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He forced himself to scrutinize her story as dispassionately as he'd once taken apart the testimony of eye-witnesses after a crime.
Either her story was true—it was disjointed and bizarre enough to be—or she was a consummate actress. Charlie was inclined to trust his instincts. God alone knew, he'd had a bellyful of making snap character judgments over the years. She simply did not strike Charlie as the type who would steal. Or lie.
"Anachronism?" Charlie finally asked. "You said something about an anachronism? And what kind of 'grid sector'? What are you talking about?"
She looked blank for a moment. "The grid sector of our dig, of course. What else would it be?"
Well, that was clear as the muddy Tiber.
"Dig?" Charlie prompted.
"Archaeological dig," she said, as if that explained everything.
"Oh. Great." Archaeology had never been one of his interests, not even a minor one. Images of Indiana Jones raiding King Tut's tomb and unearthing glittering golden urns came to mind.
"I'm a grad student," she added helpfully. "Physical Anthropology and Classics, with a specialty in early Imperial Rome. That's why I speak classical Latin. I was," and her voice turned bitter again, "only a semester away from a Ph.D."
He grunted, hardly having heard the last statement. He didn't want to admit the sense of inadequacy her fluency in his "adopted" language had given him. "All right. So this Bartlett was implicated, but not apprehended?"
"He vanished into thin air. And from the looks of things, maybe literally."
Charlie nodded. There had to be a tie-in to Carreras, somewhere. "So, putting aside for a moment the technical how-to's of this, you think he marooned you here because you spotted something which gave him away, or at least something he thought gave him away?"
She leaned against the wall of the cubicle and sighed. "We were in the process of uncovering a sizeable wooden box we found in one of the beachfront grid squares. It was very well preserved. But while we were clearing it, I came across some things that shouldn't have been there. First, there was a problem with the soil. The box was covered with a different kind of soil from the rest of the site."
"Different soil? What are you talking about?"
"It looked like someone had dug a hole and mounded up dirt over the box to protect it, before the tufa was laid down. I might not have twigged so sharply to that, though, if I hadn't found the real anachronism." She frowned and squinted, as if looking at something by inadequate light. "It was a coin, a modern coin. He tried to grab it before I could see too clearly what it was. We got into a terrific shouting match. He accused me of trying to contaminate the site and invalidate the find. I yelled right back, said I was a professional, how dare he—"
She halted abruptly.
"It was pretty ugly," she said finally, rubbing the back of her neck. "At the time, I thought maybe the entire grid square had been compromised, but physically the site hadn't been disturbed. You could tell it hadn't, just by looking. You've got to chop through that tufa. There's no way anyone could have hidden signs of that kind of digging."
She turned her gaze away and stared at the ship's hull, while kneading her fingers as though they ached. Shafts of slivered light, falling from the barred hatch farther astern, caught the play of tension in her face.
"Anyway, after I was arrested, I decided he'd planted the coin somehow during the excavation, maybe to throw suspicion on me, give him a reason to stage a fight. It was obvious to me who'd stolen the artifacts. He must have pla
"Probably. Sounds like a setup job from the start."
She nodded, clearly unhappy with herself. Charlie wanted to tell her it wasn't her fault, that obviously she'd tangled with a pro, but he wasn't sure it would do any good.
"At any rate," she sighed, "the artifacts were gone. And shortly after my release, so was Tony Bartlett. No trace, no nothing." She lifted her hands, palms up. "Just... poof. Gone. It was almost like he'd never existed. The Italians allowed me to come home," her lip curled, "but the university kicked me out of the degree program. Because of the scandal. Then I drove my car through a hole in the air." She shivered. "Obviously, Bartlett thought I knew too much, because of that stupid coin. It wasn't enough he had to ruin my entire career—"
"How was Bartlett co
"He provided the financing." She glanced down into her lap and rubbed her fingers again. "Bartlett endowed the university with a research grant, specified which researchers were to be included, even insisted he accompany us on the dig." She shrugged. "It was a substantial grant. We get money from lots of weird sources. Dr. Clarke didn't imagine Bartlett could do anything to hurt the dig."
Her laughter was as hard as the unyielding wood they sat on. "Isn't that fu
Her eyes had filled with tears again. Charlie shook his head. Good grief.
"Sorry," she muttered. She attempted to wipe her cheeks dry. Then held out a hand still wet with tear trails. "I'm Sibyl Johnson, from Newberry, Florida. Well, close enough. Maybe ten miles outside town limits."
Charlie gri
The chains at his wrists clanked as they shook hands formally. Hers trembled ever so slightly in his grip. She looked so calm. Charlie knew the stress signs and feared it wouldn't take much more to break her. A brief silence held while Charlie tried to figure out what to say next. She solved his problem.
"Are we really headed for Herculaneum?" That came out sounding little-girl scared. He got the strangest impression she wasn't thinking of Publius Bericus at all.
"Yeah. Should be there in a few hours."
Her face, which had gradually regained some of its former color, paled rapidly, leaving her waxy-pale. "Do you, uh, happen to know... What year is this? By our calendar?"
"Are you kidding? What year is it? The only thing I knew about Romans before I got dumped here was what I saw on videos of Ben Hur and Spartacus." He decided to take the risk. "I'm a cop, lady, not a history professor. I got no idea what year it is."
"A cop?" She rocked back and her eyes went round. She actually squeaked when she said it. "You're a cop?"
Charlie squirmed. He'd been undercover—deep undercover—for months when he'd stumbled onto something Carreras didn't want anyone to know. Not even Carreras knew he'd been a cop. He was two thousand years away from having his cover blown, but was still uncomfortable about admitting it to a stranger. Even one who'd been through everything Sibyl Johnson had been through.
"Yeah," he muttered, trying to ease the fire in his shoulders. "A cop. Miami vice."
"You're kidding?"
When he looked, her green eyes were sparkling. They reminded him of sunlight on the sea. He found himself responding to that look. A grin tugged rustily at the edges of his mouth. "Well, no. I'm not kidding, I mean. I'm no Don Johnson, but I really am an honest-to-god detective in the vice squad, Miami Metro Dade. I can't show you a badge. I don't carry one when I'm that deep undercover—too risky—and even if I had been carrying one, well... I didn't exactly get to keep my former wardrobe." He indicated the stained loincloth he wore. "Carreras—uh, that's Jésus Carreras, head of the Miami branch of the Carreras family—was the key figure in a stolen-arms case I was working on. Crack, smack, horses, dogs, prostitution, numbers, porno films for lots of kinky markets, gun ru