by C R Trolson
“I’m all ears,” Reese said, betting that whatever the Chief was up to had everything to do with the Anaheim Vampire, everything to do with Homer’s killing spree.
“It’s about some old bones a construction crew dug up near the mission.”
“You’re liable to find anything you start digging around a mission,” Reese said. “Why’s that a problem?”
“These bones weren’t found in the mission’s graveyard is the problem. They were found on a patch of private property near the mission. The old mission garden. That’s the problem.”
“Near the graveyard, in the graveyard, who cares?”
“I’ll tell you who cares. Several years ago there was a push to canonize Father Junipero Serra, the guy who built the missions in the first place. A simple enough thing you would think, but not in California. Too many people think Serra was a killer. Indian genocide. We’re talking incidents that happened two hundred years ago, but we had a near riot at the mission. Just a bunch of damn college kids, but tourism dropped. Bus trips were cancelled. Tourists shy away from people jabbing at them with signs. It doesn’t look good on the home videos. The problem finally died down when the church backed off.”
“You think the bones belong to someone Serra killed?”
“No,” the Chief said. “I don’t think it’s someone Serra killed. The point is we already have an archeologist investigating. A very famous one, I understand, and we’re lucky to have her. Rusty Webber.”
“If that’s the point, then why do you need me?” he asked, wondering who’d hire a famous archeologist. Certainly not the Chief or the church, which left Mr. Deep Pockets, Ajax Rasmussen. He wondered why she was famous. Maybe she’d been on TV. She might even have her own show. “All you have to do is call the coroner, make sure the bones aren’t recent, and re-bury them or put them in a museum. Case closed.”
The Chief took another puff. “You’re right. It could have been simple. All Miss Webber had to do was dig up a skeleton and hand it over to the museum. Then a few paragraphs in the paper about the fine scientific job she’d done. Everything aboveboard and professional. The church is happy. The anti-Serra radicals are happy because they wouldn’t have known.” The Chief lowered his head slightly, like a bull ready to charge. “But now she’s found another set of bones and she’s making accusations. Screaming about the church killing all the Indians, acting like she found a mass grave, like she’s going to remake Shindler’s List.”
“Why is she famous?”
“She’s written books. She gives lectures and charges money. Some people in town think highly of her.” The Chief said this as if he weren’t one of those people.
“The favor?”
“Talk some sense into her.”
“Who picked me to save your tourist trade?” His guess was Ajax. His guess was this had nothing to do with Indian skeletons. His guess was the bones were somehow connected to Ajax. More victims? Possibly. Ajax had hired the archeologist to help him cover something up and now she was out of control.
“You’re not saving anything.” The Chief bit his bottom lip and laid the cigar on a blue ashtray. “I don’t want one of my young hotshots ruining things. The Franciscans can be picky. I don’t want Miss Webber distorting the truth. I want things kept quiet. Like you said, it’s no big deal, and I want to keep it that way. You got anything better to do?”
“Now, you’re doing me a favor?” The Chief said nothing. “You just want me to talk to the archeologist? A little talk?”
“I’d like you to act as liaison between my department and the archeologist. I want you to keep the situation in - ”
“ - check?” His guess was Ajax wanted to keep an eye on him, keep him close, see what he was really up to. Have him inside the tent pissing out.
The Chief glanced at his cigar, cleared his throat, said nothing.
“Liaison sounds expensive.”
“You want money?” the Chief looked surprised. “I was thinking of a pro bono job, common courtesy. One fellow cop helping another.”
“For five hundred dollars a day, I can be courteous. Most private detectives get two hundred bucks an hour, the cheap ones.”
The Chief hemmed and hawed a bit for show, citing bottom line and budget restraints. He guessed Ajax had told the Chief to act the reluctant suitor. The Chief went on about how a small department like his didn’t have money to throw around like the LAPD, but finally, “Okay. The District Attorney in Santa Barbara paid some asshole from New York fifteen hundred dollars a day to read blood splatters, so I guess we can afford two hundred for a real McCoy Los Angeles detective. But two hundred is tops.”
