Mesozoic Murder Read online

  Ansel considered this wealth of information, staunchly enduring the secondhand smoke irritating her sensitive stomach. “What was he doing on the computer?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

  “Do you know anyone named Griffin?”

  Karen ran a free hand through her shoulder-length blonde mane. “Can’t say that I do. Why?”

  “Nick mentioned the name. It’s not someone in the society and, if it’s a relative, I’d like to make contact and offer my sympathies.”

  “All of Nicky’s American family are dead. His relatives in Greece haven’t bothered to speak to him since he was a boy. I don’t see how anyone could miss hearing about the murder. Nicky’s finally getting his fifteen minutes of fame, isn’t he?”

  The heartless comment reminded Ansel of Cameron’s complaints that Nick had wanted worldly shortcuts to success. “Do you have any idea who would harm Nick?”

  “What about me? I could be in danger. Not to mention how this makes me look. I’ll be a pariah. Don’t get me wrong. Nicky and I were madly in love at one time. He changed. I changed. I didn’t hate him. I accepted things and moved on. We both agreed to start the divorce process in a few weeks. Dead or alive, I want Nicky out of my life.”

  Ansel stiffened. “Karen, Nick didn’t just die. He was murdered. He must have been involved in something very dangerous.”

  “I have no idea what he was up to. The last time I heard from him was the end of May. We talked about the divorce. Nicky never shared the details of his new life.”

  “Something happened. Aren’t you curious?”

  “Not at all.” She flicked ash into a pink marble ashtray. “I don’t need details.”

  The jangle of keys in the front door interrupted them. A tall man quickly entered and approached the living room. When he realized Karen wasn’t alone, he halted. “What’s up, babe?” he asked, making a point of staring at Ansel. A bright yellow tag stuck to the man’s shirt pocket read, bird haven. manager. alexander king.

  Karen bolted to her feet. “Alex, what are you doing here?”

  “I forgot some invoices. Who is this?”

  Ansel took in his appearance, comparing it to Nick. He wore a kaleidoscopic pullover sweater, white twill pants, and olive leather loafers. Another model cut-out, she assessed. The rugged outdoors variety.

  Karen puffed her cigarette. “This is Ansel Phoenix. You remember. She’s the president of that group Nicky belonged to. She came to offer condolences.”

  The resident Adonis shifted his rapier, green-eyed gaze back toward Ansel. His long, slicked-back blond hair and square face with a fashionable hair-stubbled chin didn’t hide his grimace.

  “That’s all? You could have called.”

  “I wanted to tell Karen in person that she didn’t have to get through this troubling time without support from the Pangaea Society. Since Nick’s death is being investigated, there’s going to be a lot of red tape along with the burial details. I’d like to help.”

  “You can rest easy, Miss Phoenix. Karen’s got me to run interference. Right, babe?”

  “That’s right,” Karen responded on cue.

  “Well, that still leaves the question of why you asked me to come, Karen.”

  “Oh, yes. I wondered if you’d appraise Nicky’s fossil collection for me. I want to sell it.”

  Ansel wasn’t surprised. The idea of Karen cashing in on Nick’s beloved fossil artifacts seemed vile, but what could she expect from an estranged wife? Cameron was interested in the collection. Wasn’t it better having the fossils go to someone who truly appreciated them?

  Ansel grinned. “I’d be glad to.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “I don’t like this.” Alex glared at Karen.

  “Why not, darling? It’s expensive getting a professional.”

  Ansel ignored Karen’s slur. “Normally you pay a licensed appraiser twenty percent of the total estimated value of the collection. I’ll evaluate it for free. It’s the least I can do for Nick.”

  “I don’t think we should rush into this,” Alex insisted. “The police won’t like people rifling through his things. It might be evidence.”

  Karen pouted. “That collection belongs to me. Why should I get rooked by a stranger?”

  “Absolutely right,” Ansel said. “I have connections through the society, Karen. I know I can get you good prices for the specialty pieces.”

  “Perfect.” Karen’s face infused with color. “I’ll get the duplicate apartment key. Nicky gave me one for emergencies.”

