Effigy

by Theresa Danley

  Plus she was a total babe.

  It was uncharacteristic of Derek to be attracted to the earthy type. Lori had a natural look, perhaps the only girl he knew whose appearance might actually be hindered by makeup, if that was possible, and that made her all the more intriguing.

  But Derek wasn’t intrigued sitting alone there on a rickety barstool. Leaving his money on the bar, he finally walked out to his sporty Honda coupe. He hadn’t even developed a decent buzz for his trouble.

  With Lori still on his mind, he pulled out of the parking lot and took a detour through campus. He immediately spotted her Subaru parked at the library, just where it had been earlier that day. The building was dark so he knew she couldn’t still be in there. He drove around the museum, but to no surprise it too was dark. He continued to the only place he thought she might be and sure enough, there in a first story window of the anthropology building, he spotted a light.

  Surely she didn’t forget their date over some school project, did she?

  Derek parked in the empty lot beside the building and tried the front doors but they were locked. There was, however, a crack in the blinds on the lab window and he peered inside.

  Just as expected, he spied Lori draped in a long white lab coat. She wasn’t alone, however. Another frocked researcher stood beside her and together they were hunched over something between them on a lab table.

  How could she possibly study this late on summer break?

  He stood there indecisively in the darkness. Should he just turn around and go home? It seemed like such a pointless move considering his impulse to break through the window and beat the living shit out of that son-of-a-bitch who cheated him out of his date.

  The couple straightened from their work and Lori’s partner shuffled away. Derek waited. If nothing else, he wanted a good look at the competition.

  The guy began to turn. Derek could see his cheek. His chin. His nose. Everything was coming into profile.

  Derek hesitated. He’d seen that profile before.

  It can’t be!

  When Lori’s partner turned around, Derek found himself looking at none other than Quickie Peet.

  He backed away from the window.

  Not a smart move, Lori.

  Not smart at all.

  Citlalpol

  Agent Armando Diego tossed the riot baton onto the table and glared at Mario Sanchez groaning and writhing in blood at his feet. There was a rattle in the little man’s chest when he breathed. Dust floated in the stale air around his trembling body.

  Diego stepped in closer, his boots shuffling over the sandy floor of the abandoned farmhouse. His patience for protocol interrogations had reached its limit. The entire day had been wasted trying to get information out of this piece of shit and Diego was tired of beating around the bush.

  “Where were you on March 21st?” he asked.

  The man on the floor whimpered. “I already told you. Many times.”

  “Tell me again.”

  There was only Sanchez’s ragged breathing. Diego slipped the toe of his boot underneath his chin and lifted it off the floor.

  “Chichen Itza,” the New Ager gasped. “I was in Chichen Itza.”

  Diego bent over Sanchez. He could smell the stench of his sweat. There was a sweetness mingling with it. The salty-sweet smell of blood.

  “Why weren’t you at the equinox meeting with your followers?”

  “I was! I was!”

  From what Diego was told, it had been easy arresting Sanchez, or Citlalpol, or whatever the hell his name was. The pathetic little man didn’t even give a fight. It was getting information out of him that proved difficult.

  Sanchez could have passed for a farmer easier than he would a serial killer. It was highly unlikely that a man of his light build could overpower the healthy young victims chosen by the Equinox Killer. But that certainly didn’t rule out the chances of someone else killing under his orders. If Diego could uncover the motive behind the three gruesome homicides, then perhaps he would find the killer.

  But as he lay there crumpled and bleeding on the floor, Sanchez didn’t look like a leader of any sort of cult, much less the instigator of murder. His nose was swollen twice its size and he was still moaning, his breaths gurgling deep within his chest. Yet, he still hadn’t cracked.

  Diego wasn’t expecting such an uncooperative nature when, tired of playing by Escaban’s rules, he stole the New Age leader from his cell in the middle of the night and brought him to an abandoned farmhouse he often reserved for drug investigations. If he was going to suffer through Escaban’s personal campaign to avenge his nephew’s death, then Diego was going to do it his way.

