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Andersen took a step back. “Breaking and entering, I think. But you tell me—you’re the former prosecutor.” He nodded at Savannah and Simon. “I caught them a minute before you barged in. I’m going to call the police on all of you.” He started to dial on the phone in his right hand.
“He’s not calling the cops,” Savannah said, her voice tight with fear. “He’s calling his boss!”
Hez tensed to bring the tire iron smashing down on Andersen’s phone, but a better idea hit him. He nodded and pulled out his own phone. “Good, the state police can arrest both of you when they get here.”
Andersen looked up from his phone. His finger hovered over the surface. “The state police?”
Hez nodded. “I have friends there. Former prosecutor, you know.”
“I . . .” Andersen breathed a shaky sigh. “Look, we all need to talk.”
“Why?” Hez pulled up the pictures of the letter and statue, then held up his phone. “We have all the evidence we need. You’ve been stealing artifacts from the Willard Treasure and forging the provenance documents. Cardin lost one of those, so you killed him.” Andersen opened his mouth, but Hez ignored him. “We have video of you arguing with him, so don’t bother denying it. You also murdered Abernathy to cover up your crimes. And you framed Jess for all of it.”
Simon gasped. “My dad framed my mum?”
So Simon and Erik both knew the truth. That was unfortunate. “I’m afraid so, Simon.”
Tiny beads of sweat glistened along Andersen’s hairline. “You’ve got it all wrong. I didn’t kill anyone, and I didn’t frame Jess. I didn’t steal anything either.”
Hez flicked a glance toward the statuette on Andersen’s desk. “Then where did that come from?”
“It . . . was brought to me. I don’t know where it came from. I just get the artifact and write the letter—that’s it.”
“And you get paid, right?”
Andersen bristled. “I’m done answering your questions. And you really should stop asking them. If you don’t, you’ll wind up in a world of hurt.”
“Where I’ll join you, I guess.” Hez smiled and held up his phone. “You just confessed to aiding the trafficking of stolen goods, and I recorded the whole thing.”
Andersen’s face went gray under his tan. “Turn that off!”
“Sure thing.” Hez tapped the Stop button and saved the recording. “Just uploaded it to my cloud, which is password protected. I put Savannah’s pictures there, too, by the way.”
“What . . . what do you want?” Andersen’s voice was barely more than a whisper.
“Answers. Let’s start with who you were about to call when I came in. Who’s this boss of yours?”
“I—I can’t say.”
“Sure you can.”
Andersen licked pale lips. “No, you don’t understand. He’ll kill me. He already killed Cardin and Abernathy. He’ll kill you, too, if you don’t stop poking around.” He turned to Savannah and Simon. “All of you.”
Chapter 35
Savannah fingered her bracelet and tried to calm her racing pulse now that Hez had taken charge of the situation. A placating tone had replaced Erik’s rage, but his warning about what his boss would do to them rang with authenticity. She stared at his frightened face a long moment before she moved to the desk and picked up the statue. The jade warmed in her hand, and she ran her thumb over the smooth texture.
Something about the artifacts had troubled her from the very first, and staring at the statue, she still struggled to decipher her unease. She picked up the provenance letter identifying the item as part of the Willard Treasure. This Olmec piece was exquisite and should fetch a high price. She should have recognized it and didn’t. Why had she never seen it? She set it and the letter back on the desk and tried to figure out the questions swirling in her head.
Wait a minute. Olmec. Willard looted an Aztec city that had been abandoned soon after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The Olmecs were the first known Mesoamerican civilization. They occupied the Veracruz area starting in 1600 BC until about 400 BC. And though the university had acquired a few Olmec pieces through the decades, there had been none in the Willard Treasure since it was a completely different time period. The Aztec civilization hadn’t arrived in central Mexico until AD 1300, well over a millennium and a half later.
She stepped to Erik and held out her hand. “My phone.”
He hesitated and glanced at Hez, who still held the tire iron ready. Erik shrugged and placed the phone in her hand, and she scrolled through the pictures she’d taken in the warehouse nearly three months earlier. She enlarged the pictures of the boxes and crates and studied them.
Then it hit her and she gasped. “Hez, this isn’t part of the Willard Treasure. It’s too old.” She turned the phone around to show him. “It’s not that someone is selling off the Willard Treasure. There aren’t boxes and crates missing—there are too many! We had it all wrong. No one is stealing from the Willard Treasure—they’re parking smuggled artifacts in the warehouse and writing fake provenance letters claiming they came from the Willard Treasure. They’re using the Treasure’s reputation to smuggle newly looted treasures.”
Hez’s blue eyes narrowed as he assessed her sudden insight. “An ongoing laundering operation, not just theft and embezzlement.”
