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Let her pull me away from this awkward conversation? Sounded like a pretty good idea to me.
“Buongiorno, Signor,” I said, then let Freya tug me out of the room and up the curved stairs to her suite above.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked as she closed the door behind us and pulled out an old, tarnished clock from one of the bags.
“Um… nice?” I said. It was a rather generous assessment, in my opinion. Honestly, the clock looked like a piece of junk.
Freya smiled. “It’s a silver-cased, humpback carriage clock, at least two hundred years old.”
“Garage sale find?”
Freya nodded. “The old woman was going to sell it for ten dollars—she had no idea what she had.”
I laughed. “Let me guess, you rectified that for her?”
She shrugged. “It was the fair thing to do.”
Don’t let her fool you; Freya was kind, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew money didn’t grow on trees, but it did flow freely from her father’s coffers, and so long as he insisted on controlling her life, she got in her shots where she could. Hence, the antique shit that peppered her room, like the sixteenth century writing desk in the corner and the authentic Egyptian pottery in the antique curio cabinet next to her closet. When all tallied up, the stuff in her room probably cost more than most peoples’ houses.
“Seeing as you’re so enthralled with old shit, do you think you could help me with something?”
“Of course. More symbols?” she asked, and her hazel eyes flared just a little.
She loved her work with old stuff, but what was missing in her life was right there in her eyes. Freya wanted to feel useful. And as much as I respected her father, God damn him for trying to keep that from her. What my father had to offer had been modest in comparison to the Lucianos’ luxuries, but he’d let me be me. I’d take that over a big bank account any day of the week.
“Not symbols. Stones,” I said, pulling the photos from my jacket pocket and handing them to her. “Brute’s sister pointed out that the walls in these pictures don’t look like modern stonework.”
She flipped through them, one after another. Halfway through, she paused. “They’re not walls.”
“Um, okay?”
“I mean, they’re not just walls. Look at the way it curves at the top,” she said, swiping her finger along the top of one of the photos. “The wall curves… like a tunnel.”
Hm, interesting. “There are a lot of tunnels in Mexico, mostly set up for drug and gun-running, but most of it is relatively modern construction. Does this—”
She shook her head. “This isn’t modern. And do you see that faintly metallic sheen on the rocks?” she asked, pointing it out on several of the photos. “That looks like pyrite to me. It’s found pretty much all over the world, but just a few years ago, they found it lining tunnels beneath the pyramids built by the people of Teotihuacan…inMexico. They’d embedded the pyrite into the rocks.”
“So, you think these photos might have been taken in tunnels beneath pyramids in Mexico?”
It was a start. How many pyramids could there be in Mexico? Certainly, this had to help narrow down our search.
“No, I doubt it,” she said, continuing to flip through the photos.
Damn.
“The pyramids and tunnels beneath them are carefully guarded archaeological sites. But nobody knows much about the Toltec people who inhabited the city—including where they went after the city was burned down. It’s possible these tunnels were built elsewhere by them, or even by another closely related people of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture.”
All right, so, tunnels lined with pyrite, somewhere in Mexico. This wasn’t narrowing down the search as much as I’d hoped.
“When you needed that tattoo, you said you were going to Lázaro Cárdenas, right?” she asked as she handed the photos back.
I nodded. “It’s Domínguez’s homebase.”
“Maybe, but it’s not where you should be looking,” she said, shaking her head. “Teotihuacan is twenty-five miles from Mexico City. It's unlikely that its emigrants would have traveled all the way to the Michoacán region.”
So, the only place I could rule out was the only place we’d been searching? Wasn’t that just freaking awesome?
“I guess it’s back to the drawing board.” I sighed.
