The Illumination by Karen Tintori Page A

damaging effects of chemical analysis.”
    â€œPretty impressive.” He picked up the pendant. “So where do we go to analyze this?”
    Where indeed . . . ?
    Natalie hesitated, chewing on her lip.
How about to the police?
she thought. Part of her wanted to call Detective Henderson back and simply hand the pendant over, but that meant facing ramifications from the police and her employers for having lied to him. She might even lose her job because she’d tried to protect her sister.
    â€œThere’s an Ion Beam lab at UAlbany, but I’m not sure that’s the next step,” she said reluctantly. “If Dana was
killed
and Rusty is
missing
on account of this pendant, maybe we should go to the police instead. Although that might prove problematic. . . .”
    She explained how she’d dodged Henderson’s questions about the amulet, allowing the detective to conclude that Ski Mask hadn’t been after it. “Because at the time, I never suspected he’d broken in because of the pendant. It’s only now that I’m starting to wonder if that was his purpose all along. If he knew that Rusty had brought it to the museum . . .”
    â€œForget about the police.” D’Amato snapped the book shut with a thud. His eyes darkened with purpose, like a hunting dog’s after picking up a scent. “If this pendant is linked to an international murder, and to an interstate missing persons alert, and if it
is
an antiquity taken from Iraq, then the scope of any investigation will go way beyond the NYPD. I’ve got a better idea.”
    She stared at him, uneasy, waiting.
    â€œWe call a contact of mine at the FBI.”
    He began scrolling through the list of contacts in his cell phone. He paused and glanced at her, tacitly waiting for her assent.
    The FBI.
Natalie felt numb. She looked at the pendant andthe pouch with its tiny inscription, seeing them through bleary eyes.
    Dana died for this? Why? How? I need to know.
    â€œGo ahead,” she heard herself say in a voice that sounded like a wan imitation of her own. “Call the FBI.”

16
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    FBI Special Agent Luther Tyrelle sat across from Natalie at the coffee shop, sipping his second cardboard cup of chai tea and studying her with a tiger’s caramel-colored eyes. He was a muscular black man with a receding hairline and a neck roughly the circumference of a gallon-size milk jug.
    In between sips he scribbled notes on the pages of a small, bound, government-issue notebook as Natalie outlined how she’d come to receive the pendant and her assessment of its possible value. D’Amato sat silently between them at the small round café table, barely touching his extra-large decaf, black, three sugars.
    When Natalie fell silent, D’Amato inched his chair closer to the table. “My gut says there’s a connection between Dana’s contact with this pendant and her murder in Iraq, and with Rusty Sutherland’s disappearance after he handed it off at the Devereaux.” He pushed the pendant from the center of the table to Tyrelle. “Not to mention that on the same day, presto, we have someone breaking into the Devereaux—and it turns out the only thing the thief hones in on is this.”
    â€œAn amulet designed to ward off the evil eye,” Tyrelle mused, lifting it by the chain. “You wouldn’t believe how many of these eyes I saw in Turkey last year. They’ve got blue-eye beads hanging everywhere.” The FBI agent shook his head andset the necklace carefully down on the table. “Even their national airline has huge eyes painted on the tails of their jets. It’s wild.” He leaned forward.
    â€œThey’re so leery of the evil eye that some villagers actually defaced ancient cave murals there—scratched the eyes right off the damn faces. They destroyed irreplaceable ancient art just to stop those eyes from staring