by Elise Noble
Of course we would. No way I was taking that bet, and the buzz of Black’s phone proved the decision right.
“It’s a surgeon’s knot,” he read. “Similar to a square knot except you pass the end through the first loop twice instead of once. Most commonly used in surgery, fishing, and jewellery making.”
“So we could be looking for a doctor?”
That would be some violation of the Hippocratic oath.
“Don’t forget we’re in a fishing town. And it’s not exactly a difficult knot to tie. But it’s a starting point. Tomorrow, let’s ask Aurelie whether Carmela hung out with any doctors or fishermen.”
“Or jewellery designers,” I reminded him. “There’s a lot of handicrafts for sale along the high street, and that would fit with the beetle.”
“When you look at it that way, half the people in town should be on the suspect list.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m not sure what’s worse—having no suspects or a surplus of them. We’d better do some research on this scarab too. Miles should be able to help us out there.”
Miles was Bradley’s boyfriend, an archaeologist who just so happened to be digging things up in Egypt at that very moment. He was farther south, near Luxor, but he had a satellite phone and once he started talking about old dead things, it was difficult to get him to stop.
“You’re gonna call him?” I asked.
“That was the idea.” Black forked another piece of cake into his mouth and pondered for a moment. “On second thought, it’s late, and neither of us needs a three-hour lecture on the Ptolemaic dynasty or ancient burial rites. I’ll take some pictures and send him an email.”
Thank goodness. “Great plan.”
CHAPTER 12 - EMMY
DUST MOTES DRIFTED in the early-morning sunbeam shining through a gap in the curtains. Five thirty a.m. and I was already awake thanks to my husband. With his head between my thighs, I should’ve been halfway to heaven, but in the stillness, in that quiet time before the world fully came to life, all I could hear was the shuffle-click-bump of the bloody rabbit in the next room. Last night, we’d made it a pen by nailing together some old sunloungers, the slats forming a makeshift prison topped by a gauzy curtain we’d borrowed from one of the cabanas on the beach. But it seemed determined to escape.
Usually, Black put his all into making me come, driven to be the best as he was in every other aspect of his life, but this morning, he seemed distracted too. A hesitation here, a sideways glance there. When he went for my clit with his thumb and missed, I levered my head off the pillow.
“What’s up?”
“That fucking rabbit. It walks into everything.”
“I know—it kept me awake the whole damn night.” Weirdly, I could sleep soundly in a war zone, but over the years, I’d conditioned myself to wake at the soft sounds that could indicate unexpected danger. A quiet footstep. A rustle. The squeak of a door. “I’m sorry she’s annoying, but I wouldn’t have slept if I’d had to think about her stuck in that cage either.”
“An assassin with a heart. I love every facet of you, Mrs. Black, even if it ends in coitus interruptus.”
“Perhaps I could put some music on?”
“I’ll do it.”
He rolled out of bed, and the sunbeam sliced across his bare ass as he headed for the lounge. The man had the sculpted muscles of Michelangelo’s David but with better equipment, and even after fifteen years, I still pinched myself whenever the glint of my wedding rings caught my eye. One plain silver from the original drunk-in-Vegas debacle, the second its fuck-I’m-not-that-cheap platinum companion complete with a hidden handcuff key, and the third a flawless diamond from our recent slightly-tipsy-in-Vegas attempt. Yeah, Black loved me enough to marry me twice, even if I struggled to love myself sometimes.
Perhaps we could put some sort of carpet in the rabbit’s run? That would muffle the click-click-click of nails on tile. But what about her terrible spatial awareness? Padding? A tiny crash helmet?
I was expecting classical music, maybe R ’n’ B. Black preferred piano, Beethoven or Chopin. Rachmaninov when he was annoyed. Bach when he was sad. At home, the music room was his sanctuary like the stables were mine. But instead of the delicate notes I’d been waiting for, I heard the rap of knuckles on wood.
What the hell?
“Who is it?” Black called.
