This woman was a crusader.

And a pretty hot one too.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Thalia demanded.

“I’m just thinking you’re an admirable woman.”

Thalia’s eyes narrowed. “I have a boyfriend.”

Of course you do.

“That’s not what I meant. I mean, like, if someone was going around destroying every Edison cylinder recording, I’d want to beat their face in.”

“Cylinder recording?”

“The first music was recorded by the Edison company on cylinders in the 1880s. It was the most popular medium until about 1910 or so.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Most people don’t. I have an original player from the turn of the century and a small collection of cylinders. You can come over and listen to some if you want.”

Thalia rolled her eyes. “Come over to my place and listen to my cylinders? That’s a new one.”

“I don’t mean anything by it. Your boyfriend can come too.”

She shook her head and grumbled, “Let’s just stick to the job, all right?”

Heinrich sighed and they continued their tour of the Met. It looked like this was going to be a long case.

Early the next morning, before he left to meet Thalia at JFK so they could catch their flight to Athens, he Skyped Jan.

Heinrich had met the kid a year ago in the weirdest place possible—a neo-Nazi rally in Poland. He’d infiltrated the group to help a client solve the murder of her husband, who had possession of documents that supposedly pointed to the location of a fabled Nazi gold train hidden during the war’s last days. The march had been attacked by Communists, whom Heinrich hated only slightly less than Nazis, and he’d had to haul a teenaged Nazi skinhead from the fight.

That was Jan—a belching, shoplifting, glue-sniffing mess of a kid who had, oddly enough, helped him crack the case. It turned out the gold train didn’t have any gold, so Heinrich didn’t end up a multimillionaire. Instead, he ended up being a pseudo-stepdad to a Polish problem child.

Not a bad deal overall. Thanks to equally fucked-up parents, Heinrich had been a lot like Jan at his age. He wished he’d had someone come along and show him the right way to live, and to be admitted into a halfway house for unwanted kids where he could get a second chance at childhood. That would have saved Heinrich some pretty grim years.

Of course, Jan didn’t have his own computer with access to Skype. The halfway house strictly monitored the Internet; otherwise the little bastards would be looking at porn twenty-four hours a day. There was only one house computer they could use. Heinrich had set up certain times when he would call, and Jan would be there to answer. Therefore, he was surprised when the camera turned on and he saw one of the monitors instead.

“Oh crap,” Heinrich said in Polish. “What happened?”

“Nothing worse than usual, Mr. Muller. He’s been acting out in class and not doing his homework.”

“Damn it,” Heinrich muttered under his breath. Out loud he asked, “Where is he now? Is he in detention or something?”

The monitor looked uncomfortable. “No. He said he didn’t want to speak with you.”

“What? Why not?”

The monitor shrugged. “I don’t know. He isn’t speaking much. He’s been in a serious depression since you left. It’s all highs and lows with that kid.”

Heinrich sighed.