THEY WERE ALL GOING HOME in the morning.
Hauck to D.C. through London. Harper and Tolliver on their return trip through Frankfurt. Their work was done here. Stephanie’s body had been found. Razi had been detained by the police. Whether or not there was enough evidence to convict him in a country like Egypt, a place of influence and power and family, who knew? Hopefully, they would find his fingerprints on the tire iron they’d uncovered. And it would be missing from his own car. Nabila promised she would press the case aggressively. Her eyes had definitely been opened in the past two days.
And so had Hauck’s.
He’d said his good-byes over plates of spaghetti at the hotel’s restaurant. Tolliver wolfed down the food like he hadn’t eaten a meal in weeks.
“If you’re ever in Greenwich, look me up.”
He shook Harper’s hand.
“We never seem to get that far north,” Tolliver said.
“If you ever need a recommendation”—he laid his card on the table—“you know who to call.”
He went upstairs, packed, and made a few calls. He left a message for Naomi he’d return by tomorrow night. Around eleven he came back down for a nightcap and thought he’d take a walk.
Experience the city one last time.
“American bourbon,” he told the Egyptian bartender. He pointed. “That Woodford’ll be fine.”
“Interesting business in Alexandria?” the bartender inquired.
Hauck chuckled and savored a long sip. “You’d never guess.”
“Then relax, sir, and enjoy yourself.”
He sat back and let his mind drift to what lay ahead. At home he had a lot of choices to make, and Naomi was at the center of most of them. Greenwich or D.C.? As he was finishing his bourbon and thinking of going to bed, he spotted someone through the lobby, leaving the hotel.
Harper.
Alone.
Dressed in her jean jacket and college sweatshirt. It was going on midnight, not safe for a woman to be out alone. Especially a Western woman.
He signed the bill and ran after her.
On the street, she made a right turn toward the harbor with a fifty-yard head start. He followed. The night was bright, the moon exceedingly large. A warm breeze blew in from the Sahara to the south.
A sirocco, he recalled.
Harper kept for the harbor at a good pace, as if she knew precisely where she was going. At this late hour she certainly wasn’t catching up on some last-minute souvenir shopping. He wanted to make sure she didn’t find any trouble. Stephanie already proved what could happen.
Harper kept walking.
As if drawn, never looking back.
The streets were mostly dark and empty. The open markets shut up, the shops closed. Occasionally a café leaked music.
But Harper continued on her way.
As she neared the water, it began to grow cooler. The wind picked up. There were more hotels, cafés, and modern businesses. The new Alexandria library was out on the point, the previous one, one of the wonders of the ancient world disappeared centuries ago.
Finally she came to land’s end at the seawall.
Nothing in front of her but the dark harbor.
She walked along the wall, the Mediterranean quietly lapping against it. Past a hotel and a restaurant, everything dark and quiet at this late hour.
At the end of the harbor, she stopped.
Something seemed to be guiding her.
She held out her arms.
The wind kicked up, brisk and warm, whipping her hair. She stepped closer to the water’s edge. For a moment, he was worried she was going to do something crazy. He edged closer, now only about ten feet from her. He didn’t want to scare her.
He was about to ask if everything was all right when she spoke.
“He wants to be found now, Mr. Hauck,” she said, without ever turning around to acknowledge he was there. “He’s ready.”
More wind blew her hair. The moon bathed her in an eerie, almost holy kind of light.
“They brought him here, after he died. It was his favorite among all his cities. The city of his dreams. And it became so. He said it would unite the East and West.”
“You’re speaking of Alexander?”
“He was so young, but he had accomplished so much. There was so much more he wanted to do.” She turned around. “I feel it in his bones.”
“How?” he asked her.
He wanted clarity.
“I can feel his thoughts at his death. It’s perfectly clear.”
She halfway smiled.
Now Hauck’s blood surged with excitement. “Where, Harper?”
“You know what used to be here, don’t you?” She pointed. “The Pharos. The famous lighthouse from ancient times. A beacon to the entire world. That’s where he is.”
In the moonlight, Harper’s skin was eerily white, like alabaster. “He wants to be found now, Mr. Hauck. He said it’s time. He’s ready. There’s a lot of water all around him.”
She walked to the edge, so close for a moment he thought one more step and she would fall into the sea.
But then she stood still, the water lapping over the wall, the wind taking her hair, and she pointed, to the earth that had buried so many civilizations, so many worlds.
“Dig here.”
LISA JACKSON AND JOHN SANDFORD
LISA WANTED TO USE DETECTIVE Regan Pescoli from Grizzly Falls, Montana, in this story. The character is central to her ongoing To Die series. One of John’s most popular characters is Virgil Flowers. He’s an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, but he’s also an avid fisherman and sportswriter.
So John had an idea.
Send Virgil on a fishing trip to Montana, Regan Pescoli’s home turf, where a crime would draw the two characters together.
Lisa freely admits that John started the story and ran with it. They didn’t toss it back and forth, or pit one scene against the other. John wrote the entire draft, then Lisa added scenes, filled in details, and tweaked. She’s a huge fan of John’s Lucas Davenport series, but she’d never read any of the Virgil Flowers books. To prepare herself, during the months between agreeing to write the story and actually finishing it, she devoured five Virgil Flowers’s novels.
Here’s another interesting detail.
At the end of Lisa’s 2017 novel, Expecting to Die, a pregnant Regan Pescoli finally has a baby. But when this short story was written (in 2016), Lisa had no idea of the child’s sex, as that was to be determined through a contest her publisher was running. Since this story would be released a few months after Expecting to Die, Lisa had to go ahead and make Regan a lactating mother of a newborn, sex unknown.
A final thought.
Lisa loved the way John ended the story. It actually provided her with some great grist as she continues the Regan Pescoli series.
Now it’s time to found out just who— Deserves to Be Dead.
DESERVES TO BE DEAD