Chapter Twenty-Four
Marcella had arranged for early morning delivery and Harley’s laptop arrived before Gabriela finished her second cup of coffee. She took the box to the kitchen table, removed the computer, and turned it on. She scanned through the current emails and did a search of deleted items.
“More coffee,” she said to Rafer after an hour of scanning. “I need more coffee. I’ve found the aliases for two of the principals, but their emails are password protected.”
“You might want to pull back on the caffeine. Your eye is twitching. You need to defrazzle. You need something to help you relax and focus. How about trying a sugar rush from a couple doughnuts?”
“I thought we ate all the doughnuts.”
“You’re right. We ate all the doughnuts. How about sex?”
Gabriela turned from the computer and gave Rafer full attention. “Sex?”
Rafer grinned. “It would be strictly for the sake of cracking the code. It’s a scientific fact that after an orgasm a woman’s body is flooded with dopamine and oxytocin, counteracting the stress hormone cortisol.”
She was tempted. So far, her week had been crap. She could use some dopamine. And Rafer was looking good as usual with his sun-bleached, tousled hair and his killer smile. Plus, he’d rescued her from a burning building.
“And since cortisol also makes women fat, there would be an added bonus for you,” Rafer said.
“If that’s supposed to convince me to have sex with you, you’re going in the wrong direction.”
“Not that you’re fat,” Rafer said.
“Too late. The moment is gone.”
Rafer’s grin morphed into a full-blown smile. “Your loss.”
Gabriela turned back to the computer thinking that he was right. The marriage had been a disaster, but the sex had been terrific.
Rafer brought a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a knife to the table. “Lunchtime,” he said. “Do you need jelly? A banana?”
Gabriela shook her head. “No. This is good. I’m making progress.
I remembered Harley telling me that his friend at work, the IT guy, sent him an email warning him to get out of town.
Harley said he never got the email, but it occurred to me that an IT guy might send something in a way that couldn’t be traced back to him.
Harley would have thought it was spam and put it in the trash.
I found it because Harley never empties his trash.
The subject was ‘Parking ticket BM EA 24 overdue. Pay now to avoid penalty.’ The sender’s address was a no-reply with various country domain extensions.
If Harley knew anything about any of the items he insured, he would have recognized this as not trash because ‘BM EA 24’ is the Rosetta Stone’s registration number. ”
“The IT guy was assuming Harley was smart,” Rafer said.
“Yes. Unfortunately, Bench or one of his lackeys was smarter than Harley and picked this up before the computer was scrubbed. The file the IT guy sent is huge. It’s a multiperson chain conversation with enough information to allow Harley to follow the breadcrumbs to the Rosetta Stone, if he was so inclined. ”
“This is why you make the big bucks,” Rafer said. “You’re smarter than the smarties.”
“Uncle Scrooge is smarter than the smarties,” Gabriela said. “I’m tenacious.”
“Tell me more.”
“I had to patch a bunch of emails together and make some connections and assumptions, but I think what I’ve come up with is pretty accurate.
“John Mackey was part of the team on the night of the theft. He helped get the stone out of the tunnel and into a van that was parked on the street in back of the noodle shop. Leon Blake took over from there and drove the stone to a storage facility. The plan was to hold the stone there until it could be shipped to someplace called ‘the castle.’ Two days later Leon Blake goes to check on the stone and there’s no stone.
They look at the security camera history and see John Mackey walking up to the storage facility in the dark of night.
The camera takes a bullet after that and goes black.
Leon Blake is sent out to speak to John Mackey and ends up shooting him dead and staging it as a mugging. ”
“Whoops,” Rafer said.
“Not so much whoops as good riddance. Before Mackey goes lights-out, he admits to Blake that he has the stone in his truck, in his garage. Blake takes a look at the garage and thinks it’s as good a place as any to store the stone.
I mean, who would suspect that the Rosetta Stone was under a bunch of rags in the back of the dilapidated truck?
