A Deadly Twist by Jeffrey Siger (free novel reading sites .txt) 📕

into the hive. “From my onetime experience in this business, I’d say that this hive contains all the pieces of at least one very old urn.” He carefully put the pieces back in the hive and replaced the sections.

Tassos aimed the light at the rows of hives. “If all those hives are stocked like this one, I’d say we’ve hit upon a serious antiquities-smuggling operation.”

“How would that tie into Honeyman arranging for a hit on Yianni and Popi?”

“It may not.”

“Another coincidence?” said Andreas.

“I’m just as suspicious as you are of coincidences, but it’s a possibility. After all, I haven’t seen or heard anything that ties the reporter, Yianni, or Popi to antiquities smuggling. Have you?”

“No.” Andreas waved his hand at the hives. “But here we’ve got this honey seller sitting atop a fortune in illegal antiquities, organizing a frantically ill-conceived hit on two cops looking to find a missing newspaper reporter writing a story about tourism versus preservation. It makes no sense.”

“Maybe Honeyman is more than just a honey seller. Perhaps he’s a really bad guy.” Tassos paused. “Possibly even Nikoletta’s mysterious guy?”

“Wouldn’t that be a fateful twist?”

“Is a fateful twist any different than a coincidence?”

“Let’s go back inside and talk to the kid some more. Then I’ll answer your question.”

“I’ll meet you later. I want to check out that shepherd’s hut.”

“For what?”

“Who knows what other wild coincidence or fateful twist might be lurking in the shadows?”

“Good point,” said Andreas, turning back toward the house.

Who knows, indeed?

* * *

Their efforts at getting the boy to talk began with wading through the boy’s defensive barrage of “I don’t knows” and “I haven’t spoken to my father in two days.” Once the boy admitted that his father had never left him alone this long before, it didn’t take much to convince him his father might be in serious trouble, and by keeping quiet he wasn’t helping him.

The boy knew all about the beehives but swore nothing in them was his family’s. His father had told him he ran the beehives as a hotel for other people’s property—he called the items guests—and also provided transfer services for guests requiring a pickup from or delivery to a plane, boat, or other place on the island. He’d transport the guests hidden beneath a tarp in the back of his truck. Sometimes the boy helped his father transfer guests from the truck into the hives. At other times he’d help move guests out of the hives, either back to his father’s truck or into a stranger’s vehicle, but no matter what, his father would smile and say, “Sure beats beekeeping.”

The more the boy talked, the more noticeably anxious he became for his father.

“When’s your mother coming back from Athens?” asked Andreas.

“I don’t know. When she left she said next week.”

“Does she know you’re alone here?”

“No, I didn’t want her to worry.”

Andreas nodded. “Is there anyone you can stay with until she’s back?”

“My aunt.”

Andreas looked at his watch. “It’s about a half hour before dawn. We’ll call her after sunrise.”

“You’ve been most helpful,” said Tassos. “I have just one more question.”

The boy tensed.

“How did you know which guests went in which hive? And which guests belonged to the strangers who came to collect them?”

The boy pointed at a loose-leaf notebook on a shelf behind the kitchen table. “It’s all in there.”

Tassos pulled it off the shelf, opened it, and spent a minute quickly looking through it. He smiled. “It sure is. Thanks, son, you can go back to bed now.”

The boy hurried out of the room.

“What’s in the notebook?” asked Dimitri.

“Separate ledger pages for each hive, recording guests, dates of check-in and checkout, and initials, which I suspect represent who was paying rent on the particular hive.”

“Any way to put a name to the initials?” said Andreas.

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Maybe we’ll find a key somewhere else in this mess?” said Dimitri.

“I’d like to think so,” said Tassos, “but the truth is there’s only a half dozen or so sets of initials, so he probably doesn’t need to keep a list in order to know the names that go with them.”

“I guess we’ll just have to find Honeyman and sweat him.” Andreas looked at Dimitri. “But until then, and until the Ministry of Culture gets its people here to catalog and take custody of all this, you better keep some cops here. It would be a real embarrassment if any of what we found disappeared while in the hands of the police.” He spread out his arms, stretched, and yawned. “Make that a career-ending embarrassment for everyone involved.”

“It’s going to be a busy day,” said Dimitri. “And you’ve got that meeting at 15:00.”

Andreas nodded. “Plus Yianni’s checking out of the hospital this morning.”

“Don’t worry about picking him up. I’ve arranged for an ambulance to take him to your house.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“It’s the least I could do for you after all you’ve done for me.”

“What have we done for you?” asked Andreas.

“I agree that losing any of these artifacts would be a surefire career-ender. But on the other hand, finding them should put us all in line for serious promotions.”

“I don’t want one,” said Andreas.

“Me either,” said Tassos. “But I’ll tell you what. If you take responsibility for protecting all this stuff and coordinating things with the Culture Ministry so that I can get out of here and back to bed, you can have my promotion.”

“Mine, too.”

Dimitri smiled. “Deal.”

* * *

Yianni refused to leave the hospital in an ambulance. He said he was fine. Toni told him to get over his macho stubbornness and think of it as a limo or else she was going straight back to Mykonos. They compromised on Yianni sitting up front with the driver.

When they arrived at the house, Lila and Maggie were waiting for them outside the front door. “We had to put the brass band on hold,” Lila said, exchanging cheek kisses with Yianni and Toni, “because the men of the house are sleeping.”

“They were up until