A/N: Thanks for the review, Leya! Yeah, Joe's girlfriends really had a hard time on that show! Must have been why they only lasted a week. LOL There will be plenty of danger ahead here, too. Because I like that sort of thing. Thanks for reading!

Chapter 33

Fenton leaned forward and rested his arms on the conference room table. He clasped his hands together and stared at Perriton.

Perriton shifted in his seat. "Is Emily all right?"

"She's fine. She's staying at my house until this ordeal is over."

Perriton nodded. "That's good. She's a lovely girl. I hate seeing her dragged into this mess."

"It is a bit of a mess, isn't it?" Fenton said. "Unfortunately, she seems to be at the dead center of it."

Perriton looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," Fenton paused. "Emily seems to have something that somebody wants very badly. Badly enough to attack her in her home in the dead of night to find." He leaned back in his chair. "Emily claims she doesn't know what that something is, and I believe her. What we've determined is this guy is after some sort of paper or file or something of that nature." He leaned forward again and stared intently at Perriton. "I think you might know what it is."

Perriton returned Fenton's stare. "Now why on earth would you think that?"

"Hmmm." Fenton stood. "Well, for starters, this is your museum, your responsibility. I would hope that you would have some sort of grasp of what's going on around here. That is your job, is it not?"

Perriton looked bored. "Yes, Mr. Hardy, that is my job. Must have taken you hours of grueling detective work to come to that conclusion."

Fenton continued, ignoring the gibe. "Rumor has it, Mr. Perriton, that you may have also have misplaced some important papers around here. Ones you're searching for quite intently."

Perriton seemed startled and looked up at Fenton sharply. "What makes you say that?"

Fenton shrugged. "The hours of grueling detective work pay off occasionally."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't you?" Fenton walked around the conference table and stopped in front of Perriton. "What about that extra entrance to your office? Know anything about that?"

Perriton leaned back in his chair. "Only what the police have told me. I'm much too busy to be checking out my lavatory for secret passageways, Mr. Hardy."

Fenton stopped in front of him. "Mr. Perriton, your memory seems to be quite lacking in a number of areas. My suggestion to you would be to think a little harder about some of your answers to these questions."

"I don't have to think any harder about anything, Mr. Hardy. Except how I'm going to put my museum back together after this colossal disaster that has befallen us." He stood. "And right now you are wasting a great deal of my valuable time that could be spent toward that effort."

Fenton stood to the side and made a sweeping gesture in the direction of the conference room door. "By all means," he said. "If you don't know anything, then you don't know anything."

As Perriton walked past him, Fenton spoke. "But just so you know...the detective work I've done so far on this case has not even begun to approach what I would consider grueling. And when it does, there won't be anything you can hide from me."

Perriton sighed as he reached the door. "I wish you well in your efforts, Mr. Hardy. I also want to see the person behind all this brought to justice. Most likely, more than you do."

He stepped through the door and let it shut behind him. Callie began to applaud. "That was brilliant."

"Not really," Fenton said with a sigh. "I didn't get anything out of him."

"You scared him," she protested. "And, he is hiding something. If the droplets of sweat beading on his upper lip were any indication. Not to mention, the nervous way he shifted in his chair."

"Excellent observations, Callie."

She smiled. "Thank you. Now, what's the next step?"

"Try and find out what he's hiding."

"How do we do that?"

"You got me," Fenton said.

OOOOOoooooOOOOO

"How are you feeling?" Frank asked Joe as they drove away from the crash site, shortly after Emily's car was towed out of the ditch.

"Pretty good, actually," Joe said. "I'm not woozy anymore and the painkillers have taken care of the 'sledgehammer to the head' feeling."

"Good enough to stop at the museum before we go home?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I've got a hunch."

"About what?"

"The charmstones," Frank said. "I'm almost positive someone put them in the shipment boxes after they arrived at the museum. And I think we can prove it."

"Care to enlighten me as to how?"

"The bill of lading", Frank said.

"The what?" Joe asked.

"The bill of lading. It's a document that comes with goods that are shipped. It has a lot of information on it, but what we're interested in is the weight of the freight." Frank looked in the rearview mirror at Emily. "Where would the bill of lading for the claymore be?"

"Um, well, we usually file those in the receiving room after the shipment is unpacked."

"Would we be able to see it?" Frank asked.

"Of course," she replied. "We can check as soon as we get there."

"Good." Frank turned to Joe. "Dad said he was headed over to the museum this morning to interrogate Perriton. I'm interested to see if he found out anything substantial."