“It’s me.” The voice was young. Female. A touch nervous. “I brought breakfast for the rabbit.”
No doubt because Zena was a teenager, and also because she was a friend’s granddaughter, Black tried to temper the edge of annoyance in his voice, but he didn’t quite manage it.
“It’s five thirty in the morning.”
“Grandpa said you always get up early.” Not voluntarily. “And the rabbit’ll be awake now.”
How to deal with this one… In all honesty, inviting Zena in was probably easier than explaining the reason why we couldn’t. Black’s dick had rapidly deflated, and was it my imagination or was the rabbit scratching louder?
Black flipped on the light switch, blew out his cheeks, and exhaled a sigh.
“Perhaps we could get her to take the rabbit outside?” I suggested as he pulled on a pair of shorts and a well-worn T-shirt, a sky-blue one advertising a beachside restaurant in California we’d visited about a decade ago. Sized extra large, but it still stretched tight across his chest. Bradley had regular culls of our clothing, but our Egyptian wardrobe had escaped his attention, thank goodness. Sometimes, the old stuff was the most comfortable and the most comforting, like putting on a hug from a long-lost friend.
“Take it outside—good idea.” Black tossed me a shirt of my own and a pair of baggy harem pants I’d bought in the high street on my last visit. Pants I wouldn’t be caught dead in stateside, but which somehow seemed to work in Dahab. “Why don’t you talk to her? I might get tempted to introduce her to Carmela.”
What made him think I wouldn’t?
Still, the rabbit had been my fault, and I took responsibility for my mistakes, even if it meant negotiating with a teenager at daybreak instead of screwing my husband.
“Don’t you know about the birds and the fucking bees?” I muttered quietly as I opened the door, but not quietly enough.
“Of course I do. I scored straight A’s in biology. And Mom says it’s rude to swear.”
“It’s also rude to get people out of bed when they’re on vacation.”
“And speaking of bees, did you know that the number of colonies in the US has dropped by sixty percent since 1962? And pollen’s full of pesticides now.”
“It’s too early for this.”
“It’s never too early to save the planet.”
That wasn’t a discussion I wanted to get into before breakfast, and certainly not with a kid who knew more about wildlife than I did. If I had to spout statistics like that, say if I was attending a fundraising dinner or a corporate event where I needed to sound smart, I generally wore an earpiece with a research team on hand to assist. And since it was approaching midnight back at headquarters in Virginia, I didn’t feel our merry band of IT geeks would be too chuffed if I kept them awake so I could win an argument with a sixteen-year-old. Instead, I nodded at the tray Zena was carrying. It held two plates, one full of fruit and one full of vegetables.
“That’s a lot of food for a rabbit.”
“It’s my breakfast too. Want a grape?”
“No, I want coffee. And if you give me a lecture on caffeine, I’ll be forced to shoot you.”
“Right. Like you even have a gun.” Oh, how little did she know. “Can I come in?”
“How about I bring the rabbit out?”
“I was going to clean her run.”
Well, when she put it like that… I didn’t want to pick up rabbit poop before I’d had my coffee either. Black would understand.
“Fine. Just promise you won’t turn up at this time tomorrow.”
“But the rabbit—”
“Will be fine until nine o’clock.”
All thoughts of resuming our earlier activities came to an abrupt halt when Black’s phone rang while Zena was still down on her hands and knees in my old bedroom, talking to the rabbit in some weird cross between snuffles and baby-speak.
I paused, a perfectly buttery pain au chocolat halfway to my mouth, when I heard him say, “Are you sure they’re human?”
Two guesses… Either our friend Jed had held one of his legendary parties at our house again and Bradley was trying to deal with the aftermath—which usually involved people stumbling around the place with varying degrees of hangover—or some kind of body parts had turned up. The pastry turned to cardboard in my mouth as I sidled closer and glanced at the screen. Khaled calling.
