The music stopped, and Roberto opened his eyes. It had grown dark, and his companions were making ready for sleep. Roberto felt lazy. He also felt he had to answer a call of nature. He rose from his log and walked into the woods.
He had just finished his task when he suddenly found himself flat on the ground, a knife poised above him. His attacker was a mere shadowy figure, but he heard the French curses. Roberto tried to talk to him in the little French lie knew.
"Are you lost, as I? I can help you!"
Surely the man was mad to attack in the dark. They fought, but he was strong, very strong, and Roberto was tired from the day's travel. Then, just as suddenly as the man appeared, he was gone. Roberto sat up, blinking back the blood running into his eyes from a cut on his forehead. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and saw that Piaquay had pulled the man off and slit his throat.
Roberto was breathing hard, gasping for air. Piaquay hauled him to his feet and dragged him back to camp.
"Sleep," he said.
"What if there are more?" said Roberto, feeling his ears, realizing both of his lobes were torn and one of his earspools gone. He winced as he thought he would have to cut the dangling tissue in order to look normal.
"There are no more. Sleep." Roberto then saw Quanche and Minque silently slipping back into camp.
In the morning, when the sunlight filtered through the green canopy, Roberto and the others examined the dead man. There was a fog in the woods, and the air was cool. Roberto shivered as he looked into the face of his attacker. He had fair skin and hair and a wispy beard. The man was half naked and thin. A madman, thought Roberto, probably lost or held prisoner, perhaps tortured by the Indians or the Spanish. It could be either. He was French. Roberto had felt the man's fear the night before. He felt sorry for him now. He understood how this strange land could drive you mad with fear and loneliness, until you learned how to live in it.
"I will bury him," said Roberto.
"Why not let the coyotes have him?" asked Piaquay.
"He was lost and afraid. I will bury him."
To Roberto's surprise, his companions helped him dig the hole. They first softened the ground with sharp sticks, then found wide thin stones to dig out the dirt. With all of them working, it did not take long.
Roberto laid the Frenchman out in the grave, bowed his head, and muttered a Latin prayer over him. He knelt and put the rosary in the dead man's hand.
"This will help you, my lost friend," he whispered.
They covered him with dirt, and Roberto piled as many rocks as he could find over the grave.
"Your beads," said Piaquay. "They were sacred to you."
"I made the first rosary. I can make another, and it will be sacred, too. I thought he needed it on his journey."
Piaquay nodded. Roberto thought he seemed to understand.
"It is time for you to make a choice, my friend," Piaquay told Roberto. "Which path will you take?"
Lindsay was right. Jennifer and Ken had disappeared. She gave them a pretty good chance of not being found. Those two knew how to plan and be patient. The next morning she drove home. Derrick wanted to drive with her, but she knew he needed to get back to his site, and she told him she would be fine.
"And, Derrick," she said as she started to get into her Rover, "perhaps we can talk after you get back."
"Perhaps we can," he said and kissed her. He watched her drive away. In the rearview mirror she saw him get in his jeep and start off in the other direction.
Her trip home was uneventful. She was thankful for that. Susan had returned to Lindsay's house with Mandrake.
"The calls stopped, so I decided it would be all right to come back," Susan said. "Mandrake's fine."
"You went above and beyond in taking care of my place. Thanks."
"That's all right. That was a strange end for Denny Ferguson."
"Yes. If it weren't for Mr. Kim and his family, I could almost feel sorry for him."
Lindsay wrote Susan a check and paid her extra for her time and effort. Susan tried to decline, but Lindsay insisted. "It meant a lot to me to have you take care of things."
It was good to be home. Everything in the house was as she had left it. It was familiar. Susan had left her kitchen stocked, and Lindsay made herself a taco salad for dinner, watched some TV, and went to bed early. She took the phone book before she turned in and looked at the listings for plastic surgeons. She was not vain, but she didn't want to look in the mirror every day and think about the cave. Or maybe she was vain, she thought to herself; there's nothing wrong with looking good.
