In the cellar, it was a strange thing indeed to have Ray Moretti give Joe a weapon. But when he placed a rifle in the open hands of Oscar McCormick, the hair on Joe’s neck lifted.
“How about you, Ray?” Joe asked. “Join us?”
“Not my style.” He wrinkled his nose. “My tastes are more refined, remember? I come for the conversation, the camaraderie. My brother, though...” He tilted his head and pointed to a man halfway down the range. “Just watch.”
Joe did. Straight from the shoulder, Tony Moretti fired his weapon into the circular paper target downrange. Then the target moved back twice as far, and he finished unloading his weapon.
Hanging from wires on a pulley system, the targets came back to Moretti, who plucked them from metal clips. As if he sensed his audience, he turned the target to face Ray, Joe, and Oscar. With an eerie grin, Tony poked his little finger through the hole his bulletshad made at the center of it. He’d been as accurate at one hundred yards as he had been at fifty.
“Bull’s-eye.” Ray shook his head in obvious admiration. “Practice makes perfect.” When he faced Joe again, the smile he wore matched his brother’s.
CHAPTER
33
TUESDAY, JANUARY 26, 1926
Lauren didn’t want to be a coward. She didn’t want to run from the truth anymore, the way she had as a child, and the way her father had throughout his life. So she’d shared everything with her roommates this weekend and grieved as though Lawrence Westlake had died. Indeed, she had lost the father she thought she had. It was a different kind of pain, to mourn what she’d never had in the first place.
When Lauren returned to work this week, she immersed herself in ancient Egypt only because it was her job, and not to escape from the hard realities of the present.
She needed to notify the Vandermeers they’d purchased forgeries, but there would be no containing that news once Victoria learned it. Lauren needed to connect with Joe first and see how best to proceed. She’d called over the weekend but had missed him. He’d returned her call, according to Ivy, but Lauren had been out with Elsa. With every delay, the evidence she held grew heavier. Joe would have enough now to arrest her father. His denouement, and by association, her own, was inevitable.
Beneath the Egyptian rooms, in the basement of the museum, Lauren took her lunch break without eating. Her appetite had vanished with her hope of reconciliation with Lawrence. She wouldnot think of him as “Dad” anymore. He’d betrayed the closeness that title suggested.
Organizing the stacks of paper on her desk, she came across the letter from Miles Vandermeer. The poor man had no idea he would soon receive some very bad news about the jewelry in the photographs he’d sent to her.If they are to be used in some kind of publication,he’d written,we would be grateful to be named as the owners.
Not even close.
Although...
She pulled one of Mr. Clarke’s books from the shelf above her desk. This was one of the volumes he’d had published on his finds from the years 1915–1917. She didn’t care one whit that he’d had others write the chapters. She wanted to see the photographs.
She flipped to the chapters about digs from 1917 and found the image she was looking for. There it was: the ointment jar made of Egyptian alabaster, inscribed with Hatshepsut’s titles as queen. The jar Mr. Clarke had gifted to Newell St. John, the first fake she had identified last fall. The provenance had declared it had been purchased from a dealer in Luxor.
Then why would it be included in a volume of Mr. Clarke’s excavation finds?
She searched the text for an answer and found it. The ointment jar was uncovered from tomb 1, wadi D in the Wadi Gabbanat el-Qurud. Along with several other artifacts from this site, it was snatched by a tomb raider when the guards fell asleep and turned up in a shop in Luxor the next day. Upon finding it there, Mr. Clarke purchased the artifact to recover it, adding to his personal collection.
The provenance document was not wrong. It just hadn’t explained the whole story.
Pulling a magnifying glass from her drawer, she enlarged the hieroglyphs etched into the jar.
They were perfect. This was genuine. It was most decidedly not the same jar she’d pronounced a forgery.
Joe’s suspicions weren’t wild imaginings. Based on everything else she’d learned about her father recently, it was easy to believe he’d swapped out the genuine jar for a lookalike he’d forged, just so she would find it. Just so he could tarnish Mr. Clarke’s name, even if only a little bit.
How petty. How cruel to Mr. Clarke and Mr. St. John and her. Lawrence had probably been coming out of his skin waiting for her to find the fake.
There was no doubt in her mind that her father was a crook. When it came to light, she could only imagine her career would be finished, too. Not by a court of law. No, she was confident she would not be convicted as an accomplice to this ring. But in the court of public opinion, especially among those in the art world, she’d be cast as guilty, like Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the first director of the Met, accused of forgery and only technically exonerated. The detail of where the guilt truly belonged wouldn’t matter. The scandal would be enough.
That wasn’t enough to stop her.
Taking a deep breath, she reached for the phone to call Joe.
It rang beneath her hand.
She answered it, and the operator connected her with Theodore Clarke.
