That last sentence had an ominous ring. "I didn't tell you to kill him. I just want to be able to keep on working with no threat hovering over me."

"I can't promise you that will happen anytime soon. There will be a threat until Diaz is gone."

"Montalvo."

"Yes."

"You know what I said about how ridiculous you were to wear a gun in the house?"

He nodded.

"Erase it from your memory. I was damn glad you were wearing it tonight."

"So was I." He turned and walked away from her.

She drew a deep breath, braced herself, and went back into the library.

Everything in the room was as neat and orderly as if the incident had never happened, she noticed. Miguel had been busy. The remains of the snake had vanished. The lamp she had thrown at the serpent was back on the desk. Even the drop cloth had been whisked away.

She went over to the dais and gazed at Nalia.

Coffin-shaped, triangular head lunging toward her.

She tensed and instinctively took a step back. Christ, she couldn't work with that memory hanging over her.

All right, play it over so that it couldn't sneak up on her. She closed her eyes. Black mamba striking at her. The drop cloth falling from her hand. The lamp hurling through the air. The snake coming. Coming. Coming. Montalvo shooting the snake. The snake was dead. Nothing to fear. Nothing to fear.

Gradually the panic faded away and she opened her eyes. It might return but not with the same force. "It's gone, Nalia. We worked our way through it. But you'll have to help me keep it from coming back."

Get to work. Do your job. She examined the work she'd done that day. She couldn't see that any of the depth markers had been disturbed by the snake but she'd have to recheck them to make sure they were still accurate.

"Okay, here we go again," she murmured. "It was ugly using you that way. You had enough ugly things happen to you. You didn't need this."

She carefully began to measure.

"I hear you had a nocturnal visitor," Galen said when she came down the stairs the next morning. His expression was sober. "You were lucky. I ran into one of those snakes in Africa while I was on a job once. Nasty."

"I hope you don't mean that literally. If you did, Montalvo was lying about how deadly they are."

"He's not lying. The mamba slid into one of my men's bedroll. It bit him in the throat. He didn't have a chance."

"It didn't happen to me. I don't want to think about it any more." A sudden thought occurred to her. "How did you find out?"

"Miguel. He told Soldono and me last night after he searched your room. He thought we should check out our own rooms in case you weren't the only target."

"Does Joe know?"

He shook his head. "I didn't want to drive him nuts. I searched his room myself after he went to sleep. He's having enough problems getting himself in shape without having that to goad him on."

"How is he?"

"Why don't you go and see for yourself?"

"So that we could argue? No thanks. I'm having enough trouble concentrating."

"I wonder why. I don't imagine it's every day you have a black mamba popping out of one of your reconstructions."

And he didn't even know about Diaz's threat to Jane, she remembered. "No, it's not a common occurrence."

"Have you had breakfast? I thought I'd grab a bite before I took a tray up to Quinn."

"Miguel brought a tray to my room." She smiled faintly. "He said that it seemed the only way he was sure I'd eat something."

Galen gazed at her appraisingly. "You do look a little finedrawn. Are you sleeping enough?"

She'd gotten three hours last night. She'd been on edge and excited and her mind wouldn't stop functioning. "Enough. I can sleep later." She started down the hall toward the library. "She won't let me sleep right now. I'm getting too close."

"'She'?"

"The work. The reconstruction."

"It sounded much more intimate."

"I feel intimate when I'm working on a skull. It's a human being, for God's sake."

"How close are you?"

"I should start the finish work either tonight or tomorrow." She stopped at the door of the library. "Can you keep Joe from making a move until then?"

"I'll try. No promises."

"It's only one more day."

"But you never can tell when you're going to run into another pesky reptile. That could cause a delay."

"Montalvo says that there won't be any more problems. He promised that he'd find out which one of his men took a bribe to bring the snake to the library."

"I'm sure he's doing everything he can. Miguel said Montalvo was going to work all night going over the personnel records and trying to discern the weak links. Everything will be fine if he can isolate the snake he took to his bosom." He smiled. "Did you ever realize how many phrases there are that pertain to snakes? Our culture seems to be obsessed with them."

And she wasn't sure she'd ever hear one of those phrases without remembering that moment when the mamba had lunged toward her. "I'd just as soon ignore them from now on."

"I can understand that." Galen turned and headed for the breakfast room. "But Montalvo won't be ignoring what happened and neither will Quinn if he finds out."

She didn't want Montalvo to ignore the incident, she thought as she opened the door. She wanted protection from interruption during this critical stage in the reconstruction and it was his job to give it to her. But she hoped to God that Joe wasn't told about what had happened. Joe was the-

She stopped.

Montalvo was sitting in the desk chair, staring at the reconstruction. "Good morning, Eve." He didn't take his gaze from the skull. "It's exceptionally gruesome, isn't it?"

"Not really. But I suppose it appears that way to most people."

His lips twisted. "But I'm not most people, am I? I loved her. I've spent years trying to avenge her. Yet I look at… this and I can't muster any tenderness. It looks like the cover of a horror DVD."

"If she were alive and horribly scarred, would you feel like that?"

"No."

"It's the same. She's not with us any longer but your memory of her is here. A reconstruction isn't pretty during the initial stages. That's why I didn't want you to see it until the end. I didn't have a drop cloth or I would have covered it last night."

"I told Miguel not to give you another one."

"Why would you-" Then she understood. "The snake. You thought that every time I took it off her that I'd remember the snake."

"A natural reaction. You didn't need the drop cloth. I did. So I thought I'd come in and meet her face-to-face again."

"You're not meeting her. You don't understand her. This isn't who she is." She sat down on the edge of the desk and stared at Nalia. "Let me explain her to you. Those little sticks that make her look like a voodoo doll are tissue-depth markers. There are more than twenty points on the skull for which there are known tissue depths. There are anthropological charts that give a specific measurement for each point of a Caucasian woman of average weight. After I have the tissue depths right, I take strips of plasticine and apply them between the markers, then build up to all the tissue-depth points." She delicately touched the nasal cavity. "The nose is always very difficult. I have to make sure the measurements are precise on the nasal spine and the opening. They dictate everything, the length, the angle of the nose. But it's all there if you work hard enough. The bones tell us what we need to know if we listen. She's telling us, Montalvo. There's nothing horrible about her. She's the woman you loved. We just have to strip away the veil."

"And then what happens after you finish measuring?"

Her gaze shifted to see that his intent stare was no longer on the skull but on her own face.