The Medusa Curse Read online

  ‘It’s possible,’ Jazz considered, thinking back to what she’d heard Dr Zhang saying the night before. ‘Whatever was going on, someone he was working with wanted more from him, some extra “bending of the rules” that he wasn’t willing to do.’

  Phoenix was still looking through the ledger. ‘There’s more written here but I can’t make it out.’

  ‘Show me,’ said Jazz. ‘You’re right, it’s an impression from something that must have been written on another piece of paper on top.’

  She watched as Phoenix put the ledger on the desk and took a photo of it with his phone.

  ‘You’re taking a picture of it?’ asked Jazz.

  ‘Once we’re out of here, I’ll digitally enhance the image and use a backlight to see what it says.

  Jazz laughed. ‘You’re tech obsessed! Move over. I’ll do this my way.’ She took a pencil and a blank piece of paper from her bag. She placed the paper on top of the ledger page. Rubbing her pencil lightly over the area of the impression, she gave a triumphant cry as an address and phone number began to appear. ‘Yes! Look here, you can clearly see some writing.’

  ‘Nice one,’ said Phoenix.

  Jazz opened up CrimeSeen and added the information.

  ‘We might need to check that place out.’

  ‘OK. Can we go now?’ asked Phoenix. ‘That detective already thought I was shady. If she finds us here . . .’

  ‘Yep, just give me a sec.’ Jazz carefully put the paper back in her bag. Then she flicked over to CrimeSeen’s CAMERA tab and took some pictures.

  She then switched to video and slowly panned around the room, recording each angle of the office. As she did so, she noticed something odd. The rug on the floor was slightly raised in one section. ‘Look at that!’

  She walked over to the rug and flipped back a corner to see what was underneath. It was a flat brass handle, set into the floor that would normally be hidden under Dr Zhang’s large desk chair. It was a trapdoor. Jazz grasped the handle and lifted it. A dark space was revealed beneath the floorboards of Dr Zhang’s study. ‘A secret cellar?’

  ‘Let’s check it out!’ Phoenix said.

  ‘Are you sure? The last time we went down into a cellar we were trapped . . .’

  ‘That was different. Jump!’ Phoenix urged.

  Jazz jumped down and Phoenix followed.

  Phoenix shone his mobile phone light around a small room cut out of the sandstone underneath the Knowledge Institute. A wide tunnel led off it into darkness. ‘What is this place?’ he muttered.

  ‘I remember Mack telling me a rumour ages ago about tunnels—’ She was cut off by a sound above.

  Someone was rattling the locked door to Dr Zhang’s office, trying to get inside.

  Jazz’s heart beat faster. ‘What if they have a key?’

  ‘They won’t. The office isn’t usually locked,’ Phoenix replied. But he didn’t sound confident. Nervously, he reached up and pulled the trapdoor closed, plunging them into darkness.

  ‘They’ll see that we’ve moved the rug,’ Jazz whispered, heart pounding, as they listened intently to the sounds above. It was harder to hear with the trapdoor closed, but eventually they heard footsteps retreating.

  ‘It’s quiet upstairs now,’ Phoenix said. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘OK, I hope that door opens this time!’

  Phoenix pushed, but nothing happened.

  ‘Not again!’ Jazz exclaimed. She heard Phoenix trying not to laugh. ‘What?’

  ‘This,’ he said, as he pushed on the door and light streamed down. ‘Got you!’

  ‘Seriously?!’ Jazz cried with annoyance and relief.

  They climbed out of the storage area and back up into the office, closing the trapdoor with a click.

  Phoenix was moving the rug and chair back into place when they were startled by the sudden shrill sound of a song chorus. Jazz recognised the tune of Shake it Off.

  ‘Put your phone on silent!’ she hissed.

  ‘That’s not my phone,’ complained Phoenix. ‘Do you think I’d have that ringtone?’

  Jazz moved a stack of papers on the desk. Underneath lay Dr Zhang’s mobile phone, now silent except for a message beep alerting a missed call.

  The two stared at it.

  ‘He must have left it here last night.’

  ‘Why hasn’t he come back to get it?’ Phoenix reached out a hand towards the phone, but Jazz slapped it away.

  ‘Phoenix, it’s evidence!’

