Free Mesozoic Murder by Christine Gentry Page B

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