Dead Hunt

she shut the door. Diane stood for a moment and closed her eyes before she turned back to Agent Jacobs.
    ‘‘I have to go,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ll have Andie show you to Bookkeeping.’’
‘‘I have really good hearing and the acoustics in this room are quite superior,’’ said Agent Jacobs. ‘‘I’d like to come with you. See how Ross is doing. Do you think you are going to be arrested?’’
He said it as if it was such a normal thing. Not cause for alarm or disgrace. Just a simple statement. Diane was wondering if he was that unflappable in his un-FBI persona.
‘‘I think they probably found where I hid the body. I probably left my letter opener stuck in her back with my fingerprints on it,’’ she said. Then she added, ‘‘That’s a joke.’’
‘‘I can tell a joke from a confession,’’ he said. ‘‘So, you think they found the body?’’
‘‘I think that’s probably why the marshals are here—tying up loose ends,’’ Diane said. ‘‘I guess it’s all right if you come along. It’ll give you a chance to fight over who gets to take me in.’’
‘‘You believe that I’m about to arrest you?’’ he said, amusement twinkling in his eyes. Diane was glad that someone found all this funny.
‘‘I’m sure you catch a lot of people with your friendly charm,’’ said Diane.
‘‘You think this is an act?’’ Jacobs put his hand over his heart in mock pain. ‘‘And here I thought you trusted me.’’
‘‘I obviously do; I spilled my guts to you, didn’t I?’’ said Diane.
‘‘I see, you just weren’t fooled.’’ He was still smiling, but Diane thought he probably had elicited a lot of information with his friendly manner.
She got a light sweater out of the closet and put it on.
‘‘Like all of us, you have a job to do,’’ she said. ‘‘Those artifacts came from somewhere and they are unprovenanced. You have to be suspicious. But I hope you see that neither Kendel nor Jonas could have hoped to get by with anything. If anyone could, it would be me. I control everything here. Or at least I thought I did.’’
‘‘I think it’s too early to fall on your sword,’’ he said as Diane led them out the back door of her office.
‘‘I’m not falling on my sword. I just think Kendel and Jonas need to be protected from whatever mischief is going on here,’’ said Diane.
‘‘Ross said you have a highly developed sense of justice,’’ said Jacobs as they walked through a small door into the Pleistocene room.
A docent was telling a group of Japanese tourists about woolly mammoths. One man was arguing about whether or not the giant beasts were really here in Georgia.
‘‘I hope he didn’t mean I’m prone to take justice into my own hands,’’ said Diane.
‘‘You mean like killing Clymene? No. He said you believe in a justice system. That’s why, when you were a human rights investigator, you collected evidence all those years even when there was no court in which to present it,’’ he said.
So Jacobs knew more about her background than he had admitted, she noticed.
‘‘I’m glad he thinks so highly of me,’’ said Diane.
‘‘He does. All these Richard the Third T-shirts have fair trial written all over this museum’s identity,’’ he said.
‘‘You’re familiar with Richard the Third issues?’’ said Diane.
‘‘I took a lot of history and art history in college. That’s how I ended up in this section of the FBI. These guys were really big,’’ he said as they passed a giant bison.
‘‘You should visit the dinosaur room while you’re here,’’ said Diane.
‘‘I will. I’ll visit the whole building before I leave.’’
‘‘Do you know where the artifacts belong?’’ Diane asked after a moment.
She went through the large entrance to the mammal room, where more tourists were viewing the dioramas of taxidermied and skeletonized animals in artists’ recreations of their natural habitats. This is where I was attacked, she thought. Here among all the animals. It looked so harmless in the daylight.
‘‘No. It’s hard to prove something is stolen when you didn’t know it existed in the first place. That’s the problem trying to deal with looted artifacts. The thing that made the Getty Museum case so great was one of the principals had photographs in his apartment of the artifacts actually being looted. You don’t get that kind of hard evidence often. I need a witness. And with Cunningham Jr. dead, there isn’t