  ‘But don’t you want to—’ He stopped at the sound of approaching footsteps.

  ‘They’re coming back with the key,’ said Phoenix. ‘We gotta leave!’

  They hurried into the small courtyard, closing the sliding door to Dr Zhang’s office behind them.

  Looking for a safe way out, Jazz saw that opposite them was the partially open window of an empty meeting room. Fully open, it would be large enough to climb through. To their right was a closed door with ‘Service Entry’ painted in red. The courtyard was deserted except for a black cat sleeping in the sun.

  ‘Is that the same cat as before?’ wondered Jazz.

  Phoenix didn’t reply. He had hurried across to the large window and was trying to pull it open. The window was stuck tight. Phoenix swore under his breath.

  They went over to the service door.

  ‘Hey, where did that cat go?’ asked Jazz. There was no sign of the feline anywhere.

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ said Phoenix. He sighed with relief as the service door opened easily. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  30:27

  They made their way past various power switches and dials for the different sections of the museum. The service area opened into the Antiquities wing where visitors milled around the displays. They took no notice of Jazz and Phoenix as they exited the service door on their way back to the lobby.

  ‘What next?’

  ‘We’re now—’ Jazz checked her watch ‘—seventeen hours into the first 48 HOURS. We need to gather more clues as to where Dr Zhang might be. That means asking questions of museum staff, seeing if anyone heard or saw anything yesterday or last night, or this morning.’

  ‘What’s our cover?’

  Jazz thought for a moment. ‘We know he’s missing, but that doesn’t mean everyone else does. We just ask if anyone has seen Dr Zhang, and when they say no, ask when they last saw him.’

  ‘Let’s start with the security guards, one of them should be back in the office by now,’ said Phoenix.

  The arrived at the security desk to find Gustav doing some paperwork. Jazz was relieved that it wasn’t Sammy, the officer who’d challenged them the night before, but she still wasn’t sure how Gustav would react to seeing them so soon after the raid.

  ‘Hi,’ she said confidently. ‘Is Dr Zhang around?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s not available at the moment,’ Gustav replied. Then, recognising them, he became suspicious. ‘Hang on, you two were here last night. What have you come back for? The police aren’t letting anyone into the Velocity wing.’

  ‘Dr Zhang had asked us to help out again today,’ Phoenix explained. ‘We figured he’d need us now more than ever.’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t. He’s not here.’

  ‘I see,’ Jazz said pleasantly. ‘When will he be back?’

  Gustav sighed. ‘I’m not sure. But if Dr Zhang does end up coming in later, he’s going to be extremely busy. There’s nothing you two can do to help today.’

  ‘I left a message on Dr Zhang’s desk before the break-in last night,’ Phoenix said. ‘Maybe he had a chance to read it. Has he been here this morning?’

  ‘I seriously doubt it. Sorry, but I’m very busy. You’ll need to find something else to do today.’

  Jazz and Phoenix turned away, disappointed, and went back into the lobby. There, Jazz spotted another staff member they knew. ‘That’s Maureen, one of the conservators. She repairs and restores artefacts in the permanent collection. I know she was here yesterday.’

&
nbsp; She waved and called out. ‘Maureen, hi!’

  The woman came over to them. ‘Jazz, and Phoenix isn’t it? Did you hear the big news? About the break-in?’

  Jazz nodded. ‘We did, it’s such a shame. We actually wanted to talk to Dr Zhang about what will happen next. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘No,’ Maureen replied, looking troubled. ‘The police are looking for him too. He’s been so stressed lately. I haven’t seen him since late yesterday evening.’

  ‘Really?’ said Jazz. ‘After the robbery?’

  Maureen shook her head. ‘No. A few minutes before the crash I walked out the front door and saw Dr Zhang going down to the car park to meet someone.’

  ‘Were they in a blue van by any chance?’

  Maureen shook her head again. ‘Something far flashier. A red sports car.’

  Jazz’s relief turned to puzzlement. She hadn’t noticed a ‘flashy’ car in the visitor car park last night.

  Maureen continued, echoing Jazz’s thoughts. ‘It did seem a bit odd. But it probably belonged to one of the exhibition sponsors.’

  ‘Did you notice anything else unusual?’

