Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  There were no answers to be found, only more questions. How did the two files relate to one another? Why the covert nature of the investigation? Why did they need him? It was obvious they were further along connecting the dots than he was.

  Carver leaned back in the seat and allowed his mind to work through the facts. He watched as foothills green with pines passed beneath, listened to the hum of the engines, felt the gentle vibrations, and was overtaken by exhaustion.

  Chapter Two

  Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer;

  nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

  --Fyodor Dostoevsky

  I

  Sonoran Desert

  Arizona

  The chopper blades thundered overhead, muffled by the cans on his ears to the dull thumping of a mechanical heartbeat. Countless miles of desert stretched beneath, marred by a dusting of bushes, cacti, and the occasional scar of an arrow-straight dirt road. Carver remembered the rugged red buttes and the fascination he'd felt seeing them as a child. The parallel layers of hard earth from which they were formed, sometimes horizontal, other times diagonal. Had they been thrust up from the ground or had the sand receded from them? How did the pine trees grow on top of the bare rock? He had been raised in Sun City on the northwestern edge of Phoenix until the football scholarship money had transplanted him to Boulder, Colorado and he had traded brutal heat and scorpions for wicked cold and Buffaloes. As finances had been tight, their infrequent vacations had always begun in these vast wastelands, his mother at the wheel of one dusty car or other, regaling him with stories of what they would do when they reached Las Vegas or Los Angeles or wherever they were headed while he daydreamed of an unlimited future beyond the terminal sand.

  "That's it," a voice said through the speakers in his headset. "Off to the left about ten o'clock."

  Carver acknowledged the Special Agent in the seat to his right with a nod and caught the glint of the sun reflected from the roof of a vehicle. Roughly two hundred yards to the southeast, the top of a low, flat butte was framed by the crumbled stone walls of an ancient dwelling. Past the ravine behind it and another hundred yards to the east was a tent, which blended into the sand so well he hadn't seen it at first.

  "They don't know yet?" Carver said into the microphone poised in front of his lips.

  "We made sure they'd hear it from us first so they wouldn't go blabbing about it. Right now there are probably a dozen panicked IT guys at the university sweating over their mainframe, fearing for their livelihoods, and wishing they'd just gone to the Star Trek convention instead of answering their pagers."

  Carver turned to the agent, who gave him a conniving wink. Wolfe was his name, and when he had introduced himself on the tarmac at Sky Harbor, he had made the impression of a movie star trying to play an FBI agent. He wore black sunglasses that hadn't left his eyes yet and a crisp matching Valentino suit. His hair was an oil slick and his face was as smooth as silk. The left corner of his mouth curled up just enough to make him appear as though there was something only he knew and wasn't about to share, or perhaps he was simply cocky, an explanation Carver had begun to favor.

  "What do you know about the victim?" Carver asked. He could now see they had attracted the attention of a small group of people who'd gathered in front of the tent.

  "You mean victims."

  "They found more?"

  "At least two. We poached a cell phone call to the university."

  "How did we get the carbon dating results before they did?"

  "This is a digital world, my friend," Wolfe said, smirking behind the microphone. "All C14 tests are flagged by CIDIS for just such an occasion."

  "So you work for CIDIS?"

  Wolfe's smile showed teeth. "In a way."

  The Bell Longranger VH-MJO helicopter descended, kicking up clouds of dust. The canvas siding of the tent flapped as though trying to take flight, straining against its pegs. Shrubs shed their leaves and tugged at their roots. The world became a sandstorm as they alighted thirty yards from the encampment in a patch of bare desert. Three shapes stood in front of the tent, shielding their eyes with their hands. The runners bounced on the sand and the rotor whined to slow the blades.

  "Let's get this party started," Wolfe said, casting off his headset and bounding down to the ground.

  Carver climbed out his side and the two converged in front of the chopper. They walked directly toward a middle-aged man and two young women, all of whom wore the same shocked expression. The girls retreated a step, but the man held his ground. He finally lowered his hand from his eyes as the props came to rest.

  "This is an archeological dig," the man said, striding forward. "You could have easily done irreparable damage to--"

  Wolfe silenced him with a flash of his badge. "I'm Special Agent Wolfe and this is Special Agent Carver. Who's in charge here?"

  "Dr. Emil Mondragon, Regents' Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies at Northern Arizona University." He proffered a hand, which the agents shook in turn. "As I was saying, this is an--"

  "Archeological dig," Wolfe finished. Carver imagined he could see the agent roll his eyes behind his glasses. "But unless you're planting corpses just to dig them up again, you're way too early for this site to be of any archeological value."

  "What are you suggesting?"

  "That your stiffs are no more ancient than *NSYNC."

  "That can't be right. If you've seen the condition of the body--"

  With a flick of his wrist, Wolfe was holding a cell phone identical to the one Carver had found in the remains of the farmhouse. There was a picture of the bundled remains on the screen.

  Mondragon shook his head in disbelief. "How did you--?"

  "Magic," Wolfe said, walking past the professor with a nod to the undergrads. "I assume the lady of the hour is in here?"