Emily's eyes widened. "Do you think Mr. Perriton had something to do with all this?"

"We're suspicious." Frank filled her in on what he and Fenton discovered the previous night in the museum.

"Wow." Emily sat back in her seat. "That would be awful. D-do you think he's the one who attacked me?"

"Dad's working on that right now, Em. We'll know more when we get there," Frank told her.

"Just how is Dad 'working on that?'" Joe asked.

Frank grinned. "He's going to slug Perriton in the arm."

"Oh, so if he drops to the ground like a sack of wheat, we've got our man?"

"It might not be sophisticated, but I think it will give us the answer we're looking for," Frank said. "According to the lab, Emily dug that shard of glass pretty deeply into her attacker's arm. He would have needed stitches."

"Way to go," Joe said and smiled back at her.

Emily looked a little nauseated and gave an involuntary shiver. Joe patted her leg reassuringly.

Frank checked his rearview mirror again. "We're closing in now, Em. It won't be long."

OOOOOoooooOOOOO

"What else is on the list for today?" Callie asked Fenton as they exited the conference room.

Fenton took a look at his notepad. "I want to have a closer look at the security tapes from the night of the banquet. Collig has those in evidence at headquarters. I also want to question Mitch about his activities that night and his whereabouts over the past few days. I need to see who has access to his office on a regular basis and take a look at the security tapes from the past two weeks."

"That's going to take forever, isn't it? Looking at all those tapes?"

"Yeah." He grinned at Callie. "Don't tell the boys I'm paying you double time for it, okay?"

Callie made a zipping motion across her mouth as they headed toward the security office. "My lips are sealed."

OOOOOoooooOOOOO

As soon as they arrived in the museum, Emily led Frank and Joe to the receiving room. She turned on the overhead fluorescent lights then proceeded to a nearby filing cabinet. Reaching for a set of keys in her purse, she unlocked a drawer and began rifling through its contents. "Here it is." She brought a file over to the examination table and Frank turned on the metal light hanging above it.

"What does it say?" Joe wanted to know.

Emily scanned the form. "Okay, the 'description of commodity' space says 'one claymore sword.'" She dragged her finger across the page. "Weight says 'five and one half pounds.'"

"What about the weight of the box?" Frank asked. "Is that anywhere on there?"

"It says the container is a specially made case and that it weighs four pounds."

Frank paused for a moment and glanced around. "Emily, is that container still here somewhere?"

"Actually, I think it is." She moved towards the area cordoned off by the chain link fencing. "Evan didn't want anything done with the packaging until he'd heard from Edinburgh about the whether or not they'd sent the witch box." She turned the dial on the padlock and popped it open. "We just put the packaging material in there."

Joe stepped inside the cage and grabbed the box. As he brought it into the light, he peered inside. "Looks just like it did on the day we unpacked it." He set it on the examining table. "What are you thinking, bro?"

"Do you have a freight scale here, Emily?"

She pointed to the other side of the room. "Right next to the door. The packages are weighed as they come in and then the information is entered into a log."

"Perfect." Frank took the box over to the scale and stepped back while the numbers registered. "Okay, it says four and one-half pounds."

"That's more than what the bill thing said it should be," Joe said.

Frank pulled some Styrofoam out of the box and set the box aside. "Styrofoam weight is exactly half a pound." He turned to Emily. "Where's that log book?"

"Hanging on the wall." She walked over and lifted up some of the sheets of paper attached to a three-ring clipboard. "Um, okay, let me see. Here it is. The shipment weighed ten pounds even on arrival."

Frank looked at the bill of lading again. "Ten pounds when shipped. Ten pounds on arrival." He grinned. "Someone put that witch box in the shipment after it got here."

Joe chuckled. "Congratulations. You're back to being the smart one."

"What?" Emily asked.

"Inside joke," Joe said, as he moved to stand next to her. "I'll explain it to you later."

"So, that means it was someone here," she said thoughtfully. "Someone who had access to this room and to the shipments. Mr. Perriton?"

"Maybe," Frank mused. "Or maybe not. The two situations might actually be two separate crimes, committed for different reasons. Em, could you get us a list of everyone who has a key to this room and the combination to the cage and people who usually work in this room, even if they don't have keys?"

"Yeah, sure." She turned to Joe. "But this still means it's someone on the inside, doesn't it?"

He noticed the frightened look in her eyes. "It's okay, Em. We're only one or two steps behind him now."

OOOOOoooooOOOOO

Fenton and Callie entered the museum security office to find a lone security guard that Fenton didn't recognize, manning the bank of cameras.

