The woman nodded, lips pursed as if all her suspicions had been confirmed, and said, “Well, then, I see.”

She punched a key, and three tickets emerged from a slot in the desk. “But you-all watch yourselves, y’hear?”

Dess snatched the tickets and was about to say something, but an older man in a tweed suit came through the staff door behind the desk, interrupting her just in time.

“Ah, it’s the Arrowheads,” Dr. Anton Sherwood said with a chuckle.

Rex felt the tension leave him. He grinned at the museum’s director. “Good to see you, Dr. Sherwood.”

“Got anything for me today, Rex?”

Rex shook his head, taking a moment to enjoy the confusion on the ticket woman’s face. “Sorry, we’re just here for a quick visit. Anything new to look at?”

“Mmm. We got a new biface point in from Cactus Hill, Virginia. Looks like a good candidate for a Solutrean link. It’s in the pre-Clovis case on this floor. Let me know what you think.”

“I’d be happy to,” Rex said. He smiled politely at the baffled woman behind the ticket desk and led Dess and Melissa into the museum.

“Psych-out,” Dess said softly. Even Melissa was smiling. Rex allowed himself a few moments of pride. At least his two friends weren’t ragging him about acrobats anymore.

The museum’s low lighting settled around them, relief from the blinding noonday sun. Rex breathed in the cool, comforting smell of exposed red clay. One wall of the museum was open to the original Bixby excavation, the walkways suspended a few feet from the raw earth. Set into the hard clay, as if never fully excavated, were tools made of bone, fossilized wooden implements, obsidian flakes in the shape of arrowheads, and the skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger. (Saber-Toothed Tiger was what the label said, anyway. Rex was certain that his own theories and Dr. Sherwood’s differed on exactly what the beast had been.)

As they headed for the sloping ramp that led down to the basement floors, Rex checked his watch. It was a few minutes past noon; Jessica might already be waiting. But on the way he paused for a quick glance into a glass case of pre-Clovis finds.

The case was full of crude arrowheads ranging from a half inch to five inches in length. Some were long and thin, others wide and barely pointed, like the end of a shovel. Most were spear points rather than true arrowheads. The makers had attached throwing shafts to them, but the wood had rotted away twelve thousand years ago. The newly arrived point was easy to spot. It was almost eight inches long, wafer thin and proportioned like a narrow leaf. It bore the telltale marks of a hammer made of soft stone and all the signs of a skilled workman. He propped up his glasses.