The Darkest Hour
The cops would treat this as a crime scene, so he went back to his office to wait and think.
His office had always been a place of refuge. No matter what happened in his life, he could always go there, shut out the present, and lose himself in the distant past.
He walked over to his bookshelves and lifted up a small fossil. It was only two and a half inches long. An Archimediella shell, white and rounded like a narwhal horn, with whorls overhanging the sutures that wound around the shell from base to tip. It was an ancient, primeval snail shell, yet it was also a thing of beauty, even though it was the kind of fossil one could find almost anywhere in the world.