  Wolfe disappeared into the tent and Carver followed. He slid down the dirt slope into the hole and crouched beside the other agent in front of the body.

  "Fine piece of work," Wolfe said. "Whoever did this has some real talent. Look how well the skin is simultaneously aged and preserved. Someone put a lot of time into preparing this for us." He traced the line of the corpse's upper jaw with a pen before tapping the rope. "We already know from the testing that the blankets and rope are authentic, but I can imagine it was no small feat procuring them." Leaning forward, he used the cap end of the pen to push the teeth apart. "The molars aren't worn down well enough and the gums are in good condition, though you can tell an effort was made to file the teeth unevenly. All that accomplished was scraping away the enamel to expose the healthy pulp."

  "You have training in archeology?"

  "I watch the Discovery Channel."

  Carver inspected the folded cadaver. There were no similarities between it and the remains of the girls Schwartz had butchered. And Wolfe seemed to be in his element, leading Carver to again wonder why they needed him.

  "Why am I here?" Carver asked aloud.

  Wolfe locked eyes with him through the shades. "You tell me."

  Carver stared at Wolfe, unable to read his expression, until the uncomfortable silence was broken.

  "I want to know what's going on here right now," Mondragon said. "Just how did you learn of our discovery and what would lead you to believe--?"

  "That this isn't your prized four hundred year-old Sinagua mummy?"

  "Stop interrupting me!" Mondragon snapped, his face flaring red.

  "Do I have to show you the badge again?" Wolfe sighed.

  "Where are the other bodies?" Carver asked.

  "On the far side of the tent," Mondragon said.

  "Why don't you show me."

  "Yeah...sure."

  The two left Wolfe to prod at the deceased and walked around the side of the tent to face the eternal desert. Carver immediately noticed the grid on the ground ahead. The sand was brushed away just enough to expose a lump of cloth. Farther along there was another, an
d about fifty yards beyond that, a figure crouched at the base of a fire-flowered ocotillo, working at the earth with its hands.

  "My colleague has already discovered three more bundles," Mondragon said, "but I suppose you already knew that."

  "We were aware of two."

  As they approached, Carver saw that the figure was a woman. Long dark hair pulled into a ponytail, trailing down her back from beneath a faded ball cap. Red- and blue-checked flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled past the elbows. Dirt-brown jeans. She was so involved with her work that she didn't know they were right behind her until Mondragon cleared his throat.

  "Emil, who the hell was landing a helicopter out here?" she said. Turning, she rose and shielded her eyes from the sun. "It nearly blew all the sand right back over--"

  Her eyes met Carver's and he blinked in surprise.

  "Ellie?"

  II

  Sinagua Ruins

  36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona

  "Pax?" she gasped, her eyes widening in surprise. "What in the world are you doing here?"

  "I could ask you the same."

  She bounded forward and hugged him. When she withdrew, she saw that she had covered his suit in dust and started to brush it off. "I'm so sorry."

  "You two know each other?" Mondragon asked.

  Elliot could only stare at the man standing before her. His eyes were worn, but otherwise he hadn't changed in the slightest.

  "Oh my God, Pax. How long has it been?"

  "Too long." He smiled. "You look amazing."

  Elliot brushed unconsciously at the dirt on her shirt.

  "So do you." She looked him up and down. "Wedding or funeral?"

  "Hmm?"

  "The last time I saw you in a suit was our senior prom. You said the only way you'd ever put one on again was for either your wedding or your funeral." But he had said our wedding, hadn't he? A lifetime ago when they had just been kids and the future and their dreams had been indistinguishable.

  "Unfortunately, this one goes with the job," he said, producing his badge and flipping it open for her to see.

  "FBI? Why would you be interested in...?" Her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes momentarily. "How did you figure it out?"

  "The carbon dating results were flagged by our lab. You knew?"

  "I had my suspicions," she said with a wan smile. "I was just really hoping I was wrong."

  "Why didn't you share your concerns?" Mondragon asked. "How could you tell?"

  "The hair," Elliot said. "It continues to grow even after death. I could tell the hair had been dyed by the roots. And there were a host of other details that weren't quite right." She hung her head. "I needed to look at the other bundles myself before saying anything. I had to be sure first. I so wanted this to be the discovery I've been searching for my entire career."

  "I'm sorry," Carver said.

  "What did the carbon dating show?"

  "Since the dating is measured in half-lives, any recent sample barely registers, so the tests were only able to narrow the body to within the last ten years."

  "Ten years? She's remarkably well aged. There's no way she could have been preserved so well by simple burial. And to be bundled in traditional Inca fashion? Someone would have had to go to great lengths to...That's why you're here."

  Carver nodded. "Can you tell me how someone might have prepared the corpse to replicate the appearance of mummification?"

  "I could tell right away that she had been smoked. She had an almost sweet smell to her."

  "Smoked? Like meat?"

  "It's a common method of mummification practiced for more than a thousand years. The body is suspended in a closed room over a tended fire, allowing the heat to melt the fats, which drain through the skin while the smoke dries it out."

  "How long does that take?"