In the morning she called and made an appointment with a plastic surgeon she had heard about from another faculty member. She was lucky. There had been a cancellation, and they would fit her in the next week.
Lindsay parked at the medical building and followed the directions given to her over the phone. She still had misgivings about coming. Her scrapes might not warrant such dramatic treatment, she thought as she walked down the long hall, passing the doors of other medical professionals. Timothy Scott, M.D., P.C., Pediatric Medicine, one said. Where had she heard that name? Oh yes, Kelley Banks's boyfriend. Kelley Banks, thought Lindsay, was having a time explaining to the authorities how her client ended up being misidentified as her uncle.
Terence Wilson, D.D.S., P.C., Dentist, the door past Timothy Scott's said. Lindsay passed it, stopped, and looked again. Side by side. What a coincidence. The dentist whose name was on Denny Ferguson's x-rays had an office next to Kelley Banks's boyfriend. She walked on down to the end of the hall to her appointment. While she waited, she tried out different scenarios in her mind.
Kelley went to visit Denny in jail about his appeal, told him that it wasn't going well, reminding him what an injustice had been done to him, how he deserved to be free-that she had a plan that would free him.
Drink this. It will give you bad stomach pains and they will have to take you to the hospital. You can escape from there. After we have you out of jail, I'll have a dentist look at your teeth. That was how you got caught the first time. Crooked teeth.
Kelley's boyfriend, Timothy Scott, was probably friends with the dentist next to him-the dentist may have been in on it. Anyway, it would have been easy for Scott to pop in and out of his friend's office. Perhaps he purloined a key. He could make a file, change the label on the x-rays. Ken may have gone to this dentist before. Maybe made a point of it so that he would have a file there. It would have been much easier for Scott to have altered the records than for Kelley to have done so. The unidentified print on the false x-ray, whose was it? Sloppy for a dentist. How about a pediatrician not used to developing dental x-rays?
Lindsay guessed that Kelley's tuition had been expensive and she had massive loans. Agent McKinley hadn't verified it with her, but he wouldn't. She wasn't really in on the investigation anymore. Lindsay wondered if Timothy Scott was Kelley's boyfriend before or after the scheme was concocted. She imagined he had some pretty hefty expenses himself, opening up a practice. Lindsay was so lost in thought the nurse had to call her name twice before she heard it.
The plastic surgeon, Dr. Lacey, told Lindsay that she thought there was a good chance her facial injuries would heal without much scarring, but it would be a simple outpatient procedure if she needed anything done. Dr. Lacey was a competent woman, and Lindsay liked her. She and her nurse were riveted by Lindsay's explanation of how she came by the wounds.
"Have they caught the guys who did that to you?" asked her nurse, a young black woman who looked to Lindsay as if she was sixteen. I am definitely getting old, she thought.
"No. There are leads, but so far they haven't found anyone," she told them. They shook their heads at man's inhumanity to man.
She left, still deep into her thoughts as she walked back to her Rover. It could be a coincidence, she thought. After all, it was a coincidence that she picked this plastic surgeon to consult. She wondered who had done Ken Darnell's plastic surgery. She couldn't imagine the nice
Dr. Lacey being involved in this, but then, the surgeon didn't have to know Darnell's intentions. But this is too close to home, she thought. Colorado. It popped into her head. Of course, he would have it done out of town; he probably really did go visit Colorado. She must have said it aloud, for she heard a voice say it back to her.
"Colorado? Hello, Lindsay."
Lindsay looked up and was startled by Dr. Timothy Scott. Apparently, his car was parked next to hers. He was getting out of it.
"Oh, hi," she said. "How are you?" Fear ran down her spine. She dropped her keys on the ground and hurriedly picked them up.
"Visiting me?" he asked.
"No. Dr. Lacey, the plastic surgeon. I may have some scarring on my face."
"Yes. I heard what happened to you. But it doesn't look too bad from here."
For some reason that made Lindsay angry. She smiled tightly at him, got in her Rover, and drove off. She was right. It was him, she thought. There was something about the careful way he talked to her, the measured calmness in his voice, that convinced her. It was him. She drove to her office.
