The Inquisitor's Key: A Body Farm Novel Read online

  “I’m not head over heels in love with that theory. I offered it as an olive branch to the Shroudies. And they clubbed me over the head with it.”

  “So if Giotto wasn’t copying an earlier Shroud—if he did it as a prank, or a fake, or whatever—then it’s not a likeness of Jesus, or of anybody, for that matter. He could just make up any old face, right? He wouldn’t have needed a human model.” I was asking for two reasons: I needed to lay my Avignon hypothesis to rest once and for all, and I was still intrigued by Miranda’s snuff-film theory—a theory that resembled Emily’s autopsy-photo idea, but with a sinister twist.

  “Occam’s razor, Dr. B. Giotto was an artist. Artists use models. Of course there was a model.”

  “But the guy in the painting—”

  “It’s not a painting,” she interrupted. “It’s an illustration.”

  “Okay, okay, the guy in the illustration: Would his dimensions, his stature, match the stature of the model?”

  “Absolutely, if the artist was doing a life-size illustration,” she said. “A good artist can draw exactly to scale. When I was a medical illustrator, I did it all the time.”

  Exactly to scale: The words sliced through my Avignon theory like a razor, parting and crumbling the hypothesis like ancient, fragile linen.

  AN HOUR LATER, I WAS SPRINTING UP THE STAIRCASE of the Hotel Diplomatic and pounding on Miranda’s door. “Miranda, Miranda, wake up!” I drummed again, louder, hoping she hadn’t sallied forth in search of coffee and breakfast.

  “Jeez, what the hell? Just a second.” A moment later the door was opened by a bleary-eyed Miranda, wearing only a long T-shirt. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. She glared, plucking twists of toilet paper from her ears. “Sorry, I thought for sure you’d be up already.”

  “Man, I’d just gotten to sleep,” she grumbled. “Be grateful you got a room on the back side of the building. Away from the sirens and car alarms that blared all night long.” She pressed her palms against her eyes. “So, what’s up—besides you, early bird?”

  “This,” I said, stepping aside to show her the Shroud, which I’d unrolled in the hallway again.

  “I’m thinking Housekeeping’s gonna do some damage when they run the vacuum cleaner over that,” she said, but I could see her curiosity awakening.

  “I just talked to Emily Craig.”

  “Emily? In Kentucky?” I nodded. “Just now?”

  “Maybe an hour ago.”

  “Betcha woke her up, too, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yeah. I did wake her up. But that’s not the point.”

  “Might’ve been the point to Emily. Are you about to tell me what you think the point is?”

  “I am. Emily was explaining how the Shroud could’ve been made. A dust-transfer illustration—like a cave painting, or a brass rubbing.” Miranda nodded, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “She thinks the Shroud was made by a medieval artist named Giotto. Giotto was—”

  She fluttered a hand in the air. “Yeah, yeah, Giotto and I go way back. I minored in art history.” She pondered. “Okay, stylistically, Giotto seems plausible.”

  “But Giotto’s not the point, either,” I said.

  She sighed. “Anybody ever mention that you take a long damn time to get to the point?”

  “I’m getting there, I’m getting there. So Emily’s going on about how a good artist can draw to scale. Exactly to scale. Which is just rubbing my nose in the fact that the Shroud guy isn’t our Avignon guy. Can’t be.”

  “Because our Avignon guy’s six inches too short.”

  “Right. The Shroud guy is ten percent taller. But then, after I hung up, I thought, hmm.”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. The hmm—that’s the point.”

  “Exactly the point, Miss Smarty-Pants. Because after I thought, hmm, I thought, If he can draw exactly to scale, maybe he can scale it up, too. Why not larger than life? So I found a copy shop. Hey, you know the Italian word for ‘photocopy’?” She shook her head wearily. “Fotocopia. Isn’t that great? Anyhow, I found a fotocopia shop. Look.”

  I knelt and laid a photocopy over the face on the Shroud. It was a full-frontal image of the Avignon skull. I’d taken the CT scan to the fotocopia shop, enlarged it to 110 percent of actual size, and printed it on clear Mylar film. When I moved out of the way, Miranda gasped. “Oh, my God, it is him—the fit’s perfect now!”

