Within a few minutes, everyone except Aguilar had piled into the van and Deborah got on the road to Ek Balam. She didn’t mind driving. It gave her the chance to fully check out each one of them in the rearview mirror.
Chad Rylands, the wunderkind osteologist—tenured at thirty and a full professor just a few years later—was businesslike to the point of rudeness. He wasn’t interested in Deborah or anyone else for that matter. He just wanted to get to the site to “see how badly you’ve screwed things up.” Deborah bristled and he added, “No offense,” in a voice that said he didn’t care one way or the other.
He looked out of the van window and said, “Someone always screws things up where bones are concerned. I spend half my life doing damage control.”
He had bright blue eyes, a blue that was deep and hypnotic, like the water in the cenote now that the rubble and dirt had drifted to the bottom. But they were hard, unsmiling. He should have been a handsome man, Deborah thought, with his chiseled features and strong, rangy body, but there was something cold about the man that immediately put her off. He was a store window mannequin with the brain of a computer and the personality of a kitchen appliance.
The women couldn’t have been more different from each other. Krista Rayburn was young and brimming with energy and enthusiasm. She had a tanned round face—pretty in an ordinary sort of way—and dirty-blonde hair that she wore in a ponytail that made her look younger still. She couldn’t have been more than two or three years Deborah’s junior, but she could have passed for a student, maybe even an undergraduate. She smiled a lot. When Deborah had introduced herself, Krista had flashed that sunny smile and said, “My! Aren’t you tall?” Deborah said that yes, she supposed she was, and Krista said, “Awesome,” patting her arm as if congratulating her on a job well done. Then she’d thanked Deborah repeatedly for the “opportunity” as if she had won the lottery, rather than being the author of the closest thing to a definitive book on Mayan environmental archaeology.
Marissa Stroud was the strangest of the lot. She was in her midfifties, Deborah guessed, and wore her graying, wavy hair long. It constantly fell in her face, but the woman would just stare through it, like it was a veil, and it was all Deborah could do not to reach forward and part it for her. Stroud was big, not fat so much as solid and powerful. She wore a long brown skirt and faded floral blouse with a tie at the throat, and clutched a stained and battered rucksack. Between her awful outfit and her brownish, uneven teeth, it was clear that here was a woman who paid absolutely no attention to her appearance or what people thought of her. Deborah wanted to like her for that, but she wasn’t what you would call warm, and she had a way of staring at people that unnerved them. After meeting her, Deborah found it easy to believe the rumor of her leaving her husband and child so that she could spend more time in the field, but harder to imagine how she had gotten married in the first place. Maybe there was someone for everyone after all.
Ha! laughed her mother’s voice in her head.
If Stroud looked ill-kept, her résumé was anything but. A few decades ago, experts had been able to read little of Mayan glyphs beyond proper nouns and calendars, but things had changed drastically of late, and a whole new picture of the Mayan world had begun to emerge. Stroud had been part of that revolution, and her name was all over every monograph on the subject. She was also an authority on royal regalia, European as well as Mayan, and her popular history of royal jewelry had received that rarest of accolades for academic work, a review in the New York Times.
She smelled odd, though Deborah couldn’t place the aroma. Some herb extract, perhaps, dry and dusty with a little musk. It took over the van as soon as she got in, and though it wasn’t exactly unpleasant, it made the air feel heavy, even with the AC on full blast. Rylands pulled a sour face and opened his window, but if Stroud noticed, she didn’t let on.
Deborah grinned with relief as she swung the van into the site’s parking lot. In person, this group of experts intimidated her less than she had expected, their strangeness somehow making them manageable. Perfect people—or people who seemed to think they were perfect, like Bowerdale—bothered her. Misfits, she could deal with. Misfits (freak!) she knew all about.
She stepped out into heat. It took her a second to realize that the person running toward them from the site entrance was calling her name, and another to realize it was Bowerdale’s graduate student, Alice. She looked frantic.
“What is it?” said Deborah. “What’s the matter?”
“Someone got into the tomb overnight,” said the girl. “We just found out. They stole everything. It’s all gone.”
PART 2
Chapter Seventeen
Chad Rylands reminded himself that he shouldn’t be surprised by their amateurism. Still, this was incompetence on a new and appalling level. He blamed the Miller woman, who had no business running a find of this scale. At least the situation wasn’t as bad as he had feared. The thief had stolen the knickknacks, the jeweled trinkets on which so many archaeologists assumed everything depended. The good stuff, by which he meant the bones, was still there, apparently undisturbed.
As an osteologist, an expert on bones, Rylands did not practice what the old-school establishment considered “real” archaeology. Or as he thought of it, dirt archaeology: squatting in mud and poking about till you found something that you then misinterpreted, publishing your arbitrary speculations in some big-shot journal to the applause of all. He, by contrast, was a scientist and could get more real, hard information out of a handful of skull fragments than they could out of a square mile of digging. It was hardly surprising the dirt diggers felt threatened. They ought to. They were the dinosaurs of archaeology, lumbering about with their pickaxes, while the osteologists scurried between their feet, out-evolving them.
