"Lieutenant Ashley, please come in," said Hiram Moss to the burly detective framing the doorway to his office. Ashley nodded and followed the trail of Moss's well-manicured finger to the armchair on the reverse side of the antique rolltop desk. He folded his large frame into the leather chair. It creaked loudly, accentuating the early morning silence.
Outside, snow thick as fleece fell against the long casement windows. It was a snowy day in the nation's capitol; snowy, stormy and dull and cold. Inside the Institute's Museum of History and Technology, however, things were far from dull. For curator, Hiram Moss, that could never be the word used to describe the circumstances that had thrown Lieutenant Ashley once again into his neat little world.
"I know that's a noisy chair, but it's rather comfortable, don't you think?"
"Yes," replied Ashley, his gray eyes scanning the painted walls adorned with various plaques and awards. He sighed, opened his small notebook and removed a pen from his inside pocket. "Just like it was last week when I sat in it for the first time. But that was before Mr.Duncan's er- situation."
"I know," said Moss, his small, dark eyes never actually meeting Ashley's gaze. "This entire matter is all so strange. In the five years I have been here, I've never encountered anything like this before. I just don't know what to make of it. And poor Mr. Duncan! My God, what can I say?"
The curator was accustomed to answers and none of his manuals or degrees or acquired knowledge could explain how five days before someone had decoded the elaborate alarm system and broken into one of the display cases, stealing the set of George Washington's teeth that it contained. To further deepen the mystery, nothing else was stolen, despite the presence of several very valuable gems nearby. Not so much as a whimper was heard from the police dogs that patrolled the grounds every night. There were no fingerprints found anywhere near the scene, nor were there any signs of forced entry.
John Ashley and his men had thoroughly questioned all of the members of the Museum's work force, including James Duncan, who was the head of Security. No one saw or heard anything unusual. Ashley's return to the scene was most embarrassing for both men, for as mysteriously as the set of teeth had vanished, so they had reappeared during the previous night.
