I SWITCHED MY PHONE BACK ON—I’D LEFT IT OFF for two hours to keep Reverend Jonah twisting in the wind if he tried to call me again—and sure enough, the phone showed a missed call from his North Carolina cell number. I had a voice mail, too, and the instant the message began playing, I felt the instinctive revulsion that the televangelist’s voice never failed to trigger in me. My revulsion swiftly gave way to panic, though, as his words floated up and their implications sank in. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” he said. “You are not to be trusted. If you try any treachery when we meet, the girl dies. If I even think the police are watching, she dies. If you stall or bargain, she dies. And if the bones are not genuine, she dies.” My heart skipped a beat when he said it. “I have photographs of the teeth,” he went on, and I thought my heart would stop altogether. “Before I came to terms with your friend Stefan, I had him send pictures of them. I’m no big-shot forensic detective, but I swear by the blood of Christ, if the teeth don’t match exactly, the girl will die, and so will you.”
I stared at the phone in my hand, hoping it wasn’t real, hoping this was a nightmare message, hoping that if I stared at the phone hard enough, clenched it tightly enough, I would awaken.
I did not awaken; the message was indeed a nightmare, but it was a waking nightmare. Flinging open the lid of the bone box, I lifted out the cranium and mandible, and grew dizzy with despair. I’d hoped and assumed the preacher wouldn’t be tipped off by the decoy’s shovel-shaped incisors, but I saw now that those were the least of the problem. The real problem was the number of teeth: the decoy had four more teeth than the missing skeleton had. Even a preacher inclined to have faith in miracles was not credulous enough to believe that the skull of Christ had sprouted four new teeth twenty centuries after his crucifixion.
Frantic now, I called Descartes, who was still searching the labyrinthine corridors and crannies of the Palace of the Popes. “You’ve got to find those bones, and find them fast,” I said. I recounted Reverend Jonah’s call, and his threat. “He’s not going to fall for it,” I said. “There’s no way. Even a child could tell that these teeth aren’t the same.”
Descartes was silent. Finally he said, “We’ll keep trying, but we’re running out of places to look. See if you can get more time.”
“How do I do that, Inspector? We were pushing our luck with Geneva. He’s getting suspicious. I’m afraid he’s about to snap.”