An Angel In Stone. Peggy Nicholson
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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, joy! Dad always says you can judge a person by his enemies. But we have to piss off an Arabian oil tycoon?”
“You’re sure he’s carrying a grudge? Did he threaten you?”
Raine smiled to herself. She could almost hear Trey flexing, two thousand miles to the west. “Not in so many words. He said something about SauroStar being just a hobby so far, but now that he’s got time to give us his undivided attention…”
“Hmm. Is there any chance, considering this is the find of a lifetime and considering you’ve been known to be a trifle, well…intense…when it comes to getting your dino, that you’re mistaking plain old bone hunter’s lust for something stronger and more personal?”
Slowly she shook her head at the cat, who’d rolled onto his side to gaze at her with a pair of simmering amber eyes. “No.” Cade had looked at her last night the way Otto must contemplate a mouse creeping along the baseboards. As something to be toyed with, then tasted, and finally devoured—and every last bite would be personal. “No, he’s got something against us, Trey. Something big and bad.”
“Then it’s got to be findable. I’ll keep on digging.”
“Thanks.” She stretched to rub her foot along the cat’s belly—a dangerous caress, but hard to resist. “Anything else?”
“One last thing. You mentioned the girl’s gloves? Are you sure they were gloves—and not tattoos?”
Raine laughed in surprise. “No, the light was hardly the best, but I’m fairly certain. Thin blue gloves, chopped off at the first knuckle. Why?”
“Just something I stumbled across, once in my travels. You know Borneo’s head-hunting country?”
“Yikes!” Raine sat upright, then scootched back against the mounded pillows. “But that’s got to be…way back in their dark and evil past, right?”
“Well, yeah, if you call 2001 the Bad Ol’ Days.”
“Oh, stop! You’re not serious.”
“’Fraid I am, though I s’pose you could write off that latest episode of head-taking as a nasty little hiccup. Just a minor backslide during an intertribal tiff about land rights.”
“I thought Lia seemed a bit…intense, herself,” Raine murmured, smoothing her palm thoughtfully down her neck.
“If she’s a Dayak, then, yeah, the women were as warlike as the men. But what you’ve got to understand is that head-hunting was a matter of prestige. To prove your daring and skill. If a guy wanted to score with a girl, he darned sure better bring a few heads when he came courting.”
“Beats a bouquet of roses any ol’ day,” Raine observed dryly.
“On an island with ten thousand flowers for the picking, I reckon it did. Anyway, to take a head meant you were a great achiever. And to advertise that you were a head-lopping Bravo, you had your hands tattooed blue—from the wrist to the first knuckle.”
Goose bumps stampeded up her arms. Raine shuddered as she rubbed them. “Oh, come on! This is a thoroughly twenty-first century kid. Uses the Internet and nail polish, for Pete’s sake.”
“Yeah, but it never fails to amaze me how people hang on to what works for them from their own culture, like polygamy or camel racing, then they graft MTV and cell phones on top of it. All I’m saying is that maybe Lia’s given herself blue hands to show she’s a high achiever. That she’s fearless and she’ll stop at nothing.”
“Or that she means to score big,” Raine murmured.
“All of the above. So my one bit of advice to you is, whatever you do, just don’t…lose your—”
Raine