Helena picked up her flashlight and directed its strong beam down at the point of the shovel, revealing a long, twisting streak of silvery metal like a vein in the earth. The casket lid caught the light and shimmered with it, new and slightly burnished.
“Eureka,” Brutus said. “The daring group of coffin prospectors has struck another lode.”
“Thank God,” Helena said, feeling her biceps.
Jessie set to work more industriously than before, clearing away the last couple of inches of earth, until he had the entire face of the casket revealed. It was a plain model, not what one expected the second-ranking embassy maseni to be laid to rest in, without curlicues or decorations. It was smooth, slightly raised, and very difficult to stand up on, as he was forced to do. Starting at the top, right corner, Jessie worked his way around the oblong box, cutting the dirt away from its lid so that they could open the thing when the time came. At a quarter past four in the morning, he tossed the shovel out of the hole, finished.
“Are we going to have to fill this back in again?” Helena wanted to know, her lips pouted, one hand gingerly testing her other biceps.
The detective said, “Well worry about that later.”
“I’m worrying about it right now.”
“There’s a length of rope in the satchel,” Jessie said. “Would you toss it down to me?”
“I’ll get it,” Brutus told the girl.
“You’re a charmer.”
The hound got up and walked over to the open satchel, peered inside, plucked out a coil of rope with his teeth, brought that to the open grave and dropped it on Jessie’s head.
“Why didn’t you warn me, for Christ’s sake?” Blake asked, stooping to pick up the rope, rubbing his head with the other hand. “This is steel-link covered by nylon, you know; it isn’t quite so light as a feather.”
“Why weren’t you looking up?” Brutus asked, sitting down beside Helena again.
Still rubbing his head, Jessie said, “I was looking at the twin locks on the casket lid. I thought I’d have to hammer them off, but it looks like they were never engaged.”
“They put it down there unsealed?”
“Seems that way,” Jessie said.
He uncoiled the line which Brutus had thrown on his head, tied one end of that to the coffin handle, threw the other end up to Helena, then scrambled out of the hole.
“Now,” he told them, “I’ll just pull the lid up so we can see inside that box. The raising lid’s going to block my view, so why don’t you two go around to the other side of the hole, where you can look straight in.”
Helena got to her feet. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I didn’t like it at the start, and I like it even less now. I’m sure we’re being watched.”
Jessie looked around the empty cemetery. “Impossible.”
“I feel eyes on my neck.”
“Just go around the other side and tell me whether Tesserax is laid out to rest in a normal manner.”
When she and the hound were around on the other side of the grave, Jessie wiped perspiration out of his eyes, dried his hands on his trousers, then wrapped the rope around his wrists so he wouldn’t lose hold of it. Putting his broad shoulders into it, he began to backstep across the yard toward the other aisle of stones, grunting to get himself in the mood, raising the coffin lid an inch at a time.
“Must weigh a couple of hundred pounds,” he called to them. “You see anything in there, yet?”
Helena hunkered down and probed the grave with her flashlight beam, squinted prettily, either to see better or to register distaste.
“You’ll have to get it open more, Jess,” the hell hound said, looking along the beam of Helena’s light.
Jessie’s feet were slipping on the damp grass, and the job proved to be more difficult than he had originally supposed. Nevertheless, he gritted his teeth and continued to backstep.
Something in the hole creaked loudly.
“Uh—what was that?” Jessie asked.
“I hope it was only an unoiled hinge on the coffin lid,” Helena said, her voice quavering.