"Exactly."

She called Marsh back. "You might be looking for some Russians," she said as he picked up. She kept the phone on speaker.

"Withholding information from me?"

"No. It's an angle we just figured out when you called. We had to discuss it to decide if it was a viable direction. We think it might be. I think early on Del gave you some of the story, but there wasn't much to give you—a missing painting that supposedly held a clue to some treasure that had our two families connected. It seems that Mario Guidry's family was connected too, and it all leads to Brazil, which is where we're going. Up until now, that's really all we knew. We did finally find the painting…" He tried to interrupt, but she talked over him. "…which has since been stolen again. It was with the man in Nebraska who was killed. The painting was of almost no help anyway. However, something that kept popping up, but that we kind of ignored, was something about eggs."

"Eggs," he stated flatly.

"Our thought exactly, which is why we put it on the back burner. However, it came up again just in the last day or so…"

"How?" he interrupted.

"Hard to explain."

"Try."

"No, I won't. Look, we are trying to be as honest with you as we can. There are aspects to this that would make no sense to you that might or might not be related to the case."

"Why don't you let me be the judge of that. I'm good at what I do."

"I have no doubt about that. We are not trying to keep you out of the loop. These are personal things that take on a whole new dimension. But they might only be family issues."

She was good. She was managing to skirt the issue by being just vague enough to give him no ammunition to come back with.

He sighed. It must have been frustrating for him, but dealing with a hot celebrity was always tricky and he knew he had to tread lightly.

"So, tell me about the Russians."

"Back in 1918, a collection of Faberge eggs was stolen from the Russian Royal Family. Some were never recovered. We think some of the treasure that has been referred to revolves around those eggs."

"Why?"

She was silent.

"Yeah, I know. It's part of what you can't tell me."

"What I can tell you is what we just found out. There seems to have been a Russian involved with our families. In fact, he may have been the one who got them into this whole mess. We think he was searching for them and got Del's great-grandfather and Mario's great-grandfather involved. Anyway, we don't know his name or anything about him beyond that, but we are deducing from all of this that there is a third party involved in this treasure hunt and we think it might be a Russian … or Russians. We are now thinking that it wasn't Guidry who killed my sister or tried to kill Del in front of his house. We also don't think he was responsible for Russ Simpson's death in Nebraska. We think it was people connected to that original Russian."