There was no one in the lab. Students were still off on their summer vacations. She unlocked her office and went in. It was as she had left it. Familiar, comfortable, like her house. There was a package lying on her desk. She sat down at her desk and opened it. It was the knife from the Lamberts' field, the one Joshua traded his tooth to Marilee for. The note said that it was French, not Spanish, the kind used by French soldiers who were battling the Spanish conquistadores for a foothold in the Americas. They wrote a long report on it. Lindsay laid the pages on the table and examined the knife. It looked as though it had once had a handle, but only a thin metal hilt remained. The blade had been relatively thick. The restorer had done a good job with it. It was gray and heavily pitted but had a slight sheen. She thought Joshua Lambert would be pleased with it.
She looked up when her door opened. Timothy Scott was standing in the doorway. She gripped the knife and put her hands in her lap. He came in, closed the door, and locked it.
"You know, don't you?" he said.
"Know what?" she asked.
"Let's not play games. I doubt if either of us has the mental strength for it. All this is a strain, isn't it?"
"Why did you do it?" asked Lindsay.
"Money." He was very calm. "Look, Denny Ferguson was a waste to society. He won't be missed by anyone but his mother and a few odd relatives."
"What about Blaine Hillard? What had he done?"
"He was just a poor guy worth more dead than alive. Besides, I didn't kill him. Roy Pitt did. I didn't even know about all this then."
"Who was Roy Pitt?" Lindsay asked.
Scott shrugged. "Some loner friend of Ken's. The two of them came up with the idea together."
"But Ken stuck a knife in his back instead," said Lindsay. Two methods of murder, two murderers, she thought. Scott nodded his head. "Then I guess the problem was to find a body to substitute for Ken." She wondered if she could make it past him or if she could grab the phone and punch in a number. No, he would have her before she could do that. Keep him talking, she thought, while she made a plan. "And along came Denny Ferguson. What did you do-have Kelley give him a drug to simulate appendicitis, help him escape, then take him to the dentist whose office is next to yours?"
"I knew that's why you were there, checking up on your theories."
"No. I was really there to see Dr. Lacey."
"Oh." That seemed to disconcert him. "But you saw the names on the offices, and you figured it out, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"You're too smart for your own good."
He's starting to get hostile. Ready to to do-what? she wondered. Keep him talking.
"Did Kelley know?"
"About Ken's fraud? Yeah, she knew. She was desperate for money, too. And crazy about her uncle. He generated loyalty like that, in women anyway."
"What about killing Denny? I have a hard time seeing her go through with that."
"I told her that the dentist had to put Ferguson to sleep to pull a bad tooth. I said he died and that, rather than turn the body over to the authorities, we should just put it to good use. She bought it. Ken had already approached me about finding a body to substitute for him. Denny was perfect."
"You killed him?" she said.
"Yes. I told him I had dental training. I got into Dr. Wilson's office at night. Denny-stupid bastard-thought it was neat to sneak in and use the equipment to make the xrays. Thought he was going to get a dental makeover. It fit into his criminal sensibilities. It was pretty easy. Dr. Wilson and I have adjoining doors. I took the x-rays, labeled them, and put them in Ken's file. Wilson was Ken's dentist. Neat, huh?"
"Yes. Neat. How did you kill him? Lethal injection of some kind?"
"Yes, very fitting, don't you think?"
"You killed him at the Lamberts', didn't you? Told him he could hide out there while they were on vacation. When he was dead, you decomposed the body in their shed. You even killed the neighbor's calf and pretended it caught its head in a broken wall of the shed so you could mask the odor. Everyone would think any telltale odor was the decomposing calf." Lindsay watched the surprise on his face as she talked.
"You are very clever. How did you work that out?" he asked.
Lindsay shrugged. "I'm an archaeologist. We have to be very clever and look for all the clues to be able to generalize behavior from the skewed data we dig up."
