Glass House

By Patrick Reinken

Megan Davis is a smalltown civil litigator who dropped out of the world for a year after her husband died in a plane crash. Now back at her job and her house and her life, she finds herself faced with an old client, Jeremy Waldoch, who tells her a female former employee has brought a case against him.

It’s not Waldoch’s first defense. It’s not even the first defense Megan’s handled for him.

There was another one before. Another former employee. Another woman. Another set of claims arising out of sex, out of relationships gone bad, and – as Megan starts to discover when she digs into the new case – out of diamonds and deceit and murder.

But she’s not the only one looking at Jeremy Waldoch. Megan’s agreement to take the case sets her on a course that brings her to the attention of Jackson Hanley, a federal agent with an altogether different interest in Megan’s client.

Hanley’s task is to bring down the man who runs Laurentian Mines, a violently aggressive diamond mining company – a “glass house” – in a forgotten corner of South Africa. That man is Waldoch himself, and when Hanley can’t get Waldoch for what he’s done in Africa, he knows he’ll have to find a way to get him in the United States.

When all those worlds come together, Megan faces choices she doesn’t want and options she doesn’t like, ultimately finding herself in the middle of a battle between Hanley and Waldoch, truth and lies, and right and wrong – a battle that extends across continents and an ocean in a shattering series of events that may cost her everything she has.

Reinken is also the author of Judgment Day, described by Publishers Weekly as “a nearly seamless medical/legal chiller that’s one slick piece of work.”

The ebook edition of Glass House also includes the first chapter of Omicron, which is now available in ebook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Reinken
• Release date: Jul 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466120327

Patrick Reinken

Patrick Reinken is the author of Glass House, Omicron, and The Guardian's Deceit. He also wrote Judgment Day, which Publishers Weekly described as "a nearly seamless medical/legal chiller that's one slick piece of work." Judgment Day was published by Simon & Schuster and, in Japan, by Hayakawa Publishing. He is the Director of Legal Affairs for the National Marrow Donor Program in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Glass House

Patrick Reinken

Copyright 2011 Patrick Reinken

Smashwords Edition

Publication and Copyright Information

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Patrick Reinken (Smashwords edition)

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Cover design by Patrick Reinken.

Cover photograph of the Mir diamond mine by Vladimir Artukhov. Cover photograph is licensed under and used pursuant to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license. At the time of use, the human-readable summary of the full legal license could be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en; the full legal license, including disclaimers of warranties, could be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode. The image was originally posted at Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/knave2000/XpCCB#5257662700913048066) and was reviewed there on July 21, 2011, by Patrick Reinken, who confirmed that it was available under the above license on that date. As of the same date, the image additionally was posted on Wikimedia Commons, with identification and description of the same license (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mir_mine_in_Yakutia.JPG). Use of the photograph does not and is not intended to implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship of, or endorsement by the Original Author and Licensor.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Prologue: Pressure

