Dust to Dust Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Praise for the Novels of Beverly Connor

  “Calls to mind the forensic mysteries of Aaron Elkins and Patricia Cornwell. However, Connor’s sleuth infuses the mix with her own brand of spice as a pert and brainy scholar in the forensic analysis of bones. . . . Chases, murder attempts, and harrowing rescues add to this fast-paced adventure.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Connor combines smart people, fun people, and dangerous people in a novel hard to put down.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Connor grabs the reader with her first sentence and never lets up until the book’s end. . . . The story satisfies both as a mystery and as an entrée into the fascinating world of bones. . . . Add Connor’s dark humor, and you have a multidimensional mystery that deserves comparison with the best of Patricia Cornwell.”—Booklist (starred review)

  “In Connor’s latest multifaceted tale, the plot is serpentine, the solution ingenious, the academic politics vicious . . . chock-full of engrossing anthropological and archeological detail.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Connor’s books are a smart blend of Patricia Cornwell, Aaron Elkins, and Elizabeth Peters, with some good Deep South atmosphere to make it authentic.”

  —Oklahoma Family Magazine

  “Crisp dialogue, interesting characters, fascinating tidbits of bone lore, and a murderer that eluded me. When I started reading, I couldn’t stop. What more could you ask for? Enjoy.”

  —Virginia Lanier, author of the Bloodhound series

  “Beverly Connor has taken the dry bones of scientific inquiry and resurrected them into living, breathing characters. I couldn’t put [it] down until I was finished, even though I wanted to savor the story. I predict that Beverly Connor will become a major player in the field of mystery writing.” —David Hunter, author of The Dancing Savior

  “Fans of . . . Patricia Cornwell will definitely want to read Beverly Connor . . . an author on the verge of superstar dom.”—Midwest Book Review

  “Connor’s breathtaking ability to dish out fascinating forensic details while maintaining a taut aura of suspense is a real gift.”—Romantic Times (top pick)

  ALSO BY BEVERLY CONNOR

  SCATTERED GRAVES

  DEAD HUNT

  DEAD PAST

  DEAD SECRET

  DEAD GUILTY

  ONE GRAVE TOO MANY

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, August 2009

  Copyright © Beverly Connor, 2009

  eISBN : 978-1-101-10882-6

  All rights reserved

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Robbie.

  This one’s for you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Charles Connor, as always, for his unlimited support and patience.

  Thanks to Kristen Weber for her hard work, expertise, and kindness.

  Prologue

  Marcella Payden straightened the silverware beside the two cobalt blue dinner plates, then lit the fat cinnamon-scented candle in the middle of her small oak dining table. A breeze from the open window carried the tinkling sound of ceramic wind chimes and made the candle flame dance. Nice, she thought as she surveyed the table, smiling at herself and the giddy feeling in her stomach. How long had it been since she’d had a date?

  Marcella smoothed her cotton Navajo-style skirt and ran a hand over her hair, tucking stray tendrils back into the beaded barrette that loosely bound her graying lock
s. She felt like a teenager. It felt good.

  She looked at her calloused hands—deeply tanned, a few wrinkles. Much like her tanned and lined face. It was a good face. She liked the way she looked—the roughness was the mark of what she was.

  The woman next door back in Arizona had smooth, unlined skin and soft, manicured hands that Marcella’s husband had found more to his liking. It hurt, of course, when he left her, but the strongest emotion was surprise. She was astonished that her husband would find someone who sold lipstick for a living more interesting than an archaeologist.

  “No accounting for taste,” she muttered to herself. That was what she got for marrying a philosopher. It would serve him right if he had to drive around in that lilac convertible for the rest of his life.

  The wind picked up and the napkins fluttered on the table. Marcella walked to the window to close it. Outside was already dark, even though it was still early by her reckoning. Along with the rustling of leaves and the ringing of wind chimes, the wind carried a chill. She stood for a moment, taking in the cool fresh air. North Georgia was so much cooler than Arizona. It was very pleasant.

