“I can’t pretend that Steph and I were close friends,” she said. “But I do know that she was having some kind of crisis. She was really worried. And it wasn’t boyfriend crap that was on her mind. It was something much bigger.”
He was an old hand at keeping his reactions private. “Bigger, like artifact smuggling? Or faking antiquities?”
“Bigger, still. She found something.”
“Like?”
“You know her area of expertise,” Jerri said. “What do you think?”
And as quickly as she had started the conversation, Jerri ended it by walking out.
He ordered a bourbon and settled back in his chair to think over what she meant.
His cell phone rang.
“Can you come up to our room, Mr. Hauck?”
Harper sounded upset.
“Tolliver’s too sick for me to leave him, and I have to tell you something. It’s 709.”
“Sure, why not?”
ON HIS WAY UP IN the elevator, he noted that this seemed his evening to receive information from young women.
He knocked at Harper’s door, and she answered it quickly, waving him in.
“How’s your brother?” he asked.
“Not good. He only thought he had a cast-iron stomach. I can’t really do much until the worst of it is over, which I hope will be soon.” She looked both worried and exasperated and didn’t invite him to sit. “Look, I found something at the apartment. I wanted to show you privately.” She dug in her jeans pocket and extracted a Kleenex, unfolded it, and handed Hauck a tiny fragment.
“It looks like part of a tooth.”
“It’s Stephanie’s. She’s dead,” she said in as matter-of-fact a tone as if she was making a bank deposit. “I felt a tiny buzz from it in the apartment. It was between the stove and the refrigerator, not even visible until I leaned down and looked. I don’t think she was murdered there. It came to the apartment some other way. Maybe on someone’s shoe.”
“Surely the Egyptian police searched the place and tested for blood?” He was thinking out loud, and he wasn’t too surprised when Harper didn’t offer an opinion or comment. “We need to find the rest of the bones. Can you track them with the piece of tooth?”
“You suddenly seem to have a lot more belief in what I do than you did before.”
“You’ve earned it,” he said.
“Tooth is not bone, but it turns out it’s close enough,” she said. “I’ve never tracked a body that way. But I could try.”
He shook his head, placing the wrapped-up tooth fragment in his shirt pocket. “You’re quite the surprising gal.”
“I am what I am.” She shrugged. “But thanks. Now let me get back to Mt. Vesuvius in the bathroom.”
“Be my guest.”
Back in his room, Hauck spent the rest of the evening studying Nabila’s file. Something didn’t sit right. Poor Stephanie. He looked over her photo again.
Was she dead?
Jerri said she had found something.
Something big.
You know her area of expertise.
Electromagnetic cartography, he read from the file.
She could find what was under the ground.
Unable to rest, he threw on a jacket and took a taxi back to Stephanie’s apartment building.
“You remember me, I represent the family,” he said to the man in the lobby. He showed him Nabila’s card with a two-hundred-Egyptian-pound note wrapped around it. “I want to check out her car.”
“I go on break.” The guard looked through a cabinet, taking the card and cash.
He handed Hauck a set of car keys.
“In twenty minutes.”
HAUCK WOVE THROUGH THE ROWS of cars to the blue fiat Stephanie had leased when she’d arrived in Alexandria. The police had gone over it, Nabila had assured him, but found nothing suspicious. The contents of the car had not been significant, so they’d left them in a shoe box on the front passenger’s seat. He took out his cell phone and switched on the flashlight app.
He looked through what was in there.
A grocery list, some notes on a museum exhibit in town, a city map, tourist brochures, and a small date book filled with appointments, sketches, some restaurant comments, and travel notes she had made on side trips to Cairo, Italy, and Croatia.
Nothing entered on the day she disappeared.
He turned on the car and checked the GPS memory for recent destinations.
It had been wiped clean.
Interesting.
Cradling his cell-phone light in his lap, he paged through the date book one more time. There were numbers scattered throughout. Prices, dates, addresses, shopping notes. Things so trivial she likely wouldn’t have even bothered to enter them on her phone.
Two of the numbers stood out.
They weren’t on the same page. Instead, they were some ten pages apart. One, on March 8, the other back in August. Both written in blue ink, instead of the more prevalent black. The first was an eight-digit number with two letters in front of it.
LO31.200092.
The second similar.
LA29.918739.
He turned the page, pretty sure he knew exactly what these numbers represented, and his heart stopped in his chest. There was a sketch of what looked like two statues, side by side. Each had the body of a man. A measurement to the side read 50′.
Fifty feet tall?
But that wasn’t what stopped him.
It was the face.
The two of them side by side.
Anti.
Each had the body of a man and the face of a falcon.
It was a long walk back to his hotel.
A lot of the city was quiet, a few cafés were still open, people playing games or watching soccer on TV.
A few cabs rushed by.
In his room once more, Hauck booted up his laptop and entered the numbers as GPS coordinates, with a period after the first two in each sequence.
And struck gold.
THE NEXT MORNING, AROUND 9, NABILA arrived at the hotel in her car. Hauck and Harper climbed in. Tolliver was still sleeping, though Harper said he was feeling much better.
The inspector turned to Hauck. “You texted me that you had a new itinerary today?”
He took out his iPhone, which was set to Google Maps. He’d entered the location of the numbers, which he now knew were GPS coordinates.
“It’s in Abu Qir.”
“Abur Qir? That’s west. Maybe forty minutes, depending on traffic. Why do we need to go there?”
“Humor me.”
“I don’t have the time, Mr. Hauck, to be chasing shadows.”
“Just this once?”
She complied, though she was clearly not happy that he chose not to explain. Harper sat in the backseat with the piece of Stephanie’s tooth, which he’d returned to her earlier.
Her eyes were closed. She seemed to be taking a nap.