“Five hundred for a real McCoy,” Reese said. “Plus expenses…three meals, gas, incidentals.”
“Incidentals?” The Chief picked up the cigar. He tidied up the now smoldering end on the ashtray. “I’ll just have to get my boys to write a few more speeding tickets. People come down that Lobo grade ninety mile an hour.”
“Good,” Reese said. “I’ve never been one to turn down easy money, especially not Ajax Rasmussen’s money. Isn’t he the one giving orders around here?”
The Chief thought about this and smiled. “He seems to think so.”
Ten minutes before three that afternoon the famous Rusty Webber found the brow of the second skeleton. She uncovered the forehead and lower jaw. Using a Phantom number-three boar-bristle brush, she carefully cleaned the parietal bones. The eye sockets, packed with mahogany-colored dirt, stared from the past, stared beyond her at the blue sky.
The morning had been shot arguing with Ramon and mapping out and photographing skeleton number one. Ramon had been no help. Before she’d arrived, he’d already removed number one’s canine teeth, leaving broken stumps, and mangled the sternum, trying to remove a wooden stake, of all things. He’d also hidden away the right leg that had been originally uncovered by the backhoe, refusing to let her see it.
She touched number two’s cool, smooth forehead. Ramon had first claimed skeleton one had flesh, somewhat mummified, when first discovered by the construction crew, and then the flesh had miraculously disappeared, leaving the clean set of bones she’d seen this morning. When she questioned him further, he said it was all a mistake, that all he’d ever seen were the bare bones.
His flimsy attempt at deception had made her mad, and she called him a fool for tampering with the remains. He called her a witch.
She called him a fat pervert and liar. He rushed her swinging pudgy fists. She grabbed her sickle, swinging hard, but purposely only cutting air, missing his nose by a good six inches. He screamed and jumped back, stumbling along the path as if Lucifer himself were hot on his heels. That had been it for Ramon.
After a late lunch at a beach diner, Foggy Ben’s, and calling the cops to complain about Ramon, she returned to a powdery outline, all that remained of skeleton one. A young cop, red-headed and fresh looking, had stopped by briefly to discuss her complaint, but left with a confused look, not sure of what was going on or what she was complaining about.
She had gathered a sample of skeleton one’s bone dust - if that’s what it was - took a few pictures, but before she could stabilize the dust with resin, the afternoon winds blew it away. The left sandal, dried up and curled like a donkey’s ear, the stake centered in the ditch, a mushroomed signpost, and the sample were the only evidence remaining. Ramon had the right leg and sandal, but she’d have hell getting them back.
Never had she seen perfectly good bones turn to dust. Her first thought was Ramon had used acid, but that made no sense and acid left a gummy residue. Or possibly Ramon had removed the bones and replaced them with some kind of powder, borax or cake mix, or put the bones in a blender and returned with the dust. That explanation also seemed both incredible and ludicrous. The only other explanation was the sun. Mineral salts could have weakened the bone, plus, the sun and pollution…it still made no sense.
She found skeleton number two by digging at the feet of number one, in the trough
of the existing ditch. Skeleton two was only a few inches below the bottom of the ditch, and it was just dumb luck that the workers had missed it with the teeth of the backhoe.
Now, with a dental pick, she slowly removed dirt from the nasal cavity. She tried to concentrate, but felt trapped, weighing the need for diligence against the need to quickly discover what was going on. She took a deep breath and hoped this wasn’t a replay of Romania, some kind of vampire lash-up manufactured by Ajax.
If this was, as Ramon had loudly proclaimed, an Indian burial ground predating the mission, predating the Church’s responsibility, Ramon’s responsibility, then the ground should be rich with shells and beads, shards of pottery and remnants of Chumash baskets, grave goods. The Chumash often buried the dead next to their possessions, broken so as to be useless to grave robbers - a bow snapped in two, a smashed knife - useful things that would be resurrected in the next world and serve their owners. But this soil was clean.
