The Bone Chamber

2

Sydney Fitzpatrick looked at the boxes stacked around the living room of her apartment, boxes she’d yet to unpack since her transfer to the FBI Academy at Quantico almost a month ago. She thought about digging through them to find her favorite cashmere sweater, only because Tasha usually dressed for dinner, even at the more casual restaurants. Then again, anything she pulled out of a box was bound to be wrinkled, and after the errands she’d been running this afternoon, she had just about enough time to brush her hair and race out the door as she was.
Tasha was waiting for her at a table in the Ristorante Primavera, an upscale Italian eatery. She stood when Sydney approached, her gaze locked on the door behind her, for what seemed a second too long, before suddenly smiling, then reaching out to give a hug. “Syd! You haven’t changed a bit.”
“In seven months? I hope not.” Sydney eyed her friend as she took a seat opposite her. “How is it you have a tan, when the rest of us haven’t seen the sun in weeks?” she said, when what she really wanted to ask was if Tasha was unwell. Beneath that tan, she looked tired, nervous even.
“Just got back from a dig. I’ll pay for it down the road, wrinkled like an old prune, but that’s the hazard of working in the sun.”
“Where this time?”
“Egypt. Valley of the Kings.”
They sat, scanned the menu, and almost in unison said, “Pizza Margherita!” A waiter approached, and Tasha ordered a bottle of cabernet to go with the pizza. “Unless you wanted something else?” she asked Sydney.
“Cab is perfect.” The waiter left, and Sydney leaned forward. “Is everything okay, Tasha?”
“Major jet lag. I’ve only been back a couple days. But trust me. A couple bottles of wine, a taxi ride home, I’ll sleep like a baby and all will be well with the world. How about you? I heard about all the mess with your father’s old case.”
“I’m fine. The case is fine,” Sydney said, not wanting to get into the particulars of what had happened to her father. Not here at dinner. “So tell me about this latest dig of yours. Bones? Pottery? Ancient treasure?”
“Is the FBI spying on me?”
“Spying?” Sydney laughed. “Yeah, we’ve got a whole wing at Quantico devoted to the pyramids. Right next to the X-Files. So give me the scoop. Find anything interesting?”
Tasha smiled. “Besides a few pottery shards? Nothing. What about you? How’s this forensic art class you’re teaching at the academy?”
“So far so good,” Sydney replied, as the waiter returned with the wine. “Two-week course. Students are a mix of police officers and civilians working for law enforcement agencies from around the country. It’s fun.”
They spent the next hour talking about everything from Sydney’s work to which fashion designer needed to die for bringing back some godforsaken style, like neon oversized flower prints that never should have seen the light of day in the first place. The closest they got to talking about Tasha’s job was when she tried to convince Sydney to put off her plane trip and work the forensic ID case with her, which struck Sydney as odd—never mind that the whole time they sat there, Tasha’s attention seemed to wander toward the entrance and the street front window. Sydney would have dismissed it as simple preoccupation, if it weren’t for the fact that Tasha was definitely jumpy. Maybe something was wrong at work. Stress, bosses, who knew? “You sure you’re okay?” Sydney asked.
Tasha started to deny it again, but suddenly stopped, leaned back in her chair and said, “You’d never believe it if I told you.”
“Told me what?”
“The tomb I was in? Supposedly anyone who entered was subject to a two-thousand-year-old curse and would be dead in a fortnight. So, call it bullshit, call it whatever. It gave me nightmares, and I haven’t been able to sleep.”
“Nightmares?”
“You know how vivid my dreams are. Like after I saw that Count Dracula movie and everyone in my dreams sprouted fangs and came after me, and I had to defang them?”
“I thought you said you were a kid when that happened?”
“I was. But I remember it like it was yesterday, and if I never see another Dracula movie again, it’ll be too soon. Now give me the real dirt. Why is Scotty helping you look for an apartment? I thought you two broke up?”
There it was again. That turn away from Tasha back to her. Maybe it was best just to let it go. Tasha was a big girl, and certainly knew Sydney was there for her. “We’re done.”
“For good?”
“For good. But we’re still friends.” Scott Ryan, her ex-fiancé, was happily married to the FBI, which left no room for her. “Why? You interested in him?”
“Hardly, but there was that cute friend of his who worked in the same bureau. The one who just got divorced…” Tasha was three years divorced, and as far as Sydney knew, not in a particular hurry to settle down again.
“Carter?”
“Yeah. Too bad I’m going to Italy at the end of next week, which is why I need you to work with me on this drawing before I go,” Tasha said, tipping the last of the wine into her glass, then signaling for the waiter to bring them another bottle. “If I hadn’t already committed to this dig, I’d give him or any other eligible male some serious consideration.”
“I’m sure Carter will be there when you get back,” Sydney said, thinking that was the closest Tasha had come to talking about herself all night. “Me, I’ve sworn off Feds.”
“All Feds, or just Scotty?”
“My opinion, Scotty’s a good representative example of what they’re like.”
“He’s damned cute, if you ask me,” Tasha said, seeming more like her old self.
“And a really nice guy. But if you want a warm body sleeping in your bed each night, pick a man in the private sector.”
The waiter brought a second bottle of cabernet, and as he walked off, Tasha leaned over and whispered, “Waiters are in the private sector.”
Tasha’s laugh was vivacious, infectious, and by the time they finished their second bottle, Sydney wasn’t sure if she’d ever again look at a glass of cabernet without thinking of waiters in Italian restaurants.
The next morning Sydney wasn’t sure if she’d ever look at a glass of red wine period. A textbook hangover made her head pound, and when the phone rang, the pounding increased tenfold. She hoped like hell it wasn’t Tasha, because she had a hell of a time convincing her that she was not giving up her trip home.
“You ready to go look for apartments this afternoon?” It was Scotty, who, ever since her transfer back to Quantico, had made it his mission to get her out of her temporary apartment supplied for agents in downtown Washington, D.C. She’d done little to discourage his interest, because it gave her something to talk about with Scotty, telling him that she wanted to find a decent place to live.
It was really a smoke screen. She liked temporary. It meant she didn’t need to make a decision. “Yeah, maybe…I don’t know. I’m a little hung over.”
“From what?”
“Tasha and I went drinking last night,” she said, before she remembered the lie she’d told him about having a headache and just wanting to relax for the evening. “I started to feel better and she called. I’m sorry.”
A stretch of silence.
“I figured you’d already made other plans,” she said.
“Did I say anything?”
Did he ever? “Look, I’ve got to go take mass quantities of ibuprofen. I’ll be ready in an hour.”


