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“Hey, Haze,” he’d said.

“You didn’t charge her.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to ask the poor woman for money. I’ll do the job and then I’ll ask for payment when she picks it up.”

But, of course, she never came back, so into the museum the turtle went.

Why did that turtle garner my attention now? There was something off. I made my way to it and squinted. It was displayed so I couldn’t see its front right foot unless I moved it away from the wall a bit.

I peered in between the wall and the mount, and knew I’d come upon something that wasn’t right. I couldn’t be sure that this was the thing my subconscious had keyed in on, but I knew something had changed from the last time I’d looked at the turtle.

I grabbed my phone and flashed the light, spotting something that shouldn’t have been there.

“Oh. Damn,” I said as I looked at the bone—possibly another phalanx, a finger bone. “Damn.”

I didn’t know who to call—Calloway or Verro. I called both.

Verro was the first to arrive, but Calloway wasn’t far behind. For a moment or two as they questioned me, I wished I’d gathered the bone first and looked at it closely, but a sense of responsibility won over and now it was bagged evidence, beyond my grasp. I hadn’t even really gotten a close look at it. It hadn’t been very visible, tucked under a foot—why hadn’t I looked closer?

In a strange scene, the turtle was also bagged—in a very big evidence bag—and taken out of the museum. I had no idea when the bone had been left there, but I told the officers that I felt like something was off when I woke up at four.

We went through the sequence of events that led me to discover the strange display. Neither Verro nor Calloway scoffed at my “instincts telling me something was off.”

Calloway nodded. “Did you look around the rest of the place?”

“I did. I touched the front door’s knobs, but no others. I didn’t touch the windows either, just looked. No one broke anything to get inside.”

“The door was locked?”

I sighed. “I think so.”

“Do you typically lock it?” Verro asked.

“I do.”

“What would make you think you might not have this evening?”

I was not going to tell the police that I was floating a little from my time under the stars, but that was the truth. I shrugged. “I got home late. I just don’t track those minutes in my memory. I don’t know when the intruder came in either. Though I didn’t sense anything was off until early this morning, maybe it happened another time and my intuition just took some time to realize it.” I paused. “However, I always lock the door. And, the lock on that door—unlike a deadbolt—could be opened with the slide of a credit card. Maybe I’ve been fooling myself regarding my own security.”

“That’s true. Let’s get a deadbolt on there.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Calloway said, “Good. Were you here, working in your lab today?”

“No. I spent some time with Chief Verro looking in the barrel.”

“That is true.” Verro nodded.

“I heard,” Calloway said. “The scarf is up in Tucson, and it has been confirmed to be identical to the one around the sculpture’s neck, but we still don’t have any further answers.”

“Okay.”

“You said you got home late. What time?”

“About ten.”

“And you’re not sure if something was out of place then?”