Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries (23 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries
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She sank down and braced her back against the stone
door frame. “Maybe it’s time to let it die.”
Browser saw her eyes tighten. “What’s wrong?”
She hesitated. “I was making my rounds, checking our guards, when I overheard that strange little girl talking to herself.”
“I thought she was supposed to stay with White Cone tonight?”
“She must have sneaked out. I found her huddled inside a pile of fallen roof timbers with a cornhusk doll clutched to her chest.”
“What was she saying?”
Catkin’s sandals scritched against the dirt on the floor. “Strange things. It was as though she was speaking to someone beside her. She said, ‘I won’t tell. I’m being good. I’m a good girl.’”
Browser lifted a shoulder. “What did it mean?”
Catkin’s eyes strayed to the stairs cut into the cliff and moonlight sheathed her dark eyes. “I tried to talk to her, but she just looked at me with huge black eyes. At the end, I said, ‘Who were you talking to?’ and she pointed at nothing and said, ‘Can’t you see him?’”
Browser shook his head. “She’s an orphan, Catkin. Her souls have been wounded so many times they’re like an arm that has been burned, sliced, and punctured. All that’s left is ugly scar tissue.”
Her sharp eyes searched the flats before Kettle Town. “Do you think her souls are loose?”
“Maybe.”
Browser impulsively slipped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to share warmth. It was the first time he’d ever touched her so. A smile turned her lips as she settled against him.
“What next?” she whispered. “How do we go about finding Two Hearts? I suspect his lair will be well guarded.”
“I’m going to send out small parties at night, to search for activity,” he told her. “No matter how careful they are, one of our scouts will see the glow of a
fire, or hear their voices. Then we will—”
“Do you trust the Mogollon?”
“A little,” he answered. “They are warriors of the Bow. One of their prophets has been killed. Probably by one of Two Hearts’s assassins. I think they know how important this hunt is. Imagine the prestige it will bring to their society if they are there when Two Hearts is hunted down and killed.”
“You are more forgiving than I. I remember their insults too well.”
Browser could still see the faces of the Fire Dog warriors who’d been raping her, which meant their faces must be burned into her souls.
“I think we must forgive, Catkin. We are like coyotes with the foaming-mouth disease, mad, tearing at each other because of wrongs committed by people long dead.” He exhaled and a white cloud drifted before his face. “Their prophet was right. If we don’t stop this, many sun cycles from now a new people will come here and find these ruins, and wonder who we were and why we destroyed ourselves.”
Out in the night, an owl hooted, as if it were the assent of the dead.
 
 
“I’LL RIDE IN back,” Rupert Brown said as he shoved the passenger seat forward and climbed into the back of the Bronco.
Dusty took one last look around the Visitors Center parking lot, and got behind the wheel. An unearthly gray shimmer lit the canyon today. Part of it was the snowflakes pirouetting out the leaden sky, but there was something else, too. Dusty couldn’t identify it; it was as though the ghosts were dancing. He could feel them all around him.
Maureen slid into the passenger seat and turned around. “How are you doing back there, Rupert?”
He maneuvered his feet around the thermos and a wealth of travel junk. “Fine, thanks.” Then he added, “What’s this?” as he studied the bound journal.
“We’ve been reading Dale’s diaries from the early years. It’s fascinating.”
“Yeah,” Dusty muttered. “And really upsetting. God, Rupert, you wouldn’t believe the things I’m learning.”
“It was a different time back then,” Rupert said softly, inspecting the date on the cover. “Just keep that in mind.” He laid the book to one side.
The fact that he didn’t seem uncomfortable back with all the junk spoke well for his continued humility—a rare trait among federal bureaucrats.
Rupert’s olive-green down coat sported the official government patch on his left shoulder: UNITED STATES
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE. He had pulled the earflaps of his red Scotch cap down against the biting west wind. “Let’s go.”
“Saw Lupe on the way out. He says Nichols really ran him through the third degree.”
