Human Sacrifice

by Cindy L Hull

  Above them an endless expanse of stars filled the darkness. The air had cooled, and spectators who had shown foresight donned sweaters or light jackets. Claire pulled a nylon jacket from her shoulder bag and followed her group. The clanking of heavy feet on the metal stairs reverberated in the night air. Park officials holding large flashlights directed the traffic behind the north building of the Nunnery Quadrangle, away from the pyramid. Footlights followed the path toward the Cultural Center.

  Despite the size of the exodus, visitors departed as if from a church, conversing in subdued tones, except those of fussing, overly tired children, herded along by similarly exhausted parents. Madge and Claire joined a small group of tourists who wandered away from the path to take night photos. While the others rejoined their groups, Madge and Claire meandered farther afield, maneuvering carefully along the limestone outcroppings. The illumination cast ominous shadows in the crevices of the structure, and Claire paused to adjust the settings on her camera.

  A piercing scream shattered the darkness, followed by cries of alarm emanating from the far side of the Magician’s Pyramid. Claire and Madge stumbled toward the sound, Claire in the lead, dodging ankle-breaking clumps of limestone while Madge struggled behind. Just past the west stairway a crowd was coalescing, like flocking birds waiting for the signal to journey south. Indistinguishable noises, like the shrill cries of blackbirds, collided in a Babel of questions and gasps as tourists jostled to fill in the gaps of the growing semi-circle that formed around the body lying at the foot of the pyramid.

  A young, female security guard stood among the growing crowd. The guard held her flashlight on a middle-aged woman trying to make herself understood as she explained how she came upon the horrific scene. The guard punched numbers into her field phone as the witness turned her back and addressed the crowd, providing her narrative to those around her.

  “Someone’s dead!” she said.

  The guard fought back tears as she continued to push numbers, listen, then disconnect. Several people pulled out cellphones and began taking photographs, to the protest of more sensitive tourists around them.

  The guard clipped her phone to her belt and shined her flashlight around the group. “Se mueven, por favor, y no tocan fotos!” she begged, but the tourists largely ignored her.

  Claire elbowed her way to the young guard. As she approached, she could see a figure lying in the shadow of the pyramid balustrade, but she forced her attention toward the crowd. “She wants you all to move away and not take photographs.”

  An elderly man spoke from the midst of the crowd. “Why doesn’t she do something? My God!”

  Claire turned to the guard, who once again attempted a call. In frustration, the young woman held up her radio with one hand and held the flashlight on Claire’s face with the other.

  “No answer,” she said in accented English.

  In Spanish, Claire said, “Get help! I’ll watch the crowd.”

  The young woman turned and ran toward the Cultural Center, and Claire looked closely at the body for the first time. Blocking out the voices bouncing around her, Claire’s eyes locked on the unnatural position of the neck and the huge gash at the back of the head, a man’s head, matted with blood that had flowed freely over his gray nylon jacket. She couldn’t see his face, yet there was something familiar about him. Claire scanned the crowd and saw her colleagues huddled together at the edge of the circle that had formed around her and the body. She sighed with relief when Brad joined her in the circle. He looked down at the body and frowned at Claire.

  “I told the guard I’d keep everyone away,” Claire said as Brad threw off his backpack and knelt next to the body. He used his fingers to test for a pulse behind the man’s ear, then leaned down to look closer. Gently, he turned the body over. Claire reached out to stop him, but she was too late. When the face was visible, a new rush of gasps erupted from the anthropologists in the crowd.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Claire looked into the staring eyes of Paul Sturgess. His face was bruised; his wire-rim glasses, broken in the fall, hung from one ear. Instinctively, she reached out to touch him, but Brad pulled her hand back. He looked up at the crowd bearing down on them, a mixture of tourists and anthropologists with facial expressions ranging from horror to poorly disguised voyeurism.

  “Can someone find that security guard? Call someone?” Brad demanded in English and Spanish. Bystanders looked helplessly at their cellphones or surreptitiously took photographs of the gruesome scene. “Por favor!” he shouted.

  A student wearing a University of Yucatán sweatshirt took off in a sprint. “Me voy!”

  Claire’s colleagues inched closer to the inner circle as they realized who had died. Tanya stared at Paul, biting her lower lip, her eyes wide. Madge, unsteady, leaned into George, and George, deathly pale, put his arm around her. Laura Lorenzo stood off to the side. Only Jamal was missing.

  Tanya forced her eyes away from the body. “Did he fall? What happened? I don’t understand!”

  Madge wiped her eyes with her fingers. “He must have fallen from the ledge,” she said. “George and I stood in that same spot this afternoon.” She choked back tears, “Why was he up there?”

  Claire stiffened as Brad struggled to remove Paul’s jacket, displaying the maroon shirt that would have identified him sooner.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, watching his ashen face as he fumbled with the jacket sleeves.

  “Help me, Claire,” he said. “It’s only proper to cover him.”

  Claire helped him remove the jacket, and Brad placed it over Paul’s face, carefully smoothing the jacket with his hands.

  “Um, Miss?” Claire looked up to see the elderly couple from Michigan standing at the edge of the circle. She struggled to remember their names as the woman tried to recall hers.