The Good and Solid Pink

Book I: Rough

Chapter 1 – Megan

Chapter 2 – The News in Cairo

Chapter 3 – Talking to Anthony

Chapter 4 – Bucephalus

Chapter 5 – Anthony

Chapter 6 – Two Sides

Chapter 7 – On the Shore of the Diamond Coast

Chapter 8 – The Structure of Glass and the Body Behind It

Chapter 9 – Night

Book II: Marketing

Chapter 10 – Deposition Preparation

Chapter 11 – The Pipes and the Rough

Chapter 12 – To Liberia

Chapter 13 – Neria Motaung

Chapter 14 – Deposition

Chapter 15 – A Call to Saifee

Book III: Windows

Chapter 16 – The Tango

Chapter 17 – Security

Chapter 18 – Window

Chapter 19 – Lora

Chapter 20 – Night Call

Chapter 21 – Out From Laurentian

Book IV: Cleave and Cut

Chapter 22 – Cleave

Chapter 23 – The Transcript

Chapter 24 – Hanley at the Cape

Chapter 25 – Finn

Chapter 26 – Peter’s Pence

Chapter 27 – Warrant

Chapter 28 – A Little Independent Investigation

Chapter 29 – The Fate of Arthur Ariacht

Chapter 30 – Leaving Claire

Chapter 31 – At the Home of Samuel Chilcott

Chapter 32 – Cut

Chapter 33 – Ruined Rough

Chapter 34 – Search

Chapter 35 – Milvian Bridge

Book V: Polishing

Chapter 36 – Rupert

Chapter 37 – Glass House

Chapter 38 – The Right Motivation

Chapter 39 – Two Calls

Chapter 40 – Krelis

Book VI: Sale

Chapter 41 – A Return to Form

Chapter 42 – Into Day Three

Chapter 43 – Riding Bucephalus

Chapter 44 – Preparation

Chapter 45 – Two Choices

Chapter 46 – The Offer

Chapter 47 – In the Vallonia

Chapter 48 – Up and Out

Chapter 49 – The Chrysler with the Pushbutton Shift

Book VII: The Box

Chapter 50 – Bombardier

Chapter 51 – Flight

Chapter 52 – Advance

Chapter 53 – The Box

Chapter 54 – Upington

Epilogue: Diamonds

Chapter 55 – The Sand

Chapter 56 – The Pink

Author’s Note

Note Addendum (2011 Ebook)

COMING SOON

Omicron

About the Author

Prologue

Pressure

The Good and Solid Pink

You could smell the ocean. To the south – past Vredendal and Lambert’s Bay and Saldanha – the gray-blue waters were mixing. The cold Benguela Current on the continent’s west and the Agulhas on its east churned together at the spot the Portuguese first called the Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms, and the salt of the seas was being beaten out into the winds in the process. This near to the Cape the sharp tang of the salt and the softer, mossy smell of the ocean blew up into the desert and savannahs on the same trade winds that blew the Benguela north.

Anthony Dikembé had known the smells of this place for most of his thirty-six years. There were days when they were lighter, more of a hint. And there were days when they were heavier, with a presence that could fill him. But they were always there. Even far up and onto the karoo plateaus where he was, he could catch the smells of the ocean in the air.

Anthony breathed deeply. The surf was two miles to the west and hundreds of feet down in elevation, but the sea was strong that evening. He could almost taste it. His eyes drifted past the heights of the sorting rooms, conveyors and crushers, and the mine’s other facilities and machinery. He squinted and stared beyond the lights that decorated the buildings’ corners and tops, trying to search out some glimmer against the expanse of water in the distance, as if to prove the water was there.

He couldn’t find it. Fog on the coast was common, and a heavy bank was drifting in and hiding any reflected light from the just-vanished sun.

Anthony breathed in again, smiling faintly before returning to the papers on the clipboard in his hand. He was a supervisor at Laurentian Mines, overseeing operations on the middle shift that ran from eleven in the morning to seven at night, and he was reading over the recovery reports and making checkmarks based on staffing points that were sent in a memo the previous day.

Laurentian’s management wanted to add three dozen miners across all crews, but they wanted ten others cut before they did. Anthony’s extra notations were on worker performance – a simple mark next to someone’s name likely meant that man would be dropped from the shift and replaced.

He scanned the numbers and names again, adding an extra check next to a worker listed at the bottom, then signed a scrawl on a line at the end of the page. He clipped the pen to the top of the board and moved to a pickup truck that was idling nearby.

The truck was headed off site, and approaches by workers were typically forbidden, but Anthony’s movements brought no reaction. His position entitled him after all. As shift chief, the sign-off and pass of the log to the administrative rep were part of the routine.

As expected, the driver wasn’t there. As always, Anthony had timed it that way.

He reached into the truck’s open window and dropped the clipboard and log onto the driver’s seat. Before his arm came back out, he shot it straight, his wrist snapping against the shirt’s cuff.

The diamond – more specifically a piece of diamond rough – jumped into his hand.

The stone was a little over a half inch across, its shape a rough octahedron, an eight-sided figure with irregular triangle faces. The sides of the stone stepped across one face like stairs, and its surface was coarse and smooth at the same time, unfinished but surprisingly soft to the touch.

On the outside, a layer of sandy soil dirtied portions of it. But the cleaner areas allowed a glimpse of what was inside. There, visible under the coating of caked-on grime, the diamond seemed little more than a sizable piece of off-color, maybe smoked-out glass. But a perception like that was naïve. Uninformed. Misleading, even.

