Storm Front

was secret communication, like with a lawyer.”
    Virgil looked at him and said, “Quiet.” And to Crawford: “Go ahead, Derrick.”
    “So anyway, when he got to the house, I called up Raj, here, and he said thanks, he’d give Jones a ring. He told me to stay on the job until he called and let me go,” Crawford said. “So fifteen minutes after that, another car pulled up. A rental. I checked on the tag, ran it through a couple of databases, and it turns out it was rented to a guy named Timur Kaya, who’s traveling on a Turkish passport. I happen to know he’s staying at the downtown Holiday Inn.”
    “How do you know this?” Yael asked.
    “I followed him there,” Crawford said.
    “Good work,” Yael said. “Which room?”
    “One-twenty.”
    “When the Turk left, he didn’t leave with a body-sized bag, did he?” Virgil asked.
    “He didn’t leave with any bag,” Crawford said. “Not even a stone-sized bag.”
    Virgil: “So you followed the Turk to the Holiday Inn? Then what? You talk to him?”
    “Hell, no. Raj told me about the Turk and this thing with testicles, and I said to myself,
That’s not necessarily a guy I want to know
. So I went back to Jones’s house, drinking lots of coffee, making two hundred bucks an hour. I’m standing behind a tree, taking a leak, when another car pulls up.”
    “It was like a traffic jam,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah,” Crawford said. “I oughta mention, it’s two o’clock in the morning by now, and the light’s still on at Jones’s house. It’s like he was expecting these people. Anyway, a guy gets out of the car and goes up to the house, and I see Jones let him in. I check the tag on the car, it’s a Cadillac SUV. I find out it’s private, owned by a guy named John Rogers Sewickey from Austin, Texas.”
    “How do you spell that?” Virgil asked. He was taking notes. Crawford took his own notebook out and spelled the name.
    “Never heard of him,” Awad said. “Who is he?”
    “He’s a professor who specializes in Ancient Mysteries,” Crawford said, orally capitalizing Ancient Mysteries. “I was about to tell you that when Virgil arrived. He teaches the Ancient Mysteries core course at the Center for Transubstantial Studies at University of Texas.”
    “Hook ’em, Horns,” Virgil said.
    “Exactly. He’s written a lot of books and papers and so on. I looked at his bank account, don’t ask me how, and he has fourteen thousand dollars in checking and in an investment account. He appears to be writing two alimony checks a month.”
    “Then he’s not here for the stone,” Yael said. “He couldn’t afford it.”
    “The Turks are agents for somebody else, so maybe he’s an agent for, like, the Iraqis,” Crawford said. “I know he’s been there—he led the search for the Garden of Eden. I guess he found it, at the junction of these two big rivers, the Euphrates and the Ganges.”
    “I believe the Ganges is in India,” Virgil said.
    “Okay, then it was something else,” Crawford said.
    “Where’s he staying?” Virgil asked.
    “Well, conveniently at the downtown Holiday Inn, in room two-seventy,” Crawford said.
    “Then what?” Yael asked.
    “After I watched him check in, I went back to Jones’s house, and the lights were out and the rental car was gone.”
    “Ah, crap, you missed him,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, I did.”
    “Did you try going in the house?” Virgil asked.
    “No, no, I didn’t. . . . You know why.”
    “Okay. Do you know anything else? Anything at all? Or have any guesses?”
    “Well, before you got here, Raj told me that you’d found blood on the floor?”
    “Just a smear.”
    “Then I suspect the Turk probably created that,” Crawford said. “When Jones came to the door, to meet Sewickey, he looked like he was blowing his nose in a hankie. Now, if there was blood on the floor, I think he might’ve been trying to stop a nosebleed. I mean, how many people would meet somebody at the door while blowing their nose? And keep blowing it?”
    “That’s a legitimate question,” Virgil said.
    “Thank you,” Crawford said. “Also, when Raj first called me, and before I found out that Jones was at the Mayo, I walked across the street to the courthouse to look up his tax records, to see where he lived. Turns out he has two places—the one here in town, and he’s got what looks like an old family farm off Highway 68 West. I haven’t gone out there yet, just looked at the tax file.”
    “Where