The people at the museum had nothing but good to say about him. In their words, he was one of the best hires they had ever made. Why then had he been so brutally tortured and then killed? He likely would have died just from the injuries sustained during the torture. Snapping his neck almost seemed symbolic somehow.
Something else that bothered me about the whole torture scene was that it appeared that he had been gagged the entire time. The torture had been sadistically carried out in his hotel suite and yet no one had heard the screams of pain there must have been which helped verify that he had been gagged the entire time. It seemed more like a ritualistic killing then it did a quest to find out information.
His wife had discovered what was left of his body and I could still remember the quiet horror I had seen reflected in her almost vacant gaze. Her life would never be the same, after witnessing the body of her husband torn apart, in the perceived sanctity of their room.
I had seen many grisly sites like that one before, but not many that had been worse. I pushed the dark images away and came back to the present. My working hypothesis had been that the most likely cause for such a brutal murder, given the absence of seemingly anything in the present, was that the murder stemmed from something that had occurred in his antiquities dealing past. Perhaps he had cheated someone or stolen something. Grave robbers and the underworld of the illegal antiquities market weren't good people to tick off. They were more than capable of doing something like that to someone to make a point, but this elaborate sting operation didn't seem to fit their M.O.
This place had cost a small fortune to build and accessorize, only to be torn down two weeks later. Who had these kinds of resources and would go to such great lengths to gain information without torture? It seemed more government related than thieves' world. Was this something to do with terrorist activity? I doubted it. Because if it was, some higher up brass would already be crawling all over my investigation, essentially taking control of it. If the people who had built this place had tortured Ahmed, why had they left him to awake from a drug induced slumber and walk out of here, only to torture him later?
They'd had all the opportunity in the world to torture him as they pleased in this deserted warehouse, and yet they hadn't. They'd spent thousands of dollars to get information without the use of torture. That didn't even sound like the government, come to think of it. It was clear that there was a third party involved, and my head was beginning to ach with the possibilities.