“Anything in the newspapers?”
Jon Westgate lit a cigarette, glanced over at his boss. “Not yet.”
“Do not smoke in here.”
“Sorry.” But he made no move to put it out. Instead, he walked toward the window, away from the man who sat in the leather wingback chair, drinking his coffee. Politicians. He wouldn’t be working for one if the perks weren’t so damned good. “I’ve checked all the papers, and the Internet. Nothing.”
“I find that odd. A young woman so brutally murdered…One would think they’d want her identified.”
“If that were the case,” Westgate said, “maybe one shouldn’t have had her face removed.”
An icy silence seemed to fill the room, and Westgate wondered if perhaps he’d been too sarcastic to the man who was signing his checks, until his boss said, “You’re right. It seems the man Adami sent was a bit overzealous when I suggested that we didn’t want her immediately identifiable.”
“Adami is becoming a problem. He is obsessed with these Masonic symbols.”
“Most Grand Masters are.”
“Most Grand Masters don’t carve pyramids on a girl’s face. Clearly he ordered his man to do it. I think he needs to be reined in.”
“I’ll make that decision. For now, I’m curious to find out what this third key is. He insists that it’ll change the course of bioweaponry.”
“I thought you said it was nothing but a pipe dream?”
“I still think so. But I’m also smart enough to know that I don’t know everything, especially when it comes to biblical history. I imagine that has something to do with this latest scientist Adami picked up, Dr. Balraj. His specialty is in the evolution of plagues.” He shook the paper out, then turned the page. “I just don’t get this. How is it this girl hasn’t been reported missing? I have plans for this when she is identified, and it would be nice if it made the news. Are you sure there’s nothing?”
“It’s like the entire government has closed ranks around this case.”
“That can’t be good.”
“There is one small lead.”
“About?”
“Her skull,” Westgate said, taking a long drag from the cigarette, then exhaling a plume of smoke against the cold windowpane. He looked out to the street below. Pedestrians hurried across the intersection, stepping over shallow snowdrifts from the previous night’s storm. “My source thinks they’ll take it to Quantico. We’re looking into it.”
“I want to know everyone who is even remotely connected to this case.”
Westgate opened the window, flicked his cigarette into the dirty slush in the street below. “Arrangements are already being made.”


Sydney Fitzpatrick stepped off the plane that Sunday at San Francisco airport, looking forward to time with her family, especially her eleven-year-old sister. Her vision of two weeks of relaxation culminating in a home-cooked turkey dinner evaporated the moment she was greeted by SFO airport police.
“Special Agent Fitzpatrick?” the uniformed man asked her, after the flight attendant pointed her out.
“Yes.”
“You need to call Quantico at once.” He checked a piece of paper he held. “Contact SAC Harcourt.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking out her phone and powering it on, then hitting speed dial for Harcourt’s cell phone.
“Hate to cut your vacation short,” Harcourt said, once they connected. “But we need you for that drawing.”
“What happened to that spiel about the full list of artists available at a moment’s notice?” she asked.
“Think of it this way. You come do the drawing, and you’re back in San Francisco before the turkey’s thawing on the counter.”
As much as she wanted to decline the job, if they’d gone to this much trouble to get her, she knew she couldn’t. She’d accepted the transfer to Quantico for a reason. True, she needed the rest and respite from her last case that almost ended her career, never mind her life. She’d gone out of her comfort zone on that last assignment, and she wasn’t about to venture out again. But the hard truth she didn’t want to face was that she’d pushed the envelope so far, the Bureau was watching her, and wanted to know if she was a team player. Besides, Thanksgiving was nearly two weeks away. A drawing with a forensic anthropologist couldn’t take more than a day, maybe two, depending on the condition of the body. “Let me check on flights and I’ll call you back.”
“We have a plane standing by. The officer will take you to it.”
And that didn’t make any sense. Since when did the Bureau have private planes waiting for something that could have, should have been dealt with before she ever left Washington, D.C.? Like they were expecting to fly her back?
Something was up.