It took nearly twenty minutes to flee the city center. He was tense, and the closer the car drove to the designated site, the more anxious he grew. The landscape was now desertlike and far less populated, though there were settlements from time to time marked in Arabic and English on green road signs. He was all too aware that he was basing this bet simply on some numbers he’d happened on and a hunch. That, and the dubious talent of a woman who’d been struck by lightning.
They turned north a mile or so after they left the city, heading toward the Mediterranean. The landscape became arid and barren, the Sahara creeping right to the sea. Palm trees dotted the road like sentinels. The towns were smaller and poorer, the signage all in Arabic. When they were within half a mile of their destination, Harper took out Stephanie’s tooth fragment and held it between her forefinger and thumb.
“What’s going on?” Nabila asked.
“Jerri came to meet me when we got back to the hotel yesterday afternoon,” he said. “She told me that Stephanie was on the trail of something really big. Razi never mentioned that, did he?”
Nabila turned while driving on the dusty, narrow road. “Not a word.”
“She said Stephanie was obsessed with that statue we saw in her room. Anti. The Falcon God.” He turned around to face Harper. “Feel anything yet?”
“Nothing.”
He prayed this wasn’t a wild-goose chase. If so, he’d probably have two Egyptian cops escorting him onto the first plane out of here.
Nabila said, “Feel what?”
“Last night I went back to the apartment and looked through Stephanie’s car.”
“How did you possibly get in?”
The inspector seemed annoyed.
“I gave them your card.”
Nabila’s dark eyes flared in anger.
“Plus a two-hundred-Egyptian-pound bill. Anyway, I found this notebook, among her things.” He showed her. “No worries. No reason anyone would have thought it suspicious. But it had this sketch of Anti in it, you remember, the man-falcon god. Two Antis, to be exact. They look like statues. And two, separated, not meant for anyone to see together.”
Nabila looked confused.
“GPS coordinates.”
“And where do you think they lead?” the inspector asked, though as soon as the words were out of her mouth, her eyes widened with understanding of what Hauck meant.
Google Maps announced they had arrived.
“Here,” he said.
They were next to a large dirt field. Maybe a farm that had dried up. Few structures were around. A couple of run-down stucco homes, more like shanty houses, outfitted with satellite dishes. And a domed stone building that looked like some kind of local community center. Two men were sitting at a table outside it, reading newspapers.
Nabila stopped the car. “You’re saying these statues are somehow connected to these coordinates? Here?”
“Stephanie was an expert in electromagnetic cartography. She could see what was under the ground.”
The detective seemed to finally grasp what Hauck was implying. “You’re thinking Razi—”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking yet. We’re just—”
Harper gasped.
“What’s going on?” Nabila demanded. “What have you found?”
“Let’s get out,” he said.
The car’s rear door opened and Harper was out, on the move.
“Over here,” she called, leading them away from the coordinates.
Her eyes were squeezed shut in concentration. She held the tooth fragment to her forehead, as if to help her mind listen more closely. She continued to walk, almost blindly, leading them into a barren crop field with a large mound of rock on the other side.
“The site’s back there,” he said, catching up to her.
Harper kept walking, as if following an inner radar. “That may be, but she’s here.”
Nabila picked up her skirt and tried to keep up with them. “Tell me what’s going on?”
“Harper is earning her fee.”
It was even hotter here than on the coast, and the sunlight was blinding. There were rocks ahead, and if you looked closely, you might conclude that they were not rocks, but building stones.
Palm trees stood all around.
Harper held out one hand, and Hauck understood he was supposed to take it. She pointed where she wanted to go, eyes still closed, and he led her, not breaking the trance. He started to say something, but she put up her hand and shook her head. The hill of rocks ahead seemed the target. She rounded the mound and stopped.
“There she is.”
And he saw it.
A body.
The remains loosely covered by dirt and scattered rocks.
Whoever dumped Stephanie there had surely hoped some animal would make a meal. She’d been stuffed into a naturally formed cavity within the stones, which had then been sealed with smaller rocks. Unless you came around here, to the far side, looking for something, you would never notice.
Nabila stared, stunned.
Then she looked at Hauck. “You’re saying Razi killed her?”
“I think Stephanie told him she’d found a promising new site. You heard what he said. She was impulsive, impatient. She always wanted to rush out to anything she found. But not just a site. A major Egyptian tomb, guarded by giant statues, which is what those Anti figures represent. The ferryman to the afterworld. And Egyptian, not Greek. The tomb of someone important.”
Nabila nodded, seemingly stunned at the magnitude of Stephanie’s discovery. “That would be quite a find.”
“And here, near Alexandria. Not on the Nile. She’d discovered it, plotted the coordinates, mapped out what it was. Maybe it was her hope to bring it to the world’s attention. Who knows? Maybe Razi wanted the credit for himself as the vaunted director of the program. Maybe he told her not to be looking here and now he would be completely shown up. Maybe she brought him here to finally show it to him.”
“What about this tooth?” Harper asked.
“I think Tina told Razi that Stephanie was going to tell her family about what she’d found, and then the government. Razi would be the man who let a Western woman trump him. I’m sure he and Tina were an item. Maybe Tina put a drug in Stephanie’s drink, at the apartment after she left the bar, or there was a struggle and then Tina and Razi brought her out here and killed her.”
“How?” Nabila asked.
“Tire iron,” Harper said. “That’s what she’s telling me. That’s what killed her. It’s out here somewhere.”
She started walking away from Stephanie’s resting place.
Hauck just followed.
“She’s looking for the murder weapon?” Nabila said, disbelievingly. “Out here?”
“You’re the one who chided me yesterday for thinking so Western. You have to believe.”
Harper kept kicking up dust and dirt as if on the scent of something. Fifty yards away, as if she had a divining rod in her head, she stopped at a small clump of dirt in the arid earth. Hauck bent down and swept away loose dirt with his hands.
“There are fragments of her skull on it,” Harper said, opening her eyes as if her work was done.
Hauck kept digging.
He removed a rock from the ground and pawed at the earth. Finally he came upon the edge of something promising.
Metal.
“Don’t touch it,” Nabila said.
“Been doing this twenty years.”
He took out a handkerchief.
“I know what I’m doing.”
Then he freed the metal from the ground.
A tire iron.
He winked at Harper. “Never doubted you.”
“Can we head back to town now?” Harper said. “I really need to see about Tolliver. He might want something to eat by now.”
Hauck grinned. “I think we can do just that.”