She stared at him in shock. “Just like that?”

  “Well, not quite, nothing is just like that, but we’ll get them soon enough,” he noted. “Now, if you want food or any other supplies, I can’t take you anywhere, but, if you need or want something, I would have no trouble getting it delivered to you here.”

  “You can’t take me anywhere? Is that to keep me hidden?”

  “Partially,” he replied. “Think about it. We’ve been asking a lot of questions. A whole lot of people are interested in your whereabouts.”

  “And we don’t want to let them know?” she asked cautiously.

  “Not yet. I also don’t want to leave you alone and have somebody find out about you and maybe decide you had something to do with the foreman’s death.”

  She stared at him, her color fading. “That would not be good.”

  “No, it sure wouldn’t be.”

  She dropped into the chair beside her. “I was hoping to let my friends know.” She stared at him, disconcerted at staying hidden. However, staying for a few days with this man? No problem. … Staying hidden? Well, that put a different spin on it.

  “Which friends?” he asked curiously.

  “Back in England.”

  “I would hesitate to let you do that just yet.”

  She looked over at him. “Is there a particular reason why?”

  “Because we don’t know the whereabouts of the person who kidnapped you. I would just as soon not let anybody know until we get back to England. He could have connections there, you know.”

  “Fine,” she murmured.

  “Do you know where your father’s locker is?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I’ve been with him there a couple times. He wouldn’t let me inside, but I know the building, the address.”

  “Does anybody else know about your father’s locker?”

  She shook her head but then stopped. “I would say no because I don’t know of anybody with knowledge of it, but I can’t guarantee that. He may have had employees or friends there. I would like to get there sooner rather than later.” He frowned at her, but she shook her head. “No, I’m not leaving here until we get answers.”

  “And what if we can’t get answers?”

  She repeated, “I’ve got the forty-eight hours. I’m not talking about more than that. And, speaking of which, couldn’t we be doing something, while Corbin is off doing his thing?”

  “Well, right now,” Hatch said, “we’re waiting for your stuff to arrive, and, after that, we’ll see. Tell me the names of everybody you worked with when on digs with your father, and think about anybody you might have been suspicious of.”

  “Suspicious in what way?” she asked curiously.

  “Somebody who didn’t like your father or who might have been plotting behind his back. We are looking for somebody who might have done something illicit, maybe smuggling drugs with the antiquities, things like that. Somebody who might have had a sketchy past, with a criminal record or something.”

  She stared at him. “Well, a criminal record is a different story. My father hired a couple people like that.”

  “Interesting,” he murmured. “Why would he do that?”

  She shrugged, frowning. “I have no idea. Remember. Hiring wasn’t part of my job. In fact, I wonder how I heard of this. Maybe talk among the crew. I don’t know. However, you would think, with the local economy being so depressed, that anybody would have jumped at the chance to work for him—even though he was a bear at times.”

  “Okay, and having hired those people, did you ever have any trouble with them?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t deal directly with the workers. Again, our foreman dealt with everyone.”

  “So, you don’t really know if there was any trouble or not?” She shook her head. “What about your father? Did he use a laptop? Did he have anything to do with computers and such?”

  She stared at him, clapping her hand over her mouth. “What happened to my father’s gear?” she cried out, bolting to her feet.

  “There was no record of any electronics left behind in the hotel. That’s another reason why everybody thought that you guys had run off.”

  She shook her head. “We didn’t run anywhere,” she snapped. “We were taken.”

  “And I get that,” he murmured. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s still such a stressful thing. I shouldn’t be jumping on you. You’ve been lovely to me. But my father did have a laptop,” she murmured. “And a cell phone, which we both used.” She glared around. “I gather that’s not coming with my clothing.”

  “Unlikely,” he said quietly. “We won’t know until it gets here of course. However, I would think that, no matter who kidnapped you, the electronics would have been one of the first things they would have wanted access to.”

  “Right,” she agreed.

  “Do you know any of the log-ins?”

  “Yes, of course.” She looked up at him in surprise. “One of the things that I always insisted on was memorizing my passwords because you never really know who to trust in this world. I had a bad scenario when I was in university, where I had my laptop stolen, and people got into my bank accounts, and it was just a mess,” she explained. “I learned my lesson early on.”

  “Well, not everybody has learned it. Even now,” he said, with a smile.

  “Once you get in trouble, it’s pretty easy to make it a priority.”

  “I wish more people would do that as a preventative measure,” he noted. “Too often it’s not an issue until it becomes a huge pain in the ass.”

  “That’s always the way,” she muttered.

  He continued. “If you had a laptop, where could you find more information about the people who either worked with you or your father?”

  “Well, I have his email access,” she shared, as he stared at her. She shrugged. “He didn’t take much time to do basic correspondence, so I did it for him.”

