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Hours earlier, the sun had set in fiery amber ripples on the horizon over the sea. A sharp slice of moonlight glimmered on the waters close to shore. The streets were busy at all hours in Cádiz. The city offered so much to experience in food, music and festivity. And with the bullfights on the mainland in Jerez, Cádiz celebrated with all-night dancing in the streets.
Diego turned a corner into an empty street. Though he’d been a Cádiz resident all his life, the sudden street-to-street changes from festive to silent startled him. He was tired, but the coffee he’d slammed down before leaving the club after tonight’s performance had given him a jolt.
Exiting the momentary solace, he crossed a main street peopled with tourists in jeans, sandals and baseball caps, and entered the Hotel Blanca’s whitewashed stucco facade. Diego smiled at the squat matron behind the front desk who wore black edged with touches of white lace. She was someone’s grandma, surely, and her jet eyes brightened at the sight of him. Yet as he approached, she blew him a kiss that seemed more flirtatious than motherly.
He was always startled to notice a woman’s reaction to his appearance. His mother had called him ma bonita, “my pretty,” but his three brothers had pounded him regularly because of his looks...and possibly because of their mother’s affection for him. And because he had no inclinations toward the bullfight. In a family of toreros dating back three generations, Diego had opted to study music.
His hotel room was on the second floor, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, several blocks from the avenue Compo del Sur that fronted the beach. Setting the crate on the small, wobbly table near the bed and untying the cotton bag, he let it slide down to his feet and land on the floor. Sitting on the narrow bed, he pulled the guitar around from his back. Quickly, he loosened the E, A and D strings, and drew them out from the wooden tuning pegs so they sprang like whiskers from the bridge. He slipped his hand inside the guitar’s sound hole.
The small statue had fallen out of the cloth bag and felt cold against his palm as he carefully eased it, and the duct tape he’d used to secure it, from inside the guitar. He shouldn’t have taken it out until morning, but he couldn’t play with it inside the instrument, so he set the shiny piece aside next to the wooden crate. Maybe it wasn’t bronze. Maybe it was gold. He was no expert on metals.
He considered what he could buy if he kept the statue for himself. A lot. But if he didn’t deliver it tomorrow morning, he knew he wouldn’t see tomorrow evening.
Now all he had to do was wait for the first meeting—at midnight. An appropriately menacing time to meet a stranger.
Diego passed the hours strumming his guitar.
* * *
AS MIDNIGHT TOLLED, the door to Diego’s hotel room creaked open. Diego abruptly stood as a tall stranger in a long black leather coat stepped in. He wore sunglasses and a dark fedora, the crown of it circled with a red ribbon. The brim was tipped low over his eyes. Cordoba leather shoes caught Diego’s eye. Very expensive. His father had once owned a pair.
He flexed his fingers. He couldn’t recall leaving the door open, but he hadn’t locked it.
“You Diego Montera?” the stranger asked in a low tone.
A dreadful chill froze Diego at the end of the bed, his guitar held ready as if it was a weapon.
“Yes. Are you the liaison for—”
“Yes, the liaison. You have it?”
“Yes. Ah! I need to check a message first.” He eyed the corner of the battered cell phone on the floor, which lay half out of the cotton bag. “Verify the transaction before we do this.”
The other man tipped his sunglasses down and looked over the rim at Diego. “You’ve not done this before, have you, Señor Montera?”
Diego rubbed his sweating palms down the sides of his jeans. He didn’t like that his employer had given his full name to the client. “What makes you think that?”
The thin man smirked as he approached the crate. “Do what you must. All my accounts are in order. Is it in here?”
“Yes.” Diego opened up the cell phone and turned it on. The thing was four years old, taped across the cover and slower than an adagio. He waited for the screen to boot up.
The liaison didn’t seem to notice him. He paused to look at the statue of the bull in bronze...or gold... before pushing aside the top of the crate.
“This was nailed down originally. With more rivets?”
“Hmm?” Diego looked down at what he was doing, studying the cell phone in his lap. “Uh, not sure. That’s exactly the way it was when I received it.”
The cell-phone screen flashed and the icon that indicated it was searching for service blinked.
“So...” The stranger exhaled in a heavy sigh. He tapped a rough wood slat of the crate. “You’ve touched what’s inside?”
“Damn.” The battery warning flashed red and the screen flashed to black. Diego scampered to the other side of the bed trying to find an outlet to recharge the device. “Touched it? Oh, well... Yes, the cover came off easily, so I did look at it. I didn’t take it out.” An outlet. Excellent. He plugged in the phone.
“That’s unfortunate.”