  I couldn’t help preening. “See? The hmm was important, right?”

  “No shit, Sherlock. Very important.”

  The effect created by the overlay was almost like X-ray vision; almost as if we were looking through the face on the Shroud and seeing the bones beneath. I’d used this technique, facial superimposition, in several cases over the years: superimposing photographs of missing persons onto skulls that turned up, seeing if the face fit the skull. Most times the fit was terrible—the eyes floated out beyond the edges of the skull, or the nose hovered in the middle of the teeth, or the skull’s chin was twice as wide as the one in the photo—but sometimes, like now, everything on the face aligned with everything on the skull.

  In a court of law, facial superimposition couldn’t be used to prove an identification; it could be used only to exclude one—to say “No, that face can’t possibly fit that skull.” If the Shroud face hadn’t aligned with the Avignon skull—the scaled-up skull—I’d have concluded once and for all that the portrait in Turin and the bones in France belonged to different men. But this was a better fit than I could have imagined, and Emily Craig’s confident assertion—that a good artist can draw exactly to scale—no longer struck me as artistic license, as illustrator’s exaggeration.

  I fetched my tape measure, and Miranda and I took measurements from the Shroud to compare with those from the bones. We couldn’t get as many measurements as I’d hoped, because the Shroud’s image was vague, the landmarks tough to pinpoint. It was like examining a newspaper photo through a magnifying glass: the closer you look, the less you see. Still, the few solid measurements we managed to get—overall stature, femur length, nasal breadth, nasal length—fit well, once we scaled up the bone measurements. Even the skeleton’s leggy, storklike proportions—the short trunk and long limbs—were accurately rendered on the Shroud. “Everything’s the same, just ten percent bigger,” Miranda said. “Why do you suppose he did that?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he wanted it to look more impressive.”

  She laughed. “Maybe he was getting paid by the foot.”

  I laughed, too. “We can probably never prove it, but I feel sure. This guy on the Shroud is our guy from the palace.”

  “But who is our guy?” she said. “Is it Eckhart, or is it Jesus?”

  “That, Miranda, is the million-dollar question.”

  CHAPTER 14

  A5 Motorway, Italian Alps

  The Present

  “IN-TER-ESTING.” MIRANDA WAS SCROLLING DOWN the screen of her iPad as the car careened through a curve near the Mont Blanc Tunnel on our drive back to Avignon.

  “How can you read on these roads without getting carsick? I’d’ve thrown up before we got out of Turin if I tried that.”

  “It’s a gift,” she said. “I have many. Now shut up and drive. And listen. Three interest items about the Shroud. Interest item number one: In the 1990s, a prominent microscopist named Walter McCrone found red ochre in the image on the Shroud—and vermilion pigment in the so-called bloodstains.”

  “That would explain why those are bright red,” I said. “I was gonna circle back to that at some point. Since when is dried blood cherry red? Every death scene I see, dried blood’s almost black.”

  “Right. The point is, this microscopist McCrone seems to support Emily’s position. Interest item number two: When the Shroud first surfaced in Lirey, France, a bishop in a nearby town got suspicious. He poked around, asked a lot of questions, and eventually wrote to Avignon to warn the pope that it was a fake—‘cunningly painted,’ he said—created to draw
pilgrims to Lirey. What’s the catchphrase these days? ‘Faith-based tourism’? Ha. This sounds like a case of fake-based tourism.”

  “Did this sleuth of a bishop happen to finger Giotto as the cunning painter?”

  “He did not,” she said, “but I’m glad you asked, because that brings us to interest item number three. In June of 2011, an Italian art historian, one Luciano Buso, announced that he’d found an artist’s signature—guess whose?—hidden in the Shroud. Somewhere around the face, supposedly.” She unfastened her seat belt, and the car began beeping in alarm. She clambered out of her seat, squeezing her way into the back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting the Shroud.” She wormed her way back to the front, belted in, and began unrolling the giant print. One end of it flopped halfway across the windshield, and I nearly ran off the road before I managed to bat it away.

