Cool Cache (Tucker Sinclair Series Book 4) by Patricia Smiley

Author:Patricia Smiley [Smiley, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

It was three o’clock by the time I arrived at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park and walked across the grassy commons it shared with the University of Southern California’s coliseum. The guidebook I’d consulted listed the architectural style as Spanish Renaissance, but the blocky stucco building seemed more Socialist-Realist to me.

I walked up the steps and entered the lobby through the heavy bronze doors. Inside, the floor was covered with travertine marble, accented with intricate multicolored inlayed tiles. Doric columns stood guard over the bones of a prehistoric critter. The columns were less elaborate than the ones on Eugene’s Greek revival in-basket, but they still served as a painful reminder that he was missing.

A security guard sat on a stool at the information desk, scrutinizing a line of people waiting to buy tickets. I asked to speak to Marianne Rogers. A few minutes later, she walked into the lobby. As soon as I mentioned Eugene’s name and told her he was missing, she led me past dark wood display cases that looked as old as the exhibits they held.

Rogers looked like a skeleton in somebody’s biology lab. I could almost hear her bones clanking as she guided me to a small office on the third floor where the curators worked. Even though her body fat was low, her enthusiasm was high, especially for all things chocolate.

“Eugene stopped by the museum yesterday morning,” she said. “He was interested in Mayan spouted chocolate pots. As Professor Osteen probably told you, I have a passion for the subject. Eugene wanted to know if we had one in our exhibit. I told him we didn’t.”

“Did Eugene say why he was interested in chocolate pots?”

“He was researching information about chocolate for a client and he ran across a doctoral dissertation on the Internet about the pots. He couldn’t open the link, but it piqued his interest.”

I pulled Helen’s replica from my tote bag.

“How interesting.” Marianne Rogers reached for the pot, holding it up to the light streaming through the window. She seemed almost reverent as she studied it from every angle.

“Where did you get this?” she said.

“It belongs to that client Eugene mentioned. I’m not sure where she got it.”

Rogers shifted her gaze to meet mine. “It belongs in a museum.”

I was taken aback by her comment. “You think it’s real?”

“If it isn’t, it’s a magnificent reproduction. We’d have to run some tests to know for sure. Authentic Mayan chocolate pots are rare. Several were uncovered at Colha in Northern Belize in 1981, but those are now housed at the University of Texas at Austin. At least one was stolen from a museum in Guatemala City during the civil war. It’s never been recovered.”

“Did you mention that to Eugene?”

She nodded. “He seemed interested in knowing everything I could tell him about the theft. All I remembered was an article from several years ago. The Guatemalan police suspected it was an inside job, but they couldn’t prove it. The case is still open, but I don’t suppose anybody’s looking very hard.

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