“Oh, so now I’m a fence?” She toed a plastic file of recipe cards detailing notes from a dig in Wales that had toppled on the floor. “Bart, please. Like I told you, I exchanged a few e-mails with the guy, then bam.”

“You always arrange to meet strangers?”

“Not always. Sometimes they arrange to meet me.” Or she found them waiting in her living room with nasty tools and a taste for bone. “You know I can’t resist a mysterious artifact, Bart. A skull to me is like a cache of stolen credit cards to you. Yes?”

“I hate credit-card scams. So much paperwork involved. All right, so we’ll agree the answer to why the thief chose you will never be solved. And he probably didn’t intend to make you a fence, just wanted your opinion on its value.”

“Agreed.”

“You get a clue on the skull yet? Someone killed for it. Is it made completely of gold?”

“There is some decorative gold between the cranial sutures. Total? Probably less than a few ounces. I left it with Professor Danzinger at Columbia this morning. He’s unable to date the thing because they don’t have the proper equipment at the university, but he did find some interesting markings on the skull interior.”

“Inside it? How does a person get anything inside a skull?”

“Very carefully.”

Should she tell him about Serge’s visit?

Annja was always cautious about telling Bart too much about the fiascos she found herself involved in. But she wasn’t stupid. If having a detective back her up would advance the case, and she read Bart’s mood as helpful, she’d ask.

She wasn’t sure if police involvement was wise at this point in the game. It may hinder her by requiring she turn over the skull as evidence.

On the other hand, Serge had hurt her. The stab wound still pulsed with a dull ache. But what had he been trying to accomplish with the weird instrument?

She’d have to see if she could find a match on the Internet. If she knew who used a tool like that, and what for, that may give clue to who the heck Serge was. But what would she look under? Bone core samples? Bone biopsy tools?

She did not like knowing someone was walking around the city with a literal piece of her. Her DNA. The last time someone had gotten a piece of her DNA she’d come close to being cloned.

“I need a look at the evidence you have, Annja.”

“Of course. I’ll pack up the tools and get them to you.”

“What about the skull?”

“Not in my hands at the moment.”

“So you’re going to sit tight until you get word from the professor?” Bart asked. “Or do I sense you’ve already formed a plan to track the origins of this thing? Something that’ll see you in more trouble than a pretty young woman like you should be in?”

Pretty? Had he ever called her pretty? Maybe, but if so, she’d never noticed. Hmm, she’d take the compliment. Lately, they were few and far between.

“Bart, please.” She sat on the floor and tugged a pillow to her lap. “I’m so not like that.”

His chuckle tweaked her to smile. All right, she was exactly like that. And that Bart knew as much meant a lot to her.

She did have other friends. Some. There were the women on the Chasing History’s Monsterscrew. And Doug Morrell was a friend. An irritating one, but that’s what friends were for, to irritate.

“I’ll keep you updated,” she said to him. “Let me know if you learn more about the thief. Like where he’s been the past few days. You can track his movements, can’t you?”

“Possibly. But I’ll need more reason to do so than curiosity. I may need a certain skull as evidence to trace to its origins. Would you turn it over if you did have it in hand?”

“Probably not.”

“Annja.”

“Bart, don’t press on this one. You handle the police business. Let me follow the skull’s trail.”

“Annja, you were shot at last night. So I am going to press. I’m getting a sense that you’re only telling me half of what’s going on. And why is that not unusual?”

He cared about her; she knew that. It felt great. Sometimes too great. Because the moment she let down her staunch defenses and let her innate neediness rise, then look out. Sometimes a girl had to resist what she wanted most. A pat on the back, a compliment.

Yeah, too risky.

“So you’ll let me know if you come up with more info on Marcus Cooke?” she asked, avoiding his accusing question. “Anything that can point me to where the skull was found, unearthed and/or stolen is going to help me a lot.”

“What if it’s just another skull?”

“Men don’t kill for just another skull, Bart. I’ve had a look at it. There are some amazing carvings inside. It’s special—I can feel it. But it will help to know if it was taken from a dig, or a museum, or a private collection.”

She made a mental note to get online and do a search for infant skulls.

“Hey, Annja?”

“What?”

“Are we still going to dinner tomorrow night?”

“Uh…”

“Annja? How else will you hand off the tools to me?”

“It’s a date. And not even because of business. I want to see you, Bart. It’s been too long. Talk to you soon.”

She’d hand over the thief’s tools but there was no way she’d give Bart the skull.

She hung up and went to bandage her wrist. She kept an arsenal of medical supplies stored in her medicine cabinet—which were presently strewn all over the floor.

“He was looking for a skull. It couldn’t possibly fit it in this narrow cabinet. This wasn’t necessary,” she muttered.

Minutes later, she’d dabbed the wound with alcohol and bandaged it with medical tape. It had stopped bleeding. She’d be fine. Heck, she took bullets and knife slashes all the time. This was nothing.

“You are so not the Rambo you sometimes think you are, Annja,” she reminded herself.

Thoughts to start picking up her trashed loft were counterattacked by the rumbling reminder from her gut that she hadn’t eaten yet. Picking through the debris on the kitchen floor and over the counters, she found a box of cereal Serge hadn’t emptied onto the floor. That he had emptied others and unscrewed all the jars astounded her.

“Who’s going to hide a skull in a cereal box?” she muttered as she poured the cereal into one of two bowls remaining in the cupboard. “Really. Did the guy think he’d find the prize at the bottom of the box?”

The fridge was relatively undisturbed. She knew that was because she hadn’t gotten groceries lately, and there wasn’t much to toss around. She poured milk over the chunks of colored sugar and fortified whole grain, plucked a spoon from a pile of scattered flatware and padded into the living room to sit before her now-clean desk and looked at her laptop.

“And to think I was complaining about how messy this desk was. Guy did me a favor. Too bad he doesn’t dust.”

The cereal was a rough go at first. Her aching jaw reminded her she’d taken a few more punches than she’d delivered.

Pressing the spoon over the cereal so it sank deeper into the milk and would become soggy and easier to chew, she moused her way to the archaeological site and found a few replies to her post.

BestMan573 wrote, You’ve seen one skull, you’ve seen them all. Though it does resemble that of a newborn. Where’d you say you found this? By the way, love the online pic!

“Must not be an anthropologist,” she commented on his blasé dismissal of skulls. “And no, I’m not going to tell anyone I found this in some dead man’s backpack. Online pic? Must have seen my bio at the Chasingsite.”

In that picture, taken on a lavender-streaked Scottish moor, she wore a boonie hat, cargo shorts and hiking boots. Not at all sexy. But indicative of her true self.

PinkRibbonGirl started by saying she was only in the seventh grade. Annja worked the numbers and figured she must be about twelve years old.

Hi! I’m so excited to be talking to you. I think you have the Skull of Sidon. I just found out about it a week ago, and thought it would be an awesome idea for my history report. I handed the outline in to my teacher and she nixed the idea. Said I couldn’t write about necrophilia in middle school. It wasn’t very becoming of a young girl. I didn’t even know what necrophilia was until I looked it up. Eww!