Haddon turned grimly to TJ. “I think we’d better see what your husband has to say about this.”

TJ nodded, but she didn’t hold out any hope that Jerry would be able to shed much light on things. They had both come to Horizon House seven years earlier, hired as a team; TJ as a staff archaeologist and Jerry as administrator of the extensive library. It had taken four months before he’d happened to notice that his official title was librarian/registrar, and when he’d asked Haddon what that meant, he’d learned that he was also in charge of the old collection of artifacts and skeletal remains-at least to the extent that anyone was in charge. In reality, neither Haddon nor anyone else (including Jerry) gave much of a damn about it.

Even TJ didn’t. The fact was, it wasn’t much of a collection. Ninety percent of it had been excavated in the 1920s by the famous-to some, the infamous-Cordell Lambert. Those had been the days when most Egyptologists were still glorified grave-robbers, and Lambert, an Arizona copper magnate turned ardent archaeologist in his fifties, was even less well-trained than most. Objects had been torn out of the ground with no concern for stratigraphy or relationships. The few really extraordinary pieces had found their way into museums and private collections outside of the country; the best of the rest had been commandeered by the Egyptian government; and whatever was left had been exhibited in Lambert’s “museum” for a few years and then gone into storage to be forgotten.

The el-Fuqani skeletal collection was squarely in the last category. Crudely dug up and primitively processed, it had been placed in storage in 1927 and lain there ever since, exciting no interest, scholarly or otherwise. Why anyone would take the trouble to remove one of them and toss it into the junk pile was anybody’s guess.

They found Jerry in his office off the library reading room. When he was told that the mysterious remains were apparently those of a Bronze Age man from the time of Userkaf, first pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, he too burst out laughing, which didn’t appear to improve Saleh’s mood any, or Had-don’s either. But a discreet gleam of amusement appeared to play about Sergeant Gabra’s dark eyes.