“Why don’t you go look for your precious artifacts,” he said to Miller, spitting out the last word like it left a nasty taste in his mouth, “and leave me to do some actual work.”
They had climbed down the ladder and were standing in the tomb, everyone from the van ride squeezed in together. For a moment he had stood there, breathless, not daring to speak in case he gave away just how astounding the place was. He gazed almost hungrily at the masked skeleton seated in place and the sacrificial bones bundled into its lap, the adolescent heads set on the ground around it. It was magnificent. They should have stationed armed guards outside the moment they found the place.
Morons.
The story as he understood it was that the site staff had taken turns watching the tomb because the lab in Valladolid wasn’t ready for the contents to be moved for cataloging. It was an idiot move. If there was half the gold and precious stones in there that they had bragged about in the e-mails they had sent to lure him here, they should have known that the half-starved natives would try to grab what they could. Leaving a couple of dopey graduate students armed only with a cell phone that couldn’t get a signal till they climbed a hundred-foot tower at the other end of the site was beyond bush league, and he planned to let their organizers in Chicago know it.
Anyway, some idiot kid—James, his name was—had been in the tomb by himself in the middle of the night and had heard someone coming down the ladder. He had waited them out and then, when he thought the coast was clear, went back up top to make sure they didn’t come back. Except, of course, that they hadn’t gone. They were waiting for him when he got to the top, hit him from behind with a log, and then ransacked the tomb. The kid had seen nothing and was now sitting in the shade of a tree under the acropolis with a bandage round his head and a pathetic look. While the rest of them were down here in the tomb, James was waiting for the police, though Rylands knew what that would yield.
Miller and Bowerdale were screaming at each other while Marissa Stroud stood unnervingly still, staring fixedly at the skeleton in the throne like she was trying to talk to it. The environmentalist girl looked like her puppy had been run over, but she wasn’t saying much. He wished they would all get ou
t and let him do his job.
“You have more pictures than the ones you e-mailed me?” he said.
“What?” said Miller, who had been yelling at Bowerdale for trying to blame her for the whole fiasco.
“Pictures of the tomb,” he said, frosty. “And video. I want to see exactly how everything was before you people fucked it up.”
Miller took a breath.
“Yes,” she said. “We tried to document everything as thoroughly as possible, though the official site photographer hasn’t arrived yet.”
He considered the lights inside the tomb and the power cords running up to the generator.
“Get me a video monitor and whatever you stored the data on,” he said.
“Here?” she said, incredulous. “You can’t just watch them at the lab?”
“No,” he said simply, moving into the recessed alcove where the skeleton sat and pulling a pocket lens from his shirt. “I need it here.”
She opened her mouth as if to protest, thought better of it, and nodded.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said.
“And I need the rest of these people out of here,” he added.
“Now look here, Rylands,” Bowerdale began. “You aren’t any more important than the rest of us.”
“You’ve had plenty of time to look at what was here, Bowerdale,” Rylands countered evenly. Bowerdale was always a pompous ass but he was acting more defensive than usual. “Since most of what these people came to see isn’t here anymore, I see no reason for them to get in the way of my work. I came to look at bones. You have lost everything else, but we still have them.”
“He’s right,” said Miller. “But I want another detailed video shot of the tomb as it is now before anyone starts working in here.”
“A good idea,” Rylands acknowledged with a cool smile.
It took ten minutes to get the cameras back in and to shoot their sad little documentary. They all stood silently out of shot while Bowerdale shot the video and Miller added commentary in a pathetic voice: “This is where the fabric bundle was. This was the location of the gold rod and the red crystals.”
Idiots. The only thing they’d saved was the one stone that the Mexican deputy—Aguilar—was analyzing back at the lab. Still, he had his bones, and that was what mattered. And now that he came to think about it, as they stood around like mourners at a funeral—mourners who had been cut out of the will at the last second—it was kind of funny. Actually, it was the perfect image of what had happened in archaeology, people like him moving into the light while the dirt guys, baffled, resentful but knowing they were beaten, gave ground.
They need you now, Chad, he thought. Ain’t that something?
No trinkets to play with. No jewels. Just bones. Bones only he could read.
Chapter Eighteen
It was Bowerdale who first noticed that Eustachio was missing. The elderly Mayan was invariably on site by sunup and he had never been this late. Bowerdale decided to drive over to the village himself without discussing it with anyone. He had to get away from Rylands and the tomb anyway, just to clear his head. By the time he got back, everyone would have realized the same thing, but in the intervening half hour or so, he’d get the jump on finding the guy. Maybe he knew something.
He told Miller he was going back to Valladolid, which was a mistake, because Stroud woke up and said she wanted to go back too. She had nothing to do so long as “that bone man” was in there, and she wanted to get out of the heat. She could search the pictures they had already taken for glyphs that might help identify the body in the tomb.
Once they’d climbed back up the ladder and started for the van, James—the idiot who had let all this happen—said he wanted a ride back as well so he could lie down.
“You’ll still be stupid when you wake up, you know,” Bowerdale snarled, but the kid came along anyway.
