It was a while since she’d been in a relationship. Many men had been turned off by the mere fact of her profession.
Some were too turned on by it, and they scared the hell out of her.
But her last relationship had ended not because of what she did, since she’d been seriously involved with another pathologist.
He’d happened to come in when she was talking to a corpse.
She knew he’d been bothered. The relationship wasn’t instantly over. It had ended one morning when she’d awakened to find him staring at the ceiling. He had seemed so anguished, and then he’d told her—he believed she had some strange power, and he’d tried, but he couldn’t make the relationship work. He couldn’t forget that she talked to corpses. And he was terrified that one day he’d see them talking back.
The breakup had hurt. She’d cared about him, and she knew he’d cared about her, as well.
And she’d wondered if she should keep her affairs few and far between and very casual.
There could be nothing casual about a relationship with Will. But while she found herself fantasizing about him in a sexual way, she was also gratified to realize that he was just like her. He wasn’t turned off by her science or what lay beyond science.
But…
That didn’t mean he was fantasizing about her!
After she’d dried and dressed, she gave the cat some attention. “Poor baby. Your master is gone,” she said. Bastet purred, looking at her with beautiful cat eyes. She seemed to know.
Animals did know many things people couldn’t understand.
“I’ve got to meet Will and we have to get moving, Bastet. The day is almost gone.”
The animal meowed pitifully when Kat was about to leave. Stroking Bastet, she placed her on the bed. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “But you have to stay here.”
She met Will in the hall.
“I reported in to Logan,” he said. “Tyler is at Austin Miller’s. He’s keeping an eye on things, plus he did a cursory search of the house and yard. I told Logan about the image you ‘saw’ at the ship and he’s going to send Jane out to the house so she can sketch it for you.”
“Good idea,” Kat agreed.
She looked around as they drove. Chicago was truly one of the great American cities. The lake, a constant presence, glittered in the bright sun. Heading along South Lake Shore Drive, she could see Grant Park and the Buckingham Fountain, the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum ahead of them in the distance.
“I’m just wondering,” she said to Will, “do you think we should focus on Austin Miller’s house—or on the Egyptian Sand Diggers?”
“I think we’ll find more of what we’re looking for at Austin’s house,” Will said. “Your team is investigating the Sand Diggers. But the two people who can help us the most with the ship are Austin Miller—well, not Austin himself but the journals in his home—and Dirk Manning. You heard what Manning said—he and Austin Miller were the rock-solid foundation of the society.”
“And if Dirk’s pain at losing his old friend was faked, I’m turning in my badge and giving up on this,” Kat said. “I don’t believe Dirk Manning is guilty of anything. And Austin Miller is dead.”
“We’re back to the salvage divers, then,” Will muttered. “And after what you heard Amanda say on the phone, I think she’s somehow involved.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know.”
“Obviously, Agent Chan, I’m just musing aloud,” she told him.
When they reached the estate, there weren’t any patrol cars in evidence, but Kat reasoned that Tyler Montague must have rented the Honda that sat on the embankment. The house itself—the circumference of the wall—was wrapped in tape with regularly posted warnings not to enter.
Kat hit the buzzer; a minute later, she heard Tyler’s voice. “Agent Montague. What’s your business here?”
“It’s Kat and Will,” she said. “We’ve got Dirk Manning’s key. Just letting you know we’ve arrived.”
“Enter into the museum!” Tyler told them grandly.
He met them at the door. Kat had known Tyler a long time; like Logan, he’d been a Texas Ranger before joining the Krewe, and they’d worked a few cases together when she was a pathologist with the city of San Antonio.
She was very fond of him. In appearance, he might be the toughest-looking member of the Texas Krewe. He was tall and well-muscled and his passion was martial arts. He and Logan had been close friends through harrowing times.
“Glad you’re here,” he said, shaking hands with Will, then hugging Kat. “The house is enormous but I knew you’d be coming after the dive and I figured I’d let the others continue with the research and alibis. But I’ve been here awhile and, so far, I’ve only gone through the parlor and the guest rooms. I’m assuming that what we’re going to discover is either in Miller’s office—his den—or his bedroom, but this entire place is like a museum.” He raised his eyebrows. “If we are going to discover anything helpful.”
“We’ll know when we discover it,” Will said. He looked at Kat. “Bedroom or office?”
