“Does this mean you’re done with Raphael?”

I gave him my sniper stare. “If you ever want to set foot out of the office again, you will stop taking an interest in my love life. It doesn’t concern you.”

He turned to me with an expression of remorse that could’ve made the angels weep. “Yes, ma’am.”

How do you go from Baby Rory to Ascanio? To think that one day I might have kids, and given that I was half-bouda they would probably turn out just like him. The mind boggled.

“It says here Jamar bought a toilet seat for fifty thousand dollars,” Ascanio said.

I looked on the screen. “It says it’s from Amarna, from the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt.”

“It’s a toilet seat,” Ascanio said.

“It’s four thousand years old.”

He looked at me, incredulous. “Some ancient Egyptians sat on it and took a dump.”

“I assume so.”

“He paid fifty thousand dollars for a used toilet seat.”

“Maybe it was gold-plated,” I told him.

“No, it says here it’s made of limestone, so if you were to use it, you’d freeze your ass off when you sat on it.”

“It’s not cold in Egypt. It’s hot. Your grasp of geography is shaky, my friend.” I sat down at a terminal next to him and typed “Jamar Groves” into the search window.

“You could buy a car for fifty thousand dollars. A really nice car.” Ascanio’s eyes lit up. “A Hummer. You could buy a converted Hummer.”

“You don’t need a Hummer,” I said.

“Chicks dig the Hummer.”

“You don’t need any chicks either.”

He gave me an injured look. “I have needs.”

“I have needs too and right now I need you to concentrate on tracking down Jamar’s antique collection. Get to it.”

We’d been in the library for three hours when the magic hit, cutting our research short. We’d identified thirty-seven items. Considering that my list of the vault’s contents included only twenty-nine, that gave us at least eight artifacts for which we couldn’t account. A knife from Crete; two necklaces from the Etruscan civilization, which was apparently some sort of pre-Roman culture in Italy; a cat-headed statue from the Kingdom of Kush; a bronze head of Sargon the Great, who was some sort of king in Akkadia; a spear from the same country; and two stone tablets with ancient Hebrew writings. None of those lit up with Christmas lights and sirens when we found them. Whether I liked it or not, it was time to quit and head home.

“That mechanic said he’d found the check from the woman he towed,” Ascanio said.

“Yes?” He was going to be my next stop.

“I can pick up that check for you,” Ascanio offered.

I eyed him. “Promise not to get yourself killed.”

“I promise.”