  “Are you crazy? There are so many better reasons to die than this.” I pulled onto the shoulder and parked.

  “Sorry; it got away from me for a second there.” She hopped out of the car, laid the print on the hood, and unrolled it as far as the face. “Come help me look.” She pored over the image, squinting and frowning. “I don’t see a damn thing that looks like ‘Giotto.’ Do you?”

  “No,” I said, “but that swirly bit around the eye looks kinda like a doggie.”

  She retrieved her iPad from the floorboard and did further searching. “Okay, here’s the picture this art historian gave to the media. A close-up of the neck, showing the signature.” She enlarged the picture and studied the screen. “Hmm.” Then she studied our immense, high-resolution print again. “Hmmmmm.”

  “Hmmmmm, what? I’m assuming the hmmmmm is important.”

  She showed me the screen. “In his print, just above that double wrinkle in the neck, can you kinda-sorta see a potential ‘Giotto’?”

  I was surprised by what I saw. “Yeah, I kinda-sorta can. It’s grainy, but I see something that could be a lowercase cursive g and a couple round bits that might be o’s.”

  She stared at the mammoth print. “But now look at ours. Notice anything funny?”

  “It’s really different. I see blotches and splotches, but everything looks all vague and random.”

  “I think he’s cranked up the contrast a lot in his picture. Not in the whole image; just in that part of the neck. Looks like he’s Photoshopped it to highlight what he wants us to see.” Then she groaned loudly. “Oh, good grief.”

  “Now what?”

  “Look. On the actual Shroud, the forehead blood—the artful, crown-of-thorns trickle of blood—is above the right eye.” Then she pointed to the iPad. “But in this art-detective’s version, it’s above the left. He’s flopped it, left to right.” She growled in annoyance. “No fair. Shit, Dr. B, if I played image doctor for a day or two, I could probably make it say ‘Miranda rocks!’ somewhere in there.” She rolled up the scroll, shaking her head in disgust. “Come on, let’s go. What a gyp.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “I was hoping this Giotto story might help Emily Craig’s work finally get the attention it deserves.”

  We hadn’t gone more than a few miles before Miranda simmered down and resumed the quest for interest items. “During the early Middle Ages, there were supposedly dozens of ‘true shrouds’ rattling around—more than forty, according to one guy who’s researched this. But none of those showed an image of Jesus; they were just strips of cloth. It wasn’t until…”—she paused to scroll—“…1203 that there was a record of a shroud with an image. But it just showed the face, not the whole bod.”

  “Where was it?”

  “That one turned up in Constantinople,” she said, “which was the crossroads of the relics trade.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  “How come it turned up?”

  “No, how come Constantinople was the crossroads of the relics trade?”

  “Ah. Because of Saint Helena.”

  “And what’s she the patron saint of?”

  “Of relics, looks like. Helena was the mother of Constantine—the Roman emperor who finally gave the seal of approval to Christianity. She was quite the pack rat when it came to relics. She made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and brought back a boatload of ’em. A true cross or two, three crowns of thorns, the Holy Sponge—”

  “The Holy what?”

  “Sponge. The Holy Sponge. A Roman soldier stuck a sponge on a stick and gave Jesus a drink up on the cross. Holy Nails.”

  “Wait, go back. The sponge? Really? Jesus dies a horrible death, his friends and family are devastated, but as they’re pulling him off the cross and hauling him away, somebody stops and goes, ‘Say, soldier, can I have that sponge?’”

  “So the story goes. Where was I? Oh, Holy Nails—lots of Holy Nails. At least thirty Holy Nails, scattered all over Europe.” She scrolled down the screen, then hooted. “Wow. The Holy Stairs: twenty-eight marble steps—I’m not making this up—from the palace of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. The steps Jesus stood on, supposedly, when Pilate washed his weaselly hands of the whole affair.”

  “So after the grieving disciples snag the Holy Sponge and pry out the Holy Nails, they swing by the governor’s palace and pinch an entire staircase?”

