Ashes and Bones by Dana Cameron

fact.
    On the other hand, I was more than willing to exploit that and his guiltiness for never hanging out with the old crowd at the conferences.
    Getting to be quite the coldhearted creature, aren’t we, Em?
    Sod off.
    I lucked out, he was there, for once, and more than that, answering his phone.
    “Hi, Emma! How’re you?”
    Damn caller ID. Always took me by surprise. “I’m doing okay, Rob, you?”
    “Can’t complain. What can I do for you?”
    Was there just a touch of impatience there? I didn’t care. “Got to ask you some questions about the antiquities trade, if you’ve got a minute.”
    “Just about five, but I’ll see what I can do for you. Shoot.”
    I outlined the problem, without giving him the reasons I was so interested in it. “I’m hopelessly out of date when it comes to the latest bulletins, and such. Where are the best places to sell gold, or rather, golden antiquities, these days?”
    There was a heavy silence on the other end. “What the hell are you getting into, Em?”
    “Um, let me rephrase that—”
    “What did you find this time, Emma? Exactly what kind of trouble are you in?”
    “I’m not…I didn’t find anything, it’s not me.” None of it was me, I thought angrily. “Look, I don’t know if you heard, if you remember what happened a couple of years ago—”
    “Is this the stuff that Duncan Thayer was going on about, back at the ASAAs?”
    There’s that name again. “What? No. Well, yes, but probably not the way he was…why? What did he tell you?”
    There was a long pause. Rob was going to be diplomatic. It was one of the things that I loved about him, ordinarily. Now, it just seemed like he was covering for my evil ex, the oft-wished-I-could-eradicate-him-from-the-record-of-my-life, Dunk the Skunk.
    “You know everyone was pretty well jarred by what happened at the end of the conference this year, up in New Hampshire?”
    How could I not know? I’d exposed a killer, one of my colleagues and someone I’d accounted a friend, and nearly got myself killed in the process. “Half of the folks blamed me for causing trouble, half thought I was a liar, and half of them just thought I was mental.”
    “Um, okay. Jarred. But Duncan falls into that third half. He claimed that he passed along a hello from someone and you assaulted him.”
    “Assault is a strong word,” I said carefully, knowing it wasn’t too strong: I’d gone ballistic, true, but with good reason. Didn’t make it less of an assault, I guess. “He gave me greetings from a murdered man, and the person using that man’s name was probably the murderer. The same guy who tried to kill me.”
    “This is to do with that thing out at the site that time? Three, four years back?”
    Rob was an old enough friend that he knew about the murders at Fort Providence on Penitence Point. “Yeah. You know, at the conference in January, Duncan made a point of telling me that a guy approached him. I don’t think Duncan was lying, now. I think the guy is back. Looking for me.”
    “Give me some context, Em.”
    So I told him about Tony and the gold he’d stolen and why I thought he was back. “I was trying to figure out if I could trace him by the British gold he took from the river. I never saw it, but I figure if I could track the dealers, find out which illegal antiquities markets would be the most like togive him a good profit and yet not send up any signals to the authorities—”
    “Emma, believe that I say this from a place of love: You think way too much. Always have, always will. You’re over-complicating this to extremes.”
    “Yeah? So tell me how you’d approach it.” Okay, I was feeling prickly.
    “Shit, if it were me? Either the gold is in bars, in which case you melt it down and sell it to your local refinery, or it’s in coins, and you don’t melt it because of the numismatic value. Also more portable that way. Go to your local coin dealer and say you found Grandpa’s collection in the attic