Mesozoic Murder (13 page)

“What happened to them?”

“I don't know. Did you know Nick was interested in Baltic amber?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Ansel believed him. Cameron looked truly appalled that Nick's collection of fossil flora had slipped through his fingers into unknown hands. Even the heartless director knew how woeful it was that a lifetime of collecting rare paleobotanical specimens had ended, leaving nothing to show for it. Nick had cherished his collection more than his marriage or his wife.

“I've got to run.” Ansel took a last glance at the dead sea gull and walked out, Cameron on her heels.

“Call me. We must monitor this situation,” he commanded.

“Uh huh.”

Ansel swung open the entrance portal and a brilliant light cascaded inward. She was blinded. The sound of whirring machinery accompanied the white-hot glare. She raised Leslie's file in front of her eyes and peered around its edges.

A woman stood in front of her. A man with a high-intensity lamp and a minicam perched on his left shoulder dogged her side. Grinning triumphantly, the media huntress shoved a bulbous, foam-covered microphone directly into Ansel's face.

“Nancy Kilpatrick. Channel Three News. Are you aware, Miss Phoenix, that your Pangaea secretary, Evelyn Benchley, was found murdered this morning at the Roosevelt Museum?”

At the same moment, Ansel felt a firm shove against her back. Propelled forward, she almost toppled down the steps. The white steel door behind her slammed shut. A deadbolt echoed in her ears like a gunshot.

God damn, Bieselmore. He was throwing her to the wolves.

Chapter 17

Ansel's hands shook from fury even as she gripped the steering wheel and guided the Ranger onto her driveway. How could Bieselmore thrust her into the clutches of Kilpatrick and her video toady? Cameron was despicable. And how had the media found out about Evelyn's murder so quickly?

She couldn't remember exactly what she'd said during the interview. The rapid-fire round of questions and answers had accelerated with dizzying speed. She had tried speaking calmly and succinctly to Kilpatrick while striding toward her truck. Had she come across on film as a harried, professional spokesperson or a simpering idiot?

The headlights washed over the trailer. Ansel sighed with relief. She was home. Even if she wouldn't stay there, it was comforting to see the boxy dwelling. In contrast to the night before, the double-wide blazed with brightness.

Light poured through the open windows and front door. Her father's truck was backed up near the front steps. A white sedan sat next to it, trunk open. Dorbandt. Ansel grabbed Maze's folder with one hand and hurriedly stuffed it beneath her seat. She didn't need the hawk-eyed detective prying into her affairs tonight.

Ansel parked the truck and jumped from the cab. The spiked heels of the button-laced half-boots she'd worn since the luncheon sank into the grass like pylons as she went to the steps. She could hear Dorbandt and her father talking. Their words jarred her to a halt.

“Why did you tell me not to mention the pond outside your study?” Dorbandt asked, his voice resounding from the left-hand side of the living room where he couldn't see her.

“Oh. I didn't want you upsetting Ansel,” Chase said. “She almost drowned in the pond when she was a little girl. She's never really gotten over it. Me either, if truth be known.”

“An accident?”

“Not hardly. It was Thanksgiving day, and a boy pushed her through an ice hole. She was under for forty minutes before I got her out.”

Ansel stood frozen where she was, hand on the wood railing, right foot raised and about to land on the bottom step. Their voices seemed unnaturally loud in her ears, amplified so she couldn't miss hearing them. A foul, slimy taste rolled across her tongue, and the air around her felt heavy, soapy. Cold. Her breathing stopped.

The instinct to flee the property was almost overpowering. She squelched the panic response and forced her leg to move backward. Breathe, she ordered herself. It's just idle talk. It means nothing. Still she wished that she hadn't heard them.

Dorbandt whistled. “Forty minutes. That's a long time.”

“The cold water saved her life. She sank to the bottom and balled up like a hibernating ground squirrel. I pulled her up by snagging her coat with a fishing rod the kids were playing with. Had to find and re-string the damn hook because the old one was gone.”

“You showed amazing control under the circumstances, Mister Phoenix.”

“Don't know how I did it. Lordy, dinner guests were crying and screaming that she was gone. I wouldn't give up on my little girl, though. I couldn't. Not with her momma watching me. Mary believed in me, and I had to, too. Ansel came up blue. Just about then the paramedics arrived and took over. They got her breathing, then carted her off to the hospital. She stayed there three weeks fighting off a bacterial infection from the water in her lungs.”

Ansel couldn't stand any more. She turned and hurried away from the doorway, their voices fading to nothingness behind her. When she reached the truck, she stopped for several seconds to regain her equilibrium. She didn't have time to do much else.