  “I’ll ask you again,” Diego growled. “Why weren’t you in Teotihuacan with your followers? They told us you were nowhere to be found.”

  In painstakingly slow movements Sanchez rose to his elbows, then his knees. His head hung, his face was a smear of blood. An eye was swollen shut.

  “We were supposed to meet in Chichen Itza, not Teotihuacan.”

  “According to your followers, you always meet in Teotihuacan.”

  Sanchez sat there, breathing.

  Diego landed a vicious uppercut with his boot, flinging him against the spattered adobe wall. The energy transfer felt welcoming, even arousing. A pleasing sense of PJF nostalgia seeped into his pores.

  Sanchez swallowed and the gurgling returned to his chest. The son-of-a-bitch could drown in his own blood for all Diego cared. He snagged the New Ager’s shaggy hair and pulled his face up to him.

  “Answer me!” Diego demanded. “Don’t make me get my stick!”

  Sanchez’s swollen lip quivered; a shredded lump of flesh nearly detached from his face. Diego wondered what the New Agers would think of their Citlalpol now.

  He shook him.

  “Speak up! Was it your idea to go to Chichen Itza?”

  The man weakly shook his head. Diego felt slightly rewarded. Now he was getting somewhere. All it took was knowing how to ask the right questions.

  “Who told you to go there?”

  Sanchez moaned. “Gas… Gasp…”

  Diego loosened his grip, allowing him more air, but the frail man only collapsed. Diego stepped away, allowing him to crumple back to the floor. To his surprise, Sanchez gathered what was left of his strength and propped himself up on his trembling arms. His nose nearly touched the floor.

  “Who did you meet in Chichen Itza?” Diego demanded.

  Sanchez wheezed. Diego bent down to catch his faint whisper. “Cat…”

  “Who?”

  The gurgling was growing stronger.

  “Answer now or I’ll get my baton!”

  Sanchez lifted his grotesque face and focused his good eye on Diego. His lip quivered again and with a tongue he’d nearly bitten in two, he wheezed, “Acatzalan.”

  Laboratory

  Lori rubbed the strain from her eyes as she stepped away from the microscope. The lab room was dark save for the narrow florescent strip hovering above the microscope counter and the halo of lamplight spilling across the nearby lab table. There was something strangely comforting about those two islands of light. Their seclusion kept her mind focused, keeping a world of distractions hidden in darkness.

  She tossed her notebook atop the geologist’s reference guide lying beneath the table lamp and sat down. If she was anything more than an amateur geologist, the process of sorting and identifying the intergrown crystals within the jade may not have taken so long. But finally, she was convinced she had it right.

  Geology had its uses in archaeology. Stratigraphic layers of earth were often essential in dating archaeological sites. The way erosion and soil movements changed the provenience of artifacts also had to be taken into consideration. But what Lori found most essential was her knowledge of soil and mineral types when evaluating the material and temper of Anasazi ceramics. That finer geological element was central to her dissertation, and now it was proving useful for picking the effigy apart, min
eral by microscopic mineral.

  Leaning into the lab table, she scanned through the data scribbled in her notebook. Primary mineral—jadeite, in combination with analcime and white mica. The effigy was not made of just any old jade, but of the purer jadeite which, according to the library book opened before her, was most likely mined from the region north of the Motagua fault in Guatemala.

  Interesting, but what good was the information?

  She retrieved two reports from her three-ringed binder. The first was a photocopy of the report received from Radco Analytic who had performed the radiocarbon date on the shell in the effigy’s eyes. The test results simply read,

  Radco-173225 1820+/-75BP*

  *radiocarbon years pre-adjusted for reservoir effect on isotopic composition of marine sample.

  Lori flipped the page to a photocopy of Dr. Friedman’s preliminary report. She scanned down the data until she spotted in bold print:

  SUMMARY OF INTERPRETATION.

  Based on the radiocarbon data, the shell sample, and presumably the artifact as a whole, can be dated somewhere between 55BC and AD205, thus placing it squarely within the Mesoamerican Proto-Classic period. Given the craftsmanship of jadework and use of turquoise, and the simplistic, blocky shape of the artifact as a whole, this observer deduces that the effigy was constructed by the peoples of Teotihuacan in central Mexico who may have established trade commerce with the peoples of the southwest.