He smiled slightly with one side of his mouth. "You're right, of course. And you know how easy it is to decompose a corpse in the summer if you have the proper place and can get the right bugs. Inside that shed at the Lamberts' place it gets up to 120 degrees every day when it's closed up. There was nothing much left but bones inside of two weeks."
"Too bad about the neighbor's calf."
"Yes. Another sacrifice for the cause. But they would have just killed it and eaten it anyway."
"It must have been hard to put clothes on a skeleton."
He laughed. "That's true. I had to stuff the bones in the pants, hoping they weren't in too much disarray. It was not easy. I was afraid the crime scene would look too staged. See, we read a lot about what we were doing and knew that some crime scene professionals could detect things like that. Staging and posing and all that." He laughed again. "But after all, this was just small-town stuff; we really didn't expect to deal with an expert crime unit. Jennifer was a big help. You've met detail-oriented people? That's Jennifer. She doesn't miss a thing. You'd have thought she was decorating her living room. She arranged for Dr. Ballinger to identify the bodies, too. She knew he operated on Blaine, and dropped the suggestion to the coroner, who jumped on it. He got Ballinger to ID the others, too. Ballinger himself sent off for Ken's x-rays from Dr. Wilson, so it all seemed on the up-and-up. No one had a clue until you turned up on the scene. That was a real scare. We knew if you ever saw that mouth-"
"You and Ken put me in the cave?"
"You would have had an easy death, like Denny. We weren't sadistic. It was your idea to lose yourself in the cave."
He took a hypodermic needle from his coat pocket. This was it, Lindsay thought. She held tightly to the knife in her lap. He approached.
"Don't move," he said. "This won't hurt."
Lindsay stood. The desk was between them, but he was between her and the door. He was in somewhat of a bind himself, she thought. He couldn't come around or she would run and flee out the door. And it was hard for him to reach across the desk. He pulled a small gun from his pocket. Not such a bind after all.
"Just stay still and give me your arm." Lindsay did stay still, but she didn't hold out her arm to him. "You aren't going to cooperate, are you?" he said. "Well, I don't suppose I can blame you. Move away from the desk, back against the wall."
"Look, it's useless to kill me. Your fingerprint developed into Denny Ferguson's dental x-ray."
He looked alarmed, then smiled. "Good, good. You almost had me. Clever. I'd lie, t
oo, about now."
"It's true," she said.
"I don't believe you. Now, do as I asked." He gestured with the gun.
"Will you answer one more question?" she asked.
"Why not?"
Good, he wanted to put off killing her. "Why did you kill Gil Harris? That has completely stumped me."
"Well, what do you know. Something you couldn't figure out. Well, I can't blame you there. It was completely out of the blue. Not that it will matter to you, one way or another, but I didn't kill him. Ken did. We were following you, Ken and I, trying to get you to call off your investigation and go home. Why didn't you just go home? All of this could have been avoided."
He seemed to be getting frustrated. She had to calm him down. "It didn't occur to me to go home."
He shook his head as if he found that amusing. "We tried everything we could think of to make you go home," he continued. "We even shot your tire, but you knew that, didn't you?"
"Yes. What about Gil Harris?"
"I'm getting to that; be patient. Ken got the idea of disabling your Rover. We figured if you didn't have transportation, you would just give it up after everything else that happened to you. See, we tried every way in the world not to kill you. We only killed when it was completely necessary. Ken even laughed at our efforts-started calling us Wiley Coyote and you the Road Runner. We aren't bad people."
No, thought Lindsay wryly. You just do bad things.
"Gil Harris saw us," he continued. "That wouldn't have been so bad, but he recognized Ken. Can you believe it? After all that plastic surgery. I didn't recognize him. Jennifer didn't. Nobody else did."
"It was dark," said Lindsay. "It muted the differences, probably. And I imagine he heard Ken's voice. We had just been talking about Ken, and Ken was already on his mind."
"That makes sense." Scott seemed to appreciate the explanation.
Lindsay had been moving slowly around the desk as they talked. Now they were both in front of it.
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