at the caller id on his new answering machine. “Gotcha.” Area code 212. That was New York City.
He stood, stretched, then hauled his old army duffel bag out of the closet; he’d packed it days ago. Figure a two-hour drive to Raleigh, then catch the morning flight.
When he got to New York, he’d go to a library, find a backward directory, which showed the address when you looked up the phone number. Dropping by a drugstore for a roll of duct tape and a pack of single-edge razorblades wouldn’t take but a few minutes.
By early evening latest, he’d be knocking on the bitch’s door.
“One of these days you’re going to tell me you were a guy in your last life,” Raine murmured drowsily, her fingers ruffling through silky-soft fur. Otto, the portly orange tomcat from the apartment below, had a suspicious fondness for jumping her, every time he caught her in bed. Stretched out full length on her chest, with his nose snuggled under her chin, he rumbled in unabashed contentment. He’d tiptoed up the fire escape, then in through her open window this morning and she’d woken to a familiar twenty-two pounds settling into place. “You know, I’ve had maybe four hours sleep. Surely a cat can appreciate that that’s not quite—”
She broke off as the bedside phone rang. Managing to reach it without dislodging her passenger, she yawned and said, “That…was fast.”
She’d phoned, then faxed Trey at headquarters when she got in last night. Out in Grand Junction, Colorado, the rising sun would have yet to clear the Rockies. Knowing Trey, he hadn’t slept since she roused him.
“I’ve just scratched the surface so far.” Trey’s gravelly voice echoed the cat’s rumble—about two octaves lower. “But I’ve got a few things of interest.”
Trey was the Expediter of Ashaway All. The still and ingenious center around which Raine and her siblings whirled. The man who arranged, and the man who obtained. He was an ex-SEAL—and maybe ex-merc, though he’d never admit it—with useful connections in the weirdest backwaters of the world.
A dozen years ago he’d come limping into their lives on his one good leg plus a whole lot of attitude, and he’d soon made himself indispensable to the firm and to the family. There wasn’t one of the Ashaway women who hadn’t sworn at one point or another that she’d die if he didn’t love her—and there wasn’t one who could claim she’d ever been properly kissed by the man.
But they all would have gone to the wall for Trey, and he for them. He was big brother and stand-in father, since John Ashaway’s accident. Keeper of their darkest secrets and their most excruciating bloopers. Teaser and mentor and coach. And he got them whatever they needed, whenever they needed it; he was their expediter. “Whatcha…got?” she asked on another yawn.
“The language on that newspaper you faxed me is Indonesian.”
“Darn, I was afraid of that.” Indonesia was a sprawling archipelagic nation, covering a swath of the Pacific about the size of Europe. The country encompassed a few monster-size islands to the northwest of Australia, and hundreds of small ones. If Lia was Indonesian, then she and her tooth might hail from Bali, or New Guinea, or Java, or—“It’s not from Sumatra, where the tsunami hit?”
“No, from about a thousand miles east,” Trey assured her. “The name of that paper translates as the Morning Star. It’s the local daily for the city of Pontianak, Kalimantan.”
“As in Borneo?” Raine rolled to one side, then unhooked Otto’s claws from her T-shirt. He scrambled to his feet and stalked to the foot of the bed, tail lashing his vexation.
“Yep. Borneo is the third-largest island in the world. It’s divided between three countries. Kalimantan in the south is a province of Indonesia. Sarawak and Sabah in the northeast and northwest are states of Malaysia. Then tucked in between them is the Kingdom of Brunei.”
“A lot of ground to cover. What’s the date on the newspaper?”
“Mid-August of this year.”
“Six weeks ago—that sounds about right. The way the tooth was wrapped, I’m betting somebody mailed it to Lia. If she’d carried it as hand luggage on a plane or ship, she wouldn’t have needed so much cushioning—and it was too valuable to risk checking it with her bags.”
“Plus you said her English is fairly fluent, which might mean she’s been in New York awhile.”
“Mmm,” Raine mused. “So six weeks ago somebody packs up this tooth and mails it to Lia. Somebody who can only afford to send it surface mail. Somebody who trusts her to find out what it’s worth and to cut a deal.”
“A relative…a friend…maybe a classmate?” Trey hazarded.
“Somebody who sees Lia as the smart one in the family? The big-city college girl who should know how to tap the American money machine?”
“Sounds about right. And here’s another thing. The city of Pontianak is on the coast, at the mouth of the Kapuas River. But that tooth can’t have come from there. Geology’s wrong for finding fossils—nothing but swamps and mangrove. But more than that, the area’s too populated, with an entrenched power structure whose prime law is ‘Top Dog eats first.’ A priceless find along the coast would have been impossible to hide. It would’ve been snapped up by the head honchos.
“And when they went to sell it, the boss-guys wouldn’t trust it to a twenty-year-old girl, with no credentials or standing.”
“Amateur hour is what we’re talking here,” Raine muttered.
“Gotta be. So if not from the coast, the tooth came from somewhere in the wilds of the interior. That’s the deepest, darkest rainforest remaining in the world. No cities, no roads. Transportation strictly by jungle footpath or by longboat up the river. You’ve got rice-farming tribes settled along the waterways, and nomad hunters up in the mountains. It’s not even a money economy yet in the interior—it’s barter. Boar fat and birds and wild honey brought down to the river towns to be traded for shotgun shells and salt.”
The back of Raine’s neck was tingling. This was why she was a bone hunter! Not just for fossils, but for the crazy adventures in finding them. The new, the strange and the wild were what called her. “That’s where it came from!” she said with conviction. “Somebody found it up there, somewhere in the mountains. An innocent who hadn’t a clue what it would bring in a city.”
“Probably traded it for something practical, like a case of dried beef or a pair of used eyeglasses,” Trey agreed. “So it passed into a slightly savvier somebody’s hands, who passed it on to Lia to get what she could for it—where the money grows on trees, and the streets are paved with gold.”
Raine sighed. “Yep. She was flashing dollar signs on every wavelength.”
“Have you thought about an offer price?”
“That depends on what will beat Kincade. What have you found on him?”
“Nothing you’re going to like. Turns out he owns half of Okab Oil.”
Oil! She winced. “A drilling company out West? He sounds like a Westerner, with a bit of polish.”
“No such luck. We’re talking offshore oil, the Red Sea. His partner is the nephew-in-law of the emir of Kurat.”
“Oh,