Diego straightened and immediately had to take a step backward because the man suddenly stood before him. His brain registered the swing of an arm, a fist soaring in an arc to deliver a punch, but the man moved so rapidly, Diego had no time to duck.
Knuckles bruised the side of his jaw, and his head snapped back sharply. A loud crack could have been the man’s knuckles or Diego’s teeth. His equilibrium faltered, but he managed to stay on his feet.
The liaison emitted a guttural grunt, similar to a workman lifting a bale of hay. His thin, leather-clad body rose before Diego. He propelled himself into the air by stepping onto the bed, knocking the guitar onto the tiled floor.
Not his guitar!
Who was this man?
Searing pain pierced Diego’s spine at the base of his neck. He cried out, but only a gurgling mumble came out of his throat.
He tasted more blood and swallowed it back. He started to choke. He couldn’t catch his breath. Blood bubbled up into his throat. His spine felt numb, but his heart pounded rapidly. His neck and face were on fire.
Grasping for the man who had removed his sunglasses and stood calmly before him, Diego dropped to his knees. Grasping at his chest, he closed his eyes. He choked to death on his own blood.
1
Annja Creed dragged herself out of the narrow, lumpy bed mumbling, “Must find a new place to stay.”
Her regular morning routine found her rising, showering and fitting in a jog before the first glint of sunshine hit the rooftops. But today? Six o’clock was absolutely torturous after spending the night at a hostel populated with more partying teenagers than she could shake a fist at.
But after nearly two months straight of traveling, she teetered close to an edge no one wanted to see her step over. She powered up her laptop and located a hotel by the sea. She was financing this trip to Andalusia herself, so had initially thought to go cheap. She’d been invited by James Harlow, the head of acquisitions and curations at the Museum of Cádiz, to view their recently acquired collection of Greek coins featuring Hercules’s twelve labors, found in Egypt. He must’ve discovered that she was writing an article on coins depicting mythological heroes. She’d jumped at the opportunity. The collection was pristine, and she’d taken some excellent pictures yesterday. Today, she planned to take notes and make pencil rubbings of both the obverse and reverse of each coin.
Two days previously she’d been in Puerto Real, across the Bay of Cádiz, squatting alongside Professor Jonathan Crockett on a small dig she’d learned about while researching the area for hotels. The bay area was made up of tiny villages dotted with small white houses and was rich with Moorish and Roman remains. So she’d planned a few extra days to dig in the dirt. Frankly, it had been months since she’d participated in a dig. She’d been unable to resist.
The Cádiz website featured a list of recommended hotels, most bordering the Atlantic Ocean. Annja made a reservation, hoping for less of a party atmosphere. A touristy hotel was fine with her.
She swept her chestnut hair into a ponytail, stuffed her few articles of clothing and essential tools into her backpack—laptop, flash drives, camera, trowel and dental pick, latex gloves, passports and SPF 30 sunscreen—and headed out to find the Hotel Blanca.
On the sidewalk outside of the hotel, she splashed through a puddle, evidence of an early-morning rain shower. Her sure strides scattered a clowder of feral cats sprawled around the furry remains of what must have been a rat.
Set by the sea, Cádiz was a cosmopolitan Spanish city. Yet being one of the oldest cities in Europe, it clung to its heritage, steeped as it was in Gypsy culture and the art of flamenco dance and music. Farther inland, the province was covered with national parks and mountains. She’d once backpacked through Moorish villages to study an ancient fortress believed to have been Ferdinand II’s stronghold.
Founded by the Phoenicians in or around 1100 BC, Cádiz was interesting to Annja in that no archaeological strata on the site could be dated earlier than the ninth century BC. Historians decided Cádiz, or Gadir as the Spaniards called it, had once been a shipping stop instead of an actual port, which may be reason for the lacking pre-ninth-century archaeological finds.
Nothing of major importance had been found at the dig site until yesterday when she’d turned up a bronze bull statue. Possibly an effigy to Baal, the bull god, she had decided. Baal was associated with thunder and rain, and had been killed annually by Mot, the god of summer heat. Killing Baal stopped the summer rains so Mot could scorch the earth. Baal’s sister, Anath, brought him back in the fall, and he renewed plant life and allowed the earth to once again be plowed.
Annja figured Mot had worked his alchemy this week. The thermometer was rising, and out on the dig, the earth had been hard, which made for easy brushing, but challenging trowel work.
She’d taken photos of the bronze statue in situ and then again after digging it out and placing it on the finds table. After being cataloged, it would be sent to a local university. She’d shown James Harlow at the Cádiz museum the photos, and he’d been fascinated.
