Mystic Warrior. Alex Archer
think it is.”
“So what do you suppose it is?”
“Serendipity. Sometimes when you’re looking for one thing, you discover another by accident. You’ve heard of Juan Cabrillo?”
Cranmer nodded “Sailed with the conquistadores, with Hernán Cortés, and later explored the West Coast while searching for a trade route to China.”
“And his last voyage?”
“In 1542 he sailed most of the West Coast and ended up on what we call Santa Catalina Island, intending to stay the winter. Some of his men got attacked by Tongva warriors around Christmas Eve. Cabrillo stepped off the ship and splintered his shin, ended up getting gangrene and dying there. He never made it back to Europe. On San Miguel Island, somebody found a headstone that might have been his.”
“Now I’m impressed.”
“I’ve got four kids. My wife helped them with math and science. I helped them with history and English... They like Chasing History’s Monsters, too. I think my older two boys like it for the other host, but my daughter wants to be you when she grows up. When I tell her I met you today, she’s going to freak.”
He pulled his smartphone from his shirt pocket.
“Do you mind...?”
“Sure.” Annja stood beside Cranmer and he got the phone ready. “Wait!” She reached up and took her hair down and ran her fingers through it. “Okay.” She smiled, Cranmer smiled, and he took the selfie. Twice.
“Thanks.” Cranmer put the phone back in his pocket.
“How does Juan Cabrillo fit in with the elf witch’s scrying crystal?”
“Cabrillo’s logbook of the voyage along the West Coast was never found,” Annja said. “There’s only a concise summation made by Andrés de Urdaneta, a Spanish navigator who also worked on finding a way to sail around the world after Magellan’s crew managed.”
“Another ship’s captain who didn’t finish a voyage.”
“Exactly. Anyway, one of the local professors of history at Cal State has some old journal pages that one of his students said had been in the hands of his maternal grandmother’s family for years. They were an heirloom of some sort, saved in a safe-deposit box that ended up bequeathed to the student in a will. He asked Dr. Orta to have a look at it. Dr. Orta had read I was in LA working with Krauzer, so he called me.”
“He’s a fan of the show?”
“Claims to be, but he’s more interested in history. The papers Dr. Orta showed me claim to be from one of the mates aboard the San Salvador, a man named Julio Gris. Gris was a treasure hunter and in the papers he states that he found a lead to a lost treasure.”
“But this could be a hoax.”
Annja held up the scrying crystal. “It could be, except the papers describe this perfectly.”
The papers Dr. Vincent Orta possessed had a sketch of the scrying crystal. The drawing was on the fourth page of Julio Gris’s manuscript. The parchment was old and weathered, unevenly burned along one side, and had turned the amber hue of honey. All twelve sheets were hermetically sealed in individual plastic protectors.
Some of the ink had faded, but Orta had brought the lines back to clarity with a chemical treatment. Annja just hoped that the work hadn’t erased the hidden message she thought might be there.
She sat on a high stool at an architect’s desk in the university classroom Orta had opened for their use that night. He’d also taken the liberty of sending out to a Mongolian restaurant and had ordered enough so that Krauzer could join them for dinner.
Orta had been polite about the unexpected company, but he wasn’t overly friendly to Krauzer, who continued to be loud and obnoxious. The director didn’t notice the snub on Orta’s part, though.
“So that’s my scrying crystal?” Krauzer leaned over Annja’s shoulder to look at the page.
“I believe so.” Once she’d carried the crystal in, Orta had become as excited as she was, and he was just as certain it was the artifact described in Gris’s papers. Krauzer shook his head. “Nah. Doesn’t look anything like my crystal.”
Annja shot him a look. “It’s round. It’s glass. It has four flat spots on it. That,” she said, pointing the chopsticks at the glass ball, then at the drawing, “is this.”
“I don’t see it.” Thankfully, Krauzer’s phone rang and he turned away to answer it.
Orta shook his head. “That man’s an idiot.”
“I heard that,” Krauzer said.
“Good. I don’t have to repeat myself.” Orta heaved a sigh.
“So we’re in agreement?” Annja asked.
“Definitely. I can’t believe you found this.”
“I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t shown me these papers. Sometimes it’s like that. There are places all over the world where artifacts have sat in plain sight for years and no one knew what they were until they started investigating.”
“Do you know where Krauzer got it?” Orta asked.
“Not yet.”
Orta studied Krauzer. “He didn’t tell you?”
“He doesn’t know. He got it from a set designer. She’s out of town on a shopping spree somewhere in South America. I’ve sent emails, so hopefully, when she gets somewhere with internet access, she’ll have more information.”
“There’s not a bill of sale or something? No means of tracing this?” He shook his head in disbelief.
“Set designers collect from everywhere and often the objects sit in warehouses—or their homes—until they can find a movie to sell it to. They’re given a budget and, more or less, told to spend it. I’ve also discovered that sometimes the bills of sale are as fictitious as Hollywood. Tracking down where things actually came from can be difficult. Besides, we’re more interested in where this is going to take us. If we find out for sure what this is, we’ll figure out where it’s been.”
A rueful frown pulled at the corners of Orta’s mouth. “Where it takes you, perhaps. One of us still has classes to teach.”
That was true. Annja felt bad for him. She couldn’t imagine being trapped on a schedule without recourse to follow up on an artifact. “I appreciate you calling me in on this. And I appreciate dinner.”
“It’s the least I could do. I haven’t forgotten you agreed to take a lecture for me at some point.” Orta grinned. “That’s got me in pretty solid with the dean.”
“Well, let’s see if we can decipher what Julio Gris was protecting.”
* * *
“ARE YOU GOING to get me out of here?” Melanie Harp pulled at the oversize orange jumpsuit as she sat at the visitation window in the LAPD jail. “This place is horrible, Ligier. They’re treating me like I’m a criminal.”
She spoke in French because using the language made her feel special and because she didn’t want the guards and prisoners around her to listen in.
She ran her fingers through her hair and tightened her grip on the phone that connected her to the man on the other side of the bulletproof glass that separated them.
“I’ll get you out as soon as I can, baby,” Ligier de Cerceau replied calmly. He was always calm. That somber solidness was one of the things about him that had first attracted Melanie. When he was in LA, he was her rock.
He looked as if he was carved out of