Black switched to speaker and turned the volume down enough that Miss Satellite Ears in the next room couldn’t hear. Neither of us needed her questions when we had so many to answer as it was.
“I haven’t seen the bones,” Khaled said. “The captain made me follow the tourists back down the mountain. But the woman who found them swears they came from a person.”
“Emmy’s here now,” Black said for Khaled’s benefit. “A tourist on a quad-bike safari stopped to answer the call of nature and found the remains of what could be a skeleton lying behind a boulder, and Khaled wants to pick our brains about the investigative process. Khaled, was anything else found nearby? Clothing? Shoes? A bag?”
“Nobody mentioned any of those.”
“Can you ask?”
“Captain al-Busari does not like questions.”
“Then ask your colleagues. Surely the captain wasn’t the only person there?”
“I will try.”
“Good. We’ll need photos and an exact location too. Is the scene secure?”
“No, it is on a mountain. The captain says nobody will be bothered to climb there.”
Apart from the person who found the bones in the first place and, presumably, their friends since I couldn’t imagine a tourist taking an early-morning quad-bike trip alone. Black’s roll of the eyes echoed my thoughts. In private, he was a lot more expressive than in public. In public, he left people guessing most of the time.
“Fine. Be ready to take us up there when your shift finishes.”
“My mother wants me to fix the kitchen tap this afternoon.”
“How many detectives on CSI do you see fixing kitchen taps?”
Silence.
“Meet us outside the hotel at two, and don’t forget those photos.”
Another body? Although the circumstances were different, something uncomfortable stirred in my gut. This was Dahab. Crime was normally restricted to problems with unruly dogs and the occasional burglary, which was probably why al-Busari had grown so complacent. Now? I had the horrible feeling our discovery of Carmela’s body had been the start of something bigger and a whole lot darker.
CHAPTER 13 - EMMY
TWO O’CLOCK IN the afternoon, and the sun beat down with the intensity of a blowtorch. By rights, I should’ve been either incinerating myself on the terrace or floating around on the water, but instead, I was rooting around in the room of doom in search of my hiking boots as we waited for Khaled to arrive. Black, of course, had put his away properly last time and found them in the appropriate place.
“How difficult can it be to get hold of some fucking photos?” he grumbled as I pulled out a pair of sunglasses I thought I’d lost roughly a decade ago.
“Khaled didn’t have any luck?”
“The captain has them on his camera, and he might download them tomorrow or the day after.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Khaled offered to help, but the captain declined. Apparently, the camera’s expensive and he doesn’t trust a mere private to work it properly. Are you up for a little breaking and entering?”
“Do Russians drink vodka?”
“Good.” He glanced at his watch. Black changed his timepieces as often as he changed his guns, and this month’s was an oversized green thing gifted to him by a sheikh whose kidnapped daughter he’d rescued. According to the leather-bound instruction manual it came with, it had been modelled on a car engine, and if you wanted to reset the time, you had to use a miniature power drill. I hadn’t yet worked out how to actually tell the time on it. “Hurry up with those boots. I’m going to find some bottles of water.”
“At this rate, I’ll be climbing the mountain in flip-flops.”
Where the hell had I put them? I’d trekked up Mount Sinai on the trip before last, so there was a good chance I’d had the boots then, but they’d vanished into the Egyptian equivalent of a black hole. In desperation, I rang Bradley.
“It’s me. If I was going to lose a pair of hiking boots, where would they end up? And stop rolling your eyes.”
“I’m guessing this isn’t a hypothetical question. If you had a system…”
“Please, spare me the lecture. I’m about to climb a mountain in baking heat and I’d rather not end up with blisters.”
“Climb a mountain? But I thought you were supposed to be on vacation? Let me guess—this was Black’s idea.”
“Yes and no.” I’d jokingly suggested taking quad bikes like normal people, but unsurprisingly, he didn’t want to mess up the crime scene any more than the police already had. Hence, we’d be walking, looking for anything out of the ordinary as we went. “That was where the body was found.”