Something else slammed the door on Ramon’s theory: both skeletons had been laid out in the sleeping position, European style, head to toe. The California Indians, most Indians, buried their dead in the fetal position, often on top of each other, as if they were being born again, born into the next world. But why would Ramon bother to lie? Who cared about the Indians or trying to preserve the Church’s honor or good intentions? It didn’t matter.
Ramon had not been lying about the skeletons being Native American. She put down her pick and compared a Polaroid of skull number one to the skull in front of her. Both showed Mongoloid traits: both skulls round and compact, flat-faced, the sutures between the cheeks and jaws straight.
She traced the smooth line of the skull’s jaw and then traced the line of her own jaw. She covered the eyes with one palm and stared into the blackness of her other hand.
She imagined a world of domed huts made from marsh reeds, fishermen in long boats lancing green waves, children chasing dogs, the women weaving baskets, tending cooking fires. She saw a princess draped with otter fur and shell necklaces, her black straight hair, her smooth brown skin. A warrior.
A siren in the distance, a plane overhead, a flash of light and the vision was gone. She massaged her brow and rubbed the back of her neck. She did not have time for daydreams.
She gently pried out a rock and touched a braid of dusty black hair, perhaps three inches long, near the back of the jaw. She worked the hairs away from the soil and curled them around her finger like a girlish memento. She caught the smell of jasmine.
Who had last smelled the hair? What lover? Friend? The skull was cocked slightly, looking up at the lowering sun for warmth. Had she once been beautiful? She considered the skull’s high cheekbones, the even teeth, the straight line of the nose. Yes.
She slid the hair into a plastic pouch, ran her fingers along the seal, and set it aside. Finding hair on a skull this old made no sense. Judging by the sandal she’d found with skeleton one, handmade, the distinctive Mission-era bullhide laced with cat gut, she dated the remains at one hundred and fifty years plus. But human hair, in this kind of soil, at least 30 percent clay, decomposed in two to four years.
What about Ramon’s assumption that skeleton number one had been female? He was no archeologist so it must have been a lucky guess. Unless, as he’d first claimed, he’d seen a fairly intact body. And if the first body had been intact and gender recognizable, then why hadn’t skeleton two, except for the braid of hair, also been intact? Was it because skeleton two had spent a day close to the sun and air with only a smattering of dirt over it? Or maybe, as she’d first suspected, Ramon had been lying about finding an intact body and simply made a lucky guess. And why would Ramon lie? It made no sense.
The other argument could be that the second skeleton had been buried much, much later than the first one. But she disregarded that because they looked alike, and they were buried head to toe. It was difficult to bury people that close together in unmarked grave unless you did it at the same time. She wondered if she’d find another skeleton at number two’s feet, or at one’s head. Skeleton one might have not been the first of the group buried, but the first found, and she wondered why she was thinking in groups. Ajax’s vacant lot could be filled with bodies.
When she’d first seen skeleton one this morning, she’d been relatively certain it was female. But her guess had been backed by years of studying the subtle gender indicators: the wider hips, the narrower jaw, the smaller bones.
She slowly pulled a slab of dirt from the side of skull two. She reached her finger inside the bottom of the cranial vault and felt for the bone beneath the ear, the mastoid process, so named because it resembled the female breast. She found it and pressed her finger against the characteristic notch of the female. There were other things: a less prominent temporal ridge, the lower jaw less rounded, the ridge above the eye socket, the supraorbital margin, sharper. She could go on, but for now, was satisfied.
She cleared the clavicles and worked down to the chest, exposing the shell of the ribs and the hammered end of another wooden stake.
It really was ridiculous - bones turning to dust and wooden stakes and disappearing flesh. But there had to be a scientific explanation. She was positive that Ajax was involved.
She worked down the body, uncovering the pelvis and the legs. At the feet she found more wood, but it was not another stake. She quickly brushed off the small brown face.
In ten minutes she’d uncovered a wooden doll, about two feet long, crudely painted. Dark red for the dress, the paint chipped and peeled. Dark blue eyes. The stomach exaggerated to symbolize pregnancy. She carefully put the doll inside her pack.
