Page 164 of Blue Moon

“No, but this particular arsehole is anything but normal. He seems to think he’s Mark Antony and she’s Cleopatra. Do you know much about them?”

“Not my area of expertise, I’m afraid. I deal mainly with the New Kingdom—the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth dynasties. You’re looking at the Ptolemaic dynasty.”

“There’s a big difference?”

He laughed heartily. “Roughly a thousand years. But if you need an expert on the Greco-Roman period, then I could certainly try to put you in touch with somebody.”

“It might be useful to get a name just in case.”

“Of course. Your best bet is probably Norman Allenby. I believe he’s lecturing at Brown at the moment, but I’ll have to double-check.”

Dusk got there before me. “Have any Greco-Roman experts died recently?”

“Uh…” His gaze flicked upward for a second. “Yes, we lost Stefan Suchkov almost two years ago. He’d been sick for a while, but it was still a tragedy, especially for his family.”

“I’m thinking last year. A woman.”

Miles considered the question. “Well, there was Julia Strand, but I wouldn’t have recommended you contact her. There were…” He sucked air through his teeth. “Let’s just say there were some unusual circumstances surrounding her last expedition, and she withdrew from the public eye after that.”

Julia Strand. We had a name. It had to be her, didn’t it? How many other history-loving Julias had died in the past year? And what were the “unusual circumstances”?

“Did Julia Strand have money?”

“Oh, yes, at least she used to. She spent most of it on expeditions. The rest of us have to apply for grants for every dig, but she funded everything herself. Living the dream. Why do you ask?”

“We believe our suspect is Julia’s heir. We’ve spent days trying to find out her identity, but all we had was a first name.”

Miles’s jaw dropped. “Julia wouldn’t have gotten involved with anything criminal.”

“I doubt she realised what our suspect was planning. He has a dissociative personality disorder, but he doesn’t like taking his meds. Do you know where she lived? We’re trying to track down any property she might have owned.”

“I’m afraid I have no idea. As I said, we had different areas of study, and we only met a handful of times. But I could make some calls?”

“Please do that.”

My first call went to Emmy.

“Tell me you have good news.”

“Yes, I have good news. Her name is Julia Strand.”

46

EMMY

Julia fucking Strand.

Once we had a surname, the web of secrecy began to unravel. I left Slater babysitting Carole-Ann Murray, and it turned out she’d bought more than just a rocking chair—there was a whole IKEA warehouse worth of flat-pack furniture sitting in her conservatory, just waiting for a willing sucker to get stuck in. It was a whole different kind of screwing than Slater was used to, but who cared as long as he kept her occupied?

What we didn’t yet have was a location.

Miles had taken a break from his dig to run down leads, and honestly, I never realised archaeologists liked to gossip so much. Turned out that if you put fifty grand’s worth of funding up for grabs, they practically fell over themselves to dish the dirt. I’d holed up in a conference room in Blackwood’s San Francisco office with a triple espresso, a selection of donuts, and a screen full of bearded, middle-aged-to-elderly men who were all talking over each other.

“I always thought there was something hinky about that incident,” Clovis Buttermere said. “Someone bought off the investigators.”

“Which incident?” Mike “Indiana” Jones asked. “The car accident or Omar Sharawi’s disappearance?”

“I was talking about Omar’s disappearance, but now that you mention it, the crash was a little unusual.”

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