  ‘Now that you mention it, Dr Zhang did seem to stumble when he got into the car. It was dark, though. I thought he must have tripped.’ Suddenly she looked anxious. ‘Oh dear, do you think he might have been attacked? Pulled into the car by force?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ replied Phoenix. ‘But it’s possible. Nobody knows where he is. Not even his family.’

  Maureen’s face had gone white. ‘I’m such a fool . . . I should have remembered this earlier. Look, I have to go. I need to speak with the police. You two stay safe!’

  Jazz and Phoenix made their way to a small grassy area just outside the museum. Jazz opened up CrimeSeen. ‘Now we have a new Point Last Seen,’ she said, making notes on what Maureen had told them.

  ‘What if that car was the one used in the ram raid? I wish we’d had more time in the Velocity wing before the security guards and police got there,’ Phoenix said. ‘I would have collected mud from the tyre tracks.’

  ‘Then you would have deliberately interfered with the crime scene. I’ve just finished a book about crime scene protection and we came close enough to interfering last night as it was, walking around like we did.’ Jazz’s avid reading of true crime books and forensic studies sometimes got on Phoenix’s nerves.

  ‘Under the circumstances, I think it would have been justified,’ he argued.

  ‘It was bad enough that you fell over and landed right in the . . .’ Jazz stopped, staring at Phoenix excitedly.

  ‘Footprints!’ they said together.

  ‘We have a soil sample,’ hooted Phoenix triumphantly. ‘There’ll be dirt traces on my jeans. Let’s head back to my place and take a closer look.’

  * * *

  Jazz and Phoenix jumped on a bus. It stopped just outside Phoenix’s house. As they got off and prepared to cross the road, Jazz noticed a blue van. She looked closer and did a horrified double take.

  ‘Phoenix! Do you see what I see?’

  Immediately, Phoenix swung round to take a look. The van was empty, but attached above the driver’s door was a tiny camera. It swivelled to follow them as they crossed the road.

  ‘I wasn’t imagining things!’ he hissed. ‘That car was here last night, too. I reckon it’s the same car Anika saw.’

  They suddenly heard running footsteps. A man wearing mirrored sunglasses and a cap set low over his face shoved past them, knocking Phoenix into the gutter. ‘Keep outta the way,’ the man said roughly.

  Then, almost before they had time to register what had happened, the man jumped in the car, revved the engine and drove right at them.

  ‘Move!’ cried Jazz, grabbing Phoenix by the arm to yank him out of the gutter and onto the footpath.

  At the last moment, the van did a U-turn, altering its course to stay on the road. Finally it drove off.

  Jazz and Phoenix stood on the footpath, shaken.

  ‘Did you get the rego?’ asked Phoenix.

  ‘P something, maybe an R,’ said Jazz. ‘It was too quick. What was all that about?’

  Phoenix frowned. ‘It was a warning.’

  29:40

  ‘That was creepy,’ Jazz said, as they hurried inside. ‘The van must be connected to the robbery. I wonder who the driver was.’

  ‘Someone we don’t want to meet again,’ Phoenix said.

  ‘Whoever they are, they know who we are and where you live. I don’t like that.’ Jazz shivered.

  ‘They’re just trying to scare us off.’

  ‘I am scared,’ Jazz admitted, ‘but I’m not scared off.’

  Phoenix disappeared upstairs to grab his jeans.

  Dr Lyons came in, bag over her shoulder, and greeted Jazz warmly. The scientist worked from home in the fully-equipped forensic lab attached to their house. She employed Jazz and Phoenix as assistants there a couple of days a week. ‘How did everything go at the police station?’ she asked, concern on her face.

  ‘It was fine,’ replied Phoenix as he returned. ‘Are you heading out? I—we—need to use the lab for a while to run a soil profile.’

  ‘A soil profile?’ Mrs Lyons looked surprised. ‘Look, honey, I’m happy for you to be using the lab, both of you, but you need to know your limits. That’s specialised work, not my area of expertise.’

  ‘That’s OK. I just need to do some preliminary work.’

  ‘Phoenix, I wish you would bring this tenacity to your schoolwork.’ She sighed and then continued, ‘OK. Kit up properly, please. You know the protocols. You too, Jazz.’

