Big, strong, intimidating. A good choice for a bodyguard. Rudolph didn’t rent his guards. Everyone I’d seen so far was likely a relic hunter. This one was no exception.

He gave me a slow, heavy look and pointed to the weapons rack against the wall. I pulled out Dakkan and slid it into the rack. My knife followed.

I held out my arms. He patted me down. He was heavy-handed, but quick and thorough. I wasn’t the first person he’d frisked.

“This way.”

I followed him to the left, through a sitting room, into an office. Walking into the room was like stepping through a portal into some British lord’s 19th century study. Heavy, ornate bookcases of dark walnut wood lined the walls. The light from the windows, draped with thick green and gold brocade, reflected in the shiny dark parquet and drew bright rectangles on a bear’s pelt stretched like a rug over the floor. A massive stone fireplace rose on the left. Above it a manticore head glared at the world with glass eyes, its fangs bared.

An oversized baroque desk sat directly opposite the door. Behind it, an older man lounged in a chair. In his sixties, he must have been beefy when he was younger, but now his skin sagged, giving him prominent jowls. His longish grey hair was pulled back into a ponytail, mirroring the guard at the gate. It must have been in fashion among relic hunters, and it clashed with his white and blue polo shirt. His skin had the ruddy tint of someone naturally pale, who’d spent a lifetime broiled by the sun. His thick features and the heavy jaw combined into a brutish face, not stupid, but mean and short-tempered.

Mark Rudolph. The man who hired violent thugs who tortured little boys.

He pointed at an elaborately carved chair in front of his desk. “Sit.”

I sat. The bodyguard shut the double doors and stood in front of them, facing us, his arms crossed.

“What do you want?” Rudolph asked.

“Someone hired Pastor Haywood to authenticate some Christian artifacts. Now the pastor is dead, and you’re looking for the guy that hired him. Why?”

Rudolph leaned back, took a decanter from the corner of the desk, and splashed some amber-colored liquor into his glass. The smell of alcohol floated across the desk.

He didn’t offer me any. Aww, where was that famed Southern hospitality?

“Eighteen years ago, an asshole by the name of Waylon Billiot invited me to do a job with him. Normally I don’t work with those Creole motherfuckers out of Louisiana, but he’d been in Atlanta for years and the prospect was good, a buried temple on Mykonos. That’s a Greek island.”

I nodded. So considerate of him to educate me.

“He’d done his research; he had a guy who actually had seen the landmarks with his own eyes, so all he needed was extra money and muscle. We got ourselves a ship and crossed the Atlantic. It’s a pretty trip, the Mediterranean. With all the weird shit that’s breeding under the waves, you never know if you’ll make it. Was part of the appeal.”

He refilled his glass and took another swallow. Looked like that ruddy color wasn’t all sun.

He was talking and taking his time. Stalling. That was fine. I wasn’t in a rush.

“We got to the island. Took us a month to find the right cave and another two weeks for the divers to empty it. They pulled a lot of weird shit out of that cave. We had boxes of crap. But, the most valuable find, the real good stuff, was this chest, about this big, with a cross on the lid. We found it on the last day.”

He held his hands eighteen inches apart. “Solid white. Not plastic, not ceramic, not metal. Looked like wood but didn’t feel like it. They found it underwater, and as soon as they set it on the deck, the damn thing was dry. We poured some water on it, and it just rolled off. We tried to scrape it for sampling, couldn’t scratch it with a drill. Wanna guess what it was?”

“No.” Just because he was buying time didn’t mean I had to sell it cheap.

“We never figured it out. But during magic, the damn thing radiated power. Nicolson, he was our mage, tried to touch it and it knocked him the hell out. Haven’t seen anything like that since.”

He waited. I didn’t say anything.

“The market for Christian relics was hot. People realized faith had real power and they were buying artifacts left and right. You had your collectors, your investors planning to sit on it and resell it later, and your denominations, trying to purchase proof of their god.”

“Not a believer, yourself?”

“Can’t go to hell if you don’t believe in it. Besides, I like things I can touch, things I can own.” He raised his glass, letting the sun play on the cut crystal. “This glass is real, the bourbon in it is real. Faith didn’t buy this glass, or the bourbon, or this house.”

“Spoken like a true hedonist. That’s a Greek word.”

Anger flashed in his heavy-lidded eyes. Rudolph didn’t like to be mocked. No surprise there.

“We both knew that white chest was retirement money. We sailed home. Stopped in the Azores. Stopped again in Bermuda, spent a few days celebrating. Left port. And a mile from the fucking Port of Savannah the ship sank. No storm. No critters. Something blew a hole in the hull. I went to get the box. It wasn’t there.”

A shadow crossed his face. His eyebrows came together, his upper lip rose in a grimace, his hands curled into fists, and an instant later it was all gone, and he was back to drinking bourbon.

It still ate at him all these years later.

“The cargo went down with the boat. We spent a month combing the seabed. Pulled out everything else except for that box.”

“So you got conned by the Cajun. Did you still make a profit?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Sure. And Billiot gave me two-thirds of his earnings to compensate me for my boat. But it wasn’t about money. It was about respect. Nobody fucks with me like that. Nobody.”

“Nobody except Waylon Billiot.”

His eyes narrowed. “You got a mouth on you.”

You have no idea. “He never did admit to stealing the artifact, did he?”

“No. He was real smart about it. Never heard a peep about the box or him trying to sell it. He died about four years back. I opened a good bottle when I heard. For six years his snot-nosed kid kept his head down. See, the son is like his father. Billiot had a nose for magic, and so does Junior. He’s been digging in South America. But something happened on the last trip. Word on the street is, he’s damn near wiped out. He’s looking for a buyer for the box. He had the pastor to authenticate it, and he had a historian to establish where and when it popped up through history.”