Dane opened his mouth to answer, but Bones beat him to it by stepping around the counter and putting an arm around the man. “We’d love to answer that, but if we tell you we’ll have to kill you.”
McLeod stared at Bones, who smiled and put his index finger to his lips. Fear danced around the edges of the McLeod’s mouth in return.
“Okay then. Thing is, I actually bought two things off the guy. In addition to a medallion, there was an envelope. Clearly really old, nineteenth century probably. It didn’t look like much, but they guy came by the next day and thought it might be worth something. I got the medallion for a steal, so I slipped him an extra fifty for the envelope.”
Dane asked, “Do you still have the envelope?”
“Sure do. Follow me.”
He came out from behind the counter, locked the front door and put up a Be Right Back sign. They followed him through a door, which led into a narrow hallway and an area that made the public section of the store look clean and new. Off the hallway Dane noticed a small room containing a toilet and a sink with some dishes in it; and he made a note to himself not to use it no matter how badly he needed to go. At the end of the hallway was a storeroom piled high with every sort of junk imaginable.
Other than the scant strip of floor leading to it, the wooden desk in the corner was the only surface clear of debris. Bones looked around. “And I suppose you know where everything is here, right?”
McLeod guffawed. “More like I just pray every time I come in here it doesn’t come down and bury me alive. You boys may find this hard to believe, but I didn’t always plan on being a junk dealer. Things just sort of got away from me. Anyway, here it is.”
He pulled open a drawer in the desk and handed the envelope to Dane. The envelope did indeed appear old, and it had no writing on it that he could spot. It did have something embossed on the flap, some sort of complex logo in colors of red, black and gray.
The logo contained a cross in the middle, though it didn’t have the circle of the Celtic cross. On the horizontal part of the cross were three horseshoes, and in additional to various ornamentation, the logo contained an armored helmet above the cross.
Bones pointed to the top of the logo, above the helmet. “Is that a bat there, Maddock?”
Dane squinted. “Hard to tell. Those could be wings, but this is too small and worn to know for sure. The question is, what does this logo tell us?”
McLeod said, “Well it’s a Scottish coat of arms, that much I know.”
They looked at him and he shrugged. “I’ve seen a few of ‘em. We Scots are very big on clans and family history. I figured at some point I’d go look up which one it is, but I haven’t had the chance yet.”
Dane stuck his hand inside the envelope, careful not to tear it. He found nothing inside. He turned to McLeod. “You have a photocopier here? I’d like to get a copy of this.”
“Sure, up in front.”
Bones reached out his hand to take the envelope from Dane. “May I?”
He held it up to within six inches of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. “There’s writing inside.”
Gently he squeezed it so it turned into a sort of bowl, exposing most of the surface area of the inside. Letters were scrawled at an angle, in a clear and easy to read hand. The single word, however, did not make the picture any clearer.
It read: Hamiltonban
CHAPTER NINE
“Tell me, are we surrounded by idiots?”
“I do hope you’re not including me in that assessment, O’Meara.”
O’Meara looked at the old woman, shaking his head. These past weeks had been the first time he’d worked directly with her, as she lived in Philadelphia and he in Boston. He had heard of her before that, but the loose structure of the Sons of the Republic meant that a lot of people went their own way and only met when circumstances conspired for them to work together. Finding the Franklin Legacy was one of the main things driving him, so when the first real clues in two decades turned up in Philadelphia, they had joined forces.
“Honestly, there’s only so much we can blame on others. You and I have now contributed to two destructive incidents in the past few days.”
“Three if you count Long.”
O’Meara nodded. “Three if you count Long, although we don’t know that she revealed anything. In any case, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that you and I also bear some blame.”
The old woman regarded him, her brown eyes barely visible under the hood. She inclined her head slightly, perhaps in agreement. “Be that as it may, I assume you’d like me to keep telling you about Marshall?”
O’Meara gestured with the back of his right hand for her to continue.
“I did not ask for the surveillance video from the pawn shop. The owner didn’t seem the type to agree willingly, and I concluded it would be child’s play to steal the video that night. Which proved to be the case.”
O’Meara interrupted. “I know all that. I want to know how we managed to kill our prime lead before getting any information out of him.”
The woman continued as if she had not heard. “We easily identified the transaction with the medallion and printed the face of the man who sold it. A run against DMV photos by one of my sources confirmed him to be one Cornelius Marshall, who lives in the University area of the city. A couple of my guys went to talk to him — I did not go myself.”
“I know all that. Then they killed him.”
“They questioned him. They swore they didn’t lay a finger on him. They were a minute into talking to him after sitting down at the table and he just keeled over. No pulse, no breathing. Cornelius Marshall apparently had a weak heart.”
“And you believe them?”
“I certainly believe they didn’t do anything violent enough that it should have killed him. But this story has a happy ending.”
“Not for Mr. Marshall.”
“Which is really not our concern. We looked up his family and found a couple of things. First, he has a twin brother Octavius, who also lives in the area. But we didn’t turn up anything at his last known address, which is the same one DMV and his credit cards have. A couple of my people are still working on it.”
“The bigger thing is that back in the nineteenth century during the civil war, his family lived near Gettysburg. There are three potential properties associated with the family.”
O’Meara ran his hand over the graying stubble on his chin. “And you want us to go check them out. That’s certainly better than nothing. But what do we expect to find there?”
“We’ve been over this, O’Meara. There have always been rumors in my family, rumors about Hawthorne’s body. My great-great-grandfather went back twenty-four hours after Hawthorne was killed, and the body was gone. Someone must have taken it, probably to steal whatever they could find. Times were hard during the war. That person must have taken the medallion.”
O’Meara sighed. “You’re probably right. And I know people didn’t discard things the way they do today, so the document may still be around. It’s certainly the best lead we have. Also… ”
“Yes?”
“I heard something about one of your guys disappearing?”
“This is true. I sent them back this morning to see if they missed anything. I got the impression they didn’t stick around long after Marshall died, so I wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything. One of them had to leave before the other and he reported that they didn’t find anything new.”