Free Deadly Jewels by Jeannette de Beauvoir Page B

wanted me to be her own private PR person, ready to make her famous. I didn’t really care.
    There was another silence, and while Patricia was struggling with her inner petulant child, I looked at the skull again and wondered how long he—or she—had been lying here. Had the bright stones been in a pocket, with the fabric rotting away over time? Why hadn’t whomever shot this person taken them?
    Finally, I felt rather than saw her pushing her glasses back up her nose. “Okay,” she said.
    â€œOkay?”
    â€œJust the one policeman.”
    â€œFor now,” I cautioned. “Really, Patricia, if Julian—that’s the guy I’m talking about, Julian Fletcher—if he says it needs to be investigated, then there’s nothing either of us will be able to do about it. There will have to be crime-scene techs, probably some cold-case detectives assigned, who knows? It will have to go through the whole police procedure. You have to be ready for that to happen.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œLook, they’re not going to call up the universities and alert the world. You still have the scoop. You were still the first to find this. It’ll be your dissertation. But that doesn’t mean it belongs to you.” Zut , I’d heard about academics being territorial, but this was ridiculous. Perspective, people: perspective. I tried again. “This was somebody’s life , Patricia.”
    Her headlamp swung in my direction. “You’re right, of course,” she said, so briskly that I found myself wondering why the sudden change of attitude. “Come on.” And then she was turning around in the small space, turning away from the bones, crawling, putting out a hand to help me. “I have to keep perspective.”
    Not to mention reading minds, I thought. Hadn’t I just been thinking about perspective?
    The way back seemed longer than getting there, and I was conscious only of a prickling feeling at the back of my neck, as though someone were following us, watching us. Or maybe it was just because of what—of who —we were leaving behind, abandoning to the darkness. He’d been there already for decades, I thought: there was no need to worry about leaving him alone now. Yet it felt wrong, somehow, to take the light and the voices away, to leave him back there in the dark and the damp.
    With the jewels.
    â€œYou and Dr. LaTour were the only people to see this?” I asked finally.
    â€œThey just got control of the stream that broke through,” she said. “We were here two days ago, and Pierre has so much on his plate, he wasn’t very interested. We left, but I’d seen the hatbox with the crates, and I knew. I came here from London to find it, and I found it.”
    There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, so I didn’t say it. Patricia lapsed into silence, too, and it allowed me to think about contacting Julian. Détective-lieutenant Julian Fletcher, to give him his title and full name, both of which were meaningful: he had a decent rank within the city police force, and his surname was one of those echoed in the wealthiest enclaves of Montréal. Julian Fletcher, of the Westmount Fletchers.
    Last year, I’d served as liaison between City Hall and the city police in the business of a string of murders that had happened over the summer, and while everybody in Montréal was pointing toward a vagrant serial sex murderer, Julian and I had uncovered something deeper and far more troubling. You’d think they’d have given us medals, but instead Julian stayed at his desk for two months of forced paper pushing and Jean-Luc made sure that I got to represent the city at every irrelevant and miserable event—nothing too small—throughout the city until his pea brain had moved on to something else.
    Not without, of course, his having taken the credit for what we’d done.
    I wondered how Julian would