  “I’m just telling you what it says. Quit interrupting. There’s more, so much more in the realm of relics. Feathers from the wings of the Angel Gabriel, plucked or molted when he swooped down to tell Mary she was pregnant. Vials of Mary’s breast milk.”

  “Gag.”

  “Six Holy Foreskins.”

  “Whose six Holy Foreskins?”

  “Jesus’s, of course.”

  “He had six of them? Or was the One True Penis snipped six times?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe the rabbi was a rookie.” She consulted the screen again. “The body of Mary Magdalene—three Mary Magdalenes, actually, in three different places. The tail of the donkey on which Jesus rode to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. A few heads of John the Baptist. A tear Jesus shed.”

  “A tear? One of the ‘Jesus wept’ tears, from when Lazarus died?” She nodded. “And somebody just happened to be standing by with an airtight container?” I shook my head. “Twelve disciples? Jesus would’ve needed hundreds—thousands—to trail along behind him and scoop up everything he ever touched for all this stuff to be real. What a racket.”

  “Well, yes and no,” she said, surprising me.

  “How no?”

  “People venerate relics everywhere, always. Relics can be props—they can dramatize and validate the religion’s story; visual aids. But they can also be considered talismans, with magical powers—the power to heal the sick, raise the dead, protect a city against invading armies. People crave relics—beautiful ones, like the Shroud, or even cheesy ones like the Sacred Sandwich.” I remembered what I’d seen on my midnight walk—mementos stuffed in the moonlit niches of a prison wall, and the nearby carving of John the Baptist’s severed head—and it gave her argument the ring of truth.

  “So, circling back,” I said. “Whatever happened to that shroud from 1203—the one with the image?”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “It vanished in the sack of Constantinople a year later. In all the raping and pillaging.”

  “Who raped and pillaged Constantinople?”

  “The Crusaders.”

  “The Christian Crusaders? Raping and pillaging the crossroads of Christianity?”

  “Depends,” she answered, “on how you define ‘Christian.’”

  Just then the ring of my phone sounded—a startling noise high in the Alps, miles from any city. I snatched it from the console, narrowly missing a road sign as I sneaked a glance at the display. Private number. “Hello?”

  “Hello, is this Dr. Bill Brockton?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Dr. Brockton, my name is Dr. Adam Newman. I’m the scientific director of the Institute for Biblical Science, in Charlotte, North Carolina.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “I go
t your letter a few days ago.”

  “Are you going to be able to help us with our project? We’re very anxious to get to work, and we’re very much hoping you’re interested.”

  I hesitated. I’d been dubious when I first read the letter, and Stefan’s report had only confirmed my uneasiness. But I didn’t want to be offensive. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you with that, Dr. Newman.”

  “I think you’d find it a fascinating opportunity,” he said. “If you’ll let me tell you more about it, I think you might reconsider.”

  “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take it on right now,” I said. “I’m out of the country. I’m in France.”

  “France?” There was a silence, and I thought I’d lost the call. “Well, gracious, lucky you. What part of France?” Something about his hearty tone sounded false, but before I could decide how—or whether—to answer the question, the world went dark, we plunged into the Mont Blanc Tunnel, and Dr. Adam Newman was gone.

  CHAPTER 15

  Avignon

  The Present

  AFTER DROPPING MIRANDA OFF, I EASED THE PEUGEOT through Lumani’s wooden gate just in time to see Elisabeth arranging purple stalks of lavender in a tall vase on one of the garden tables. She waved and nodded. “Ah, bonjour. You are back so soon. How was your trip? Did you see the famous Shroud?”

  “No, we didn’t. It was impossible.”

  “Ah, quel dommage—too bad.”

  “It’s okay. It was a useful trip. We bought a copy of the Shroud. A life-size photograph. For three hundred dollars.”

  She gasped, and as she drew in her breath, she exclaimed, “Ah!” I’d never heard anyone do that before—speaking while inhaling. The intake of breath somehow invested the “ah” with a little more wonder and a lot more charm. “Mon Dieu. For so much money, I hope it has the power to make miracles.”

  “Well, I didn’t fall asleep and crash your car in the mountains, so maybe it does have miraculous powers.”