"Excuse me, we're looking for Mitch," he said by way of a greeting.

"He's not here," the guard replied.

"Do you know where we might find him?"

The guard shrugged. "No idea. I was told he wasn't coming in today. Something about his mother." He pushed a switch and adjusted a camera to a wider angle. "I think she's in the hospital. They probably know at the front desk."

Fenton turned to Callie, who nodded and headed out the door. He leaned against the table where the man was seated. "So, how long have you worked here...?"

"Bill," the man replied. "A few months." He glanced at Fenton. "You're that police detective, aren't you?"

"I was a police detective in New York City for many years. Now I'm a private detective. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"

"Shoot," the guard said.

"How many people have access to this office on a regular basis?"

"Well, anyone can come in here. It isn't locked during business hours." The guard leaned back in his chair. "If you mean who has a key, that would be Mitch, myself, Duncan and Perriton."

Fenton gestured with his head to the bank of monitors. "Who knows how to work these cameras?"

"Me, Mitch, and a couple of the other guards. We have the code to turn them on and off, but we can't do anything with the recorded material."

"Were you on duty the night of the banquet?"

"We all were. I was stationed near the entrance to check out who was coming and going." He sighed. "Nobody looked the least bit suspicious."

"I see." Fenton looked up as Callie returned to the room and nodded at him. "Excuse me. You don't mind if I come back a little later and take a look at some of your tapes, do you?"

"Knock yourself out," Bill replied. "We've already been told about the warrant, and I think the police chief has most of them by now, but be my guest."

Fenton nodded and stepped into the hallway. "What's up?" he asked Callie.

"I called Bayport General. Apparently, Mitch's mother had a stroke and was admitted around three this morning. He's been there ever since."

"Okay. Well, I guess it isn't urgent that I speak to him right now. I think I'll head to the station for awhile. How do you feel about looking through tapes?"

"Pretty good." Callie smiled. "The double time completely changed my mind about it."

Fenton chuckled as they headed towards the entrance of the museum. "I thought it might."

OOOOOoooooOOOOO

The phone rang in the receiving room and Emily startled. She picked it up while Frank and Joe looked over the shipping crate the claymore arrived in.

"Emily said the container was closed and sealed when she went to open it to catalog the sword," Frank remarked.

Joe nodded. "Yeah, which means between the time it arrived and the time it was cataloged, the perp had to come in here, open the crate and the container, put the witch box in, and seal the whole thing up again."

"And do it in a way that wouldn't make anyone here think it was tampered with."

"So, this person had to have a working knowledge of how these things are shipped."

Emily hung up the phone. "That was Kim. The insurance company wants to speak to me about the stolen non-existent artifacts again. I need to take the call in my office where the paperwork is."

Joe moved to her side. "Let me walk you there."

"It's just down the hall, Joe. I'll be fine." She patted him on the chest and gave him a quick kiss.

He followed her to the door. "I'm going to stand here until you get there."

She smiled, then jumped backwards as the door to the receiving room flew open. Evan was standing on the other side.

"Oh, sorry, I didn't know anyone was in here. I needed some paperwork for that pain in the ass police chief." He paused and stared at Joe. "What the hell happened to you?"

Joe lightly touched the gauze bandage on his forehead. "Got driven off the road into a ditch." He pointed to Evan's right arm which was resting against his chest in a sling. "What happened to you?"

Evan rolled his eyes. "I chipped my elbow when I slipped and fell on the front steps of my brownstone in the rain. I was trying to hail a cab and the damn driver wouldn't even slow down." An annoyed expression crossed his face. "The doctor said I had to keep it on for at least three weeks. I can't do that. I need both hands in the art business."

"Gosh, I'm sorry, Evan," Emily said. "I've got to run though. The insurance company is on hold."

Joe stood in the doorway and watched as she walked down the hall to her office. He glanced back at Evan. "Chipped elbow, huh? Bet that hurts."

Evan grimaced. "Yeah, I get shooting pains all the way up to my shoulder from it. Thank goodness they gave me some good drugs." He crossed the room to the filing cabinet, opened a drawer and grabbed several files. "Of course, the doctor did mention I shouldn't be operating heavy machinery while I'm taking them." He strolled across the room and paused at the entrance. "You think a car is considered heavy machinery?" He grinned at the brothers. "Wait. Don't answer that. I have to drive back to the city." He disappeared into the hall.

Joe stood next to Frank and crossed his arms. "A chipped elbow?"

"Wonder if that really means a lengthy stab wound from a shard of glass?"

"You know, that's funny. I was thinking the same thing myself."