Reluctant thief Baz Barret is tasked with stealing from the formidable archaeologist Rei Collingwood--who happens to also be his college crush and rival--but when Rei goes missing after the burglary, Baz must find her before he's blamed for her disa...
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Chapter Nine: The Ransom
Of all the professors currently teaching the downtown campus, Rei had to be in contact with Dr. Alison Monroe.
Baz knew his way to her office. He knew the long brick corridors and the way sound reverberated down them. Faraday introduced a problem he hadn't faced yet in the search for a missing archaeologist: the faculty of the Anthropology and Archaeology Department knew who he was. It just happened that the uneasy familiarity the long walk brought wasn't enough to convince Baz to cut his losses and trudge on without Monroe's help.
If Gwen brushed off his questions with her condescending never-you-minds and Cheng glowered every time Baz saw him, he had to find his insider info somewhere.
Up two flights of stairs and down one hall full of morning light and floating dust motes, Baz found Doctor Monroe's office door. He knocked tentatively. Just because he was told Monroe would be in didn't mean she would be in her office.
She could be one more dead end in a strange mystery. Rei, vanishing voluntarily. A ransacked bedroom. A model. A brother. A family friend willing family heirlooms out of the family.
The door swung open. Baz blinked at the sharp woman at the door, her hair falling out of her style and her eyes narrowed while she studied him over the lenses of her glasses.
Monroe regarded him as she might regard a skeleton. She was an anthropologist first and foremost, and Baz was as open a book as anyone. Just as he might be able to discern a Babylonian cylinder seal from an Egyptian one, she could discern a certain kind of person by the calluses on his hands, the stock of him.
"Don't tell me," she said, drawing the moment out. "'The Excavation and Censorship of Erotic Art from Pompeii and Heraculaneum.' Yes?"
The look on Baz's face must've been answer enough. It was difficult to look a woman in the eye after she identified him as the author of a paper featuring the word phallus, and all the academic synonyms he could think of for it, about seventy times. He swallowed hard.
"That was almost three years ago," Baz said.
Monroe shrugged. "It was a good paper."
She stepped aside, letting him into the room before closing the door behind him. The office gave him the same claustrophobic feeling it had almost three years ago. That was a different lifetime and yet, Monroe appeared about the same. Same flyaway hair and stern face.
"What brings you here?" Monroe asked, slipping back behind her desk. "Planning on coming back?"
She didn't invite him to sit, but he did anyway. It felt wrong to stand over her, looking down on her while she glanced between him and her work.
"Rei Collingwood," Baz said.
The anthropologist paused, looking at him over her reading glasses. "What of her?"
