The moment he unlocked the box and swung open the lid, Hadley grimaced and turned her head away. Dark energy rose from the box, so strong, it was nearly palpable.
Adam made a low noise in the back of his throat. “You can feel it, too? Lowe says he does. Stella and I can’t, thank goodness.” He lifted two items from the box and laid them down side by side on the leather. “This is the original, and this one’s mine.”
Bracing herself against the bad energy, Hadley leaned over the counter. Her mouth dropped open. Two identical amulets, each assembled with the Osiris base and two crossbars. “Good lord,” she murmured. “You’ve been copying it as we’ve found the pieces?”
He nodded. “Lowe wanted to replicate it so he could . . .” Brown eyes shifted and lowered as he cleared his throat.
“Yes, he told me,” she said. “He’d planned to cheat my father out of a hundred thousand dollars and sell the original to someone else.”
“Not sell—it was to pay off Monk for the crocodile forgery. Monk’s got no qualms about putting a bullet in your head.”
“Yes, he nearly did just that last night.” She picked up the copy of the amulet and tested its weight in her palm against the real thing. Aside from the intense energy emanating from the artifact, she could detect no difference between the two. Even the reddish hue to the gold was right. And Lowe intended to use the real amulet to pay off his debt to Monk? A fair chunk of cash, she had no doubt, but surely Lowe could’ve asked his bootlegger brother for it. Hell, if he would’ve just been honest and asked her, she would’ve gladly given it.
“Oh, boy.” Adam sighed and scratched the back of his neck. “I wonder if he’s called his brother to bail him out?”
“As of an hour ago, no,” she said. “I called the precinct and they said he hasn’t made a telephone call.”
“Probably because Winter will skin him alive if he finds out. And Lowe’s pride is bigger than the Golden Gate, in case you haven’t noticed.”
How a liar and a fraud had any pride at all, Hadley couldn’t comprehend. She wished she had brawn enough to punch him repeatedly and knock some sense into his stupid male brain. To make him see how ridiculous all of this was. How boneheaded he was to lose what they had over something as meaningless as money and as useless as pride.
“This is beautiful,” she said softly, placing it back on the leather. “I don’t know how you did it, but it’s an exact match. All my expertise, and I can’t tell it’s a fake. Your work is exquisite.”
He shrugged and waved a dismissive hand. A few quiet seconds ticked by before he said softly, “He’s in love with you, you know.”
Fresh grief made her sore, tear-weary eyes well up again. “People in love don’t lie to each other.”
“You’re wrong. They lie the most.”
She couldn’t stop her gaze from flicking to Stella. He noticed. Whether or not he guessed that Lowe had told her about their past, she didn’t know. But the sadness behind his eyes was too much for her to endure.
“If the museum finds out what Lowe’s been up to, and that I’ve been seeing him, my career is ruined. And he knows how important that is to me. It’s everything. My life’s blood is wrapped up in the antiquities wing, and . . .” No use in explaining further. It didn’t change the reality of the matter. “I guess I underestimated his carelessness.”
“I don’t think Lowe’s problem is a lack of feelings,” Adam said carefully. “Just the opposite, in fact. When he makes mistakes, he’s so focused on righting the wrong, and so overconfident about his ability to fix it all, that he loses sight of the big picture and ends up making things worse.”
She looked away to gain some control over her wayward emotions and dug an envelope out of her pocket. “Here,” she said, handing it to Adam. “For his bail. He’s being held at the Richmond precinct station. I wrote down the captain’s direct telephone line inside.”
He tried to give back the envelope. “You do it. Go talk to him.”
“Did he tell you why my father wants the amulet?” she asked in a rough voice. “Did he tell you . . . about me?”
Adam seemed genuinely confused. “I know the amulet pieces are hidden around the city, and I know how much your father is willing to pay Lowe to find them.”
“My father is very ill, and that amulet might save his life.”
Adam blew out a long breath. “You know how Lowe’s parents died?”
She nodded. “Car accident. That is, I only know from the newspapers. Lowe never talks about it.”
“Not surprising. It was a bad time. But you do know that his brother, Winter, was the one driving the car?”
She nodded once.
“Winter took it hard. Blamed himself. Lowe, on the other hand, spent a couple weeks grieving before taking off to Egypt. Thought he could outrun it, you know. And maybe he did, for a while.” He shrugged. ‘But I guess my point is that Lowe would not under any circumstances choose money over your father’s life. He may be a lot of things, but he’s not a monster.”
She ducked her head and twisted her jaw to stop from crying.
After a few moments, Adam slid the third crossbar toward her along with the real amulet, affixed with the first two crossbars. “Take it. If you sort out things with Lowe and still want to copy the rest of it, you know where to find me. And if not?” He gave her a wry smile. “Well, let’s just say he owes me.”
“Are you sure?”
He made a shooing gesture with his hand. “Take it,” he insisted, placing the amulet’s copy inside the box.
“Then you keep the crocodile. After all, you made it.” She pocketed the amulet. “That is, if you want to risk holding on to the thing. I made sure I wasn’t followed here, but Monk Morales might have ears to the ground.”
He slipped the crocodile inside the box before closing it and rapping his knuckles on the lid. “This old gal will keep it hidden. Velma said the iron alone would probably do the trick—people have hidden things in iron for centuries. But her magic makes it doubly safe.”
Hadley smiled tightly as she pulled on her gloves. A thought stilled her hands.
Iron.
She knew something made of iron. Something right in her own family’s backyard. She mentally summoned the pictograms on the last urn—the one they couldn’t crack or match up to any names on the list. It was the right number of letters, but she’d been through every possible interpretation a thousand times.
Every interpretation but one.
Funny how one wrong letter could change a word so completely.
“Are you all right?” Adam asked.
“No, I’m really not,” she mumbled as a buzzing brightness filled her mind with a singular, enormous idea—one that was so distracting, she failed to notice the dark car parked across the street, or the man who stepped out of the driver’s seat, as she sped away inside her taxi.
THIRTY
LOWE COLLECTED HIS THINGS from the holding window and nodded at the captain before heading upstairs to the police station lobby with Bo.
“Thanks again,” he told Winter’s assistant.
“You should’ve called last night,” he chastised, his slender, sinewy body outpacing Lowe’s as they ascended into dreary midday light filtering in from gray windows. “If Chief Ryan knew they had a Magnusson locked up on trumped-up charges, he would’ve gotten out of his bed to come here and personally haul their asses over the coals.”
Lowe straightened his necktie and attempted to brush out the wrinkles in his suit jacket. His back was killing him. He’d dozed off in the jail cell once or twice, only getting enough sleep to make him grouchy. He was also vaguely aware that he hadn’t had anything to eat since yesterday’s lunch. And yet, none of those discomforts matched the unyielding heavy ache in the pit of his stomach.