So what should have been a half-hour trip tripled. He dropped James off at the dorm beside the lab, gave Stroud a cursory tour and set her up with a computer stuffed with images from the new site. When he had spent enough time sauntering leisurely around the lab that Aguilar told him to get out from under his feet, he bolted back to the van and hit the road.
Bowerdale’s Spanish was so-so and he had only a few words of Yucatekan, but he could tell the village was already buzzing with the news. He asked for Eustachio, but his son—a fat, lazy-looking guy called Juan—kept dodging. Didn’t know where he was. Hadn’t seen him leave. Assumed he was at the site. In fact, said Juan, not quite looking at him, he probably was. It was a big place.
“Isn’t that his bicycle?” said Bowerdale.
Juan stared stupidly at it like he’d never seen it before, and shrugged. He guessed so.
“So an old man with a limp walked over to the site?” said Bowerdale.
“Guess so,” said Juan, his eyes flashing over to his wife. She was too old to be pretty exactly, but she had a stillness and thoughtfulness Bowerdale liked. Maybe later he could find a local girl to bring back to his hotel.
“You seen him?” he asked her, in English.
“No hablo ingles,” she lied, her eyes returning to the pot she was stirring.
“Where’s your motorbike, Juan?” he said, splaying his arm and miming revving the throttle with his right fist. “Your motocicleta. That big black thing you have.”
Juan lied fluently, but too fast. Among the stream of Spanish, Bowerdale caught “taller de reparación.”
“Oh, it’s in the shop,” he said, smiling. “And where’s that?”
Another half glance flicked toward his wife, then Juan told him it was in Valladolid. They couldn’t fix it in the village. It needed parts.
“Yeah?” said Bowerdale. “What’s up with it? Clutch? Carburetor? Cam cover gasket?”
Juan smiled and shrugged. He just rode it, he said. He didn’t know how it worked.
“I guess you can explain all this to the police,” said Bowerdale. “La policia, yeah?”
Juan’s smile flickered, then held.
Bowerdale gestured to a cabana across the street. “That where he sleeps?”
Juan nodded.
Bowerdale walked over to the dirt-floored structure and peered inside. The old man’s son seemed happy to let him look, so Bowerdale didn’t bother. He took a couple of steps back toward Juan and his wife, giving them one last look. He thought she smiled slightly, before going back inside. Now Bowerdale had Juan to himself. He met the man’s eyes and raised a crooked finger, beckoning. The Mayan hesitated, glancing behind him, then crossed the street to where Bowerdale stood.
“You find out where your father went,” said Bowerdale. “Then you let me know, OK?”
As he spoke, he plucked out his wallet and unfolded several hundred-dollar bills. Juan glanced around nervously, but his eyes were hungry, and he took the money, pocketing it quickly.
“Good man,” said Bowerdale.
He got back in the van and drove down to Valladolid, but before he reached the lab his cell phone rang. It was Miller.
“Where the hell are you?” she demanded. “I’ve been calling for an hour.”
“Couldn’t get a signal,” he said.
“I thought you were in Valladolid?”
“I had to take the van in,” he said. “The brakes needed adjusting. Maybe new pads.”
“They seemed fine to me.”
“I only noticed on the road back.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, steamrolling him—luckily. “You need to get back here. Rylands has found something.”
She hung up, and Bowerdale threw the phone onto the passenger seat feeling caught out and no further forward.
Chapter Nineteen
“It’s a stingray spine,” said Krista Rayburn. “Where did you find it?”
“On the floor by the door,” said Rylands, his eyes on the video monitor.
Krista didn’t much like Rylands yet, which bothered her. She was, she thought, usually so accepting of other people,
liking them for the idiosyncrasies others found off-putting, but the man was more than just rude. He was hostile, and Krista, who was unused to not being liked, felt disoriented.
Everyone assumed that being attractive made life easy. Not, Krista thought, in academia. She had realized some time ago that compliments on her appearance and youth were slightly backhanded, that they implied that she wasn’t serious or smart enough. Perhaps, she sometimes thought, if she was meaner, harder, quicker to rub her achievements in people’s faces, life would be easier. But then she would be a different person, one she didn’t wish to become.
“It’s not unusual to find stingray spines at a royal burial site even a long way from the sea,” she said. “The Maya imported the spines from the coastal regions and they had great ritual significance because they were used in bloodletting rites.”
She grimaced playfully, guessing that they would know how the spines were used. They were passed through parts of the body, the blood being caught on fabric or paper or in some kind of vessel, and offered to the gods. Sometimes thorns were used, fastened to string or rope and threaded through the tongue of the self-sacrificer, but stingray spines were particularly special.
“The barbs mean that you can’t go back once you start,” she said. “They have to go all the way through. Men usually put them through their penises. I imagine it must have been very painful.”
Martin Bowerdale raised his eyebrows at what he clearly took to be an understatement, but Rylands just gave her a withering stare.
“You done with the lecture?” he snapped. “We know what they were used for. We also know that they are usually found in the groin area of the body because they were carried in some kind of pouch there. And there is one like that on the body, see?”
He trained the beam of his flashlight inside the coffin with one hand and used the pencil in his other hand to indicate a slender spine down there among the bones and dust.
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