  He motioned at her. “You want to open that up then?”

  She nodded and, using his laptop, quickly logged into her father’s email. She winced. “Like sixty emails are here,” she cried out.

  “Well, considering his life, that’s not necessarily unexpected, is it?”

  “No,” she agreed. “I would normally keep track of a lot of this for him.”

  “So you did have a lot to do with him in that way then.”

  “Well, in some ways,” she agreed, “but, I mean, when you think about it, it didn’t seem like it was that big of a deal.”

  “No, but it let you have access that I’m not sure your kidnappers had any idea of.”

  She stared at him. “They didn’t even ask me.”

  “That’s because, in the boss’s mind, he couldn’t imagine ever allowing his daughter or anyone else to have access to his emails.”

  “Doesn’t that also lend weight to the idea that my father was innocent?”

  “I don’t think lending weight to any of this is really part of the issue right now,” he stated. “We’re still way too far out in the weeds right now with our lack of information, and we have no plausible ideas yet. More so, we have no working theory to see what might have gone down.” He motioned at the laptop. “So go through the emails and see if there’s any inclination of or any warning of a looming threat.”

  As she went through them, she frowned. “You know what? In all the time that I worked for him, I never saw anything like that.”

  “That’s fine. Do you know if he had another email address?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “But you don’t know for sure, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.” She went through the emails while he sat and read a little bit over her shoulder, but most of it was pertinent to the dig itself and to grants. “Like I said, he was always fussing over grants.”

  “And presumably he needed to.”

  “Yes, at least I thought so,” she noted. “In our world, grant money is the end-all of everything.” He nodded without saying anything. She looked over at him. “What are you thinking about?”

  “May I have the laptop for a moment?” he asked.

  She nodded and handed it over. He immediately went into the settings to check if any other emails were downloaded or forwarded to the same email. And, sure enough, found another one. But it was inactive. He logged out of the email she’d been into, then brought up the new email address. “Do you want to try logging into this one?”

  She quickly logged into it, using the same password, then frowned as several more emails downloaded. “How is it that I didn’t know about this one?”

  “Well, he either knew when to expect messages or knew when to not have these download around you,” he suggested. “Maybe he had a notification on his phone, and then he quickly deleted them or dealt with them himself. Or maybe he forwarded them and then dealt with them later on.” He frowned. “There are all kinds of ways around this stuff, which you know better than I do. You also weren’t looking for deceit, so you might not have been fussing with it.”

  “No, I sure wasn’t,” she mumbled.

  He tapped the screen. “And this unfortunately is not what you want to see.”

  She stared at him and then snatched the laptop back. As she read through these messages, he walked around the room and watched her closely.

  Hatch watched the color slide from her cheeks.

  “Wow,” she whispered in shock. “He’s talking about moving antiquities out of the country.”

  “Exactly, and somebody involved in that operation probably told.”

  “Of course.” Millie stared at Hatch in shock. “If I’d known, I’d have told as well. That is one of the biggest taboos. We always have problems with theft, with people picking up hidden little trinkets, when they should be passing them over. You do the best you can, but there’ll always be that certain element of criminal life that doesn’t want to play fair. And, of course, to them, playing fair doesn’t equate because they’re not getting paid enough compared to what they see as riches being moved in and out.”

  “So, if somebody thought he was being shafted by your father, he could easily have turned on him. Keep looking through those emails,” he murmured. “And, if you don’t want to do it, I will.”

  “No,” she snapped, her voice hardening. “I need to figure this out.”

  He didn’t say anything more but sat beside her and watched as she brought up emails. He read what he could, bits and pieces, but knew that more and more of it was just breaking her heart. “Try to figure out what Marcus’s mind-set was at the end.” And her mental state was worrying now, as Hatch stepped up behind her and gently massaged her knotted neck and shoulders.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes and whispered, “I don’t care what his mind-set was. It was wrong, pure and simple.”

  “What I meant is to make sure if there is any chance that whatever he did,” he murmured, “was something he was forced into or otherwise coerced into doing.”

  “I don’t know. I see no sign of that in these emails,” she murmured. “But it’s obvious that he was participating in moving some of these antiquities out of the country.”

  “What was he doing with them? That is the million-dollar question now.” She read off an address from one of the secret emails. He nodded. “I’ll look that up. It’s a commercial warehouse district out of England.”

  She stared at him. “And a little too close to his locker, I suppose.”

  “You tell me.” Hatch faced at her. “Do you know the address?”

  She opened up the other email account. “I have it written down in one of my emails,” she murmured.

  “Any reason why?”

  “Yeah, I often email information to myself, so I don’t lose it.”

  He nodded. “That just means that, if somebody else gets your laptop, they can get access to it.”

