About a week passes and Esteban and the Strausses check out some of TNI's unanalyzed rituals. There's one involving merging that they pass up, and another one that they gather ingredients for but don't perform - a simple "transference" ritual. Finally they settle on a ritual performed with a coathanger that locks a door, allegedly.
The first try, however, goes wrong and the coathanger ends up wrapped around Esteban's arm. Strangely, he can feel through the coathanger, and bending it hurts him a lot. They leave it there and experiment some more with the ritual, determining that it locks the door down but that the door can be opened by removing the coathanger. Something for the side of the door away from the enemy, perhaps. Esteban is taken to the infirmary for a coathangerectomy, which involves drinking a lot of tequila first and still screaming and passing out when the hanger gets cut off him. Alexandra enters a report about this ritual into the TNI databases.
"I think half the chanting in rituals is put there by people to make fun of their friends." - Esteban
Meanwhile Thielo has been trying to use the web to locate more copies of The King in Yellow, and has been unsuccessful. This is either good or bad, depending on how you look at it.
While recovering from his hangover, Esteban gets a phone call from Graham, who tells him there's someone frantically trying to reach him at an old number. Esteban reluctantly lets the call through. It turns out to be an acquaintance of his brother from Los Angeles named Jose. He gibbers into the phone that they're coming for him, guys wrapped in bandages, and Jesus (Esteban's brother) and they're going to kill him. Esteban hears crashing crunching noises, and the call is over. He calls Angelina and she gets everyone else organized. Damien agrees that the walking dead are worth going to Los Angeles to investigate.
That evening sees them in Los Angeles. Thielo has gone equipped with a couple of books on Egyptology, but neither of these scholarly references has anything in them about killing mummies, even the wierder one. The rest of the mummy-fighting discussion culminates in the Strausses renting some mummy movies. Displaying (for once) more sense than the Strausses, Esteban and Angelina go out on the town to pick up bed partners.
In the morning (the late morning) packages arrive via the Inquisition's favorite courier service, containing guns and more than the usual number of napalm lighters. Esteban and Angelina report in, and Esteban happens to look at the book jackets of the Egyptology books that he's been avoiding thus far. He recognizes the blonde woman who was present at his brother's death.
This is followed by a humorous interlude where it appears that Esteban is about to fly off and go after her, and in fact he does leave leading everyone to go to UCLA where she works in an attempt to head him off. In fact, he has gone to the local mall to play video games. After they determine this, he heads off again and hooks up with some of the Kings (his brother's old gang) to find out who Jose's present girlfriend is. He also tells them that someone has killed Jose, and that he's after his brother's killer. They promise to back him up.
Going to talk to the girlfriend he tries to badger Jose's latest drug deals out of her and has to tell her he's been killed before she gives in and tells him. Apparently Jose was making a big sell to someone new, but he didn't say who - some Arab guy. The girlfriend does give him a pile of scraps of paper with phone numbers on them. Investigation through Graham reveals one to be the mobile phone of Mubarek Al-Fashad... it's the only anomaly in the names attached to the numbers.
"Maybe he just hung up on me, but it sure sounded like a loud scream and a big crunch." - Esteban
Meanwhile, Angelina has called the precinct that Jose was calling from and asked about the murder she heard about. They haven't heard anything and promise to go and investigate, which is good but not useful. By this time TNI research has turned up the home of the blonde woman (whose name is Anne Covington). They decide to go raid it since they know she's presently at school, and Esteban rejoins the team there.
Esteban is in a bit of a snit after Thielo insists on going in alone (as the sneaky person) and agrees but drives off. Thielo finds the back door is too heavily secured to enter, and finally has to muscle open the garage door and enter that way. Coming up from the garage to the second floor, he finds an Arabic man with a scarred face waiting for him. Thielo tries to insist that he's a cop and the man should come with him, but then claims his badge is out in the car. "Wrong answer." Mubarek (for it is he) stretches out his hands and Thielo is knocked unconscious by the experience of a ritual sacrifice blasted into his head.
Outside, people get anxious after fifteen minutes or so. They get Esteban to start back, and Graham reports a call on Mubarek's phone (the call gong to Anne's office) to Alexandra. She listens in:
"A guy broke in and tried to convince me he's a cop. You should get over here. I dropped a death on him and... he's not human!"
Alexandra almost charges right in but is convinced not to when the rest of the phone call turns out to be that Thielo is not, in fact, dead. In fact, he may not be able to die. She and Angelina wait for Esteban before going in. Alexandra does shoot the lock on the back door a few times before she is persuaded not to go in, and then does wiget empathy on the door. It's a sad door, and even goes as far to suggest that she might just be talking to herself.
The three of them encounter two mummies in the second floor room which are more or less impervious to gunfire. Esteban lights one on fire, and Alexandra charges upstairs to go down under a blast from Mubarek. Esteban goes up after her and then Angelina finishes off the mummies and follows, finding Esteban and Mubarek trading spells until Esteban decides to be more direct and just thump the man. They take him down and Esteban kills him. Thielo is also there, strapped to a table with his arm flayed open to reveal the mechanism underneath.
Thielo revives and takes Alexandra to a discreet doctor that Darwin provides them with. She is revived with adrenneline, but is still quite weak. (Incidentally, Esteban isn't so hot either after some mummy-thumping and transferred animal death spells). Alexandra can be moved, though the doctor is mostly baffled by her lack of injury. Still, she shouldn't go on a commercial flight.
Meanwhile, the other two wait for Anne to come home which she does fairly quickly. Getting the drop on her, in takes only a spell and a shot to bring her down. Esteban kills her too. Then they loot the house quickly and flee.
Everyone regroups and gets on a private plane back to Santa Fe. Darwin remarks that while they tend to fly out coach, they always return home by private jet.