  “Lois?” Somehow, it came to her. “You need to stay back.” Claire approached them so they could speak quietly.

  Lois’s husband, Dale, said, “We saw him on the temple. We wondered why he was up there when the show was about to start.”

  Claire stared at them. “Did you see him fall?”

  “Oh, my, no!” cried Lois. She placed her hand on her heart, as if it might give out at any moment.

  “He was walking along the platform,” Dale said, pointing to the ledge that separated the first and second levels of the pyramid, “like he was looking for someone.”

  Claire asked, “Did you see anything else?”

  Lois answered, “No, we had to get to our seats.” Tears came to her eyes, and she pressed closer to her husband, whose gaze moved up and down the pyramid and settled on the balustrade at the base of the stairway. They now stood directly below where Madge had stood earlier, calling down to Claire to remind her of the meeting. It seemed like days ago, not hours.

  Claire looked at her watch…nine-thirty. How long had they been here? Why hadn’t anyone come to help? Tourists also looked at their watches or phones, deciding whether to stay for the drama or leave. Families opted to leave, pulling their children along the path.

  Fearful that important witnesses might disappear, Claire pleaded with the crowd. “If any of you saw something, you should stay. Someone will be here soon.”

  “Do you think Dale and I should stay?” Lois asked. “We would be witnesses. Oh, dear,” she lamented as she grasped her chest again. “We’ll miss our bus. So will you.”

  Claire hadn’t considered this. “We should all stay.”

  A middle-aged balding man wearing a golf jacket and a beret that looked out of place in Mexico, scoffed loudly. “It was an accident, lady. The kid fell.” He and his wife, a stick-thin, platinum blonde wearing skintight jeans and leather jacket, turned to go. “Besides,” he added, “if anyone shoved him, do you think he’d be hanging around waiting for the policia to come?” He stressed the Spanish pronunciation in derision, po-lee-see
’a. They joined the sprinkling of tourists forming a slow procession toward the exit.

  Claire suspected he was right. Yet there was something odd about where Paul had landed. With her eyes, she followed a line from the body up the wall of the pyramid, a narrow area between the stairway towering eighty feet to the first landing, and the balustrade. It could have happened that way, she thought.

  She remembered her reason for straying from the designated exit route. Although, she had been repulsed by the tourists snapping photographs, she knew she should record Paul’s location before security arrived, if indeed they arrived at all, just in case there were questions later. She took her camera from her bag, where she had stashed it unconsciously when they came upon the body. She moved toward a footlight to adjust her settings.

  The crowd shifted suddenly as the university student pushed through, followed by Cody and, a few steps behind, the security guard. The student rejoined his group, and the guard stopped to catch her breath. “La ambulancia y policía—it come. Please wait.”

  But Cody didn’t wait. He pushed into the circle and collapsed on the body of his friend. Brad reacted quickly and pulled him away.

  “No!” Cody’s scream split the air as Brad lead him to Madge and Tanya at the edge of the circle.

  Amidst murmurings around the circle and the anguished choking cries of Cody nearby, some of the remaining crowd obeyed the guard’s request. Others proceeded slowly toward the exit, finally exhausted and bored with the slow-moving drama.

  Claire addressed the guard in Spanish. “Can you help me take photographs?”

  At first the young woman pulled back. “No quiero,” she protested. “I don’t want to.” She refused to look at the body. “I’m not really a security guard,” she admitted, “just a night employee…they let me wear the uniform.”

  “You’re in charge until the police come,” Claire continued softly, to put her at ease. “It would be a great help to the police if someone took photographs of the scene.” Claire hoped this was true, and that the woman wouldn’t get into trouble for interfering.

  The young woman nodded slowly, her eyes flitting from Claire to the body. Claire introduced herself and the woman responded, “I am Maria Socorro May Uc,” drawing courage from somewhere within. “People call me Socorro.”

  Easing Socorro slowly to the pyramid, Claire asked her to aim her flashlight at the point where the balustrade protruded from the base of the temple. She thought that if Paul had hit the balustrade when he fell, he should have landed away from the temple. Instead, he lay in the shadow of the balustrade, along the wall of the pyramid.

  Brad, who now stood at the perimeter of the group, turned as he saw the camera flash. “What’s that for?” he asked.

  “You aren’t thinking…?” Tanya said, edging into the circle.

  “I don’t think anything,” Claire said, aware that her hands shook as she held the camera.

  “You’re right, Claire,” said George.

  Brad looked from George to Claire, deep in thought. He nodded solemnly and began to walk the perimeter of the circle, urging the remaining onlookers to move away.

  Laura took her cellphone from her bag and used the flashlight function as she walked away from the circle. Claire watched her as she climbed the pyramid, scanning the side of the balustrade and the steps.

  The presence of the cameras and flashlights drew the attention of the remaining bystanders, who pulled out their phone flashlights and began to scan the area around the pyramid. Claire groaned as she watched tourists kicking up loose limestone chunks as they walked around the temple.

  George stepped into the circle and projected his professorial voice to move the crowd back. Giving George a grateful nod, Claire brought her camera back into position. She photographed segments of ground where she and Socorro had not yet walked, capturing several sets of footprints.