It wouldn’t look like anything to a casual observer. A thousand people could pass by and not notice diamond rough sitting on the ground, and if they saw it, they might think it no more than a chunk from a broken soda bottle. For someone who knew, though – for someone with a different eye altogether, a trained eye – a glimpse would confirm that the stone wasn’t glass, and it wasn’t simply a stone. Or even simply a diamond.

In actuality it was quite something, indeed.

The rough diamond that Anthony held was a little large for stealing, but in the end it had been too hard for him to resist. Because it was pink.

Even in the low light of the evening, Dikembé knew the rough was at least a good, solid pink. The color was uniform and deep, maybe as high as intense. It seemed to extend throughout the piece.

There was no guarantee of that, of course. The stone’s depth of color wouldn’t be known fully until a wash, cut, and polish were completed, and the color could be lost at any stage in that process. Particularly in the cut. A cutter cleaving fancy rough might make a cut in a vivid pink or green or blue diamond, the richest of colors, then pull away and find in horror that the color had gone faint. Or had changed in shade altogether.

Fancy colors in diamonds are products of impurities and contamination at an atomic level, and they change with every shift in the light that hits them. The wrong cut in colored rough, and a $250,000 stone might drop to $25,000 in the blink of an eye. But Anthony hadn’t even needed a window into the stone to tell this one would cut well, to at least that good and solid pink.

That assumed anyone would get the chance to work on it, though. And someone working on it was hardly a certainty, because the good and solid pink was also a unique pink, destined for a unique purpose.

In diamond mines, workers don’t get contact with the mined ore itself. Security concerns and automation have together achieved a separation between the actual stones and hands that might be inclined to steal them. Anthony’s position brought him access, however, and he’d used that access when the opportunity arose.

The tucked-away pocket tailored into Anthony’s shirt cuff wasn’t visible in a typical examination. Five minutes into the crew changeover that started Dikembé’s shift, he had pulled the stone from where he hid it in the mine the day before, and he slipped the diamond into the cuff pocket.

Now, beside the truck, he held it again. The stone was warm, heated by the hours of contact with his body, and he folded his fingers against his palm to conceal it. He felt its smooth surfaces and hard shape against his skin.

Anthony bent beside the truck. In the growing darkness, he ran a hand along the arch of the rear wheel well on the driver’s side. He reached under, tapping along the metal of the truck body until he found what he wanted, and then pressed the good, solid pink rough into a small carrier that was welded between the well and the truck’s back bumper. He closed the carrier’s lid.

Anthony stood quickly and stepped away, moving toward the mine’s screening and clearance rooms. The truck would be tracked, and the rough would be plucked from the hidden carrier off the grounds. But that was someone else’s responsibility, and he was glad of it.

In the changing room inside, Dikembé undressed and passed his clothes to a screener who wore the sparkling white of a cleanroom garment. The screener disappeared down a hallway off the main room.

Anthony headed to the showers, tiptoeing hurriedly on the cold tiles of the hallway. Most of the men were already gone. The procedures required to get out of the facility and to the buses were rote for them, and they had hurried through them to get home.

While Anthony showered, two more men in cleanroom garments watched, their arms crossed, their expressions bored. Neither budged as he moved to the drying room, toweled off, and passed the towel to yet another person. Still naked, Dikembé walked down the long hall that separated the shower rooms from the dressing area. A wall cutout ran the length of it, with staffers posted at regular positions.

Sometimes mine employees made it through the hallway without being singled out, and sometimes they didn’t. Anthony Dikembé wasn’t lucky today.

The screener at the end extended a white-clad arm and signaled him to step out. When he did, finding a bench at the hallway’s end, two more screeners descended, equipment in hand.

Anthony sat as still as he could manage. He breathed slowly, his hands pressed against the bench so any nervousness wouldn’t be noticed. He fixed his sight on a point on the floor, trying to look complacent while he worked to keep his eyes from jumping between the two men.

They checked inside his ears with lighted magnifiers. They lifted his tongue. They tapped his teeth with a dental probe. They palpated the tender areas of his body, feeling for anything he might have hidden in his scalp, his armpits, his groin.

The screeners checked between his fingers and toes and in his navel. When they told him to stand, Anthony rose, then immediately turned and bent, his hands flat on the bench he had been sitting on. One of the screeners clicked on a handheld light and looked for any signs of irritation around his rectum before pushing a gloved finger in, feeling for stones, and pulling it out when none were found.