Annja dodged as a toddler, chasing a red rubber ball, with no mind for obstacles, zoomed toward her. His parents, exasperated tourists, apologized as they ran past her calling out in what she recognized as German.
A beam of sun glinted in her eye, magnified by the silver waves ridging the sea to her left. The water was clear and the sand on the beach bright and clean-
looking. After a few hours at the museum, she intended to walk down to the shore. A perfect way to end the trip before her flight back home.
Much as she enjoyed travel, she was looking forward to returning to her apartment in Brooklyn and stealing some writing time. Annja had collected notes from digs in Austria and Turkey and wanted to translate them onto the computer and see if she could wrangle a worthy story in the mix. She loved writing, and had published a few books on archaeology, but found writing time spare because, more than pounding away at the keyboard, she loved actual digs, searching for new discoveries. Generally being outdoors. Adventure ran through her veins.
The Hotel Blanca’s white-tiled lobby was filled with potted palm trees, and the overhead latticework created crisscross patterns of sunlight. The elderly receptionist wore a severely tight bun of salt-and-pepper hair and gave Annja a rote welcome to the beautiful city of Cádiz. She looked Annja up and down—taking in the hiking boots sorely in need of new laces, her khaki cargo pants sorely in need of an iron and her T-shirt that featured a fading Women for Women logo—then took her credit-card information and handed her a key.
Annja thanked the receptionist and took the concrete stairs featuring brightly colored paintings along the risers two at a time. Not authentic Spanish design, but the entire city couldn’t be authentic, she figured.
She had always been curious about Spanish culture and artifacts—okay, artifacts from any culture and time period. She’d spent two summers interning on digs in Granada during her college years and had fallen in love with this country. The Andalusians were proud of their history, which began with the Phoenicians, and over the centuries incorporated influences from the Visigoths to the Islamic empire. They were most famous for Christopher Columbus’s journeys and Ferdinand and Isabella’s rule. Not to mention their monopoly of the sea trade in the eighteenth century.
Annja found her room, and as she slid the key card through the lock, she noticed the door next to hers at the end of a hallway move inside a few inches, creaking.
With little more than a bend forward, she peered inside and noted the edge of a neatly made bed, and then two booted feet, facing down, hanging off the side.
“Must have partied over at the hostel,” she muttered. “Hello?” she called softly and moved to pull the door shut to give the guy some privacy.
But the sight of an acoustic guitar facedown on the floor instead prompted her to push the door open.
A stale, meaty odor assaulted her senses.
Clenching her fists, Annja stepped around the guitar and looked over the man sprawled on the bed. Blood stained the back of his blue shirt and had soaked the shirt through and puddled on the faded yellow bedspread.
Clasping her hands together to keep from inadvertently touching anything, Annja looked back to the door she’d left open.
“What went on here?” she wondered as she again studied the body of what appeared to be a young man. Long, dark hair covered his face. There were no signs of drug paraphernalia, no needles or spoons.
“Drugs usually don’t result in bleeding out,” she whispered. “He’s been attacked.”
The largest bloodstain was over the left side of his back, directly over his heart. He could have been shot in the back or stabbed. She’d call the reception desk to alert the police immediately.
Just as she was about to leave to do that, her gaze fell onto the bronze statue on the table next to a wooden crate that spilled out brown paper packing strips. A very familiar bronze statue in the shape of a bull, about the size of her fist. She knew that because she had held the statue not a day earlier.
Annja dodged around the dead man’s feet and tugged a pair of latex gloves out of her backpack. She put them on before picking up the bull statue.
“I just dug this out of the ground yesterday.”
It had been coupled with a bent silver platter she and Jonathan Crockett had assumed had been part of thieves’ booty. Probably nineteenth century, to judge from the strata layers where it had been found. Yet the actual statue and platter could possibly date to the eleventh century. That was her guess.
She turned it over now, noting bits of dirt were still embedded in the creases that outlined the bull’s head. It had to be the same statue. Wasn’t every day a person stumbled on something like this, though it certainly wasn’t remarkable. The bull was a symbol and totem used throughout the ages. Baal, the bull god? Maybe. Or perhaps a simple study of a bull.
No matter what it was, she knew without doubt this was the same piece she’d dug up yesterday. How had this gotten into a small seaside hotel in the hands of a dead man in less than twenty-four hours?
The impressions in the paper packing strands of the crate indicated a round object had been inside, about three times the size of the statue, perhaps a ring like a halo. Something else could have been in the crate. Maybe the bull had been set in the center with something bigger around it.
No, it didn’t look as though the packing paper had been disturbed in the center.