“The what? The body?”
“Well, possibly. Someone found a pile of bones, and they might be human. We’re going to check out the scene.”
A small, know-it-all voice came from behind me. “Oh, they’re definitely human.”
Zena.
“Don’t you ever knock? And how do you know the bones are human?”
“Who’s that?” Bradley asked.
“Captain Bob’s granddaughter. Can you have a think about the boots and text me?”
“Okay, okay, but only if you dish the dirt on the body. Is it a murder? Are you investigating?”
“Later, Bradley. Just text me.”
Zena stood in the doorway, cradling the rabbit in her arms. “She’s not so scared now. See? But I’m not sure her eyesight’s that good. She keeps bumping into stuff. I’m gonna call her Crash.”
Crash the rabbit. Good grief.
“Brilliant. Crash. Now, what were you saying about the bones?”
“That they’re human?”
“Yes. How do you know that?”
“Because I spent, like, four years studying human anatomy.”
“Can we back up a bit here? When did you see them?”
“This morning. The lady who found them’s staying in one of the villas by the pool. She took about three hundred photos, and she showed everyone.”
My initial flicker of excitement at an actual clue soon gave way to a sinking dread. Having pictures of body parts in the public domain, out of our control, could cause more problems than it solved. And if the news that today’s find was the second body to turn up within a week got out, the reputation of the town would suffer, which was bad for business. Would that spur al-Busari into action or lead him to put an even tighter lid on the problem?
“Do you know the lady?”
“Not really. But I think her roommate’s called Allie. Why? Do you want to see the pictures? Because they’re on Twitter.”
Oh, this just got better and better. Twitter? Really? For fuck’s sake. But yes, I wanted to see those pictures.
“Can you find them on my laptop?”
Boots momentarily forgotten, I dragged an extra chair over to the desk in the lounge, and Zena scooched closer to me with the rabbit on her lap. How did she get the thing to sit still like that? I’d managed to keep hold of Crash in the car when she was terrified, but last night when I tried to pick her up, she bit me.
“Here they are,” Zena said. Yup, posted by NorthernGrrrl. She had little hearts on each side of her username. “Look—hashtag Dahab, hashtag
corpse, hashtag deadbody, hashtag OMG.”
Twelve pictures, and I saved them all to my hard drive before I zoomed in. Yup, that was definitely a femur. And a lower jaw, part of a pelvis, and a fucking skull.
Black was better educated in the ins and outs of forensic taphonomy—the history of a body after death—than me, but I knew that even under normal circumstances, it was hard to determine the time of death once a body was reduced to bones. And by normal, I meant having a fully equipped lab and a police force that actually showed an inclination to investigate the case.
Who did the bones belong to? And were they male or female? How had they gotten into the mountains? And most importantly from our point of view, had the person fallen victim to foul play or an unfortunate accident? A scrap of faded royal-blue cloth was visible in the corner of one of the shots—was that part of their clothing? If not, where was it? Because naturism wasn’t big in Egypt. Nudists would probably be arrested by Captain al-Busari going for the easy wins.
“Where are the rest of the photos? You said she took more.”
“I guess she didn’t post them all.”
“Then we need to look for her.”
With the roommate’s first name and a rough location for their villa, I could get Captain Bob to go through the guest registrations, then…
“Be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
Zena was already halfway out the door with the rabbit, which seemed to have accepted its new role as a teenager’s companion with remarkably good grace. A sigh escaped my lips like air from a shanked tyre. The last thing I wanted was for Zena to get involved in the investigation, but what was I supposed to do? Drag her away? When I was her age, I’d already gotten a job, moved to a different continent, and executed my first target. On a scale of one to assassination, tracking down a few crime scene photos hardly tipped the scale. Besides, Zena seemed happier today. Whether it was the distraction of Crash or having to spend less time with her mother, I wasn’t sure, but she’d even smiled a couple of times. And heaven help me, I was actually starting to like the girl.