Anthony moved on after that. Among those chosen for the extra examination, some at that point again would be able to step out and get on their way. Those people would be done.

Not him. Not today.

Laurentian owned four standard and two backscatter X-ray scanners, and the gesture toward another door meant imaging. There was a time when standard X-ray images were regularly taken at diamond mines, but the cancer rates started to escalate, and the radioactive screens were stepped back. Then De Beers came up with a low-dose radiographic machine, and X-rays were in vogue again. Now an employee could count on a body X-ray, either backscatter or standard, anywhere from four to six times a year.

This was one of those times for him.

Anthony pressed his chest against the screen and lifted his arms to grasp two handles mounted on the wall at shoulder level. A woman he didn’t see said, Hold, and the machine clicked. He waited for it to adjust to a lower angle, heard the second Hold, and relaxed only at the click that followed that.

Examination of the pictures took only seconds. The screeners waved him on.

He put his clothes on in the outer locker room. Each morning the bus dropped him and the other miners at the entrance just beyond that room. They would change, pour into the mine, do their work, and leave at the end of the day, filing through the company-operated screens.

At the end of any examinations, the screeners would pass back the clothes the miners took off at the beginning. By that time the clothes were hand-examined and bombarded by ultraviolet light. Short-waved light like that fluoresces any diamonds in the clothing, making them stand out like flares.

Laurentian looked in every place, and in every way, they could.

Anthony turned toward the exit. He’d get on the bus and head to the company-owned apartments, sleep through the night and into the morning, then return mid-day tomorrow.

He was almost out the door when he was stopped.

Mr. Dikembé?

The man at the door wore a company uniform. An administrative uniform. His name was neatly stitched onto a Laurentian Mines patch sewn over his heart.

You’re Anthony Dikembé?

Anthony looked puzzled. He knew seven languages. He was raised with Setswana, a Sotho language of northwestern South Africa. He learned three others – Afrikaans, English, and Dutch – growing up. And he’d picked up French and Hebrew while he was getting his Masters at Columbia in New York, then learned most of the elements of Fanagalo, the southern African, pidgin language of the mines, while working at Laurentian.

But he looked puzzled anyway.

Sir? he said. He tried to sound uncertain, to match the look on his face.

This way please. The man held a clipboard of his own. He’d been taking notes, and he extended the pen he was using to point down another hallway.

Yes, sir, Anthony said, for no reason other than that’s what he should say.

They made it fifty feet or so before the man pointed down another hall. Another distance, then another point. Then at least two more times after that, until Anthony wasn’t sure himself where he was anymore.

The man stopped him at a door Anthony had never seen. It was steel, with thick, riveted edges that were broken only by a one-foot-square panel that could be slid open at the bottom. And it was heavy. He could tell that with a look.

The man knocked but no response came. He twisted a lever, opened the door, and ushered Anthony inside.

The room was stark and bare. There were no windows, and the little light that was there was yellow and faded, as though its color had fought and lost against a greater darkness in this place. The door Anthony just passed through was the sole exit he saw. The only things in the room were a man, a bolted-down chair on which that man sat in the center of the space, and a hose that ended at the man’s feet. A trickle of water was draining from the hose and across a beaten, wood floor.

The man stood up as Anthony came in. Hello, Mr. Dikembé, he said. He was smoking a bitter-smelling cigarette, and wisps of the foul smoke wafted from his mouth with each word. Have a seat.

Book I

Rough

Chapter 1

Megan

Megan Davis dug into the gap in the front seat of the decades-old Chrysler she was driving, searching for the card key that would lift the gate for the building’s parking garage. Same as every morning.

As she pushed one hand under the Chrysler’s front seatback, Megan held the steering wheel and a balanced cup of designer coffee in the other hand. A print of pale lipstick marked the cup’s white cap.

She’d purchased the coffee at a Starbucks a block farther down Massachusetts Street, waiting in a seemingly unmoving line for the privilege of paying five bucks for something that’d cost a dollar at a diner. The town’s main street was changed from what it used to be, re-shaped by the franchising that was taking over America. Where Massachusetts once was small shops, a theater, and a soda fountain or two, Megan could pass American Eagle and Urban Outfitters and The Buckle and a dozen other places that were staffed by fresh faces who beamed at the sight of any customer. Eight or ten restaurants, gleaming with wood and glass, were packed with college students at night and business people during the day.

