Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

sheep could not have sex for a day before a hunt. Their wives refrained from heating water and did not comb their hair during the duration of the hunt, for fear of combing their husband off the high cliffs where he was hunting. Bones would have been important to a Tlingit shaman, part of a hard versus soft duality of nature. Shaman often wore ceremonial aprons with bits of bone and hoof dangling from the front. A rattle made of sheep horn and bone might have held some serious power. Any carvings on it?”

“Raven,” Dutchik said. “Frog, maybe.”

“Yehk,” Maycomb said. “Shaman had spirit helpers who often took the form of animals. Yehk.”

“Look at you,” Van Dyke sneered. “Guess you did prove useful after all.”

“Did he tell you where he got this rattle?” Beason asked.

“I asked him,” Dutchik said. “But he refused.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head, looking even more like Cutter’s high school teacher. “I told him the artifact’s provenance was vital in order to be certain it’s from a private collection and not robbed from some grave.”

Maycomb scoffed. “Which still translates as robbed from a grave, just not recently.”

“True again,” Dutchik said. “Modern collectors want to share the blame with somebody who went on an expedition a hundred years ago. It makes them feel less dirty.” The gallery owner had obviously covered this ground before, probably with the people who’d provided all the contemporary Native art for her to sell.

“How much would something like this be worth?” Cutter asked. “If it’s authentic.”

“Two or three hundred,” Dutchik said.

Lola gasped. “Two hundred bucks seems like chump change for a one-of-a-kind bone rattle.”

Dutchik laughed out loud. “Oh no. I meant two or three hundred thousand. The man who brought this one in had done his research. He knew of a Raven rattle that recently sold for over half a million dollars.”

“Five hundred thousand reasons to commit murder,” Beason said.

Cutter nodded, eyes half closed, the kind of nod that said he didn’t agree at all but was in the process of thinking things through.

“Doesn’t make sense,” he said at length. “How much would you have given him?”

“Nothing remotely close to that,” Dutchik said. “I have a small fund I use when I want to buy things and get them back in Tlingit hands. He knew I wouldn’t give him much when he came through the door.”

“How’s that?” Beason asked.

“Well,” Dutchik said. “He told me about the half-million-dollar sale, then said he was willing to take ‘pennies on the dollar.’ I said I could give him a few thousand.”

“So,” Beason said, accusingly. “Did you?”

“I did not,” Dutchik said. “I told him I needed to examine the artifact in person, have it appraised. He had several photos of it on his phone, from all angles, but he refused to show me the actual rattle.”

Beason brightened. “Does he plan to bring it back, do you think?”

“I believe he had it in his pocket the entire time.”

Cutter tapped the top of a glass display case, still thinking. “I want to go back to something you mentioned a minute ago. You said, ‘the man himself is especially weird.’ It sounds like you’ve met him before. Is that how he knew you might be the person who would buy something like this bone rattle?”

“Oh, sorry,” Dutchik said. “I didn’t make that clear, did I? He came into the gallery once before, about three months ago, and sold me a large formation of crystals. I paid him in cash. He didn’t give me his name then either.”

“Crystals?” Cutter mused.

“Quartz,” Dutchik said. “Big ones, like something you’d see in Superman’s lair or something. This formation was about the size of a soccer ball. He said he’d found them in a mine.”

“Do you know which mine?” Detective Van Dyke asked.

“I’m not certain,” Dutchik said. “But I’ve only seen crystals like that come from a mine near Port Snettisham, to the south. Not surprisingly, it’s called the ‘Crystal Mine.’”

Cutter shot a glance at Beason to see if he had any further questions. The FBI agent shook his head. Grudge match or not, both were professional enough not to let it bleed into their interviews.

“Okay then,” Beason said. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Dutchik. Do you think you’d be able to help a sketch artist put together a drawing of this man?”

“I’ll do better than that,” Dutchik said. She removed one of the wooden masks from the wall. Cutter guessed this one was a bear from the rounded ears and big teeth.

Dutchik removed a small camera from the mouth of the mask. “Bear is always watching. Most of the art I have in here is one of a kind, quite valuable.”

Beason put on his all-knowing FBI hat. “Studies show that it does more to deter theft if people can see the cameras.”

Dutchik smiled sweetly. “I don’t want to deter them,” she said. “I want to catch them in the act and send their thieving butts to jail.”

Lola patted Dutchik on the shoulder and gave her a wink. “If you were twenty years younger, I’d give you an application.”

Chapter 33

“The Valkyrie is also out near Port Snettisham,” Lori Maycomb said, as soon as they were all out of the gallery and walking up Franklin Street. “I did a report about the mine owner a couple of months ago. Harold Grimsson. Fancies himself a modern-day Viking.” She sneered. “My piece was a feel-good story about all the philanthropic work his mine does for the community.”

Van Dyke bristled. “You have a problem with the industry that built this area, put us on the map?”

Maycomb, arguing from the high ground, was having none of it. “Technically, my people built this place, and we were ‘on the map’ eons before your people got here. But to your question, I love iPhones, computers, electron microscopes, and all the other things built with metals we dig out of the ground. I’ve done stories on both of the bigger mines in this area. They’re great. No problems at all