  ‘Of course, Dr Lyons.’

  * * *

  They heard her car leaving as they entered the clean room, next to the accredited laboratory.

  ‘OK,’ Phoenix said. ‘You heard Mum. We need to kit up so we don’t contaminate anything.’ He passed Jazz some white overalls and a box of gloves. They both got ready.

  Inside the lab, Phoenix placed a sheet of white paper on the wide workbench near the sink, switching on a large, powerful light that hung above it. The hum of the air pressure regulator was a soft background noise in the otherwise silent room.

  With gloved hands, and using the plastic bag itself as a kind of isolation chamber, Phoenix carefully scraped the smeared dirt off his jeans onto the piece of white paper. Jazz watched the small pile of dust and soil spread across the surface. Phoenix swung a high magnification glass over the benchtop and started teasing out some of the debris. It was slow, painstaking work.

  ‘Phoenix,’ said Jazz.

  ‘Mmm?’ he replied, concentrating hard on the tweezers and soil.

  ‘I have to ask,’ Jazz hesitated for a moment. ‘You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?’

  After moving a few more fragments of soil, Phoenix finally swung around and looked at her. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘It’s just that the clock is ticking.’ She gestured at the clock on the wall: 1.49 pm.

  Phoenix sighed.

  ‘We could be checking out that address we got from Dr Zhang’s ledger,’ Jazz continued. ‘Maybe there’s evidence there, something that’s easier to analyse?’

  Phoenix put down the tweezers. ‘Jazz, chill. We’ll be able to tell a lot from this soil sample just from looking closely at it. I’ll only take another minute or two. It could give us information about where the sample came from and help us narrow down locations for more investigating.’ He picked up the tweezers and turned back to the magnifying glass.

  Jazz continued to hover over his shoulder, trying to get a better look at what Phoenix was examining.

  ‘Here,’ he said, after several more minutes had passed. ‘Take a look at this.’ He got up from the stool and Jazz sat in his place. Phoenix pointed out two piles of dirt where he had separated out like-particles. One pile was made up of minute, light-coloured grains, while the second had larger, green pieces. Comparing them to the original scrapings from Phoenix’s jeans, which had looked like a pil
e of dirt, Jazz could see that his slow work had yielded some results.

  ‘At best guess, this pile on the left is sand,’ she said, peering closely. ‘The pile on the right, though, it’s . . .’ She hesitated a moment, wondering if her guess made sense. ‘I was expecting to see leaves, dirt, that kind of thing, but this pile looks . . .’

  ‘Artificial?’ finished Phoenix. ‘I agree. At first I thought it was grass, but the pieces are too uniform. Let’s take a closer look.’

  He plugged the magnification glass into a nearby monitor and brought up the image of the fibres on a split screen.

  ‘Could it be carpet?’ asked Jazz. ‘That would make sense, the tyres ripped up that green rug under Sapphire, so it might have been mixed up in the mud as well.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Phoenix. Plugging his laptop into another port, he uploaded one of the shots that Jazz had taken of the coloured objects beneath Sapphire’s shattered case. ‘These pics are high-res, yeah?’

  ‘Of course!’ said Jazz. ‘I picked that phone because it’s got the best camera.’

  Phoenix zoomed in on a piece of the rug visible in Jazz’s photo, and then zoomed some more, each time tweaking the settings to keep the image as distinct as possible. Eventually he pulled back, allowing both of them to examine the two images side by side.

  ‘I’d say we’re looking at two different set of fibres, wouldn’t you?’ asked Phoenix.

  ‘Definitely. The fibres in the sample are kind of clipped looking and green in colour.’ She shifted her gaze to the second image. ‘The rug in the Velocity room is also green . . . but the rug’s fibres are a lot finer and a lighter colour.’

  ‘So the fibres have probably been tracked in from somewhere else, on the thieves shoes or on the ram raid car’s tyres. Either the thief or the car has been some place where these fibres were on the ground.’

  ‘That leaves way too many possibilities. What can we do to narrow it down?’

  ‘We can try to identify the samples,’ replied Phoenix.

  ‘Which bit of equipment do we use for that?’ asked Jazz. She was surprised to see Phoenix head to the lab’s reference library.