Had the man on the bed been transporting stolen artifacts? It made sickening sense. Port-side cities like Cádiz were rife with small operations that trafficked in stolen and looted artifacts. Annja wanted to string them all up and force them to understand they were robbing an entire culture.
“Who was here before me?” she asked the dead man. “And what did he take from the crate?”
She was no forensics expert but could make an educated guess how long the man had been dead. His skin was pink at the bottom of his hands, which were flat on the bed, indicating the blood had settled. That meant six hours after death. He must have been murdered around midnight. It was a guess, though.
Slipping a hand inside her backpack, she drew out a digital camera and took a picture of the statue, flipping it over and getting edge shots of it as well as inner shots, trying to match the previous shots she’d taken while at the dig site. She and Harlow had uploaded those photos to their laptops. Then she snapped shots of the empty wood crate from all angles.
She wouldn’t take a picture of the dead body, but she did take another look at the man’s back to note the exact position of the wound. Set at the base of the neck and to the left of the spinal column, it looked too messy and wide for a bullet, but an exit wound could tear the flesh if the rifle had been high caliber. She adjusted her guess to a knife with a narrow blade.
She had the urge to search the dead man’s pockets for a wallet and identification except that she heard footsteps down the hallway. The door, which she hadn’t pushed closed, crept inside an inch.
Stepping out into the hallway, she spied a maid and grabbed her by the arm and said in her most theatric Spanish, “He’s dead! I was going into my room, and his door was open. Send for the police!”
2
Annja had waited until a pair of officers had arrived at the hotel, and answered their brief questions. They’d asked her to come along to the Cádiz city police station.
She relayed all the information she could to a Maria Alonzo—a female officer Annja decided wasn’t in a high position. She merely nodded and jotted things down and didn’t prompt with leading questions. The officer then said she’d return with Annja’s belongings in a few minutes and left the room.
Having been escorted to an interrogation room upon arrival at the police station hadn’t bothered Annja. Of course they would be thorough. And, having been on the scene, she could understand how she might be construed a suspect. But she wasn’t going to sit patiently for long.
She still had one more day at the museum planned, working alongside James Harlow. The murder mystery she would leave in the capable hands of the Cádiz police. But the question of what had been inside the wooden crate tread on her turf. And whatever it was had been worth murder to someone.
It wasn’t related to the bronze statue, she suspected. Or else wouldn’t the murderer have pocketed that, as well? There was a possibility whatever had been stolen wasn’t even an artifact. But the crate and the packing materials screamed archaeological interest.
She got up from the uncomfortable metal folding chair and stretched her arms over her head. Despite its seaside location, the heat index could rise to blistering before noon and the room didn’t have air-conditioning. She had waited an hour alone in this room before an officer had arrived to get the details from her. She was hungry, yet her system buzzed with nervous adrenaline.
“Señorita Creed?”
A second officer strolled in, favoring his left leg with a slight limp. He set her heavy canvas backpack on the table. He stood back, thumbs hooked into the front pockets of his brown, creased slacks. He wore the force’s green flak jacket with the gold policia emblem emblazoned across the back over a yellow-and-blue-striped shirt. Visible under his left arm, a holstered pistol. The big silver buckle of his belt was either a black enameled bucking horse or a bull. Annja couldn’t be sure and didn’t want to look too closely.
“César Soto,” he offered, but didn’t offer his hand. “Chief Inspector, Cádiz PNP.”
He wore a nonissue beige cowboy hat low over his brow, which emphasized his dull, black eyes. He needed a shave, and sweat slicked his cheeks and nose.
“Am I free to leave?” she asked, fingering the backpack strap. “I answered all the other officer’s questions.”
“Just a few more minutes, if you don’t mind, Señorita Creed.” He spoke English well, with only a hint of a Spanish accent. “My assistant is typing up her report, but I wanted to go over a few key points with you that I don’t quite understand.”
He pulled a credit-card-size digital camera out of his jacket pocket and set it on the table. It was her camera. Annja picked it up and turned it on.
“We uploaded and then erased the contents,” Soto said before she could verify that for herself. “Tell me why a woman who happens upon a murder scene moments after renting a room in a hotel takes pictures of the incident.”
“I didn’t photograph the victim.” She winced. As if that made her amateur-photography expedition sound more virtuous. “I’m an archaeologist, Officer Soto. I explained to your assistant, when I arrived at my room the door next to mine was open, and I am, by nature, curious.”
“And apparently quite brave to walk in on a dead man?”
“I’m also accustomed to dead bodies.”
“Is that so? How often do you come across a fresh kill?”
