Tear of the Gods by Alex Archer Page B

keeping their cool, the perps reacted before thinking it through and in the process hiked the charge against them from robbery to multiple felony homicide.”
    Beresford had been thinking the same thing. The black market in antiquities was alive and well, even here in merry old England. If the dig team had uncovered something seriously valuable, it wasn’t beyond comprehension that someone else would take it into their heads to relieve them of their find.
    “Seems a logical place to start. Take me to wherever they were storing the artifacts they uncovered,” he told his partner.
    Clements led him to a trio of tents a short distance away. Like the mess tent, these were bigger than the others, capable of holding several dozen people at once. Beresford had been to a dig site on vacation once, where he had the typical process explained to him. Each dig was split into gridlike sections and the items recovered from each section would be collected and cataloged together so that they could be studied in reference to one another. The easiest way of organizing such a project was to set up rows of folding tables, with each row representing a certain area of the dig and each table designated for holding objects recovered from a particular grid square.
    The scene that greeted them as they entered the first of the artifact tents was anything but organized. The tables had been overturned, the carefully cataloged objects they’d held scattered about the floor like so much trash. Mixed in with the pieces of pottery, clothing and various Iron Age weapons were several pieces of gold jewelry and even a large gold-plated cup that reminded Beresford of the chalice he’d drunk from at church last Sunday.
    He stood in the entrance, taking it all in.
    “Does it make any sense to you,” he asked his partner casually, “that our would-be thieves would ransack the place looking for items of value and then leave the gold lying there on the ground in plain sight?”
    Clements frowned and then shook his head. “Nope.”
    “Me, either. That means we can probably rule out simple theft as our motive here.”
    “Maybe whatever they took was worth so much that they could ignore the smaller pieces?” Clements suggested.
    Beresford thought about that for a minute and then ruled out the possibility.
    When his partner pressed him for an explanation, Beresford answered simply, “If you were a thief, would you leave any of the gold behind?”
    Clements didn’t bother to answer. He knew the other man was right. “So if they didn’t kill all those people over money,” he asked, “what did they kill them for?”
    Beresford didn’t know.
    Not yet at least.
    Clements’s cell phone rang. The conversation was short and when he got off the phone Beresford could see by the expression on his face that something had just changed with regard to the case.
    “Tell me we’ve been reassigned and I’ll buy your lunch for the next month.”
    Clements grinned, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Sorry. We’re stuck with this one it seems.”
    “Bloody hell!” Beresford said. “Give me a good shoe bomber any day.” He turned serious and asked his partner what the call had been about.
    “We’ve got two more bodies,” Clements said with a twinkle in his eye. “And this time it looks like we’ve got a couple of the bad guys.”
     
     
    H ALF AN HOUR later Beresford was standing by the side of the road, looking down at the bodies of the two men in the roadside ditch below. One of the local detectives was just climbing back up the hill toward them.
    Beresford flashed his badge and asked the other man to fill him in.
    “Bodies were found by one of the patrol cars. Both male, both in their late forties or so. No IDs in the wallets and nothing in their pockets, either.”
    The officer pointed back up the embankment at an angle. “There’s a pretty big bloodstain on the road over there, which is how our guy knew to take a look. Seems like whoever did it killed