“Certainly, Dr. Haddon,” TJ said, formality for formality. The object, she supposed, was to impress the Egyptian police with the businesslike decorum of Horizon House. Well, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

She closed the budget file on which she had been briefing him so that he could continue to delude the visiting Gustafsons into thinking that he had his finger on the pulse of Horizon House’s operations, and rose to join them. She knew perfectly well why Haddon had asked her to come along. He was afraid the officers might ask him something he didn’t know the answer to-which covered one hell of a lot of ground-and he wanted TJ, who took her administrative role as assistant director seriously, at his side to bail him out.

Well, fine. Anything was better than sitting alone in a room with him, trying to explain item after item, none of which he knew anything about, but on all of which he was maddeningly ready to lecture her at mind-numbing length.

“You’ve found something, then?” Haddon asked the major as the four of them followed the network of flower-bordered gravel pathways to the storage enclosure.

But Major Saleh wasn’t there to answer questions. “This area, it has not been used in how long?”

“Five years,” Haddon said. “That’s correct, isn’t it, Dr. Baroff?”

“Right, everything in it was ruined in those colossal rains.”

Saleh nodded his remembrance. With Upper Egypt averaging a fraction of an inch of rain a year, no one who lived there would be likely to forget the eighteen-hour deluge that had dropped more rain in a single day than most of them would see for the rest of their lives.

“So we built a new, roofed storage area onto the garage,” TJ went on, “and haven’t used the old one since. Well, for a while it was a sort of dump for things, but not anymore.”

“You know,” Haddon said, “we really should clean the place out and knock it down. It’s disgusting. Breeding area for rats and all sorts of disagreeable things. I had no idea.”