Before I could push for more than that, he gave me the recap of the article. “A deepwater salvage company, funded by a private collector, recovered some artifacts from a shipwreck, one that sounds a lot like what you just described.”
“Who’s the private collector?” I asked.
He pointed to a name. “It says the Beaumont Corporation. So whoever owns that.” I’d rolled the chair to the side to give him a better view of the screen, and me a better view of his face as he read. “But there’s no written provenance to say whether the stuff was removed from Egypt before or after it was illegal to do so, and the British have their noses out of joint since the wreck may fall under the underwater war grave protection act …”
“I get it,” I said. “Big legal battle. Where are the artifacts now?”
He smiled as if he’d conjured them himself. “On display here in Chicago.”
Holy cats, what a lucky break. Maybe too lucky. Maybe too convenient. Maybe I didn’t care, if it led to the Jackal, the Brotherhood, and Alexis.
“Are there pictures?” I asked, reclaiming the computer mouse. I clicked on a link (helpfully labeled PHOTOS). The first was of a team working to restore and preserve the items. The next, a picture of the collection in an exhibit. The caption said ON LOAN FROM THE BEAUMONT CORPORATION, and prominently featured, was a large basalt statue of the god Anubis in his animal form.
A black jackal.
So close. Light-at-the-end-of-the tunnel close.
What had the shade said? Find the artifacts that lie with my bones. “If that statue sank with Oosterhouse, it did lie in his grave—his watery, unmarked one. If it’s the one, I’ll know as soon as I see it.”
“Seeing it is going to be the easy part.”
He tapped the banner of the Web page and I understood what he meant. Stealing from the Field Museum was going to be a helluva lot harder than jumping another cemetery wall and digging up a grave.
27
FIRST, WE HAD to case the joint.
“We have to what?” asked Carson, when I’d put it in those words. “Are we in a gangster movie?”
I shrugged. “Outdated slang is sort of an occupational hazard.”
We were walking through the park that housed the museum and it was raining—a cold, miserable, umbrella-defeating drizzle that hung in the air and seeped through my clothes. Aunt Gwenda had had too much fun dressing me. I looked like a refugee from an Anthropologie catalog.
To top it off, we’d parked in the farthest possible parking lot. “Dude,” I said, shivering in my raincoat. “What if we need to make a quick getaway?”
Carson gave me the side-eye, one brow raised. “Have I yet failed to provide timely transportation?”
He had a point.
A tunnel under Lake Shore Drive gave a break from the rain, but when we came out the other side, my feet failed me. I could only gaze in awe at the huge—sweet Saint Gertrude, really huge—neoclassic home of the Field Museum of Natural History. City-block huge, so large that the far edges of the building’s wings disappeared in the misty drizzle.
“Three stories of exhibits,” said Carson, stopped beside me as I stared. “More levels of storage below. Over twenty million artifacts, only a fraction on display.”
“Stop,” I said. “You’re making me dizzy.” I hoped it was simple intimidation and panic. But that was a lot of artifacts. That was a lot of people’s history. If only a little bit of it was haunted, I might be in trouble.
“You’ll be fine.” Ducking under the edge of my umbrella, he put his arm around me and started walking again. “You had a hearty breakfast, a second breakfast, and elevenses. You should be ready for anything.”
I decided to accept the encouragement and ignore the teasing as we climbed the stairs—there were a lot of them—and went in. While Carson bought our tickets, I scoped out the steel gates and doors that would seal the museum shut after closing time, not to mention the security cameras with their eagle eyes.
Another day, another museum. I only wished I felt as confident as I had the day before.
This place wasn’t just bigger in size. It hummed with a hundred years of visitors and curators and researchers, the living, breathing stuff that was only background noise to my particular psychic channel.
But as for that—I’d never felt such an orchestra of remnant sensation. It sang to me, pulled me like gravity, but in all directions. Up, down, sideways. It was so finely