Suddenly her father's back appeared as he dragged a huge chunk of living-room carpet and padding through the trailer doorway and down the front steps. Once it hit the ground, he tossed the rolled-up mess into the flatbed. The smell of burnt nylon pile and foam assaulted her nose. Her blue mood turned black. What a hell of a day this had been.

“Hello, Miss Phoenix,” Dorbandt called from the open doorway. His white shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and his forehead beaded with sweat. He looked disgruntled. Ditto, Ansel thought.

Chase turned, surprised to see her. “Hey, darlin'.”

He slapped his glove-covered hands against his jeans. A cloud of dust, rubber fragments, and robin blue rug fibers rose around him like prairie smog. “I'm almost done. Figured you'd want the ruined carpet out.”

Her smile was weak. “Daddy, you're a prince.”

Dorbandt snapped off his rubber gloves and came down the steps toward her. “I've completed my investigation. I have good news and bad news.”

“Me, too, Detective Dorbandt. Do you mind if I change into more comfortable clothes and shoes? My feet are killing me.”

That seemed to leave Dorbandt speechless, and Ansel wobbled past him. He walked over to his car and fussed around inside the open trunk. It gave her a moment to speak with her father.

She rolled her eyes in Dorbandt's direction. “How's he been?”

Chase scratched an ear. “Not real chatty but when he does talk, he's a straight shooter.”

“I'll be out in a minute. Keep him entertained, okay?”

Chase bobbed his head, and Ansel went inside. Even with the windows opened and ceiling fans running, the trailer was hot and stuffy without air conditioning. The living-room rug was stripped away from kitchen to bedroom hallway. The acid jug and its noxious contents were gone. So were Tim's oranges, of which she'd never tasted one juicy drop.

Without carpet, the interior smelled better, but her living-room decor was a disaster. In order to cut the carpeting out, her father had pushed her furniture against the walls in jumbled groups. A single lighted ceiling fan globe bombarded the room with an unnaturally brilliant white light, washing out colors and highlighting the barren plywood floor.

“Perfect,” Ansel snorted with disgust. Her spike heels click-clacked across exposed sheathing and nail studs as she trekked to the bedroom.

Closing the door, she sank onto the bed. The boots were the first things to come off. Blood rushed to her stockinged toes, numb feet tingling painfully. Wearily, she pulled off her beaded Indian belt and form-fitting black jeans, then dropped them to the floor. Her knee-high nylons and flimsy shirt were added to the mound.

She stood in her bra and panties and rummaged through a bureau drawer for an old Moose Drool Ale tee. She also grabbed some paint-splotched carpenter jeans off a ladder back chair. So much for blinding Dorbandt with her exotic, Amerind beauty. Tonight he'd have to grill her in her work fatigues.

Ansel headed for the kitchen, not paying attention to the disheveled living room but unable to ignore the grit and sawdust on the floor beneath her bare feet. She noticed that everything knocked to the linoleum during her fight with the cowboy had been cleaned up, too. Her father. She opened the fridge and searched for something to drink, then grabbed a Coke can.

“You ready to talk now?”

Ansel jumped as if she'd been slapped. Dorbandt stood in the kitchen holding a silver briefcase. “Please, don't sneak up on me like that.”

“I didn't mean to.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“No, thanks. I have some questions.”

She pulled out a second Coke anyway. “Let's go to my workshop. It's air conditioned.”

Ansel slipped on some old, suede Minnetonkas by the kitchen pass-through, and they went outside. Her father had finished loading the rug remnants and was tying down the bulky, stinking trash with rope. A headache building momentum in the back of her skull every minute, Ansel popped the pull-tab and took a long swig of caffeine. Maybe the chemical rush would help her cope with Dorbandt's questions.

“I'm going to head home.” Chase peeled off his gloves and tossed them into the truck bed. “Tomorrow I'll move the furniture back. You're sleeping at the ranch, right?”

“Yeah, I'll be there soon.” She passed him the extra Coke. “Drive carefully.”

“Thanks for the drink. Rug scalping is thirsty work. Good night, Lieutenant.”

“Good night, Mister Phoenix.”

Chase gave Dorbandt a lingering look and got into his truck. Ansel saw the silent glances. A man thing, she figured. She watched the pickup until the rear tail lights winked out behind the driveway's curve.

“This way,” she said.

Ansel led Dorbandt around the east side of the double-wide. They walked along a worn dirt path. Crickets chirped, bluegrass rustled, and stars twinkled. The front of the hangar had a single personnel door as well as a fifty-foot-wide, bi-fold door. Two huge, light-sensitive, halogen pole lamps had tripped on at sunset so the area was well lit.