The building that housed the law firm where Megan worked was a small and shining bank, in the small and shining town of Lawrence, Kansas. The city was a vastly different place from the Lawrence of a few years before. Or even a year before.

Megan Davis’s hometown had changed so much recently that she hadn’t recognized it when she returned to it. She’d been gone for twelve months, a year in which she’d disappeared from everyone who knew her from her life before.

And now she was back. For what, thirteen weeks or so? Three months already?

A car horn honked behind her. Megan glanced in the mirror and considered a gesture, but she found the card – crammed all the way back – and she pulled that out instead.

She juggled coffee and steering wheel, card in her teeth, as she rolled the window down. She palmed the card key against the trigger panel for the garage, and the gate arm rose.

Megan angled the Chrysler’s nose between the concrete barriers on the ramp. The car was an Imperial Southampton from the late 1950s – she didn’t know exactly what year and didn’t particularly care. It was pale yellow and wide, low-backed but high-finned, with a visible spare tire mount centered on the trunk and a pushbutton automatic shifter on the dash, to the left of the wheel.

Megan felt a hundred years old driving the Chrysler, but the car was a classic. That’s what she’d always been told anyway, and she supposed it probably was true. Ben had known his cars, no question about that. The Chrysler was his baby, and she’d believed what he said. But she also knew it was a car she didn’t pick and didn’t want so much now. Not anymore.

Megan found a spot and parked. She shut the engine off and sat, one hand still holding the coffee, the other resting on the wheel. She studied herself in the rearview.

She had taken a year in which she was, quite bluntly, gone from work and from Lawrence and from everything she knew. She’d been back at work for the three months since then, but even after that time, it didn’t seem the same. Right now, sitting in the Southampton, she assumed it never would.

The last year and a half had cost her. Her hair was trim and pretty, cut short and bluntly. It shone in whatever light fell on it, and its color was dark chestnut wherever the gray hadn’t touched it. The blue eyes were pretty as well, despite the somber depth that swallowed her so much of the time. Pretty but lined. Even with enough time for her to have gotten over it, to use a friend’s words, the lines around her eyes had deepened.

Still, she was attractive, and at thirty-four, men seemed to notice her. Which would be nice, if she had any interest in return.

Megan wasn’t much for therapy, but a psychiatrist had suggested breathing exercises as a way to calm herself. She still tried them now and again, but the advice came months ago – fifteen months since she last sat on the three hundred dollar an hour couch, she realized.

That was far too long a time to be sticking with things that hadn’t helped all that much, but when she felt her chest start to constrict and her blood start to rush, she breathed deeply anyway, held it, and blew the breath out smoothly and slowly.

She pulled at the door handle and stepped from the car.

_______________

Megan passed the office receptionist with a nod, then got two nods herself on the fifty-foot walk to her office, both from attorneys looking busy. She gave them right back in return.

The truth was that she didn’t know either person, just as she didn’t know many of the people in the office. Not really, anyway.

That’s what happens when you leave a place for months. You go away for a little while, but the little while turns out to be a longer while. And when you’re gone and paying attention to other things, the world shows its alarming tendency to keep moving right along without you.

Turning a corner and starting to shrug her briefcase off her shoulder and into her hand, Megan stepped into her office. For the first time that day, she saw a face that was familiar.

Jeremy Waldoch was sitting in her chair and talking on her phone when she came in. He was facing the door and should have seen her, but he didn’t react in any way.

A man Megan didn’t know, a large one at that, stood just inside the door. He plainly did notice her arrival. Arms crossed, he smiled flatly, in a neutral reaction to her presence.

Megan ignored him, turning her attention to Waldoch. He was big himself, broad and tall both, but not heavy. He was built like a triangle, narrow at the waist and wide at the top, with his body seemingly hemmed in only by the tailoring of a suit so impossibly expensive that Megan couldn’t imagine how much it cost.

She hadn’t seen Waldoch in almost two years, but he hadn’t changed a bit. His eyes were variously soft brown or moss green depending on the light. They hid under a deep, heavy brow, and his Roman nose slid down toward a small mouth that was perpetually pursed with narrow lips. His hair was dirty blond and poorly cut, shaggy even.

