A storage room.
To the left of the door, a single desk supported a computer and printer. Tables stretched along the other side, crowded with pottery and sections of decorated stone blocks. Someone had been taking inventory. Several larger objects rested on wooden floor pallets deeper in the room: a marble statue of a woman with her arms broken away, a corroded bronze sculpture of a bull’s head, a base of a stone pillar.
Gray followed the trail inside, wondering what had led the professor to trespass here. Had he just been hiding from a passing guard? But the professor’s path seemed direct. It led straight to one of the objects on the floor pallets, a dome of carved rock. The artifact stood waist-high with a hole on top. It looked like a granite model of a volcano, except it was covered with writing. Gray leaned closer to the inscriptions.
Ancient Greek.
Frowning, Gray tested it with the Gamma-Scout reader.
Polk’s trail circled around the pallet.
Gray traced the dead man’s footsteps. Why had Polk been fascinated with this artifact?
Before he could contemplate it further, a crash sounded to his left. He turned to see Kowalski backing away from one of the tables. He held the handle of an urn in his fingers. The rest of the vase lay shattered at his toes. “It…it broke.”
The man had a gift for the obvious.
Gray shook his head. He should have left Kowalski out in the hallway. He was like a bull in a china shop—only a bull had better self-control.
“It was wobbly, goddamn it.” Still, he sounded angry more at himself. “Come over here and see this.” He pointed the broken handle toward the table.
Gray stepped to his side. On the table were stacks of ancient Greek coins. From the gap in the second row, one of the coins was missing. Could it be Polk’s coin? Was this where he’d got ahold of it?
“I bumped the base. Tried to catch it.” Kowalski carefully placed the broken handle on the table. “It came apart in my hands.”
“Don’t worry about it. They’ll just take it out of your paycheck.”
“Damn it. How much do you think it cost?”
“A few hundred.”
A relieved whistle escaped him. “Well, that’s not too bad.”
“A few hundred thousand,” Gray clarified.
“Oh, sweet motherfu—”
Kowalski’s reaction was cut off by the rattle of the doorknob. Gray started to turn, but Kowalski’s thick mitt of a hand grabbed Gray’s upper arm and yanked him back. He shielded Gray with his own body while smoothly pulling a .45-caliber pistol from a shoulder holster.
The slight figure of a young woman entered. She was fumbling with her purse, oblivious of the two in the room. She even swiped blindly for the light switch until she seemed to realize two things at once: the lights were already on and a massive mountain of a man had a pistol leveled at her chest.
She squeaked and backed into the jamb, unable to find the doorway in her fright.
“Sorry,” Kowalski said and shifted his pistol toward the ceiling.
Gray hurried around the befuddled bodyguard. “It’s all right, ma’am. We’re museum security. We’re investigating a break-in.”
Kowalski pointed his pistol at the shattered vase on the floor. “Yeah, someone broke that.” He glanced to Gray for confirmation and collaboration as he holstered his weapon.
She clutched her purse to her chest. Her other hand fixed a pair of petite eyeglasses higher on her nose. With her chestnut hair cut in a bob and her small frame, she appeared to be no more than a college sophomore, but from the crinkled pinch of her eyes, bright with suspicion, she was probably a decade older.
“Can I see some identification?” she asked firmly and kept close to the open doorway.
Gray held up his black I.D. pass. It displayed his picture, along with the presidential seal embossed in gold. “I have a number you can call to confirm who we are.”
She squinted at the pass and seemed to relax slightly, but a tension remained in her shoulders. She stared around the room. “Was anything stolen?”
“Maybe you can better answer that,” Gray said, hoping she could help. “I noticed that there seems to be a coin conspicuously missing from the table here.”
“What?” She hurried over, abandoning any hesitation. With one look at the table, her expression fell into a forlorn look. “Oh, no…we had the collection on loan from the Delphi museum.”
Delphi again.
She glanced to the carved dome of rock, the one that seemed to have attracted Polk’s attention. It may have been because Kowalski was leaning on it. “Please don’t touch that.”
Kowalski straightened. He looked at his palm, as if it were to blame. He had the decency to blush around the collar. “Sorry.”
“May I ask what that is?” Gray said casually, nodding to the stone.
Her hands wrung together with worry. “The prize of the collection. For the upcoming exhibit. Thank God, it wasn’t vandalized by the thieves.” She circled it to be sure. “It’s over sixteen hundred years old.”
“But what is it?” Gray pressed.
“It’s called an omphalos. Which roughly translates as “navel.” In ancient Greece, the omphalos was considered to be the point around which the universe turned. There are many mythologies and stories associated with the omphalos, great powers attributed to it.”
“And how did you acquire it?”
She nodded to the table. “It came from the same collection as the rest. On loan from the museum at Delphi.”
“Delphi? Where the Oracle of Delphi had her temple?”
She glanced toward Gray, her expression surprised. “That’s right. The omphalos graced the inner sanctum of the temple. Its most holy chamber.”
“And this is that stone.”
“No. Sadly it’s only a replica. Until just recently, everyone thought this was the original omphalos, as described in the ancient histories of Plutarch and Socrates. But the sisterhood of Delphic oracles goes back three millennia, and this stone has been dated to half that age.”
“What happened to the original?”
“Lost to history. No one knows.”
She straightened and strode over to a smock hung on a peg by the door. Donning it, she removed her museum identification tag from her shirt and fixed it to the smock.
It was only then that Gray noted the tag. It bore her picture and her name beneath it.
POLK, E.
“Polk…,” he read aloud.
“Dr. Elizabeth Polk,” she said.