“Macramé class,” I said. “It’s just like the others?”
“Looks like it,” she said. “What about it, Masuoka?”
“I think we got a break this time,” Vince said.
“About fucking time,” Deborah said.
“There’s an ankle bracelet,” Vince said. “It’s made of platinum, so it didn’t melt off.” He looked up at Deborah and gave her his terribly phony smile. “It says Tammy on it.”
Deborah frowned and looked over to the side door of the gallery. A tall man in a seersucker jacket and bow tie stood there with one of the cops, looking anxiously at Deborah. “Who’s that guy?” she asked Vince.
“Professor Keller,” he told her. “Art history teacher. He found the body.”
Still frowning, Deborah stood up and beckoned the uniformed cop to bring the professor over.
“Professor . . . ?” Deborah said.
“Keller. Gus Keller,” the professor said. He was a good-looking man in his sixties with what looked like a dueling scar on his left cheek. He didn’t appear to be about to faint at the sight of the body.
“So you found the body here,” Deb said.
“That’s right,” he said. “I was coming over to check on a new exhibit—Mesopotamian art, actually, which is interesting—and I saw it here in the shrubbery.” He frowned. “About an hour ago, I guess.”
Deborah nodded as if she already knew all that, even the 162
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Mesopotamian part, which was a standard cop trick designed to make people eager to add new details, especially if they might be a little bit guilty. It didn’t appear to work on Keller. He simply stood and waited for another question, and Deborah stood and tried to think of one. I am justly proud of my hard-earned artificial social skills, and I didn’t want the silence to turn awkward, so I cleared my throat, and Keller looked at me.
“What can you tell us about the ceramic head?” I asked him.
“From the artistic point of view.” Deborah glared at me, but she may have been jealous that I thought of the question instead of her.
“From the artistic point of view? Not much,” Keller said, looking down at the bull’s head by the body. “It looks like it was done in a mold, and then baked in a fairly primitive kiln. Maybe even just a big oven. But historically, it’s much more interesting.”
“What do you mean interesting?” Deborah snapped at him, and he shrugged.
“Well, it’s not perfect,” Keller said. “But somebody tried to re-create a very old stylized design.”
“How old?” Deborah said. Keller raised an eyebrow and shrugged, as if to say she had asked the wrong question, but he answered.
“Three or four thousand years old,” he said.
“That’s very old,” I offered helpfully, and they both looked at me, which made me think I ought to add something halfway clever, so I said, “And what part of the world would it be from?”
Keller nodded. I was clever again. “Middle East,” he said. “We see a similar motif in Babylonia, and even earlier around Jerusalem.
The bull head appears to be attached to the worship of one of the elder gods. A particularly nasty one, really.”
“Moloch,” I said, and it hurt my throat to say that name.
Deborah glared at me, absolutely certain now that I had been holding out on her, but she looked back at Keller as he continued to talk.
“Yes, that’s right,” he said. “Moloch liked human sacrifice.
Especially children. It was the standard deal: sacrifice your child DEXTER IN THE DARK
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