Mariah Stewart - Last Breath

“You think maybe they were contacted by the killer?”

“It’s worth a look.” He shrugged. “You never know what you’ll find, or what you’ll learn about a person when you start following their footsteps down the old information highway. Polly is still interviewing Mrs. Cathcart. If anyone has contacted her, we’ll know who, and how the contact was made. She called to let me know she was at the house and Mrs. Cathcart was unharmed, and the cylinder was still in her possession.” He paused, then asked, “What exactly is this cylinder, anyway?”

“It’s like a regular cylinder. Thin, hollow tube?” When he nodded, she said, “But this one is made out of clay. When the clay was wet, someone-probably a scribe-wrote on the cylinder. It could contain a description of an event or a person, or a story, or it could even contain laws or customs.”

“So it was sort of an early book.”

“Yes. It was a written recording of something. In the absence of paper, they made use of clay. This was very common in early civilizations. Most did not have paper. There are quite a few cylinders still packed in the crates. I’m dying to get to them.”

“Can you read them?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t really had time to study the inscriptions and symbols. As far as I know, they’ve never been translated.” She thought about that for a moment, then added, “I doubt anyone can read them, actually. To the best of my knowledge, these are the only written records from this civilization to have survived.”

She thought about it some more.

“Of course,” she said almost to herself, “since Shandihar borrowed so much from other civilizations, there’s a very good chance their language was borrowed as well. Or maybe they borrowed a bit from the Mesopotamians, a bit from the Persians, something from the Greeks…”

“I see those wheels spinning in there.”

“Sorry. I can’t help it.” Daria laughed self-consciously. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll pull one of those cylinders out and take a closer look.”

“I thought you were designing exhibits.”

“I am, and I have the best idea for those.” Her hands were suddenly animated as she described what she had in mind. “Picture this. In the Great Room, huge blowups of the photographs of, say, one of the goblets, just as it was found at the site, before it was touched. Then, on a pedestal, in front of the photos, there sits the real thing. And in those big glassed-in display cases-again, the great enlargements as background, juxtaposed with the actual artifacts. We’d use the smaller cases for some of the larger individual pieces-say, the big statues of the goddess-to display them separately, and then use the larger cases for things that are related. Maybe all the ceremonial items.”

“Very impressive. I like it.” He touched the paper towel to his mouth. “It sounds like a hit to me.”

“And if I could translate some of the writings”-she was smiling without even realizing it-“I could have them reproduced and incorporated into the displays.”

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“More than I ever thought I would. I mean, I knew it would be a great experience, and that it would be, well, fun. But I didn’t expect to feel this… connected to the project. I didn’t expect it to mean so much to me.”

“Sometimes the best things in life are unexpected.”

“Yes. I suppose that’s true.” She could feel his eyes on her face and avoided meeting them, though she wasn’t sure why.

Sweet Thing pawed at her leg, and she looked down at the dog.

“She wants us to share. I think she has her eye on the pepperoni. Do you think that would be bad for her?”

“Maybe a little bit of the crust wouldn’t hurt. Though you might want to think about whether or not you want her begging food from the table.”

“I don’t think I do. At the same time”-she broke off a piece of the crust and gave it to the salivating dog that sat so prettily at her feet-“I’m having a hard time resisting her.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” Connor’s phone rang and he swallowed his last bite of pizza before answering.

“What do you have for me, buddy?” he asked.

Connor got up from the table, his facial expression unreadable, and walked through the swinging kitchen door into the front hall. Daria could hear his pacing footsteps on the hardwood floor. After about ten minutes, he came back into the kitchen.

“Anything important?” Daria asked with more nonchalance than she felt.

“Several things,” he told her. “The hard drives on all the computers belonging to the victims have been removed.”

“Which probably means the killer had contacted them and wanted to hide the fact?”

“That would be a good guess. Especially since Mrs. Cathcart’s computer is intact.” He smiled. “Want to guess what our man Will found?”

“E-mail, maybe from the killer?”

“Several e-mails, actually, all concerning an item in her collection.”

“The cylinder?”

“Good guess.” He nodded and sat down. “But more importantly, Will traced the e-mail to the computer where the contacts originated.”

“So that’s great, right? You can find the computer and arrest the killer,” Daria said excitedly.

“It’s not going to be quite that easy,” he told her. “The e-mail was traced to a computer in the library.”

She stared at him as if not quite understanding.

“The library? Wait, you don’t mean here?”

“That’s right. The e-mails were all sent from the Howe University Library.”

“The computers we used the other night?”

“Unless there are others somewhere else in the building, yes.”

“How would he have found their e-mail addresses?”

“In Mrs. Cathcart’s case, she contacted him. She’d seen a mention of Shandihar in an electronic newsletter she receives. There’d been an article warning about fake artifacts, and someone had posted that there are all sorts of bogus items being offered online from civilizations that never actually existed-like Shandihar. The next issue carried Mrs. Cathcart’s response setting the record straight. She knew for a fact that Shandihar had been a real city, that she herself owned an artifact from Shandihar and that she’d acquired it from a highly reputable dealer in Boston.”

“So he got the victims to come to him. He smoked them out.”

“Exactly. He got them to confirm that they did have the pieces in their possession, then asked them to e-mail him privately, which they did. Very clever of him. And before you ask, yes, there is a response from Kelly Blume in the same issue.”

“But not Sevrenson or Cross?”

“No, but he could have located them some other way, maybe through Blume or Cathcart. Polly is still interviewing her, so there may be more information to come.”

“Can your guy tell which of the computers in the library was the one the e-mails were sent from?”

“Sure.”

“So, if we went over there right now, and sent your friend an e-mail from each of the computers, he could tell which one was the right one?”

“Yes. But-”

Daria was already out of her chair. “Let’s do it, right now. We’ll send him an e-mail from every one of the computers and we’ll know right now which one matches. And you could take the hard drive and read the messages that are on it, right?”

“Uh-uh.” Connor shook his head. “That’s not the way this is going to work.”

“How’s it going to work?” Daria gathered up the plates and the paper towels and the water bottles and set everything on the counter along with the empty pizza box.

“Sometime very soon, several of my colleagues will arrive, and they’re going to handle this. They’ll secure the computers and they’ll do what they can to determine who the sender was.”