“But why bury her in your father’s grave?” Paul asked. “That’s the thing that keeps me awake at night. There were other graves nearer the street. So why that one? Was he involved in something special, something important, your father, Constantin Zhukovsky?”

“My father was no one, an entirely ordinary man. A baker, for God’s sake! Let him rest in peace!” The flush test had stopped working. Zhukovsky was far too excited by now.

“He had been dead for twenty-five years,” Paul persisted. “Something or someone made Mr. Wyatt go dig him up. Obviously, there was a point to the exercise. Unless Wyatt’s just nuts. Do you think he’s nuts?”

“I don’t know the man.”

“You never met him?”

“Never. I saw him brought into court, that’s it.”

“No theory about why he would dig up your father, then.”

In keeping with his professorial disposition, Zhukovsky could not resist the opportunity to give his sister’s death a spin. Paul hoped something in what he said would give them insight into his own motives, which remained tantalizingly elusive. “Christina must have known Wyatt, and took him along when she visited our parents’ graves. She always brought cut roses. Sometimes, she cried.”

Thus he implied that Stefan might have been his sister’s secret lover, Paul supposed.

“And he,” Alex Zhukovsky, swept away with his own imagination, went on with alacrity, “that bastard, thought of the grave when he had killed her. And then possibly, while burying my sister’s body, when he came upon the casket of my father, he looked inside, saw the medal worn by my father upon his burial, grabbed it, and grabbed the-rest without thinking.”

These convolutions didn’t seem to convince even the professor, and yet he seemed sincerely puzzled about something, to be struggling to explain the inexplicable. Part lies, part truth, Paul thought, but he couldn’t sort it out. Who was lying, Zhukovsky or Stefan?

“Yes, the medal, I wanted to ask you about that,” Paul said.

“It was my father’s. What else is there to say?”

“What was it?”

He squirmed. “A military honor from the early part of the twentieth century.”

“You’re an expert in Russian history, correct?”

“I am.”

No expert in modest manners, however, Paul noted. “You know your military history, no doubt.”

“It’s all military history in Russia.”

“You weren’t curious enough to do some research on this medal?”

“During this last year I’ve learned it’s called the Order of Saint George, First Class. It’s solid gold with precious inlays, an original historic medal, with some special features. A Carmel antiques expert appraised it for several thousand dollars. Bad news for your client. I understand its theft constitutes a separate felony.

“My father wanted to be buried wearing it on a sash across his shoulder. He used to say he got it as a kind of joke when he was little for fighting with his teachers. I never knew it was valuable.”

“Was your father in the military? Involved in the revolution in 1917, maybe?”

“No.”

“Funny how things happened there,” Paul said. The naïveté of the comment was rewarded with another snarl. This professor was the fiery sort of intellectual. Paul had no use for intellectuals these days. They made lousy lovers who wouldn’t live with you. “Wouldn’t the poor old tsar be turning in his grave, seeing how things have turned out for the country that murdered him to make a revolution,” he went on, hoping to stoke the fire.

“The country did not murder the tsar! The tsar and his family were assassinated by Bolshevik elements.”

“I understand they finally dug up the grave of the Romanovs in 1991,” Paul went on, “but two of the bodies were missing. It’s a strange parallel.”

Zhukovsky made a sound, guttural, untranslatable, but plainly repelled by his comment. Paul had just been riffing, and had never intended to turn the professor off.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to disrespect your father. It’s just-you were talking about the second burial-and the two missing bones.”

Zhukovsky had had enough. “You have my card,” he said. “I want the remains of my father delivered to me care of that address within one week. I’m dead serious about this.”

“He lies, left, right, and center,” Paul said. As Wish dodged the curbs, driving them back to Carmel, Paul scribbled. “Let’s assume he hired Stefan to dig up the grave, but not to kill his sister. Question is, why? For the medal? It’s valuable, and not doing the old man any good under six feet. If Zhukovsky wanted that so badly, then why hire Stefan Wyatt to take his father’s remains as well?”

“For a satanic ritual,” Wish guessed. “Or, what about this? In Africa they grind up rhino horn for an aphrodisiac and sell it in the Far East…”

“The problem with your theory is, once he had the bones back from the cops, he cremated them. We’ll check that, but I believe him on that score. I’ll grant you, maybe the old man had a horn on his nose no one’s talking about that’s all ground up…”

“You’re makin’ fun of me.”

“Not at all. It makes as much sense as anything I can think up.” Paul thought some more, then said, “Maybe Zhukovsky has some genetic issue to explore that he doesn’t want anyone to suspect. One of those diseases that hits in middle age? Like we were all worried Arlo Guthrie might get.”

“Who?”

“Son of Woody?” Paul stared at Wish, who continued to relay incomprehension. How could he not know these cultural icons? Was Paul, twenty years older, so removed from the current set of urban legends? “Huntington’s chorea. Or Parkinson’s? I’m not sure which diseases they can find through genetic testing, but I’m making an educated first guess that’s what he wanted to find out.”

“Then why doesn’t the professor just test his own blood?” Wish asked, showing one of his rare flashes of intelligence.

“Good point,” Paul admitted.

“His father was dead in his grave for twenty-five years. So what’s the big rush?”

“Make a note for me to try to obtain Constantin Zhukovsky’s medical records. Alex’s will be completely off limits. I want you to Google the Web tomorrow. Look for the Order of Saint George. Write up a report of whatever you can find out and leave it in the mailbox at the Pohlmann office. Nina will be working there Sunday night.”

“Check.”

“I want verification on what the medal is worth, who gets it, and why.”

“No sweat.”

“Now, the boyfriend, if that’s what he was. The man she spent a lot of time with at this conference.”

“Sergey…”

“Krilov. Use the ID software on my computer at the office and find out more. Do the same on Constantin Zhukovsky, the father. See if you can find out when he came to this country. Maybe you can find some immigration records. You can get old ship passenger lists on the Web these days. Ellis Island, the whole thing. Check some of the genealogy sites like Ancestry.com. Hell, see what you can find on the whole mother-loving family. Alex. Christina. Give that info to Nina, too. Let’s get a copy of the death certificate. Call the county and see what office you have to go to.”

“Sure.”

“I can’t believe Dean Trumbo didn’t do any of this work. This is nuts. She’s in the middle of trial, trying to incorporate this basic investigative information, tearing her hair out.” Paul clenched a fist.

“Didn’t Trumbo rent your office last year?”

“Yeah. Deano.”

“That’s the same face the professor made when he said that name.”

“Deano’s giving the P.I. profession a bad name, and I think it’s time I did something about it.”

“Talk to him?”

“Something like that,” Paul said.

“Whoa.”

“What happened to Christina when she left the good old U.S.A.? A brother is going to know this stuff,” Paul said absently. They passed the Del Monte exit, along the eucalyptus-covered grounds of the Naval Postgraduate School. To their right a neighborhood of not-too-spiffy frame houses led to the little strip of sand called Del Monte Beach, where Paul had once had a bachelor apartment on Surf Way.