The Unspoken

“And he was taken right…right to the morgue,” Amanda said. She appeared stricken, as if she’d begin crying again. “He drowned down there, and it’s tragic. To us more than anyone else, but…”

“He drowned,” Jon said flatly. “Why is the FBI investigating?”

“Your filmmaker.” Will smiled and leaned across the conference table to pick up a copy of the Sunday paper, lying there. The headline read Historian Dies Tragically During Greatest Discovery—Accident or Victim of Ancient Curse?

“Oh, please!” Amanda said. “Seriously, oh, please! That’s just a reporter scrambling for headlines. I saw Brady. He drowned!” She sighed. “Listen, I loved him like a brother. But we have to keep going on this, and quickly. We’ve gotten the rights to dive her first and salvage what we can. And Brady was absolutely correct. The precious cargo down there was carefully—carefully!—wrapped and stowed. We’d dishonor Brady’s memory if we didn’t complete his mission!”

“Okay, back up for me, please. You have the rights of salvage? Didn’t you need to find the ship first?” Will asked.

Amanda flushed. “Our paperwork is all on file. We have a maritime attorney on hand who has us all ready to go with recovery.”

“But if another person or enterprise had found her first….”

“Well, I suppose someone else could have filed for the rights, as well,” Amanda said. “But no one else had Brady—or studied the effect of storms on the lake like he did.”

Will doubted that a competing group would care how someone had determined the location of a treasure. They would just want the bottom line. “Who else has been searching for the Jerry McGuen?” he asked.

“Through the decades?” Jon shrugged. “Anyone with a ship, sonar or a dive suit.”

Will smiled. “Recently. Do you know of anyone or any other enterprise searching for her?”

“A year ago there was an article about a company called Landry Salvage that was interested. Their CEO was quoted in a local TV piece on the wreck,” Amanda said.

Jon was thoughtful, drumming his fingers on the conference table for a moment before speaking. “There’s also a company called Simonton’s Sea Search that was interviewed briefly for the same piece. It was one of those little five-minute news segments, you know?”

“It never occurred to you that since the treasure on the ship is worth a fortune, someone else might be eager to acquire that fortune?” Will asked.

“It’s not like anyone could just keep everything, or that a salvage effort on the lake wouldn’t be spotted!” Amanda insisted.

“Yes, but whether the treasures were returned to Egypt or turned over to our government,” Will said, “the finder’s fee or percentages could be staggering. Though I’m not seeing a legitimate bid as something that’s likely to supersede yours. The black market is where the real money would be.”

Amanda shook her head. “That’s why we needed to find it. Stop the black market activity. And we still need to get down there fast, although…thanks to Brady, our papers have been filed.”

Will lowered his head, hiding his expression. The world did go on. They’d found Brady’s body in the ship—and they’d made sure their legal work was done, probably as soon as Brady Laurie was on his way to the morgue.

“The mission won’t be stopped—will it? I mean, I know there’s competition out there, but Brady drowned. I saw him.” Amanda’s eyes were anxious as she looked at Will. “Poor Brady—but he must have died happy. He did find the Jerry McGuen.”

Will doubted that Brady had died happy. Drowning was a horrendous death.

“The salvage is not being stopped,” Will said. “And, so far, the medical examiner’s conclusions are that Brady Laurie died as a result of forgetting his deep-water time because of his excitement.”

“So…why the FBI?” Amanda asked, obviously still puzzled.

“The director of the documentary is an old friend of Sean Cameron’s—Sean’s an agent in one of our special units—and the producer, Mr. King, is anxious about what’s happened. Not to mention all these rumors about the curse. Because of their association with us and their concern that the salvage and the documentary go well, they came to the agency. And because our most senior officer, Adam Harrison, has great relationships with state governments, we were invited in. We’re not sensationalists. We’re here to disprove a curse, as much as anything else and, hopefully, make sure there are no more accidents.”

“Oh!” Amanda said, blinking away tears again. “Well, as long as our work isn’t stopped. Brady—oh, God, I miss him, I loved him, but he was acting like a cowboy. He just had to get down there before we were really ready. He knew not to dive alone. I mean, come on, an experienced diver knows never to dive alone. Anywhere. Not even in shallow reefs in the Keys, much less here. He just thought he was better than anyone and… We are diving the wreck tomorrow? An exploratory dive before we start with the salvage?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes,” Will assured her. “Everything will go ahead as planned. Just one change,” he told her pleasantly. “I’ll be joining you, and so will another member of my unit.”

