Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries (49 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 swallows hard, the color draining from her face.
“He was a Fire Dog. Not a real human like you and me, Sister.”
“I know …”
She is so weak. I hide my anger, saying, “I am disappointed with you, Sister. But for you, Bear Lance and so many others would still be alive. Perhaps you don’t understand, living as you do in the midst of Made People, but we are fewer as a result of your actions last night.”
She hears the wrath throttled deep in my throat. She glances at the bloody cloth, heavy with meat where it hangs from one of the pilasters. I watch the shiver pass through her soft flesh. It pleases me. I know what she has been trying to do. But for my appetite, I would seek to take her place. It would not be such a bad life,
sharing Browser’s bed, being his wife. But it is only fantasy. The Blue God has other plans for me.
“How will you make this thing you have done right, Sister?” I tap my chin with a long finger, and hide a smile as her gaze slides again to Father where he lies dying.
“He wanted your heart from the very beginning, Obsidian. Yours or Piper’s. But I had such high hopes for Piper.” I glance at my daughter again, seeing her empty eyes, and wonder if indeed, I shouldn’t cut her chest open.
My sister swallows as if her throat is too tight. “I have something better to offer you, Shadow. If you will let me speak with Old Pigeontail, I’m sure that I—I can arrange—”
“Indeed?” She cannot see the smile that lights my breath-heart soul. “You still amaze me, Sister.”
 
 
CATKIN SIGHED AS she gazed at the morning light that cast a glow into their room. A warming bowl rested an arm’s length from their bed, the coals cold and gray.
Browser made one of those male sounds of indescribable contentment and hugged her.
Through the window, he could see the half-moon-shaped bulk of Talon Town. He stared at it, wondering at the twists and turns of life.
It had started on the morning of his dead son’s funeral, one sun cycle ago, with the discovery of a desecrated grave, with the wounding of his lover, Hophorn, and his wife’s disappearance. It wasn’t until now that he could understand that this cycle had begun then, on that cold and blustery morning. One after another, each event had unfolded to bring him, the Katsinas’
People, and his Mogollon allies to this place at this time. It had brought him here, with Catkin, in love, and craving a future that he could just barely feel with the fingertips of his breath-heart soul.
But it would cost something. What? The gods never granted happiness without a price. As his ancestor, Poor Singer, had known, there was always a payment to be made.
He propped himself on one elbow and gazed down at Catkin with thoughtful eyes. At the feel of the cool air on her sweat-damp chest, she tugged up the blanket, and smiled.
His hand crept to her breast. She slipped one of her long legs over his. “Are you all right?”
He smiled. “I have finally made peace with life. I understand now.”
“Understand what?” She toyed with his short-cropped hair.
“That the most important thing isn’t clan, or honor, or status, or wealth, or any of the things our people believe. The only things that truly matter are having a full stomach, a soft warm wife, and the knowledge that you’ll see the sunset.” He tipped his round face and sunlight flashed through his thick black brows. “Catkin, when we are finished here, I want to go south.”
She studied the longing in his eyes. “Why south? What’s in the south?”
“It’s far from the First People’s kivas and towns. I’m thinking of the mountains. Maybe a green valley halfway between the Fire Dogs and the Hohokam. A place where a man and woman can build a little house, grow some corn, and love each other.”
“Just one soft woman?”
He smoothed a hand over her hair. “I’m not fool enough to put you and Obsidian under the same roof. You’d kill her.”
She stared at him with glistening eyes. “You are not
a wise man, Browser, discussing a beautiful woman immediately after sharing my bed.”
He studied her with genuine amusement. “I don’t love her. I love you.” The blanket fell from his muscular brown shoulders, and he tugged it up again. “Do you realize that last night’s battle was a miracle?”
“I do.”
“A War Chief lives all his life dreaming of conducting a fight like that. We tricked two war parties into fighting each other. We didn’t take a single loss. No one was even wounded. We destroyed two enemies and didn’t suffer a scratch in the process.” His smile turned sad.
“Then why are you sad?” She took his hand and held it to her heart. “You were brilliant. You should be proud.”
