“Here we are again.” Lauren’s smile was wistful, and he had his answer. “Shall we sit?” She approached the nearest bench, which was dotted with evidence that pigeons had made themselves at home here recently.
Joe shrugged out of his jacket and spread it over the seat for her. “Please.”
With thanks, she lowered herself. Sitting beside her, he withdrew a few photographs, taken from different angles, of the gilded oyster shell Wade Martin had been holding the night Connor had shot him.
With astonishing speed and confidence, she pronounced it a fake.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“Positive. This is a pendant for a necklace. You see this hole at the top? A genuine piece would have two holes, not one. That’s how they strung pendants so they would lay flat.”
Joe didn’t know what this meant for Connor’s case, but as Murphy had pointed out, it wasn’t his to begin with. All he could do was pass the information along and let others decide what to do with it.
It did, however, confirm his hunch that Lauren’s expertise wouldbe invaluable. He slipped the photographs back into his pocket. “I wish I could do that. It would make my job a whole lot easier.”
“You can.” Her lips tilted in the same lopsided smile she’d given him thousands of times before. He beat back the memories and focused on the task at hand. “All you need to do,” she was saying, “is study Egyptology since childhood, earn a degree from the University of Chicago, and study abroad, not only in Egypt but also in Germany since they have the best translations and dictionaries of hieroglyphs—which means, by the way, you’ll have to learn to read the German language, too.”
He sat back against the bench. “Trying to impress me?” She’d practically recited her résumé, almost as if proving herself. He supposed she’d had to do a lot of that, working among men who may not believe that behind that beautiful face, a brilliant mind could spar with them—and win.
She colored.
“I was impressed even before all that, you know,” he reminded her. “Listen, I’m looking into Egyptian forgeries. I have a hunch they’ve been flowing through Manhattan along with King Tut fever. But to find the forgers, I first have to find the forgeries and work backward. Would you contact private collectors you know to see if they have acquired anything new—so to speak—recently? And if they have, would you be willing to sleuth out real from fake?”
“You want me to be a consultant for the NYPD?”
“I do.”
“Aren’t your consultants usually men?”
“You’re the one I want,” Joe said. “That is, you’re the best, and I need the best. I wish I could pay you, but this will have to be pro bono. We have zero appropriated funds for this.”
She waved a hand. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll do it. Thank you for believing that I can. It will be a service to our patrons and to the Met itself in the cases where the patrons have promised to bequest their acquisitions to the museum. Better to root out the forgeries before they ever enter our building.”
“Exactly.” He was glad she saw it that way. He figured that being a police consultant would be a boon to her résumé, too. “If you need me to talk to your boss to get the time off work for official police business, I can do that.”
“I’m already overwhelmed at work. I’ll have to help with your investigation after museum hours.”
That changed things. He’d imagined her conducting these meetings in broad daylight. “Walk me through what you’re thinking.”
“I’ll go in the evenings.” She said this as if it were a perfectly reasonable solution.
But the evenings were dark. It was barely past six right now, and night had already fallen. “Alone?” Disapproval made his voice rough.
She cocked her head, the whites of her eyes gleaming. “Who is it that you don’t trust? Is it me, the collectors, or the people I may meet along the way?”
From the second highest point in Central Park, Joe looked out over the oasis. City lights twinkled in the deepening darkness. More than two million souls lived in Manhattan alone, and nearly six million when counting all five boroughs of New York City. “I don’t trust anybody,” he said at last. It was a lesson he’d learned too often, and too late.
CHAPTER
3
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1925
An insistent purring vibrated in Lauren’s palm. Cleopatra, the black cat she’d adopted shortly after moving to the Beresford, insisted on attention while Lauren drank her morning coffee from the comfort of the sofa. The dining room in the Beresford hotel-apartment complex offered excellent breakfasts, but she could not live without her own coffeemaker in the small space she called home.
Sunlight poured through square windowpanes, beckoning Lauren to appreciate the tenth-floor vantage point. If she couldn’t be gazing at the pyramids of Giza, the view of Central Park, especially in autumn, was a lovely consolation. Between treetops and skyscrapers, she could make out the top of the massive Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“I still think we could have a bird in here without any trouble.” Elsa shuffled out of the bedroom with a limp from a childhood bout of polio, tying the belt around her robe. Her chin-length blond-and-copper hair had already been finger-waved into place.