As Megan watched, puzzling over the presence of this man in her office – these men, she amended – Waldoch raised a hand toward her as a late acknowledgment. She noticed what was in that hand then, and it stopped her short before she could manage a comment.

He held a picture in a simple department store frame that Megan recalled buying for $2.99, marked down. Waldoch’s thumb was centered on the glass.

The picture was of Megan and Ben, freshly married and honeymooning on a beach in South Carolina. The thumb blocked the image of a boat that was waiting to take the couple on a beach tour.

He’d been waiting, Megan realized. He came here and was let in, and he’d kept himself busy by conducting a little business on the phone while going idly through her things.

You can put that down. Megan’s voice showed no emotion.

Waldoch looked at her. He smiled and nodded. He held a finger up to her.

Hang on a second….

I have to go, he was saying. He didn’t wait for a reply from the other end before hanging up.

Good morning, Megan, he said. His voice was rich like his suits. It was precise but warm, educated but open and friendly, sociable and inviting. It was perfectly affected, enunciated and tailored to him, fitting him as flawlessly as his clothes did. Anyone who looked at Jeremy Waldoch and then heard him would think, This is exactly what this man should sound like.

Such a pleasure to see you again, he said. Then, as if convincing her against some looming doubt, he added, Really. It is.

Waldoch shooed the other man away, brushing his hand toward him like he was cleaning a table laden with crumbs. The man stepped through the open door, closing it behind him.

I meant the picture, Megan said. You can put the picture down.

Waldoch lifted the beach photo. He studied it, still smiling as he breathed against the glass where his thumb had rested. He rubbed the forearm of the expensive suit on it to wipe the fingerprint away.

Ah, he said. This.

Waldoch returned the picture to its place, his eyes – brown now, Megan thought absently – fixed on the image of Megan and her husband. He reached a finger that threatened to re-smudge the freshly-wiped glass, stopping just before it touched the image of Ben’s face. The finger tapped without contact as Waldoch spoke.

I’m so sorry, he said. I heard, of course.

"You heard of course?"

I’ve paid attention while you were away.

Megan waved Waldoch from her chair, stepping past him. He found a seat on the client side of the desk as she set her briefcase down.

How’d you get in?

I’m a client, remember?

"You were a client. The case is over. We won, you paid me, we shook hands. I wrote the self-congratulatory, nice working with you letter and the file closure request myself. Both of them. So you were a client."

Was a client, then. But is that any way to talk to a former client?

I’m talking that way because you’ve magically appeared in my office, Jeremy. No notice, no invitation. You just showed up here, sitting at my desk, using my phone, holding my pictures.

Your secretary was far more considerate.

Linda let you in?

Linda likes me, Waldoch said. She finds me charming.

Women finding you charming is what gets you in trouble.

"In point of fact, women finding I’m wealthy is what gets me in trouble."

Megan didn’t respond to that. She sat, looking with resignation at the man across the desk from her. What is it you think I can do for you?

I need your help.

My help? Megan laughed. "You. Need my help. She leaned back in her chair. She was more comfortable with Waldoch in his new seat, and her expression was curious and more than a little challenging. I paid a little attention while I was away, too, she said. Not that much, but enough. The word is that you’ve become successful enough to hire bigger hitters than me."

True. And I did hire them.

But…?

But I’m talking to you.

Megan waited for the explanation. She knew Jeremy Waldoch well. You didn’t live through litigation like she’d led him through, working off and on for months, then through long days and nights for the week of a trial itself, without getting to know how people acted. How they thought. How they got their points made.

She knew Waldoch would go on, even without prompting from her. He was a rhetorical man, the type that always was setting up interest, letting it germinate into something that might be eagerness, and then being the one to resolve it with what he knew.

He loved that. He thrived on it.

Megan waited. He watched her, his last statement hanging between them. And then he spoke.

Someone has brought a case against me.

Chapter 2

The News in Cairo

The city wasn’t built by the pharaohs. It started as a small Roman outpost at the southern tip of what ultimately became the Khalij, the canal that connected the Nile to the sea. Since then the settlement had moved north. Consistently from its beginning, a town and then city has crept toward the Mediterranean, with each new phase being added beyond the earlier ones.

