’d probably find Broadbent’s stiff in the house.
The road went around a corner and leveled out, and a pair of open gates came into view, guarding a sprawling adobe mansion set among a vast lawn dotted with cottonwoods. He paused to examine the gate. It was a mechanical gate with two motors. It didn’t show any signs of having been forced, but the electrical box was open, and inside he could see a key. He knelt and examined it. The key was in a lock, which had been turned to deactivate the gate.
He turned to Fenton. “What do you make of that?”
“Drove a semi up here, had a key to the gate—these guys were professional. We’re probably going to find Broadbent’s cadaver in the house, you know.”
“That’s why I like you, Fenton. You’re my second brain.”
He heard a shout and glanced up to see three men crossing the lawn, coming toward him. The kids, walking right across the lawn.
Barnaby rose in a fury. “Jesus Christ! Don’t you know this is a crime scene!”
The others halted, but the lead character, a tall man in a suit, kept coming. “And who might you be?” His voice was cool, supercilious.
“I’m Detective Lieutenant Hutchinson Barnaby,” he said, “and Sergeant Harry Fenton. Santa Fe Police Department.”
Fenton flashed them a quick smile that did little more than bare his teeth.
“You the sons?”
“We are,” said the suit.
Fenton gave them another feral twitch of his lips.
Barnaby took a moment to look them over as potential suspects. The hippie in hemp had an honest, open face; maybe not the brightest bulb in the store but no robber. The one in cowboy boots had real horseshit on the boots, Barnaby noted with respect. And then there was the guy in the suit, who looked like he was from
“This is a crime scene, so I’m going to have to ask you gentlemen to leave the premises. Go out through the gate and go stand under a tree or something and wait for me. I’ll be out in about twenty minutes to talk to you. Okay? Please don’t wander around, don’t touch anything, and don’t talk to each other about the crime or what you’ve observed.”
He turned, and then as an afterthought turned back. “The whole collection is missing?”
“That’s what I said on the phone,” said the suit.
“How much—ballpark—was it worth?”
“About five hundred million.”
Barnaby touched the rim of his hat and glanced at Fenton. The look of naked pleasure on Fenton’s face was enough to scare a pimp.
As Barnaby walked toward the house he considered that he had better be careful—there was going to be a lot of second-guessing on this one. The Feds, Interpol, God knows who else would be involved. He figured a quick look around before the crime-lab people arrived would be in order. He hooked his thumbs into his belt and gazed at the house. He wondered if the collection had been insured. That would bear some looking into. If so, maybe Maxwell Broadbent wasn’t quite so dead after all. Maybe Maxwell Broadbent was sipping margaritas with some piece of ass on a beach in Phuket.
“I wonder if Broadbent was insured?” asked Fenton.
Hutch grinned at his partner, then looked back at the place. He looked at the broken window, the confusion of footsteps on the gravel, the trampled shrubbery. The fresh tracks were the sons’, but there were a lot of older traces here as well. He could see where the moving van had parked, where it had laboriously backed around. It looked as if a week or two had passed since the robbery.
The important thing was to find the body—if there was one. He stepped inside the house. He looked around at the packing tape, bubble wrap, nails, discarded pieces of wood. There was sawdust on the rug and faint depressions. They had actually set up a table saw. It had been an exceptionally competent piece of work. Noisy, too. These people not only knew what they were doing, but they had taken the time to do it right. He sniffed the air. No sweet-and-sour-pork smell of a stiff.
Inside, the robbery felt just as old as it did outside. A week, maybe even two. He bent down and sniffed the end of a cut piece of lumber lying on the floor. It lacked that just-cut fresh-wood smell. He picked up a piece of grass that had been tracked into the house and crumbled it between his fingers—dry. Clots of mud tracked in by a lugged boot were also thoroughly dry. Barnaby thought back: Last rainfall was two weeks ago today. That’s when it had happened; within twenty-four hours of the rain, when the ground was still muddy.
He wandered down the huge vaulted central hall. There were pedestals with bronze labels where statues had once stood. There were faint rectangles with hooks on the plastered walls where paintings had once been. There were straw rings and iron stands where antique pots had once sat, and empty shelves with dust holes where treasures had once stood. There were dark slots on the bookshelves where books had been removed.
He reached the bedroom door and looked at the parade of dirty footprints coming and going. More dried mud. Christ, there must’ve been half a dozen of them. This was a big moving job, and it must have taken a day at least, maybe two.