“I’m more proud of sharing your blankets than of that fight last night. After my wife …” Pain tensed his expression. “I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to share a woman’s blankets again.”
Catkin slipped her arms around him and pressed her naked body against his one more time. “My blankets are always open to you.”
“And mine to you.”
They held each other until Father Sun’s light filled the room and their blankets became too hot.
As he rose and reached for his war shirt, Browser gazed out the window. Some of his warriors had gathered on the first-story roof, pointing.
Browser looked out, seeing the lone figure with two dogs trotting stolidly toward Kettle Town. “Old Pigeontail is coming. He seems to be in a hurry.”
“Anyone with him?”
“No. Just him. But somehow, I don’t think we can take any comfort from that.”
 
 
MAUREEN LOOKED OUT the window of the Bronco as Dusty drove past the interpretive signs for Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo del Arroyo and then crossed the bridge over Chaco Wash. In the mirror he could see Yvette’s rental Jeep following him.
“Why do you think she wants to see the place Dale died?” Maureen asked.
“She thinks he was her father. That’s enough of a reason,” Dusty said, and squinted at the road, wondering just where Maggie had seen the owl. The Casa Rinconada parking lot was just ahead, it had to be somewhere in here.
Maureen said, “Have you thought about the actual mechanics of the murder?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Ruth Ann couldn’t have killed and buried Dale by herself. How would she have gotten his body out of the great kiva and up the hill to the place where he was buried? She doesn’t look strong enough.”
Dusty parked the Bronco and gazed up the ridge to where Michall, Sylvia, and two FBI men peeled away the black plastic that had covered the site. Yvette pulled in beside them. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
They got out of the Bronco and met Yvette on the trail. As they walked, Dusty gestured to the great kiva. “Dale was actually killed at the ceremonial chamber in front of us, but he was buried up there where you see the people standing. “Do you think Ruth Ann could
have carried a one-hundred-forty-pound body up that slope?”
Yvette’s eyes widened. “Perhaps. She goes to the club every week. She used to run in marathons. Finished respectably at Boston a couple of years ago. I wouldn’t have known, but Collins was in New York on business.”
Dusty pulled his collar up against the wind. “Who’s Collins?”
“My third husband. He faxed me the sports page of the
Boston
Globe.
It said: ‘World-famous anthropologist to run Boston Marathon.’ I came to the States straightaway. I wanted to see her.”
The wind whistled up the slope and ate into Dusty’s exposed face. “Did she know you were coming?”
“Yes, I called first, but it was a terrible trip. The traffic was beastly; they shut down the city for the Marathon, you know. I got to her home just after Mum did, she was still hot and sweaty, wearing her track suit. It didn’t go well. I left twenty minutes later.”
Dusty decided not to ask what that meant.
“What happened with Collins?” Maureen asked.
“He died,” Yvette said evenly. “Killed on the motorway. He crashed his Jaguar.” She pronounced it Jag-u-waar.
Maureen’s expression went from evaluative to concerned in a heartbeat. “How are you doing?”
Yvette replied cautiously, “I’m whole, actually. Life goes on.”
In the silence that followed, Dusty led the way past the Tseh So ruins and walked to Casa Rinconada.
He stood at the edge of the kiva, staring down into the sunlit depths. The place had changed. He would never come here again without wondering if Dale’s screams had echoed from the cold stone walls.
“You can see some of the sand,” he said. “We think it was a sand painting. Maybe used by Kwewur to trap Dale’s soul.”
Dusty glanced at her. She looked a lot like him. She had his jaw, and he could see his nose on her, scaled down, more feminine. The biggest difference in their faces was her thoughtful brown eyes. Dale’s eyes.
“All that was left was the blood?” she asked in a small voice.
“That and a note. The FBI has it. Apparently it was sent to Dale to get him to come here on Halloween night. After the witch killed him and mutilated him”—it surprised him how easily he could say that now—“he carried Dale up there.” He pointed to the excavation on the ridge to their south and headed in that direction.
She followed him up the slope, walking carefully in her funky black suede boots with their high heels. She stopped beside him at the police tape.
“Michall, Sylvia,” Dusty called, “this is Yvette Hawsworth.”
