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portable sodium lamps. Even from here, Rachel made out the crisscross of crime tape.
    The explosion took place in the apse, the area behind the main altar. She headed down the center aisle, ignoring the wealth of art, architecture, and history all around her. Her attention was focused on her goal.
    Reaching the main altar, she stepped to the edge of the crime scene. Atthis hour, the area was deserted. Over the past two days, the investigators and experts had gone over the site with their evidence bags, brushes, swabs, tubes, and vials of chemicals. It was already known that the explosive charge was a dense form of heptanitrocubane, a new class of powerful energetics.
    A shiver passed through Rachel as she stared down at the scorched marble. It was the only sign left of the actual attack. Even the blood had been cleaned off. But the floor was still marked with tape, displaying splatter patterns and estimating force trajectories of the blast. On the far side of the apse, a chalk outline marked where Father Marco Giovanni’s body had come to rest. He was found at the foot of the Altar of the Chair of Saint Peter, beneath the alabaster window showing the dove of the Holy Spirit.
    Rachel had read the report on the young priest. He’d been a student of her uncle, a fellow Vatican archaeologist. According to the file, he’d spent the past decade in Ireland, researching the roots of Celtic Christianity, studying the early fusion of pagan rituals with the Catholic faith. He concentrated specifically on the mythos surrounding the Black Madonna, a figure often epitomized as the fusion of the pagan Earth Mother with the Virgin Mary.
    Why would such an archaeologist be targeted? Or was it random? Had her uncle and his student just been at the wrong place at the wrong time? None of it made sense.
    Rachel swallowed and turned. They’d found her uncle crumpled by the papal altar, blown by the blast wave, barely conscious.
    Not wanting to contaminate the crime scene, Rachel circled around the outside of the taped-off area. She climbed the two steps to the left side of the apse. There was little room. She edged along the monument to Pope Paul III, with its statues of the virtues, Justice and Prudence, done in the likeness of the deceased pope’s sister and mother.
    Her feet slowed.
    What am I doing here?
    Rachel suddenly grew too conscious of the tomblike quiet of the basilica, of the weight of ages and death, of the stacks of tombs around and below her. It didn’t help that across the apse, on the far side of the crime scene, stood the sepulcher of Pope Urban VIII. A bronze statue of thepope sat atop the monument, his hand raised in blessing. But below his feet rested his tomb, and rising from the top of the tomb was a bronze skeleton. An upraised bony hand was frozen as it wrote the name of the deceased pope on an open scroll. Rachel shivered at the sight.
    She was not normally so superstitious, but with Uncle Vigor so near death himself … What if she lost him?
    She wanted to turn away, but she found her gaze lingering on the macabre statue, the symbol of death. Then she remembered. A cold wash swept through her, raising goose bumps over her arms.
    Death.
    She mumbled aloud the one word Vigor had kept repeating in his delirium. “Morte.”
    She studied the bronze statue crouched atop the tomb. What if Vigor had been trying to tell them something, something he knew?
    Rachel hurried back around the taped-off crime scene to the other side of the apse. She tipped up on her toes to peer more closely at the statue, but though she examined it carefully, she still almost missed it. The brown leather cord was the same color as the aged bronze.
    She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and climbed up on the edge of the tomb to reach it. Grasping the cord, she freed a tiny satchel that was half-hidden behind the bony palm of the Grim Reaper. She dropped back down with her prize. Was her discovery of any significance? Or was this some bit of