“Office.”
“I’ll finish the guest rooms, then,” Tyler said.
He and Will headed up the stairs, while Kat went across to the office. She made a point of leaving the door open. Maybe Will should have done this room, since he seemed to love all things Egyptian. But she couldn’t forget the way she’d found the elderly man. He had loved his den. If there was something to find, it might well be here.
“Where to start?” she said aloud. She pulled open the desk’s bottom left drawer and took out an orderly stack of journals. The top one was the most recent. She began to leaf through it.
Despite herself, she quickly became fascinated. He had a clear, easy way of writing that engaged her in the subject. He’d been writing to enhance his own scholarship—and for his own pleasure. She studied the charts he’d made and understood that each Kingdom or period had a number of dynasties. Strange, but until the past few days, she’d thought of ancient Egypt as one phase of history, not realizing that the pyramids had existed for millennia by the time Ramses II lived and died, and the boy king, Tut, was buried in the Valley of the Kings. Austin Miller’s notes were clear and precise…and interesting.
The last page of the last journal was about the party being thrown to entice scientists and divers to search for the Jerry McGuen.
“It’s time,” he wrote, “truly time, for that the ship to come to the surface, to disprove the concept that any talisman could bring about a curse. Or that a priest, any priest of any religion of any era, could rule the heavens or the earth. This is so much nonsense. Priests and rulers have always governed through fear. When a master manipulator can control the human mind by using terror and make that terror widespread, he must be stopped. Recovering the ship will allow us to show the world that fear and terror is all a matter of perception. That whatever Amun Mopat may have carved on his tomb is irrelevant. Our problem is that salvage divers know the gain will be the state’s, so we’ll let them see what fortune may come to those who seek!”
She read the words in silence, and wondered what “talisman” he was talking about.
“Mr. Miller,” she murmured softly, “don’t you know that because of the movies, there’s no such thing as a tomb that doesn’t come with a curse?”
She set the journal down. There was one lower in the stack that didn’t align with the others; it was a different type of journal, far older. She opened it curiously. The handwriting was different, and she saw that this journal had been written in 1898.
Holding it, she felt her heart leap. The Jerry McGuen had gone down in 1898 with her Egyptian treasures, years before Howard Carter had discovered King Tut’s tomb.
The name in the book, however, was also Austin Miller. He had to have been this Austin Miller’s grandfather.
The older Miller’s writing was as engaging as that of his grandson. He spoke about being in the desert, crawling through sand, finding tomb after tomb that had been raided and looted. He wrote about the day one of their diggers had fallen into a hole. The hole had proven to lead to a shaft, and they’d followed it and found the tomb.
At first, none of the men on the dig had been particularly excited. They’d wanted to find the tomb of a pharaoh, and they’d merely uncovered the tomb of a priest. But as they went through that tomb, the hieroglyphics told of a powerful man who had held others—even the pharaoh—in his grip. He was a magician, who could make mist and rain, force love when there was none and tell a pharaoh of victories to come, or when an enemy might attack.
Once the work of removing the precious treasures began, they’d begun to know what they had. Gregory Hudson, the wealthy fur trader from Chicago who’d financed the dig and loved the country of Egypt, its present and its past, was “well pleased,” as Austin said, with their discovery.
Kat sat back, engrossed in the story. She heard the clock tolling the hours, but ignored it. This Austin Miller’s journal read like an adventure story.
He went on about the months of exploration, and how Gregory Hudson, with his beautiful young bride, had chartered the Jerry McGuen to bring them home, along with some of his men and his treasures.
Austin Miller—grandfather Austin Miller—hadn’t traveled with him because he’d had to leave Egypt earlier, before their find could be cataloged and wrapped and crated.
And then, just before her arrival, the Jerry McGuen had gone down, and she and sixty souls and the treasure had all been lost.
“It made me remember what we saw on the wall of the tomb. Our interpreter was appalled by what he read when we first saw it. In fact, he left without his pay and did not return. But he did tell us that it warned that death and despair would fall upon those who disrupted Amun Mopat’s final rest, for he was a god and wielded the scepter of a god. No matter where his remains might lie and in what condition, he would wield that scepter. I could not help but believe that Gregory, his poor, beautiful bride and all the others suffered and died because we should have let the dead rest.”