Michall climbed out of the chest-deep kiva and shook hands. Sylvia just leaned on her shovel and waved.
Rick and Bill perked up at the Hawsworth name. They walked around the kiva and eyed her carefully.
“Does Agent Nichols know you’re here?” Bill asked after introductions.
“He’s scheduled to talk to her later,” Dusty said, preempting anything unpleasant. To his relief, Yvette didn’t fumble it. She just nodded.
“This is where they found Dale.” Dusty pointed. “Buried there. So we’re digging. Trying to find out why the killer chose this spot.”
“Any clues yet?” she asked.
“Talk to Michall. She’s the Principal Investigator here.” He stepped around to study the profile where the pit transected the kiva. “Hey, what’s that discoloration?”
“The coyote hole where the site was potted.” Michall hopped lithely back into the pit and pulled a trowel
from her back pocket. Using the point she outlined the intrusive dirt that funneled down and disappeared into the pit floor. “It’s been a while, Dusty. But not that long ago.”
“How do you know that, Professor Jefferson?”
She walked to the side of the kiva and reached into a brown paper sack to pull out a rusty beer can. “Coors,” she said. “Steel. And look at the top.” She turned it to expose the characteristic triangular punctures made before pop-tops.
“Late fifties through the sixties,” Dusty said.
“Hey, you’re good at this. Have you ever thought of doing it for a living?” Sylvia asked.
“Careful,” he said. “Your next excavation is going to be a cat box.”
Sylvia grinned and used her shovel to start chunking out the next twenty-centimeter level. “I once knew a guy who found a Folsom point in a cat box,” she said. “Course it had fallen out of his shirt pocket when he bent over to … Whoa!” She laid her shovel to the side and got down on her hands and knees. “We got bone here, boss.”
Maureen leaned as far over the police tape as she thought she could get away with, and called, “What kind of bone?”
“Hold on.” Sylvia brushed sand from a brown sliver. A white gash marked where the shovel had cut it.
The FBI guys were on her like vultures, staring over her shoulder as Michall bent down to look.
Dusty knotted his fists. He couldn’t see anything except a cluster of backs.
“Washais?” Sylvia called. “I think we need you in here.”
“Wait a minute.” Bill stood up, one hand out. “She’s not cleared.”
“Right,” Sylvia said. “Can you tell me what this is? You’ve been doing great for a cop. You’ve actually proved you could learn how to dig like an undergraduate.
You haven’t torn out the strings, and you haven’t collapsed the pit walls. Now, we can shut this down for a week while you guys get an ID, or Washais can tell us in five seconds. Which is it?”
Rick, his dark blue FBI jacket mottled with dust and smeared with dirt, took the bone from Sylvia and studied it for a moment. Then he looked up at Maureen. “Dr. Cole, I’m only asking for an opinion. I’ll have this analyzed later to ID it for certain. Do you think you could—”
Maureen was under the tape like a hound after a rabbit. She took the bone from his hand and turned it over and over again.
Yvette shook her head. “My mum did this once upon a time? Mum, who wouldn’t take a chance on opening a car’s boot for fear of cracking a nail?”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, she told me she hated archaeology. The Zuni used to call her The-Woman-With-No-Eyes because she never looked at them, she just looked at her papers,” Dusty said. “But that was before she got famous. She wasn’t—”
“Human,” Maureen said. “What we have here is about fifteen centimeters of the distal portion of the tibia—the shinbone—right side. Probably male from the robusticity of the bone. The spiral fracture was perimortal. It occurred around the time of death.” She lifted the fragment to the gray light filtering through the cloudy sky. “I can’t tell you here, but from the looks of it, I’d say this was butchered.”
“Butchered?” Rick asked. “You mean they cut him apart?”
“Probably,” Maureen said.
“Is it prehistoric?” Rick asked. “Or is this one of our unsub’s previous victims?”
“Don’t be a dork,” Sylvia said, leaning on her shovel handle. “Look at it, Rick.”
Rick took the bone, slightly cowed by Maureen’s
amused expression. He studied it for a moment and said, “Prehistoric, right?”
“Why?” Michall asked. Her red hair blowing about her face in the wind.