“Yeah, well, the good old FBI seems to be drawing one blank after another. They wanted to see Reggie, too, but it’s his day off so he’s staying in town.”
Dusty drove around the canyon loop, took the exit, and pulled into the Casa Rinconada parking lot. He killed the ignition. Looking up to the west, there, on the low ridge jutting from under South Chacra’s rimrock, he could already see the site. Yellow police tape crisscrossed everything. Two men stood up there, waiting.
He got out of the Bronco and inhaled a deep breath to fortify himself. He felt light-headed, as though his soul had somehow lifted out of his body.
Rupert led the way up the path.
Dusty and Maureen followed, walking side by side.
When they passed the Tseh So interpretive site, panic gripped his heart.
He looked up at the cliffs that rose to the south. Winter shadows striped the ancient stairway that had been laboriously carved into the cliff face. It had eased prehistoric travel from the canyon bottom to the top of South Chacra Mesa. From the top of the stairs, the South Road led to the Tsin Kletzin ruin, which huddled on the lonely mesa top. Tsin Kletzin made up the southern tip of an imaginary cross created by Pueblo Alto on the north, Pueblo Bonito on the west, and Chetro Ketl to the east.
It helped that Maureen walked beside him. She had become his lifeline to sanity—and the one reason he couldn’t allow himself to crumble, like he wanted to. Just before they reached the yellow tape barrier, Dusty reached out for her hand. She clutched his fingers tightly. Dale must have walked this same path only a few days ago. Had he known what waited for him?
Who
waited for him?
The graveled trail forked, one route leading south to the archaeological site Bc59, the other to the great kiva of Casa Rinconada. Rupert led them southwest through the rabbitbrush and shocks of wheatgrass, to the base of a low shale ridge that shouldered its way out from the tumbled rim of South Chacra Mesa.
Dusty climbed.
Yellow plastic crime-scene tap warbled in the wind. On the other side stood Agent Nichols, his hands thrust deeply into the pockets of a brown canvas coat. He had the furred hood pulled up over his head. Another man, older, with gray hair, stood beside Nichols, wearing a long black wool coat over a gray suit. He had a scarf wrapped around his neck.
Dusty walked up to the tape. To the untrained eye the site would have looked like a crumbled rock outcrop. To Dusty’s eye, it was anything but that.
“Dr. Stewart, Dr. Cole,” Nichols said, “I’d like you
to meet my supervisor, Special Agent in Charge Ed Hammond.”
Dusty shook the suited man’s hand, but his eyes were drawn magnetically to the site beyond. The FBI agents might not have existed as he stepped forward, ducked under the tape, and walked out onto the ridgetop site.
“Whoa! Wait a minute!” Hammond called.
Dusty ignored him. He had to shove the image of Dale’s mangled body out of his mind and concentrate on the archaeology. “I’d say this is a five-room, single-story small house.” He pointed at the fresh dirt falling into a conelike hole at the bottom of what was obviously a kiva. “Is that were Dale was found? That hole?”
“It is.” Nichols stepped up with Maureen beside him. “Dr. Robertson’s body was lying upside down.”
Dusty clenched his fists and walked to the edge of the kiva. He knelt to stare across the rubble.
“What is it?” Rupert asked, following his gaze.
“Did you know about this?” Dusty asked.
Rupert ducked beneath the tape and came to kneel beside Dusty. “What?”
“What are you looking at?” Hammond asked. His polished black shoes slipped on the rock as he ducked beneath the tape and tottered toward them.
“It’s been potted,” Dusty said, and pointed. “These three rooms were dug up, vandalized. It’s been a while, though. Maybe thirty or forty years.”
“Or tested,” Rupert suggested. “Most of these Hosta Phase small houses were dug between 1939 and 1942.”
“I remember,” Dusty agreed. “But this wasn’t professionally excavated, Rupert. These are pot-hunter holes. They weren’t backfilled.”