“What?” Amanda was obviously dismayed. “More people down there? You don’t understand how careful you have to be with artifacts. You don’t—”

“I’ll do my best, Dr. Channel,” he said. “My colleague and I will meet you at the dock tomorrow morning.” He rose to signal that he was leaving—and that he’d be back.

“Yes, but…” Amanda started her protest and then frowned. “I could probably answer any other questions you might have right now. Where are you going?”

“I’m afraid I have another meeting,” he informed her, “but I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He smiled politely and exited the room, and then the Preservation Center.

It was situated near the aquarium, on South Lake Shore Drive, and when he stepped out the front door, he saw Lake Michigan. The water glittered in the sun, and he wished he could get out on a boat in a dive suit right away, but he had a meeting with a member of Logan Raintree’s crew.

And with a dead man.

He turned away from the lake and headed for his rental car.

2

More than eighteen thousand deaths were reported to the Cook County office of the medical examiner yearly. Of those, some six thousand received an autopsy.

The office handled investigations for a large part of the state; in January 2011, there’d been such a backup due to the number of bodies and the holidays, they were stacked one on top of the other. The morgue had been overcrowded due to what the press had dubbed “the killing season,” when gang violence had erupted on the South Side.

Kat knew these things because she’d done nothing but read since she’d boarded her plane for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

Cook County wasn’t different from any other large metropolitan area. People died. Thankfully most of them died naturally.

But some did not. Some died because of gang violence, and sometimes they died in police custody or in jail. Some died because of domestic violence, and some were simply and pathetically in the wrong place at the wrong time—victims of random crime. Some died “suspiciously” or without apparent explanation.

Despite the fact that she wasn’t in Chicago because she wanted to be, she wasn’t disturbed by her particular assignment here. While many people feared a medical examiner’s office as a frightening and gruesome place, Kat had always found that an autopsy—though invasive—was a service that man had come to do for man. It was an effort to let the dead speak for themselves, to seek justice, find a killer or, conversely, prove accidental death when no other human was at fault. Autopsy helped the living, too; some medical advances would have never come about without autopsies determining the cause of death. In medical school, she hadn’t started out feeling that she’d rather work with the dead than the living. It had been during her residency that she’d discovered she had a penchant for unspoken truths…and that, even when silent, the dead could sometimes tell their tales.

The Texas Krewe—her unit of their section within the FBI—was supposed to investigate whatever couldn’t be answered by the evidence. Usually it wasn’t because of incompetence or because leads weren’t followed by the local police. They were called in when the leads themselves were unusual. Some people described those leads as paranormal.

But in this instance…

A diver had jumped the gun. He’d jumped the gun on an incredible discovery mainly because he was the scientist who’d been determined to find the wreck of the Jerry McGuen. He’d been looking for ancient Egyptian treasures lost along with the ship.

And those treasures included a mummy.

It just had to be a mummy! she thought, wincing as she conjured up an image of Brendan Fraser and his hit movie. And of course there was the mummy in The Unholy—the recent Hollywood remake of a 1940s film noir—had been that of an evil Egyptian priest who’d turned out to be real.

“Sad beginning to this whole thing, huh?”

Startled, Katya looked over at Dr. Alex McFarland, the M.E. who walked her down the corridors and past offices, vaults and autopsy rooms. He seemed a decent enough sort, cordial and receptive. Bald as a billiard ball and wearing spectacles, he reminded her of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew of Jim Henson’s Muppets fame, the epitome of what the general public expected a doctor or scientist to look like.

“Very sad,” she agreed. The victim had been in his thirties, an expert on Egyptology and an expert diver. A young man with his life stretching out before him.

And now that life was cut short.

McFarland rolled his eyes. “Tragic…and almost no one’s talking about the boy’s death. Of course, the disappearance of the Jerry McGuen has been one of the great mysteries of Lake Michigan since she went down in the late-nineteenth century. There’s more coverage given to the discovery than to the poor boy’s death. And God help us all—the curse! But, then again, although Chicago is hardly considered to be one of the world’s great dive spots, the lakes hold a lot of wrecks where divers frequently go. I don’t dive myself, but we have many professional and recreational divers in the area. Many of them say he was being careless, that he took chances in his excitement and shouldn’t have been diving at seventy-five, eighty feet on his own.”