“Because if it was modern, you wouldn’t be jacking me around like this.”
“That’s a smart cop.” Sylvia nodded, dug another shovelful, and artfully tossed it up into Michall’s screen.
“Seriously,” Michall responded, “why’s it prehistoric?”
Rick scowled as he studied the bone. “Uh, the discoloration?”
“Right.” Maureen pointed to the patterns on the dirt. “And what’s this?”
“It looks like marks left by roots,” Rick guessed.
“Very good, Rick. Acids in roots etch the bone’s surface. It takes time. If this was a modern forensic specimen, the roots wouldn’t have had time to create this effect on the bone’s cortex.”
“Hey! Wait a minute,” Dusty called. “What’s the provenience on that tibia?”
“Pot hole backfill,” Sylvia called back. “Disturbed. It’s out of context.”
“Damn,” Dusty said.
“What’s that mean?” Yvette asked.
“It’s been moved. Probably dug out when the site was potted in the sixties and then shoveled back in when the hole was backfilled.” He paused, frowning. “Hey, Michall? You’ve read all the Parking Service’s notes on this site. Did they ever mention backfilling this?”
She looked up from the screen where she was processing the dirt Sylvia had tossed her. “No, Dusty. It’s just recorded with its original Bc number.”
Dusty shook his head. “That can’t be right.”
“Why not?” Yvette was watching him with Dale’s eyes. It was almost spooky.
“The beer can. The lack of documentation of the backfill, a chunk of human bone that big. It’s not the sort of stuff the Chaco Rangers would throw back in a hole.” He looked out at the canyon before him. “In the sixties? This isn’t the kind of place pot hunters would hit. It’s open. You can see this ridge from the entire west end of the loop road.”
“Unless it was done at night,” Maureen said as she walked up with the precious tibia fragment in her hand. “Maybe it was a summer temp working on his own after hours?”
“Yeah, maybe. It’s certainly happened before.” Dusty frowned down at the tibial shaft. “You think it was butchered?”
She used a fingernail to trace the thin line incised in the dirt-encrusted bone. “I need to clean it and look at it under the microscope, but yes, I’d say that cut mark was made when someone disarticulated the foot.”
“Cannibalism or disarticulation for secondary burial?” Dusty asked.
“If they cut the body apart to make it easier to carry to another place for burial”—Maureen’s dark eyes challenged—“how do you explain the spiral fracture?”
“What about the spiral fracture?” Dusty crossed his arm. “The tibia might have gotten broken when the pot hunter dug up the site.”
Yvette looked over Dusty’s shoulder as Maureen pointed to the dimple where the bone was broken. “Remember? The fracture was perimortal? That dimple marks the hammer impact right there.” She turned it over. “And if this was cleaned, we’d see scrubbing from the anvil right here.”
“Pueblo Animas all over.” Dusty took a deep breath. He turned. “Sylvia?”
“Yo, Boss Man.” She looked up.
“When you get to the kiva roof, keep a sharp eye out. I’m betting you a case of Coors we’re going to cut
the same McElmo ceramics that we did at 10K3 and PA. You get my drift?”
Sylvia stopped her shoveling. The wind whipped her brown hair around her freckled face. “Yeah, Dusty, I got you.”
“She didn’t sound happy,” Yvette noted. “What did you mean?”
Dusty shoved his hands into his pocket. “It’s hard to explain unless you—”
“Got charcoal!” Sylvia sang out and knelt in the pit. “We’re coming down on a burned layer.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Dusty whispered, remembering the charred ruins and burned bodies at Pueblo Animas.
 
 
BROWSER AND STONE Ghost stood with Old Pigeontail in the room where Horned Ram lay bound. The Red Rock elder had turned a shade of gray, and his shoulder, swollen and bruised, looked terrible. Blue Corn knelt at his side, mopping his face with a damp cloth.
Pigeontail’s faded red cloak swayed around his tall body as he walked over to Horned Ram to examine his injuries. His tawny eyes gleamed in his long face.
“If you do not cut his bonds soon,” Pigeontail said, “he will lose this arm. It’s already turning purple.” He bent down and gestured to Horned Ram’s bad shoulder.

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