When she returned, an odd shape near the pelvis caught her eye. A square rock? She brushed off the dirt, revealing a glint of dull yellow. With a grapefruit knife, she worked down the square of gold, her fingers a blur. In five minutes she’d uncovered a solid gold cross. Half a foot long, four inches wide. A handful. It was not typically Spanish, no embroidery or embellishment, no fancy scroll work.
Suddenly, like a wire of melting steel, she felt searing pain below her waist. She sucked in sharply and without thinking or caring about photographs or dig maps or any of it, pulled out the cross.
She crawled out of the hole. Her legs spongy. Slightly dizzy and breathing hard. She balanced the cross in her hand. Heavy and slippery, pure gold, several pounds at least. She turned the cross over looking for a forge or foundry mark. Nothing. She had no way of determining age, unless she sent a sliver to a metallurgist who could date the gold by the mix of chemicals and alloys.
She hefted the cross in her hand and looked around.
She put the cross in her pack next to the doll. She added the sandal and the sample of dust. She saw them driving the stake, pounding the cross home. She saw fully formed hands clenching and releasing against the pain, the head arched and searching the sky. She fought to catch a breath. She steadied herself and walked back to the ditch. Romania had taken more out of her than she’d thought.
Today, the delicate bones of the left hand were flat, palm down at the side of the body, but the right hand was balled up, hiding something…She climbed into the ditch and, using a slender tungsten pick, probed between the wrapped fingers and nicked something hard.
She removed the metacarpals and phalanges of the right three fingers and laid them on the ribs. She sealed three bones of the index finger in a plastic bag and slipped it in her pack, smoothing down the nylon so it didn’t look lumpy.
She kneeled at the hand and eased out a long green cylinder of California jade, perhaps four inches long and two across, oval shaped. She carefully replaced the six finger-bones.
She rinsed the rock under the cooler’s spigot, the jade polishing itself under the clear stream, revealing a charm stone, carved and polished to look like a whale. The mouth was a smile, the eyes pieces of flinty obsidian. The tail was a half moon, the side flippers carved like short wings.
Through the center of the shining whale, along the length,
a hole had been drilled. She put her lips to the tail and tasted fresh mint. Had this girl, chewing mint leaves, blown her last breath on the whistle? And why was she grasping it so tightly when she died? Was it a clue, a signpost pointing to who’d killed her? Or a way to handle the pain?
She blew hard, and a plug of dirt popped from the whale’s spout. She blew harder. A lonely keening filled the graveyard. She saw the princess again, closer, speaking to her, the hair sleek and oily, her eyes black and brilliant, now pointing to the house on the hill. The sun beat down, framing the princess’s face in a halo of gold. She tried to breathe and felt herself sinking.
10
She looked up. At least he wasn’t wearing a robe, a uniform, or a suit. He wouldn’t have looked good in any of them. And he looked good in the worn Levi’s and the beat-up hound’s-tooth jacket. His best jacket, no doubt. He was a little over six feet with short sandy hair and a used but good face. He had strong bones, the face of a centurion.
“You look like a cop,” she said. He stopped at the edge of the ditch. He wore old but comfortable-looking running shoes.
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said, careful not to kick rocks into the ditch. She liked that.
She ignored him and brought the pick down hard, splintering a stubborn sandstone ridge. She threw a few shovels of rock over the screen. He stood there looking into the ditch. “Can I help you?” she finally asked. He was nothing if not patient.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said. She wedged her hand against the side of the ditch to climb out. He caught her other arm and pulled her out smoothly. The tendons between his knuckles and wrist felt like small ropes. “I’m here to help you.”
She slapped at the dust on her jeans. “I need help?”
“The Chief of Police thinks so.” He walked to the cooler, filled a cup, and brought it to her. His movements had rhythm, like he was a half step ahead of himself, two steps ahead of everyone else.
“You are a policeman,” she said and drank. She was starting to like him. He had an odd charisma, like he just didn’t give a damn, like he really didn’t give a damn.