  They moved slowly toward the body, Claire taking photos as she walked. “You didn’t move him?” she asked Socorro.

  “Oh, no! I wouldn’t touch him…” She stared at the covered body, stammering, “B-but somebody did…while I was gone.”

  Claire didn’t respond. Instead, she knelt next to the body and asked Socorro to hold the flashlight up over her shoulder. She forced herself to remove the jacket from Paul’s face and take several photographs. His eyes were open, and dried blood had settled below his broken nose and around his mouth. Deep bruising was evident on his forehead. The frames of his glasses were bent and still hanging over one ear, the lenses shattered. None of these injuries seemed consistent with landing face-first on the balustrade. The massive gash on the back of his skull seemed the most likely area of contact.

  She lifted Paul’s shoulder and asked Socorro to shine the flashlight toward the back of his head. The flashlight wavered as Socorro huddled behind her to avoid looking at the body. Claire photographed blood-like splotches on the ground beneath the body, then lowered the shoulder to the ground. She closed Paul’s eyes.

  Replacing the jacket over Paul’s face, Claire asked a relieved Socorro to shine her flashlight along a line of disturbed limestone rubble and dirt that stretched between the body and the place where Claire suspected the body should have landed. There, the ground was relatively clear of rubble and the flashlight picked up discolored dirt. Unfortunately, this area had been trampled by the first onlookers at the scene. She took photographs anyway, hoping that the area had not been destroyed. She was quite sure these drag marks indicated the body had been moved. But by whom? As she stood to stretch, she saw headlights bobbing up and down as a vehicle moved slowly up the walkway, approaching them. An ambulance had arrived.

  Claire heard Brad say, “Well, finally!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lights flashed, but the siren did not sound. The circle—which had thinned to twenty die-hard voyeurs or potential witnesses—opened to allow two paramedics into the space. The older man maneuvered a stretcher over the uneven ground and limestone rubble. The younger man carried a medical bag. They ordered Claire and the others aside, and the younger man squatted down to examine the body. Claire joined Laura, who had returned to the group, her lips pursed together in concentration. Jamal had joined the group and taken Madge’s place next to Cody, who whimpered at the outer edge of the shrunken circle.

  “Did you see anything up there?” Claire asked Laura.

  “I’m not sure,” Laura admitted. “I wondered if there might be something on the ledge that indicated how he fell, but I didn’t see anything.” Her intonation didn’t reveal any suspicions on her part, so Claire kept private her own concern over how the body had ended up next to the balustrade instead of in front of it.

  A few moments later, the police arrived in a battered white pickup truck with Policía de Uxmal stenciled on the side and a portable red flashing light affixed to the roof. The vehicle needed no siren. The noise and smoke from its missing muffler provided all the warning any criminal might need.

  The officers conversed briefly with the medics, then identified themselves as Constable Luis Pech and Deputy Reymundo Tun. The younger man, Deputy Tun, sought out Socorro and they walked together past Claire, who suspected they knew each other. Socorro addressed him as “Mundo” as she led him away from the crowd to give her report.

  In hesitant English, Constable Pech asked witnesses to identify themselves. The woman who had discovered the body raised her hand, and the constable joined her at the edge of the circle, where she clung tightly to her husband’s arm. Trembling in fear, the chilled air, or both, she struggled to understand the constable’s questions. George came to their rescue, offering himself as translator.

  The witness explained that she and her husband had wandered away from the crowd to photograph the Magician’s Pyramid. The flash of her camera caught the clump of clothing at the base of the temple. When she realized what she had seen, she screamed, and the security guard came. N
o, she didn’t move the body. No, no one moved the body until that man—she pointed to Brad—turned the body over and then covered it with the dead man’s jacket. Then she pointed to Claire. “And that one there, she took pictures.”

  The constable frowned in Brad’s direction, then at Claire. After dismissing the jittery woman and her husband, he directed Brad and Claire away from the tourists. He motioned to Deputy Tun who abandoned Socorro and joined the constable who had already begun to question them.

  “You moved the body?” Constable Pech asked Brad, his pencil pausing over his notebook.

  In Spanish, Brad defended his actions. “No one was in charge.”

  The constable lowered his eyes and answered in an apologetic and uncertain tone. “Pues, Señor, we came as soon as we heard.” He looked at the body, and added, “It was probably an accident, but still…”

  Brad interrupted. “I turned the body over to check for a pulse. He was dead, so I covered his face. People were taking photos.”

  Pivoting from Brad to Claire, Pech demanded, “Señora, you took photographs?”

  Without Brad’s self-confidence, Claire stammered, “I thought it might be helpful, in case they are needed.”

  “Do you think you are—what is it called—CSI?”

  His sarcasm irritated her, but she sensed that his bravado was due more to his insecurity than rudeness. From her field experience, Claire knew how village deputies differed from their city counterparts. These men were hand-picked by the village president, often nephews, brothers, or compadres. They weren’t trained in police procedures, and they earned little for whatever authority they possessed.

  “I am very sorry if I have made a mistake.”

  Constable Pech said, “I will need your camera.”