The Roman outpost became a fortress and then the Christian district of Mari Girgis, as that area remains. But Roman rule was followed by Arabic invaders in the seventh century, and they built a successor city, Fustat, farther to the north. In the millennium of Arabic government that followed, the city progressed even more in that direction, with each new ruling group building downstream from its predecessors. And so Fustat gave way to a series of capitals in an Islamic district centered on the hilltop Citadel fortress and, later, a medieval-walled town. That, in turn, gave way to the colonial district and the modern Downtown.

They had called one of the original Islamic areas the Victorious – al-Qahira – and it has given its name to the greater city on the Nile: Cairo. Today, the districts of the largest city in Africa fall in a somewhat crooked line, like a toppled building. They’ve maintained their distinctions – from the old city of Mari Girgis to the modern areas, the districts are an historical chain, a highly visible, horizontal stratification of years and cultures along the east bank of the Nile.

The most dominant by far remains the Islamic district, the medieval area around the city’s old fortifications. It is the heart of the Arabic community in Egypt, the home of its culture and traditions and gathering places.

The man could see a portion of the Citadel and the Old City Wall from the window in the café where he sat. He was drinking dark, thick-tasting tea, his fingertips holding the edges of a delicate, white china cup.

Despite the man’s casual demeanor, his eyes were constantly checking the street outside. He set the cup down and picked at the pastilla before him. It was a pigeon pastry, spiced and dusted in sugar and cinnamon, and it was not, truth be told, an especially good one. He gingerly pulled at the crust, putting a small bit in his mouth and letting it melt. Wiping his fingertips on a fold of the white robe he wore, the man pursed his lips as the sweetness came together with the bitterness of the tea.

Outside, Cairo displayed its usual bustle. People hurried, their faces set. Cars slowly worked through and around them, honking uselessly as children scampered past their bumpers.

A small shopping area was only a block away. The noise of it and the scents of perfume and incense being sold drifted down the street and into the café. The man knew that area well. People would be haggling there, arguing the prices of gold or silver jewelry, spices, cloths. The tones of bells sounded nearby, and birds cooed from a place even closer, both of those things adding pleasant notes to the cacophony of the city.

His frequent and quick glances also examined the inside of the café. The floor was brick and clay tile, the tiles over the bricks. Most of them – tiles and bricks both – were broken. Cigarette butts littered the floor. Many were Egyptian, some Russian. Mainly, they were Turkish.

The café’s walls were plaster on concrete. Or they once were, at any rate. For most of the lengths of the walls, the plaster was broken away up to the height where sitting people could reach.

It was as if a never-ending

Reviews for Glass House

[quibee · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A lady is murdered, under mysterious circumstances, and Captain Lacey, as usual, gets involved in solving the mystery.
It turns out that the lady had a secret life that turned on her and Lacey, by investigating, again steps on toes (which he doesn't necessarily have to do) and puts himself into danger.

[plunkinberry · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great story! Captain Lacey gets involved in another mystery. This is the third book in the series and I'm hooked. I like his honor and tenacity. I enjoy the supporting characters and continue to enjoy their development and the way all the relationships intertwine and interact. Mrs. Danbury and Lady Breckenridge are both interesting and I expect to see more of at least Lady Breckenridge in coming books. In the end, the mystery is solved and Lacey departs for the Sudbury School to take on his new role as a secretary... foreshadowing of the next story, The Sudbry School Murders!

[librisissimo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Substance: A somewhat far-fetched premise, but a fair mystery. Set in England just after the Peninsular Campaign. High and low society; some anachronistic attitudes; alludes to sexual perversions but does not describe them.Style: Reasonably straightforward, but refers too often to past events without really clarifying the situation up-front.

[dorie.craig · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another great read. I love the characters that the author has created and want to read more about them. I'm heading right into the next book of the series.

[jorgeousjotts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This mystery held my attention, and I'm becoming more attached to the characters.

[vesper1931 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The tales of Captain Lacey continue when he is asked to identify a body pulled from the Thames, thankfully for Lacey not who is expected. But an ex-actress and lover of a Lord, but Lacey takes up the challenge to find her murderer, leading to a house of ill-repute - the Glass House - and other killings.
Continuing to enjoy this series.

[jamespurcell · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not Lacey's best; he does a lot of stomping around shouting and threatening without much success. This series is, fortunately, a cut above this entry.