  But the chill . . . or something else . . . brought a sudden shift in mood. Marcella’s hair stood up on the back of her neck and her heart beat faster. She clutched at her silver squash-blossom necklace.

  What brought that on? she wondered, squinting and looking out into the darkness through the open window. She saw nothing but the silhouettes of trees moving in the wind, and heard no sound but the rustling leaves, wind chimes, and distant road noise.

  It was a Lewis moment.

  Lewis was a cognitive archaeologist in Arizona, a colleague and intellectual sparring partner. He had a keen interest in how Paleo-Indians managed to survive among lightning-fast saber-toothed tigers and other giant predators of stealth and speed. His research into the functioning of the human brain led to the interesting discovery that the subconscious can perceive a movement or a threat and the body can respond several seconds before the conscious mind even becomes aware. A nice little brain function that helped early humans survive at a time when animals were bigger, faster, and had way sharper teeth.

  Marcella agreed with this idea because she had experienced the phenomenon firsthand. It happened while she was walking through an overgrown field surveying for signs of prehistoric inhabitants—looking for arrowheads, actually. She found herself suddenly breathing rapidly, her heart pounding . . . and inexplicably she was standing more than three feet to the side of where she had been a moment before. She had no idea what had happened or why she had jumped to the side. But her eyes were fixed on the spot where her next step would have been. There, hidden in the grass, lay a rattlesnake. Subconscious awareness and involuntary response had kicked in. A prehistoric survival function had saved her from harm.

  Marcella called such moments of subconscious wariness “Lewis moments.” She looked through the open window again but saw no sabertooths in the shadows. She wondered whether such automated responses could really have been that effective. With snakes maybe, but tigers?

  Silly woman, she thought. It’s probably all those towering trees waving in the wind. Marcella missed the desert colors: earth tones, red rock. There was just too much giant, vivid green here.

  She closed the window and walked across to the living room to turn on the light. Her eye stopped on the desk where the light sat and she realized that it was the desk—or rather what she had found in it—that was nagging at the back of her mind. That must be it.

  Marcella had cleaned out the ramshackle potter’s shed behind her house. Among miscellaneous pieces of broken furniture and weathered plywood, under a piece of old linoleum long ago ripped up from the kitchen floor, with myriad items littering its top, she had found the old desk. A rough pearl constructed of distressed maple, it had three drawers down each side and one long drawer in the middle. Although it was not an extraordinary desk, she liked its solid promise.

  When she was cleaning the layers of dust and grime from the desk, she found writing on the bottom of the middle drawer. The house had been a treasure trove of nice surprises, but this surprise was disturbing. It was also old; too old to do anything about. Still, she intended to speak with Jonas about it and ask him to mention it to Diane Fallon.

  Marcella partially pulled out the drawer as she turned on the banker’s lamp on top of the desk. The fluorescent bulb had a second’s delay before the light came on. Just as it brightened, she felt another Lewis-moment shiver and the world went black.

  Another bright shining light appeared and Marcella wondered whether she should crawl to it. It shouldn’t be this hard, she thought, as she struggled to move across the floor.

  Chapter 1

  Diane Fallon parked her car well out of the way alongside the narrow drive. She closed her car door and stood looking at the old farmhouse illuminated by the headlights of a police car and the forensics van already there. Diane was director of the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History and director of the Rosewood Crime Lab, which was housed in the museum. It was in her role as crime lab director that she was here, but she suspected on this occasion she would be wearing both hats. That was because the house belonged to Dr. Marcella Payden, whom the museum’s archaeology curator, Jonas Briggs, had hired to create a reference collection of prehistoric potsherds for the museum’s archaeology department.

  It was an old house, perhaps from the early 1900s, set among trees that looked old enough to be original to the place. The two-story white wooden structure had a blue tin roof and long open porches on the first and second floors that stretched across the front of the house. There was a redbrick chimney on each end. At one end of the house a metal carport contained a light-colored SUV. Large square-cut stones lined the gravel driveway.

