Dance of the Bones by J. A. Jance Page A

her glass—­no ice—­and stood staring back and forth between the two trophies she had held back when she had sold off Amos Warren’s goods. One was a tiny pot, a miniature olla, that she had kept and treasured from the moment she pulled the cloth-­wrapped piece out of Amos Warren’s stolen backpack. The other was a serving-­tray-­sized flat hunk of limestone with the skeleton of what looked like a crocodile fossilized inside it. That hadn’t come from the backpack. Ava had stolen it from Amos’s house when she’d cleaned that out, too. She wouldn’t have had any idea what it was had Amos not gone to the trouble of sticking a helpful label on the back. Printed in fading but still readable ink on a piece of masking tape were the words Phytosaur, Willcox Playa, 1967, followed by the initials AW.
    For some reason, those two pieces had captured Ava’s imagination—­the tiny pot and the Gila-­monster-­sized fossil. After Amos’s death, she had revisited the area around the crime scene numerous times. Johnny had taught her enough about searching for artifacts that she had known to go looking farther upstream, and she had lucked out, finding a whole other treasure trove of unbroken pots. Each of those she’d sold to the highest bidder without a second thought.
    But Fito, as she called her fossilized treasure, and the tiny pot were hers to keep, and she had never considered selling either one. Instead, she had displayed them together, in one home after another, as she gradually moved up in the world to ever more upscale digs.
    In this house, for instance, high in the Catalinas, Ava kept the olla on a clear glass shelf high above the bar, the humble piece of reddish clay keeping company with Harold’s first wife’s collection of elegant Rosenthal crystal stemware. The rock platter, along with its nightmarish, toothy captive, stood on the counter, propped against the bar’s mirror, where it served as a somewhat fierce background to Harold’s collection of expensive booze.
    Taking the pot down from its place on the shelf, Ava stood there for a time, absently tracing the tips of her fingers over the faint image that remained stubbornly etched there—­a tortoise and an owl. She often wondered about them—­about why those two images had been placed there together. They seemed so different, and yet here they were in some kind of mysterious juxtaposition.
    It was as her fingers slid thoughtfully across those mysterious figures that she reached a final conclusion about what she should do—­a decision she’d been wrestling with all day long, since the moment she had seen the article in the newspaper.
    After all these years, there was a good chance that Big Bad John Lassiter was about to have yet a third trial for a murder Ava herself had committed. She had dodged that bullet the first two times, but what if new information had come to light, especially something that might implicate her?
    â€œThat’s not going to happen,” Ava vowed aloud to herself as she returned the pot to its place on the shelf. “Not, not, not!”
    Taking her new drink in hand, Ava made her way into the bedroom—­into her bedroom; she and Harold had separate bedrooms these days. Setting her untouched drink down on the counter in the bathroom, she ducked into the attached walk-­in closet. In the backmost wall, in the section behind her floor-­length gowns, was the wall safe in which Alvira, her predecessor, had once kept her considerable collection of jewelry, which had, of course, been divvied up between Harold’s two kids upon Ava’s arrival.
    Harold could no longer get around well enough to get to the safe on his own. He had no idea that Ava had long since changed the combination, and for good reason, too. That was where she was slowly accumulating her supply of diamonds along with a collection of forged passports, IDs,