So, Blake changes the lock on the garage and leaves the stone in the truck.
They were twenty-four hours away from shipping the stone to the castle when we broke in and took the stone. ”
“Where’s the castle?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does the big guy live in the castle?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“It’s endless,” Gabriela said.
“What about the golden coffin?”
“I haven’t gotten to that yet. I’m wading through a lot of conversation. And there are times when there are chunks of conversation missing because they talked on the phone.”
Gabriela made herself a peanut butter sandwich and washed it down with chocolate milk. “Every time I get together with you, I regress to eating like I did in high school.”
“You had peanut butter in your condo.”
“I use it when I make Thai food.”
“So, you never just eat peanut butter?”
“Okay, sometimes I eat peanut butter, but never with chocolate milk. And never with white wine. Only red.”
“Good to know you have standards,” Rafer said.
“I might be revising my standards. The chocolate milk was delicious.”
“Keep reading,” Rafer said. “I’m going to take a nap.”
Rafer strolled out of the bedroom and looked over at Gabriela.
“What’s up?” Rafer asked. “You’re still on your laptop.”
“The coffin was shipped in the third week of the thefts. Harley was removed from his position at the end of the fourth week. That’s where the emails end, because that’s when the IT email was sent. Shortly after that Harley’s computer was repossessed. Standard procedure.
“From what I can see, the heists were actually very sophisticated in execution and planning. Very professional. And the core team has no problem with murder. Again, coldly, ruthlessly professional. They get sloppy when it comes to functioning on the day-to-day human level. If my timeline assessment is correct, Bench was coming to grips with the missing coffin when he discovered the email fiasco.”
“And he decided Harley had the coffin?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he hadn’t reached that conclusion yet. Maybe he just thought Harley was a threat. He had no way of knowing Harley didn’t read any of the emails. Maybe he put it together when we found the Rosetta Stone.”
“That makes sense. Any other fun stuff in the emails?”
“Fooze and Dodi Khabi opened the crate at the dig site dumping ground. According to an email sent by Rocky Mausud, Fooze was able to authenticate the coffin. They loaded it into a van, wrapped it in blankets, and Fooze stayed with the van. He made a brief side trip where he ran Dodi Khabi off the road, and then he continued on to Cairo. When he got to Cairo he crated the coffin and stored it in the Mausud warehouse.”
“These people are good at tying up loose ends,” Rafer said. “What about Brendan? Where’s Brendan?”
“The mummy wasn’t part of the traveling exhibit,” Gabriela said. “Brendan is in a museum in Cairo. He needed some restoration.”
“So, when did the golden coffin go missing?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Does this mean we’re going back to Egypt?”
“No, it means we’re going to Italy. In one of the early emails, Bench told Searl that the art was secure at Castello Blanco and ready for transfer when appropriate.
He said he was leaving Valgenico, going back to New York.
Valgenico is a small town in the Trentino region of Italy.
I’ve never been to Valgenico, but I’ve been to the Trentino region.
I traced a very unique necklace to Trento and eventually to Como a couple years ago.
It was an insurance fraud case. According to Google, there’s no Castello Blanco in Valgenico, but there are lesser estates scattered around.
I sent a text to a contact I have in the region.
He just answered and wrote that Castello Blanco might be Castello Cara Scalucci.
It’s called Blanco by the locals because the north wall is craggy and home to about a thousand swallows. The wall is white from the guano.”
“Tell me more about your friend in Valgenico.”
“He isn’t in Valgenico, but he’s familiar with the area. His name is Jacko Bartolli. He’ll meet us at the airport in Verona and drive us to the castle.”
“So, we get to the castle, and we knock on the door and ask the keeper of the castle if he knows where we can find a bunch of stolen antiquities and whatever.”
“Exactly,” Gabriela said.
“And then we ask him if he’s the big guy.”
“Of course.”
“Okay,” Rafer said. “Good to know you have this all worked out.”