Page 165 of Blue Moon

Unusual. Yes, slightly. The driver of a gas tanker had run a red light and T-boned Julia Strand’s Mercedes. The resulting fire had taken the emergency services hours to extinguish, and by then, there was nothing left but charred bones. She’d been identified via the serial number on her hip replacement.

Dusk called the meeting to order. She’d joined the call with Tulsa, and Echo was there too, albeit as an avatar of a rabbit wearing a top hat. Dan, Ryder, and I were representing Blackwood while Knox packed bags and put gas in the rental car.

“Thank you, everyone, for dialling in. First question, does anyone know anything about Julia Strand’s family?”

“Oh, yes,” Clovis said. “A great-great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side was Stan Cantley. He made a fortune during the gold rush, which his son Bryson consolidated when he invested in silver mines across the country. And one of his sons, Jim, opened the first?—”

Good grief. “Can we focus on living family for the moment?”

“Right. Of course. No, I’m not aware of any living family.”

But at least it explained where Julia Strand had got her money from. There wasn’t much to be found online, not about her personal life anyway. Her existence had been reduced to a bunch of academic papers, some vague mumblings about the disappearance of her expedition partner near Taposiris Magna in Lower Egypt—the whole Upper/Lower thing had always confused me because on the map, Upper Egypt was at the bottom—and a bunch of sensationalised articles on her death. Oh, and there were several videos of her funeral pyre on YouTube, accompanied by thoughtful commentary like, “Man, it just went boom!”

Dusk took over. “Next question… We believe a man she treated as a son inherited her estate. Do any of you recognise him?”

A picture of Anton Hebert popped up on-screen, the best likeness Romeo Serafini had been able to find from his employee file. He stared straight ahead, unsmiling.

Five men shook their heads, but one scrunched his mouth to the side. Norman Allenby, a professor from Brown University.

“I think that maybe I met him once? It would have been years ago, when Julia and I were both on staff at the University of Minnesota. For the most part, Julia was a very private person, but one year, she agreed to hold the departmental cookout at her home. I think that fellow was there. I remember because he was the only person whose name I didn’t know.”

“She didn’t introduce him?”

“No, I don’t believe she did. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and I assumed she’d brought him in to help with the food, but we did chat for a while. A remarkably articulate young man with a deep affection for all things Ancient Egyptian. That was probably why Julia took him under her wing. Can I ask why you’re trying to find him?”

“His affection for Ancient Egypt is so deep that he believes he’s Mark Antony,” I told Norman. “Which in itself wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but last Saturday, he abducted a woman who he believes is the reincarnation of Cleopatra from her hotel room and disappeared.” Gasps all around. “Clues are thin on the ground. We’re trying to track down any property that Julia Strand might have owned. She sold the place in Elk River, and Luna’s not at the house in Berkeley. It’s possible our suspect might have bought a new property with whatever money he received, but as you said, Norman, he has a thing for the past.”

He would have hung on to whatever reminded him of the mother figure he’d lost.

“She had a villa in Alexandria,” Norman said. “Quite a nice one, actually.”

“Are we talking Alexandria, Minnesota, or Alexandria, Egypt?”

“Alexandria, Egypt.”

“No, no, no,” another guy said. His screen name was “Moises the Great,” and he was one of Miles’s new hires, brought in to help after the Ay-and-Ramesses debacle at al-Nahas. “She gave the villa to Omar’s family.”

“Blood money,” Clovis Buttermere muttered.

Allenby took offence. “You don’t know that.”

“Why would she give them a house unless she knew he wasn’t coming back? Why leave Egypt, for that matter? She spent her whole life trying to find Cleopatra’s tomb, and suddenly she just quit? That makes no sense unless something tragic happened. I heard she was involved with Omar. You know, involved.”

“Julia didn’t do romance. She was married to her work.”

“I always thought she was a lesbian,” Mike Jones put in. “Sig Schäfer made a pass at her once—you know, suave Sig?—and she turned him down flat.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean she was a lesbian,” Miles told him. “Sig Schäfer is a womaniser, plus he’s always looking for funding.”

“Omar’s brother drives a good car now,” Moises added. “A top-of-the-line BMW, very expensive.”

On-screen, Dan rolled her eyes at me. I noted Ryder was muted, and I was fairly sure he hadn’t done that himself.

I clapped my hands together. “Guys, can we stay on topic? It’s unlikely the suspect managed to load our missing woman onto a plane, so let’s stick with the US, okay?”

“She had a place in New York,” Mike Jones suggested.

“I think she sold it,” Herman Dekker said. “When we met at the Who Were the Ptolemies? exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum four or five years ago, we were both staying at the Marriott.”

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