  “But it wasn’t mine in the first place,” she stated. “I just didn’t want to lose track of where stuff was, in case something did happen to my father. Once you suddenly lose one parent, and you only have one left, you tend to take a few more precautions.”

  He sat back down beside her and waited. She brought up the email with the locker address and read it off to him. He quickly typed it into Google Maps and whistled. “They’re on the same block.”

  She stared at him and shook her head. “No, no, no, please not.”

  “Go through the emails again,” he said, “looking for anything there that gives an indication of why.”

  “Nothing like that is in these emails.” She scrubbed at her face with both hands. “All I can think of was the last series of fights with the Egyptian government, where he was accusing them of stealing antiquities that needed to be preserved. So turning around and doing that himself is just—”

  “Would he have taken them out of the country in order to preserve them?”

  She looked at him sadly. “You know what? He probably would have. I just didn’t ever have any inkling that he would have gone this far.”

  “But somebody knew. And now whoever it is who kidnapped you, were they looking for a new dig site, or were they just trying to find his stash?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked back at him in confusion.

  “Think about what you were asked while you were there with the kidnappers. Was there any inclination or any talk of storage space or a locker or you know, … a warehouse or anything similar?”

  She stared at him. “I don’t think so, but he didn’t talk to me much about it.”

  “He was probably just trying to gauge whether you were involved or not. And I would hazard a guess that your father made it very clear that you didn’t know anything.”

  She stared at him, and her bottom lip trembled almost immediately. She exerted enough control to stop it. “I don’t want to cry anymore. I need to understand what’s happened.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re getting there,” he noted. “Do you have any other information on your father that would not necessarily be accessible by, … say, law enforcement?”

  She looked at him in confusion.

  “You know, like online files, cloud storage, or anything that might give us more information about what he was doing and where. Those emails didn’t have any details.”

  She shook her head. “No, they were simple shipping and receiving, and that’s it.”

  “And, of course, they’ll hide a lot of what he was doing.”

  “Not only that,” she added, “some of this stuff was coming back and forth through the import-export company.”

  “Which one?” he asked. When she gave him the name, he immediately typed it in and nodded. “Imperial Exports.”

  “What does that even mean?” she asked.

  “It means, it’s a cover for all kinds of stuff. We’ll hunt down more information on this.” He sent the information to Killian.

  “Can you just get information like that?”

  “If the information is available?” He nodded. “Yes. Lots of times it isn’t though.”

  When answers came back almost five minutes later, he whistled. “Looks like, this time, we are in luck. Apparently absolutely no penalties have been levied against Imperial Exports. Nobody has any problems with them, and they pay their taxes. Interestingly they’ve been around for ten years.” He looked over at her. “That is another suspicious duration, don’t you think?”

  Her face paled, and she nodded. “It is.” She swallowed. “What on earth was my father thinking of?”

  “Or was he even thinking at all?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “Like I said, his behavior got a lot worse over these last years since Mom’s death.”

  “And now that you know that she was murdered, is there any chance he thought it might have been connected to these antiquities?”

  “It’s quite possible.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know if he knew that this was the guy who killed her—or had her killed at least.” She waved her hand. “I don’t even know what to think about that.” In the middle of her speech, she yawned. She stared out at nothing, looking irritated. “Why am I still so tired? And don’t go saying shock or reaction.” At that, he shrugged and didn’t say anything. She glared at him. “Is that what you think it is?”

  “Well, it makes sense to me,” he replied gently. “When you’ve been through such an ordeal, it’s not like you’ll recover instantly.”

  “No, but I need to recover faster than this.”

  “You’re not going anywhere for a couple days,” he noted. “Remember that.”

  Her shoulders slumped again. “I know, but I can’t just sit here. while you do everything for me.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Hey, I haven’t looked after anybody in quite a while. It’s all good.”

  “Who have you ever looked after?” she asked.

  “I watched my kid sister when she got sick one summer. Our parents went to Europe, so it was just the two of us. She was seventeen and professed to be an adult who didn’t need my attention, but when she got sick? She became this little girl again. It helped us reconnect in ways that I hadn’t even thought about until then. When she got sick, we both realized how far apart we had grown.” He smiled. “While she recuperated, we had a wonderful time.”

  “Sounds like you had a great relationship with her.”

  “We did.” He gave her a half shrug. “Still do actually.”

  “I missed that,” she murmured.

  He frowned. “Missed what?”

  “I missed having a sibling.” She shrugged. “It was just me and my parents, and you know they weren’t the easiest.”

  “You mentioned you spent a lot of time in boarding schools.”

  “Yes. Most of my life, if the truth be told,” she admitted, “and that’s wasn’t easy either.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It sounds like you didn’t have the easiest childhood.”

  “There were some great things about it.” She gave him a big smile. Then she thought about it for a moment and sighed. “Then there were a lot of things that really sucked.”