  Ansel marveled at Karen’s transformation. The thought of getting something for nothing invigorated the woman. She also wondered about Karen possessing an apartment key. If she could access it, so could Alex.

  As Karen disappeared down the hallway, Alex glowered at Ansel with renewed ferocity. She grinned back. When this staring game became too much, he pulled a burnished silver lighter from his pants pocket. He lighted a filtered, brown cigarette with great concentration before speaking.

  “Nick was a genuine son-of-a-bitch, you know?” His scorching stare continued.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. But I guess an even bigger bastard stamped his ticket.”

  Ansel kept her game face on. She wouldn’t give him the joy of intimidating her. “Someone like you, Alex?”

  Alex tensed, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “You’ve got me wrong, Miss Phoenix. Dumping Nick in a hole isn’t my style. He waffled about giving Karen a divorce for months. He didn’t want her. He wanted to own her like a rock under glass. Nick needed a good bashing so he could feel what it was like to get stepped on. If I’d killed him, he’d have his damn head blown off.”

  Karen entered the room, oblivious to the exchange. She handed Ansel a piece of paper and a key. “The address. You can start right away.”

  Ansel took the items, then rose. “Let me know where the funeral is going to be.”

  “Sure,” Karen agreed. “I think they have to wait until the autopsy is finished.”

  Ansel choked back her disgust and double-stepped it to the front door without a backward glance.

  But Karen had already lost interest. “Alex, I don’t have anything fashionable to wear to a burial service. We’d better go shopping.”

  “Sure, babe.”

  Closing the door firmly, Ansel pushed on her sunglasses and inhaled fresh air in great lungfuls as if she could purge her soul of a black spot. Now she could search Nick’s apartment for clues. A spasm of anxiety rocked her stomach.

  Alex was right about Dorbandt. The detective wouldn’t like her snooping into his case, pawing through potential evidence, and withholding clues under the mantle of performing a good deed for Nick’s widow.

  And what about the repercussions to the Pangaea Society if she got in trouble with the law? If her behavior brought down the wrath of the museum association, the Opel funds would be history, too. Last but not least, there was the issue of her father’s stand-off with the sheriff’s department. Did she want to run the risk of causing problems for him with the county cops?

  Ansel felt Nick’s gold key sandwiched inside her hip pocket. Her eyes glistened with tears. For better or worse, she couldn’t turn back now.

  Chapter 7

  “Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand.”

  Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

  Ansel’s emotions churned her abused stomach as she drove east toward Nick’s apartment. She didn’t know the true Nicholas Capos; the man who quit his job, deserted his wife, and got murdered. How could she be so naive?

  Visceral hurt speared through her. A niggling inner voice suggested that Nick must have viewed her as less than human. Usable. Perhaps disposable. This demon of doubt had ridden on her shoulders since the day she’d been pushed into that icy pond.

  It had been Thanksgiving day. Her father and mother had given a small party for her parent’s closest friends and relatives, and there were a lot of children at the
ranch. She’d been delighted to have other kids around. As a five-year-old only child, this was a special treat which made the festive holiday that much more exciting.

  After everyone had finished a meal of turkey with all the fixings and the adults were clearing the table, she and five other children had run off to play. It was Rusty, the eight-year-old son of her father’s best friend, who convinced all of them to put on their jackets and sneak out of the house with a fishing rod he’d taken from her father’s study.

  At first she hadn’t wanted to go. The ground was covered with a light dusting of snow, and she knew it was a bad move following a boy who had taken the fishing tackle without asking permission to use it. Still this was an adventure. She didn’t want to be left behind while they headed for the stock pond in the pasture behind the house.

  They went through a cattle gate and onto the creaking, iced-over pond, slipping and sliding. Rusty had pulled out a linen napkin with some turkey to use as bait. Then he’d chipped a hole in the ice with his pocket knife while everyone watched. She’d known for sure that this was very, very bad and when she’d said so, Rusty had turned on her in a flash.