  "There's no set recipe. A week, a month, maybe longer. It depends on a variety of factors including the desired condition of the remains and environmental factors like ambient humidity. Not only must this girl have been smoked for an inordinately long period of time, but I'd imagine you'll find she's been treated with natron, a combination of sodium carbonate decahydrate and sodium bicarbonate, or possibly a more advanced chemical, which would accelerate the process of dehydration while preserving the integrity of the skin."

  "But why would someone do something like that?" Mondragon asked. "Whoever did this worked extremely hard to create the illusion of ritualistic Inca burial, but that's all it is. An illusion. Surely someone with such obscure anthropological knowledge would know the first thing we'd do is send samples for carbon dating. And right there, the illusion would be shattered. So why not just bury the body as it was?"

  "Judging by the fact that they're hardly buried at all beneath mere inches of sand and the effort invested into their appearance, whoever did this wanted them to be found," Carver said.

  "But the carbon dating would only delay the process by a couple of days at best," Elliot said. "I mean, we're talking about someone potentially spending years meticulously tending to the corpse, and all that just to delay the inevitable by days? This person would have to be psychotic."

  The three stood in silence, the implications hanging between them.

  "So what happens now?" Elliot finally asked.

  "The FBI assumes authority over your dig, which is now a crime scene," Carver said. "We'll take formal statements from each of you and provide a thorough debriefing, but for now, I have to ask that you allow me to escort you back to the tent so we don't destroy any possible evidence."

  Elliot swiped away a tear with the back of her hand. She had been so close. She had traveled halfway around the world at no small expense. She had barely slept at all in days. And with those words, the adrenaline fled her veins, and abandoned her to a level of exhaustion that nearly dropped her to her knees. She was mentally numb. All she wanted now was to curl up in a bed and sleep until all of this was a distant memory and begin the arduous task of returning to Peru after another handful of days in transit.

  "You okay?" Carver asked, resting his hand on her shoulder.

  She could only nod and turn away to look back out across the desert, which had once held such promise and hope, but was now just a desolate infinity of sand and death.

  Worse, she could still sense that there were more bodies to be exhumed from the ground, which had yet to taste its fill.

  III

  The Evidence Response Team from the Phoenix office of the Bureau had arrived while Carver and Wolfe had been taking statements from the archeology group, and was now poring over the bodies with the crime scene specialists from the Phoenix Police Department in a cooperative effort to combine resources. Fortunately, even with all of the activity, the media had yet to catch wind of their findings. Roadblocks had been erected along the lone road, but wouldn't prove much of a deterrent to anyone curious enough to veer off into the flat desert. Four more impromptu tents had been raised near the first, one to serve as an informal command center, the others to cover the now exposed bundled corpses and protect the integrity of the scene against the rising wind. Yellow police tape snapped from where it had been strung between shrubs. Four ERT agents swept the surrounding area with ground-penetrating radar machines, probing the sand for the unmistakable signals of bodies buried beneath. As Carver watched, one of the men produced a small pink flag on a thin metal post and planted it at his feet. There were four more scattered around the tents.

  Nine bodies already.

  He ducked back into the original tent and walked to the far side of the widened pit to better see around the men and women from the various crime response and forensics units. They had neatly unwrapped the top blanket and the two layers beneath and had spread them out for a female agent who inspected them while another combed them for stray fibers, which she peeled away with forceps and placed in separate plastic bags. The rope lay unraveled between them. Several artifacts had been bundled with the corpse and now rested in a plastic evidence cas
e. There was a small clay jar with an opening barely large enough to accommodate the insertion of two fingers, painted with straight dark lines and cracked by age, and two small obsidian figurines, one a bat, the other a long-snouted mammal they assumed to be a tapir. The body itself was curled on a plastic tarp, still in fetal position; to straighten it they would have to break all of its appendages. Samples of the soil and skin had confirmed staggeringly high levels of carbonate, bicarbonate, and other hypo-osmotic sodium salts. Small amounts of ash had been gleaned from the epidermis. Analysis of the carbon structure revealed the body had been smoked over mesquite wood. As the shriveled digits were useless for ascertaining reasonable fingerprints, photographs had been taken from every possible angle and casts of the teeth and face were nearly dry. Soon enough they would be able to identify her, but Carver was already short on patience.

  "So what do we know?" Carver asked.

  "Female. Approximately twenty-eight to thirty-two years of age," Special Agent Manning said. She was in her mid-thirties with shoulder length auburn hair and the hunched, slender body of a scavenger bird from too much time peering through a microscope. "Orthodontic alignment and lack of appreciable decay of the teeth suggest reasonable financial well being. The thick, dense cortex of the bones is indicative of someone accustomed to physical exertion, without the wear-and-tear damage associated with manual labor. There are no fractures or visible scarring to indicate trauma, but there is minor scoring to the right antecubital fossa possibly from intravenous drug use or catheterization."

  Carver flinched. "Is it possible she was exsanguinated prior to death?"

  "Too soon to tell, but bleeding her through her arm would be about the slowest possible way to do so."

  "So we have a mid- to upper-class, early-thirties female with good teeth who likes to work out. That doesn't narrow our field much."