The door wasn’t locked; David simply walked right in. The secretary’s desk just inside was unoccupied, but David spotted Rod Calligan sitting at a second desk just inside a door on the left, at the back of a larger office. Calligan looked up as they both entered, frowning, but he either didn’t see Jennie or simply dismissed her as unimportant.

“I’m not hiring,” he began, but Jennie wasn’t paying any attention to him. She was concentrating on the artifacts on Calligan’s blotter.

They were all old, earth-stained, fragile-looking. A medicine bag of some kind, a pipe, a fetish-bundle wrapped in ancient, handwoven grass-cloth—

“I’m not here for a job, Mr. Calligan,” David said, formally. “You are Rod Calligan, aren’t you?”

Calligan nodded, looking annoyed.

“Good.” David held out the papers, and Calligan took them, reflexively. “This is a protective order forbidding you to come within one hundred yards of Antonia Calligan, Ryan Calligan, and Jill Calligan, and a preliminary divorce decree. Thank you for accepting them.”

He stepped back from the desk; Rod Calligan stared at him for a moment in stunned shock. Then his face began to turn purple-red with anger.

“By the way, Mr. Calligan,” Jennie said, from behind David, “I’m Jennifer Talldeer, an investigator hired by Mark Sleighbow at Romulus Insurance. I’ve got a few questions I’d like to ask you. About your three friends who drove the black Lincoln—”

Jennie realized as soon as she entered the office that Calligan didn’t recognize her. In fact, he probably had no idea who she was or what she looked like. So even though she was certain the hit men had told him she was dead, he showed no surprise as she followed David in through the door.

Until she told him who she was, that is.

It had been hard to concentrate on quick strategy—hard to concentrate on much of anything, once she saw what was spread out across his desk.

Calligan had an entire array of stolen artifacts from Watches-Over-The-Land’s gravegoods, and others. Jennie could not imagine how he had managed to keep their presence hidden from her; she should have been able to sense them the moment they got near the site!

Unless whatever had been protecting Calligan was also hiding his stolen treasures. …

He had been about to launch into some kind of display of anger, verbally or possibly physically, against David, and men who were angry didn’t think about what they were saying.

She knew he had hired those three thugs, but she didn’t know if he had actually seen or met them. But he had to know that there were three of them, and he might assume whatever car they drove was dark.

The minute she spoke her own name, he went white.

But when she said the words “black Lincoln,” he went berserk.

He leapt up out of his chair, his face suffused with rage—