Read Online Dust to Dust by Beverly Connor - Free Book Online

stood on the porch and looked in the window.The paintings were not there! I’ll be damned! The paintings were gone. You mean her attacker was there in the house stealing the paintings as I was walking from my car to the house? The absence of the paintings hadn’t registered until you mentioned it. Damn.”
    “What kind of paintings were they?” asked Diane.
    “Portraits. Three of them. But I didn’t see them clearly from my car—too far away.”
    “You’d not seen them before?” asked Diane.
    “No, I’m sure of it. Marcella had a tapestry hanging over the sofa the last time I was there. The paintings were a new addition.”
    “What about the hutch?” asked Diane. “Was the pottery in it when you were with Marcella?”
    “Yes, it was there. I remember looking at the pottery and thinking how it looked just like authentic artifacts . . . and what a good potter she is. Are you saying the pottery is gone too? That young fellow, Hanks, asked me about it. I didn’t think about the implication until now. Was her attacker hiding in the house while I was there—waiting for me to leave so he could rob the place? You know, Marcella had a lot of work on her computer. If it’s gone . . .”
    “No, we have her computer. We’ll talk when you get back,” said Diane. “Thanks for the information. You’ve been very helpful.”
    “I’ll call you when I get Paloma and her husband settled. I’m sure she’ll want to get to the hospital right away,” he said.
    Diane had the phone’s speaker turned on as she spoke with Jonas so that Garnett and Hanks could hear. When she hung up, Garnett spoke first.
    “You see why I’ve found it’s a good idea to have someone from the crime scene listen to the interrogations,” he said. “They often hear things that are important.”
    Diane knew he had made that up on the spur of the moment to mollify Hanks. It was effective. Hanks nodded. After all, she had noticed something that probably was important. They had also made some progress in separating events that belonged to the attack from events that occurred later in the morning with the intruders.
    She also realized Hanks was off his game. He should have asked if the hutch still had its contents when he asked Jonas what was in it. He must have been very uncomfortable, not thinking at his best. He didn’t strike her as a man who liked to load up on painkillers.
    “David Goldstein found pieces of broken pottery on the road behind the house,” said Diane. “That’s where the thieves had their vehicle parked and made their getaway this morning.”
    “When Marcella Payden was attacked,” said Hanks, “the perp or perps took some paintings. Then the guys we ran into early this morning took the pottery from the hutch, I’m guessing. So, are we looking at art thieves?”
    “Maybe,” said Garnett. “But I don’t know. I wouldn’t expect them to be geniuses, but these guys seem pretty incompetent as art thieves. The stolen pottery isn’t even authentic Indian artifacts, if I understand correctly. Is Dr. Payden’s pottery valuable?”
    Both Hanks and Diane shrugged.
    “She made pottery more for research, I believe,” said Diane. “She tried to re-create methods used by prehistoric American Indians. And she experimented to replicate past phenomena.”
    Garnett and Hanks both raised their eyebrows at this and traded glances.
    “For example, one experiment she did was to make vessels with different-colored glazes, put them on a shelf as they may have been arranged in an aboriginal shelter. She’d tip over the shelf and analyze the breakage pattern of the pottery fragments on the floor.”
    “And this tells her what exactly?” asked Hanks.
    “When excavating a site, you find a lot of broken pottery. Mapping the location of the pieces and then reconstructing them back into a whole vessel tells you something about how it got broken in the first place. In the example I gave, would the patterns of breakage that have been