Blind Alley - Iris Johansen [80]
Then kill her abomination of an offspring who had been taunting him only days before.
Keep calm. He could wait. He had time to make sure this skeleton was the true Cira. He could study and research and put all the pieces together. It could be a trap.
Or this might not be the disaster he'd first thought. It might be fate giving him his due. The final destruction of that bitch.
And it was his due, he thought fiercely. He could see himself going to her sarcophagus and looking down at her in triumph. Reaching out and touching her. It was such a clear picture that he started to shake.
Wait. Watch. There was no hurry.
No matter what was happening in Herculaneum he still had the other Cira in Jane MacGuire.
Jane didn't wait for Trevor to call her. At 10:45 P.M. the next evening she phoned him. “Sontag refused to cooperate. Carpenter said that he was pompous as hell and said that he couldn't compromise himself by admitting a connection with a find that wasn't his. He wasn't about to risk his sterling reputation with a hoax, and threatened to expose Carpenter if he tried to unveil his discovery. Carpenter thinks he doesn't want to share his little empire with anyone who might get more publicity than he does.”
“Damn. Can Eve convince Carpenter to make a second try?”
“She's ahead of you. She was on the phone with him for an hour but it's no go. He said there's nothing more he can do with Sontag and he doesn't intend to talk to the bastard again. Evidently Sontag was pretty unpleasant.”
“Yeah, so I've found out. Even his crew thinks he's an asshole. The student interns draw straws to see who's going to have to work with him.”
“You've learned that already?”
“I wasn't about to sit on my hands and wait for Carpenter to come through for us if there was a possibility it wouldn't happen. I went out to the dig and did some snooping.”
“What did you find out?”
“Other than he's not a wonderful human being? He loves publicity and has got an ego that's as big as all outdoors. He likes money and eats up admiration.”
“Anything you could use?”
“Possibly. I'm doing a little background checking. I'll know soon.”
“How soon?”
“I'll let you know when I do.”
She stopped pushing. He'd made more progress than she could have hoped. “Anything else?”
“Not about Sontag. But I got a chance to talk to two of the students about the eruption. It wasn't hard when they're so excited about what they do. They live and breathe that day with every scoop of their shovels.”
“Did they talk about the theater?” she asked eagerly.
“We didn't get that far. They were too absorbed with the eruption itself.”
“I can understand that.”
“But you're disappointed. I'm surprised. It must have been one hell of a blowup. First, the sun brightly shining and then the end of their world.”
Night without air.
“Sun? I thought it happened at night.”
“Did you? It blew at their seventh hour. But it must have seemed like night if anyone was in a tunnel. Or when the ash and smoke covered the sky. . . . Like I said, the end of their world.”
“But I read that fewer than a dozen bodies were found in Herculaneum over all these years. Maybe most of them escaped.”
“Recently more bodies have been discovered in a drainage ditch under the marina. There's a theory that hundreds tried to get to the sea and died on the beaches or in the seismic tidal wave that rushed back to engulf them.”
“Dear God.”
“But skeletons and bodies were almost perfectly preserved there also, which lends credibility to our story about the preservation of Cira's skeleton in the anteroom of the theater. I'm sure Aldo would know every detail he could find out about that eruption.”
She had been so caught up in the vision of those poor people running in panic toward the sea that she'd forgotten about Aldo. “I'm sure he would, too. Since it seems to have dominated his life.” She moistened her lips. “Then it could be true.