“That was a long time ago, Dusty. Methodology—”
“Was poor,” Dusty finished. “Still, the UNM teams that did the excavations out here made sure they stabilized the ruins they excavated, and backfilled the rest to protect them. Why would they have left this one?
Rupert, you’re the living expert on these Hosta small houses. You did your master’s thesis on them. You’ve reviewed the field notes. Was there any mention of vandalism out here?”
Rupert fingered his chin, staring thoughtfully into the depression, as though to see into the past. Absently he said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at that information, Dusty, but I don’t recall a mention of vandalism. I do know that this site wasn’t revisited until the Chaco Center survey in 1971. We don’t have any records of testing, let alone excavation, up here dating from the UNM period.”
“How could they have missed it?” Dusty gestured down at the circle of Casa Rinconada and the hivelike foundations of the excavated small houses on the flat below. “This is a city out here.”
“Who knows? Maybe the records were lost.” He paused. “Or someone removed them.”
Maureen leaned over Dusty’s shoulder. From her expression, she must have been imagining Dale’s upside-down body. “What else did you find?”
“Not a thing,” Nichols answered. “And that’s puzzling. Whoever buried Dr. Robertson didn’t drop anything. He didn’t leave any tracks. It’s a clean site.”
Rupert stood and fixed the FBI agents with knowing eyes. “You won’t find anything on top of the ground, gentlemen. That’s why I asked for this meeting. Dale was buried here for a reason. To understand, we must dig.”
“This is a federal crime scene,” Hammond reminded. “Why should we allow you to dig it up? Doesn’t excavation destroy the site?”
“It does.” Rupert shoved his hands into his pockets. “But if you don’t dig, you’ll never solve this case.”
“What makes you so sure?” Hammond asked defiantly. “Don’t underestimate the Bureau’s capacity for ferreting out enough pieces of the puzzle to fill in the blanks. Whoever did this to Dr. Robertson knew him.
Was close to him. This wasn’t a random act. It was a well thought out murder. Someone contacted Dr. Robertson and called him to this place. Someone he knew and trusted. We’ll find that person.”
Rupert shook his head. “No, you won’t. This wasn’t a ‘White’ crime. Sure, you’re going to follow out every little lead, interview every anthropologist that Dale ever squabbled with, interrogate every student he ever failed. You’ll look up all of his old lovers and find out that none of them were spurned to the point they’d kill Dale. Dale backed a lot of controversial issues. Are you going to check out all the Native American activists who hated Dale because he believed in Anasazi cannibalism and warfare? How about the BLM archaeologists that Dale raked over the coals for turning the federal cultural resources program into a paper shuffle instead of actually doing archaeology? For that matter, he hammered the Park Service pretty hard for our half-assed implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Dale burned every bureaucrat’s butt clear up to the Secretary of the Interior. You gonna check her out, too?”
Dusty stood, and found it strange that the action took all of his effort. Reluctantly he walked over to Rupert’s side, facing the agents. “Rupert’s right. Dale always called it like he saw it, but the profession’s full of people like that. Why would they have picked Dale and not some of the other controversial figures?”
“Look,” Rupert said tiredly. “I’m just trying to save you from a wild goose chase. What happened to Dale wasn’t the result of some petty professional squabble. Witches kill for personal reasons.” He aimed a finger at the ruins. “The answer is here. I have the excavation permit already filled out in my office. I’ll beg for rubber stamps from the Advisory Council on Historic Places and the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Office. And you can bet that, for Dale’s sake, I’ll get it in twenty-four hours.”
Hammond shivered in the wind. “Who’s going to do this digging? You?”
“I can’t. Convict of interest. Dale was a personal friend.” Rupert turned away and stepped over to the tape line where he stared down at the empty circle of Casa Rinconada’s great kiva one hundred yards to the south. A strangely haunted look entered his eyes.
“I’ll dig it,” Dusty said. “I have the people. They’ll fall over themselves to get a shovel into the ground here. We all loved Dale.”

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