  He’d pushed her hard, and she’d fallen on her stomach. Then Rusty had grabbed her by her parka hood and called her a red wiggler. Indian bait. He had laughed as he’d jabbed the hook through her coat hood and tossed her into the hole. Everyone had laughed as she slid through the tiny opening like a pebble down a tube. When her weight had snapped the hook from the taunt fishing line, they weren’t laughing anymore. She had sunk like a stone, her waterlogged parka a deadly cocoon squeezing her body.

  That’s when she’d realized for the first time that she was somehow different from other children. Why exactly had mystified her, even as she flailed to reach them for help. She hadn’t understood Rusty’s violent hate of her, his snarling, ugly face. What had she done to make him so mad? Why had he hurt her?

  Only weeks later, after her mother had explained in calm and soothing tones about her heritage and how some people would react to her, did she get an answer to her questions. People saw only her skin, not her soul. Had Nick done the same thing?

  No, Ansel decided vehemently. Nick might have been many things, but he wasn’t a bigot.

  Pushing the thoughts of her near drowning away, Ansel rationalized why digging into Nick’s personal life was the right thing to do. First, Dorbandt didn’t know anything about paleobotany. He wouldn’t know a Philodendron from a phylogenetic tree. She would. If there was anything out of the ordinary with Nick’s fossil dealings, she’d sense it right away.

  Second, she wanted to know if a society member was involved. It would be disastrous for the organization, and she wanted to be the first to know about it. Nick kept indexed collection acquisition notes and detailed field logs. Cataloging the collection would reveal if anything was missing or off kilter. His records might point toward the killer.

  When Ansel reached Wolf Point, she purposely sped past the street on Karen’s note and drove another half block before parking at a strip mall. She rearranged her hair into a bun on top of her head and donned her Stetson. She also buttoned up her leather jacket. With this getup and her sunglasses, anyone watching her enter the apartment would think she was a short man wearing cowboy attire.

  As Ansel left the cab, she grabbed her Olympus digital camera. The memory disc stored over a hundred photos. She approached the Fourth Street apartment, a boxy, two-story building sticking out among residential homes. A detached two-car garage sat beside it. Though recently painted, the aged dwelling was a big step down from Nick’s house in Glasgow.

  A chain link fence surrounded the rental and a small house east of it. The A-frame probably belonged to the landlord, she reasoned. There were no cars out front. This was a weekday morning in a working-class neighborhood. She stopped only a second to snap off a picture.

  Ansel crossed the street. Stomach in her throat, she opened the gate and stepped up the sidewalk to the front door. The key went into the lock, and the knob twisted open. She hustled inside and shut the door, relocking it.

  Her sunglasses went into her fanny pack. While she inhaled the smell of stale air, standing water, and accumulated dust, the realization of what she was doing hit her full force. Sleuthing for fossils was a world away from sleuthing for homicidal killers. She dealt with dead animals, not living people. She should appraise the collection. No more and no less.

  “Bullshit,” she said, standing in the dim foyer.

  A puzzle was a puzzle. She possessed finely tuned talents of critical questioning, perception, and imagination. She could analyze anything with the proper balance between observation and interpretation. Her knowledge of scientific methodology was a gigantic plus, not a minus. Get on with it.

  A tiny, clean kitchen opened to her right: used appliances, overhead cabinets, narrow counter with fruit going moldy in a cheap glass bowl. She took a picture, lighting the claustrophobic space with a flash nova.

  She moved quickly into a small dining area with a window. Jaundiced light filtered through a pair of cheap yellow curtains. The room was sparsely furnished with a Formica table and four padded chrome chairs centered upon a gold, industrial-grade carpet. A six-foot-high, cherry curio cabinet dominated the room. Nick’s glass collection.

  Vases, huge globes, and paperweights filled the case, each imbedded with colorful ribbon swirls, bubbles, artistic figural shapes, or mosaic beads. Several contained floral inserts of real blossoms, leaves, and berries captured within the ageless grip of transformed, molten sand. Ansel took dozens of pictures, mostly for nostalgia. How long would the collection remain intact if Karen got her hands on it?

  But where was Nick’s fossil collection?