  The yard was mainly dirt with rock-bordered areas that had once been flower beds. Broken concrete yard ornaments—statuary, fountains, vases—littered the yard. From its appearance, the place could have been an archaeological dig. In reality, it was just an old farmhouse yard containing an odd assortment of disused items.

  Diane changed from her heels to comfortable loafers and slipped a flannel shirt over her dark metallic burgundy cocktail dress. She held the shirt tight around her as she walked toward the house to shield herself from the wind, which was becoming chilly.

  Neva Hurley and Izzy Wallace were taking their kits from the crime scene van as they spoke with a patrolman. Diane waved to them.

  “What do you know?” asked Diane as she got within earshot.

  Neva and Izzy were police officers with the Rosewood PD and two of the four crime scene investigators who worked for Diane. Neva was energetic, slim, and in her late twenties. Izzy, the newest member of the crime lab, was a fiftysomething, sturdily built guy. They grinned at her when she approached.

  “You know Officer Daughtry?” asked Izzy, with a tilt of his head to indicate the patrolman.

  “Diane Fallon,” she said, shaking the officer’s hand.

  “Good to meet you, ma’am,” he said.

  He seemed a little green. Must be a rookie, Diane thought.

  “Nice outfit,” said Neva. “I like the way your dress matches the burgundy in the plaid of your shirt. Very lum berjack chic.”

  Diane smiled. “I’ve been to a benefit at Bartrum University.”

  Neva looked at her watch and up at the sky. It was close to dawn.

  Diane gave her a weak smile. “Frank hasn’t given up on teaching me to dance. We went out afterward.”

  There was a gust of cool wind and Diane folded her arms across her middle to keep the chill out. She thought she heard the faint ring of wind chimes in the distance. She nodded toward the house.

  “David called me about this. What’s going on?”

  David Goldstein was assistant director of the crime lab. This evening he was on duty handing out assignments while he worked in the lab.

  “David called you?” said Neva. “He didn’t have to. We’ve got it covered. Ol�
� Izzy here is doing pretty good.” Neva punched him affectionately in the shoulder. “Rosewood PD said a woman was attacked here earlier tonight.”

  “Attacked? She survived?” Diane asked. Her body relaxed.

  “Yes, but I don’t know how bad off she is,” said Neva. “The lead detective’s on his way. I think he’s been questioning someone. That’s all I know.”

  Neva looked at Patrolman Daughtry as if he might have more information. He shook his head and shrugged.

  “I was told to wait here for Detective Hanks,” he said.

  Neva squinted, observing Diane. “Is there something special about this case?”

  “Marcella Payden is an adjunct professor of archaeology at Bartrum and a consultant for the museum,” said Diane.

  “Oh,” said Neva. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  The crunch of gravel and two blinding headlights heralded an approaching car. Diane stepped closer to the van with Izzy, Neva, and the patrolman, and they watched the car pull in behind the police car.

  Detective Hanks, she thought. She recognized him, but she hadn’t worked with him before. He took a step in their direction just as gunfire cut the ground at his feet.

  Chapter 2

  Loud bursts of gunfire exploded one after another. Diane ducked beside the van, pulling Neva down with her.

  “What the hell?” she heard Izzy shout, ducking for cover himself.

  The shots were coming from the woods beyond the drive where they were parked. Bullets dug out plugs of dirt from the ground. One ricocheted off a rock and hit the van; some hit the piles of lawn sculpture; others flew over their heads. The gunman didn’t seem to be aiming at anything in particular, or he was aiming at everything. It sounded to Diane like a rifle, but she wasn’t an expert on guns.

  Izzy, his gun out, eased to the rear of the van. Neva took out her gun and followed him. Patrolman Daughtry moved toward the front of the vehicle and peeked out at the dark woods. A bullet struck the side of the van and he pulled back.