THE NEXT MORNING, AROUND 9, NABILA arrived at the hotel in her car. Hauck and Harper climbed in. Tolliver was still sleeping, though Harper said he was feeling much better.

  The inspector turned to Hauck. “You texted me that you had a new itinerary today?”

  He took out his iPhone, which was set to Google Maps. He’d entered the location of the numbers, which he now knew were GPS coordinates.

  “It’s in Abu Qir.”

  “Abur Qir? That’s west. Maybe forty minutes, depending on traffic. Why do we need to go there?”

  “Humor me.”

  “I don’t have the time, Mr. Hauck, to be chasing shadows.”

  “Just this once?”

  She complied, though she was clearly not happy that he chose not to explain. Harper sat in the backseat with the piece of Stephanie’s tooth, which he’d returned to her earlier.

  Her eyes were closed. She seemed to be taking a nap.

  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.”

  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

  VIRGIL FLOWERS AND JOHNSON JOHNSON sat on the cabin’s narrow board porch, drinking coffee and looking out at the empty golf course. A fine mist was sweeping down from the mountains and across the tan grass of the first fairway. The dissected remnants of three newspapers lay on the table between them. Four fly rods hung tip-down from a rack on the wall.

  Two other fishermen, whom they’d met the day before, wandered by in rain jackets, aiming in the general direction of the bar, and Johnson said, “We got like a gallon of hot coffee.”

  “We’ll take some of that,” Rich Lang said, the shorter of the two guys.

  He looked soft around the middle with about a week’s worth of graying stubble on his face. The two guys took the other chairs on the porch, and the four of them sat around talking about fish and politics and personal health, as they admired the rain.

  The other guy, Dan Cain, said, “Shoulda gone to Colorado.”

  “Can’t afford Colorado,” Lang said. “Besides, the fish are bigger here.”

  The personal health issue involved Cain, who’d taken a bad fall on a river rock the day before, shredding the skin on his elbows and upper arms. Nothing serious, but painful, and his arms were coated with antiseptic cream and wrapped in gauze.

  “Pain in the butt,” he admitted.

  “That’s what happens when us big guys fall,” Johnson said to Cain. They were both six six or so, and well over two hundred pounds. “Virgil falls down, it’s like dropping a snake. I fall down, and it’s like Pluto rammed into the earth.”

  “Pluto the planet, or Pluto the dog?” Virgil asked.

  It went back and forth like that for twenty minutes, Lang and Cain browsing halfheartedly through the abandoned newspapers.

  Cain eventually said, “It’s looking lighter in the west.”

  Virgil, Johnson, and Lang said, almost simultaneously, “Bullshit.”

  Johnson checked his cell phone and a weather app for a radar image of the area.

  “We won’t get out this afternoon,” he said. “It’s rain all the way back to Idaho.”

  “What about tomorrow?” Lang asked.

  “Thirty percent chance of rain,” Johnson said. “When they say thirty percent chance of rain, that usually means there’s a fifty percent chance.”

  “We could go into town, find a place that sells books,” Virgil said. “Check the grocery store, get something to eat tonight.”

  “Or find a casino, lose some money in the slots,” Johnson said. “Did I ever tell you about the casino up in Ontario? I was up there last month with Donnie Glover, and it was raining like hell.”