  Ansel continued down the hall. Nick’s master bedroom was on the right. As she stuck her head through the open doorway, she was conscious of the barren feel of the place. Generic landscape prints on the white walls. A double bed and a single end table with a lamp. Walk-in closet. Bathroom.

  Ansel trekked toward a large living room. Closed curtains again made the area gloomy. The disarray looked common to a place where a man lived alone. Papers, empty fast food containers, and dirty clothes peppered the flat surfaces. The rented furniture looked well worn except for an elaborate entertainment unit. Wrinkling her nose, Ansel sidestepped an open gym bag disgorging sour tennis shoes and dirty sweats. She went toward the second bedroom.

  Nick had set up this room like the fossil bays found in a museum. Three eight-foot-long tables with collapsible legs lined separate walls. The fourth wall had a curtained window. A desk and a gun-metal gray file cabinet stood beneath it. Only one fossil tray rested on a table next to the desk, which was conspicuously void of anything except a cordless telephone. There were no magazines, dealer catalogs, or books. Not even a bookcase.

  This wasn’t the guy she’d known. Nick’s Aberdeen office had been stuffed with specimen trays, towering periodical stacks, and hundreds of reference books. A warehouse full of fossil-hunting supplies, paleobotany memorabilia, potted plants, and plain junk congested that room from floor to ceiling. Where had everything gone?

  Ansel peered inside the three-foot tray, hoping to understand what Nick had cared about enough to keep. To her surprise, it contained small chunks of amber. Nodules in assorted yellow hues and clarity lay in separate slots, carefully labeled with tiny stickers.

  Ansel lifted the glass cover. The two-inch-long amber nugget she picked up felt extremely light and had a warm plastic feel. A dark millipede was entombed inside. The label identified it as Baltic amber from a conifer called Pinus succinifera.

  She examined other ambers under the weak window light. Every nodule contained inclusions. Some held trapped insects. Others swirled with plant debris. One lump, which Ansel found extremely interesting, encapsulated a miniature oyster shell attached to a strand of seaweed. Little alarms went off in her head. There were many types of amber. They were excavated from places like the Dominican Republic, Burma, Romania
, Sicily, Mexico, Canada, and even the United States.

  Why had Nick forsaken his old interests and focused upon Baltic amber? European fossil resins were the oldest in the world, originating from Early Tertiary Period pine trees forty to sixty million years old. Before closing the tray, she snapped pictures.

  Ansel walked over to the scarred, cherry desk. Dust outlines indicated where Nick’s computer system and fax machine had been. Dorbandt would have taken any electronic machinery, computer disks, and files. He could glean useful information from memory drives, computer bytes, and carbon copy cartridges.

  Ansel opened every drawer in the desk and found only office supplies. The larger bottom drawers designed for file folders were empty. She checked the four-drawer file cabinet. Nothing. Dorbandt had been thorough.

  Nick’s fossil records were gone. Without them she couldn’t determine what he’d done with his collection or what he might have been field excavating. She would have to tell Karen there were no fossils to appraise, just a batch of amber with common fauna and flora inclusions.

  Ansel spied some boxes pushed beneath a table and bent to examine them. One carton contained year-old newspapers. Another was packed with unopened bags of sawdust, white sand, and plaster of Paris. A third box held two gallons of distilled water. The last carton stored casting supplies: Sil-Mold, Por-A-Kast, and Wonder Putty.

  As she returned a box, a metallic clatter echoed through the room. A cylindrical, stainless steel container rested against the baseboard. The seven-inch can had a domed top with a long funnel spout. A small, leather bellows protruded from the opposite side.

  Ansel opened the hinged lid. A smoky, burnt wood smell assailed her nose. Soot coated the inside, and a charred mass rolled around the bottom. She took a picture of the can, then tossed it on the newspapers.

  A sound outside the room caused her to freeze, blood throbbing in her ears. She listened, hardly breathing. Then she knew. A door lock was opening.

  Ansel jumped to her feet and grabbed her camera. The front door closed with a thud. The fear of discovery gave her the presence of mind to swing the workroom door quietly closed. She left a crack between the edge and the doorjamb so she could hear.