A machine sat inside the bedroom. Barnaby recognized it as a foam-in-place machine, of the kind you see at UPS. In another room, he found a shrink-wrapping machine for doing the really big stuff. He found stacks of lumber, rolls of felt, metal strapping tape, bolts and wing nuts, and a couple of skill saws. Couple of thousand dollars’ worth of abandoned equipment. They hadn’t bothered taking anything else; in the living room they’d left a ten-thousand-dollar television, along with a VCR, DVD, and two computers. He thought of his own crappy TV and VCR and the payments he was still making, while his wife and her new boyfriend were no doubt watching porno flicks on them every night.
He carefully stepped over a videotape cassette lying on the floor. Fenton said, “Lay you three to five the guy’s dead,
it’s an insurance scam.”
“You take all the fun out of life, Fenton.”
Someone must have seen the activity up here. The house, sitting on its mountaintop, was visible to all of
Santa Fe
. If he himself had bothered to look out the window of his double-wide in the valley two weeks ago he might have seen the robbery, the house ablaze all night long, the truck headlights winding down the hill. Again, he marveled at the moxie of the robbers. What made them so sure of pulling it off? It was too casual by half.
He glanced at his watch. He didn’t have much time before the crime-scene van arrived.
He moved swiftly and methodically through the rooms, looking but taking no notes. Notes, he had learned, always came back to bite you. Every room had been hit. The job had gone to completion. In one room a bunch of boxes had been unpacked and paper lay scattered on the floor. He picked up a piece; some kind of bill of lading, dated a month ago, for twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of French pots and pans, German and Japanese knives. Was the guy starting a restaurant?
In the bedroom, in the back of a walk-in closet, he found a huge steel door, partway open.
“
Barnaby nodded. With a house full of million-dollar paintings, it kind of made him wonder what was so valuable that it had to go into a vault.
Without touching the door he slipped inside. The vault was empty save some scattered trash on the floor and a bunch of wooden map cases. Slipping out his handkerchief, he used it to open a drawer. The velvet bore indentations where objects had once nested. He slid it shut and turned to the door itself, giving the lock a quick examination. There were no signs of a forced entry. None of the locked cases he’d seen in the rooms had been forced, either.
“The perps had all the codes and keys,” said Fenton.
Barnaby nodded. This was no robbery.
He went outside and made a quick circle of the gardens. They looked neglected. Weeds were coming up. Nothing had been tended to. The grass hadn’t been cut in a couple of weeks. The whole place had a seedy air about it. The neglect, it seemed to him, stretched back even more than the two weeks since the so-called robbery. It looked like the place had been going downhill for a month or two.
If insurance was involved, so were the sons. Maybe.
He found them standing in the shade of the piñon tree, arms crossed, silent and glum. As Barnaby approached, the guy in the suit asked, “Did you find anything?”
“Like what?”
The man scowled. “Do you have any idea what’s been stolen here? We’re talking hundreds of millions. Good God, how could anyone expect to get away with this? Some of these are world-famous works of art. There’s a Filippo Lippi worth forty million dollars alone. They’re probably on their way to the
Middle East
or
Japan
. You’ve got to call the FBI, contact Interpol, shut down the airports—”
He paused to draw in air.
“Lieutenant Barnaby has some questions,” said Fenton, taking up the role he played so well, his voice curiously high and soft, with an undercurrent of menace. “State your names, please.”
The one with the cowboy boots stepped forward. “I’m Tom Broadbent, and these are my brothers, Vernon and Philip.”
“Look, officer,” the one named Philip said, “these artworks are obviously headed for some sheik’s bedroom. They could never hope to sell these paintings on the open market—they’re too well known. No offense, but I really don’t think the Santa Fe Police Department is equipped to handle this.”
Barnaby flipped open his notebook and checked his watch. He still had almost thirty minutes before the crime-lab truck arrived from Albuquerque.
“May I ask a few questions, Philip? Okay if I use first names here?”
“Fine, fine, just get on with it.”
“Ages?”
“I’m thirty-three,” Tom said.
“Thirty-five,” said Vernon.
“Thirty-seven,” said Philip.
“Tell me, how is it that all three of you just happened to be here at once?” He directed his gaze toward the New Age type, Vernon, the one who looked like the least competent liar.
“Our father sent us a letter.”
“What about?”
“Well ...” Vernon glanced at his brothers nervously. “He didn’t say.”
“Any guesses?”
“Not really.”
Barnaby switched his gaze. “Philip?”
“I haven’t the slightest.”
He swiveled his gaze to the other one, Tom. He found he liked Tom’s face. It was a no-bullshit face. “So Tom, you want to help me out here?”
“I think it was to talk to us about our inheritance.”
“Inheritance? How old was your father?”
“Sixty ...”
Fenton leaned forward to interrupt, his voice harsh. “Was he sick?”
“Yes.”
“How sick?”
“He was dying of cancer,” said Tom coldly.