“Quite a workshop,” Dorbandt said, pacing behind her. “You have a plane?”

“No. The former owner had a Bonanza.” Ansel stopped at the personnel door and punched the alarm keypad. “I need the space. Besides my art room, I have my fossil collection out here.”

Ansel pulled a plastic Tilly key chain from her coverall pocket and unlocked the door. A flick of a light switch, and the front half of the divided hangar flooded with fluorescent lighting. Skylights in the peaked roof directed moonlight into the forty-by-eighty-foot space.

Ansel watched as Dorbandt stood transfixed. She knew the room was quite impressive with its collapsible tables filled to brimming with fossil bones and reconstructed fossil replicas, long glass display cases, shelving filled with small dinosaur sculptures, and artwork depicting reptiles from the ancient past.

Dorbandt's eyes focused on her largest sculpture. The life-size, wooden beast stood over twice his height and six times his length. It was made from cut plywood pieces shaped into a gigantic, head-to-tail silhouette of an upright dinosaur. Two trunk-like wire legs and short wire forearms comprised the limbs. The head was more complete, a yard-long skull resting on a tubular frame attached to the plywood neck. The menacing skull had a jaw filled with top and bottom rows of three-inch-long, razor-sharp teeth.

“That's my work in progress. It's an Allosaurus.”

“Is that a real skull?”

“No. It's a casting made from one. I'll have to get castings of the entire skeleton from a museum and position them on the plywood support.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.”

“It is. Then I have to add a clay musculature to the skeleton using body shape and ligature attachment clues on the bone castings. That fleshes the model out, but the skin makes the dinosaur come alive. Hide work requires applying tiny, wart-like bumps one by one to simulate carnosaur skin.”

Dorbandt shook his head. “And I think police work is tedious.”

Ansel led him further into the hangar. “Building the clay model is the easy part. The hard part is creating this beautiful creature and destroying it.”

“Why?”

“The clay I'll use to build the dinosaur is oil-based so it never hardens. When the original model is finished, I'll create a mold of it in separate large pieces. To do that I have to paint the Allosaurus with several coats of latex, add cheesecloth to strengthen the back of the rubber mold, then build up successive layers of fiberglass over everything to hold the latex mold in place until it hardens. When the latex mold pieces are cut away, the underlying clay dinosaur is destroyed.”

“But you'll be able to make all the copies you want with castings from the latex mold. It's not a total loss.”

“True. And I'll be able to sell the mold castings of a complete dinosaur to museums and tourist attractions. It's still strange spending months recreating a once living, sixty-five-million-year-old creature, knowing you'll destroy it. In a sense, I gave birth to it and nurtured it. Hacking it apart will be like killing my own child.”

“If that were the case, then it would be my business.”

Ansel looked at the detective. If she didn't know better, she'd think he'd actually made a joke. The corners of Dorbandt's mouth had turned up. Could it be that the pragmatic cop had lightened up a bit?

As Ansel walked into her office, a chill coursed up her spine. Evelyn had been here. She'd sat on this very sofa and expressed grief over Nick's hideous death only two short days before her own.

Ansel sat on the left arm of the horseshoe-shaped furniture. “Have a seat.”

Dorbandt surveyed the stylish office, mini-kitchen, and artist's studio with a single panoramic glance as he sat next to her. Heat from his body rushed over Ansel and she hitched in a breath. A tingle of pleasure ran through her, then irritation. She had to be severely addled when a hard-nosed cop about to interrogate her sent dormant hormones flooding across her body.

Dorbandt opened his briefcase and pawed through it with deep concentration. “I examined the trailer. No signs of forced entry. My guess is the lock was picked since I found a couple small scratches on the knob plating. Found plenty of latent fingerprints, but they're small. Probably yours. Makes sense if the perp wore gloves.”

He pulled out a manila folder and a pen. “No other obvious trace evidence at the scene, but I took vacuum samples. Lab might find something.”

Ansel rubbed her aching neck. “Is this the bad news or the good news?”

“Neither. Good news is I found a single .45 caliber pistol slug.”

“Great.”

Dorbandt exhaled. “Bad news is I found the slug inside the acid jug.”

“I don't like the sound of that.”

“Yeah. Acid may have etched away the bore marks. Means ballistics can't match the slug to the gun.”

“So even if you find the cowboy's pistol, you can't prove he fired that bullet at me.”

“With the slug casing, ballistics could link the jacket back to the gun barrel, but it wasn't in the trailer. Perp must have grabbed it before he ran.”