“Really? You look—scared.”
She smiled. “With you in the room? Never,” she said with a laugh. She walked over and hugged him and drew away quickly. “I had another thought that we might add in on your schedule.”
“Right,” Sean said, smiling. “What scene would you add?”
“Jay and me at night, walking down to where we saw nothing. Where I found the bodies the next morning. Very descriptive without being gruesome.”
“I like it. Write it in. Obviously, we’ll film hours that we’ll wind up editing out, but any scene that you think might enhance the project, just tell me.”
Vanessa lowered her head and smiled. It was amazing that he might have hurt her so much and made her so angry—and that, as far as a working relationship went, he was completely confident and comfortable. He knew what he wanted; he knew where he was going. It occurred to her then that they both wanted the same thing. She hoped they made an excellent documentary that was engrossing and made others think, as well.
Until that moment, she realized, she’d been thinking of her own agenda.
The phone rang, causing her to nearly jump out of her skin.
Sean arched a brow to her. “Hey, telephone. It’s a landline—remember those? Granted, we don’t use them much anymore.” He walked over to answer it.
She couldn’t be so jumpy. They would lock her up—before they could even get to the project.
Sean answered the phone. He frowned and reached into his pocket. “Sorry, forgot to plug it in last night.” He glanced at Vanessa and smiled. “I got distracted,” he said.
Then his smile faded. “You’re kidding!” he said.
He listened again.
“I’ll be right there,” he said.
He hung up and stared thoughtfully at Vanessa.
“What?” she demanded.
“The body was stolen.”
“What?” she repeated.
“I’m heading out to meet Liam. I won’t be long. The body was stolen out of the university van. The problem is, no one knows when. They’d packed it up this morning, and Doctors Aislinn and Latham were at a Cracker Barrel in the middle of the state when they decided to check to make sure that the chest wasn’t moving around too much. Well, it wasn’t moving. It was gone.”
“Someone stole the body out of the van?” she repeated incredulously.
He nodded.
“Who in the hell would want to steal a mummified body?” she demanded.
“Here’s my question,” he said. “Who in hell would even know that it was there to be stolen?”
Liam was in his office, filling out paperwork. He looked up the minute Sean came in and glumly waved toward a chair on the other side of his desk.
“Anything?” Sean asked him.
“Nothing—this may be worse than the damned Bermuda Triangle. Most of the time, we can’t even find a stolen car, and then we find them half the time because they have LoJack, but they’re stripped. But this isn’t a car we’re looking for, it’s a chest with a body in it! This is going to be impossible. They don’t know when it happened. They had just left a Cracker Barrel in the center of the state when Dr. Latham decided to check on their cargo. So—they’d stopped for breakfast in Florida City. The van might have been broken into then. It could have happened when they pulled off a few times along the way. So, it might have been stolen anywhere from Key West to Orlando. They believed that their cargo was safe—who tries to steal a corpse?”
“Is there anything we can do?” Sean asked.
“We have reports filled out and sent around the state,” Liam said. “They’ve dusted for fingerprints. The lock was sprung with a pick, but that doesn’t really help any. The door could still be secured, so it doesn’t mean that the chest was stolen later than earlier.” He shook his head. “Someone must have thought it was a treasure chest.”
“There was an article that ran in the paper this morning—David talked to a reporter last night, and I believe it went around on the wire and on the Internet. The article announced that it was a body that had been found.”
“Maybe the thieves weren’t on the Internet, and God knows, they probably didn’t read the newspaper, either,” Liam said. “The officers here are livid, of course. Keys police tend to be very territorial—they take the theft personally. She was our creepy old body, the way they look at it. They’ll be doing everything they can, searching for anything suspicious. Obviously, you need a reason to stop people and search their trucks or vans, but we’re good and subtle around here—learned a lot from the drug traffic. Someone may just find the chest somewhere—I mean, once they’ve discovered they haven’t any gold, silver or precious gems, they may just abandon the chest.”
Sean shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I think that the body was stolen on purpose.”