  In an earlier report Lori had all but memorized, Dr. Friedman had exhaustively analyzed the presence of a Mesoamerican artifact in Utah and concluded in a rather conceited way that the effigy could have only reached the Anasazi through trade. There were no other explanations in his mind, and any arguments stating otherwise were immediately discredited in his publication.

  The second report in Lori’s hands was an abstract from ArizonaStateUniversity, which maintained one of the few laboratories in the United States that could perform a non-destructive Proton-Induced X-ray Emission analysis of the turquoise in the effigy’s mosaic collar. Despite the expense, Lori had requested the PIXE test for her dissertation. It wasn’t enough to assume the turquoise originated in the southwest. She wanted to know the chemical signature of its copper and aluminum components to determine the exact location from which the stone had been mined. The PIXE results indicated that the hard, high quality blue turquoise with its slight shades of green webbed with smoky black matrix veins came from the Cerrillos region of New Mexico. Lori had already guessed as much but now she knew for sure. After all, the Cerrillos was the oldest site yielding Native American turquoise mined in the southwest.

  Pausing over her notes, Lori stared at the two-thousand-year-old effigy. A magnificent glimpse of history was snarling back at her and all she could think about was its conception. Just as she would her pottery, she concerned herself with the effigy’s physical origins. The finest jade and turquoise to have ever come out of the Americas, whose sources were far remote from each other, had been brought together in central Mexico and assembled into a stunning artifact that had survived a great distance of time.

  Time and material, the essence of archaeology.

  Everything about the effigy’s creation had taken extraordinary effort. The gathering of materials. The craftsmanship. The forethought. Even the dark obsidian pupils in the effigy’s eyes seemed to reflect quality and care. Surely this artifact was highly important to its creators.

  Why then did they trade it off?

  The question stained Lori’s thoughts as a yawn brought attention to a sudden weariness seeping in. Reluctantly, she slipped the effigy back into its foam-lined storage container, closed the lid and took it to the adjoining storage room Dr. Peet had earlier unlocked. It would be safe there for one night.

  She anticipated finding her answers with a refreshed mind in the morning. That was, if she could wrench her thoughts out of overdrive. For now, her inner ramblings were beginning to consume her. Why did someone make the effigy? Why did they trade it? Why? Why? Something inside her demanded answers now.

  Leaving the lamps on above the table and microscope, Lori swept her notes together and marched for the lab door. Pivoting in the dark hallway, she headed straight for Dr. Peet’s office.

  Something wasn’t adding up and she was going to find out why.

  * * * *

  Peet retrieved a Ziploc sandwich bag from the small cardboard box resting on the corner of his desk. He broke the plastic seal and retrieved the palm-sized potsherd and the stick-on label that hadn’t stuck to the artifact very well.

  He studied the gray shard a moment. Distinct black lines raced across its surface in an incomplete pattern that was lost with the rest of the pot. Similarly, the label contained its own black lettering scrawled across an off white background, completing an identification number he fully recognized.

  He found the label’s identification number duplicated in the field data log for Trader Ruin. As expected, the log’s description matched -131UU9934/CHA12TR375 - Mesa Verde Black on White, 8cm by 12.2cm by 9mm thick. Another artifact retrieved from Chaco.

  With a black archival pen, he carefully copied the identification number directly onto the concave side of the shard. He paused a moment for the ink to dry and then sealed it with clear fingernail polish, half nauseated by now from the ethyl acetate still lingering from earlier applications to a dozen other potsherds.

  He didn’t mind cataloguing artifacts really—though he intended to give his student aid the chore of logging the data into the department’s new computer program. Sure the task was a bit tedious, but when it came to archaeology, what wasn’t? This night, however, as he waited for the polish to dry, his thoughts were far off in the windswept desert of ChacoCanyon. He could almost feel the heat of that endless sky domed over Pueblo Bonito. He could feel the silence.

  Something intangible had hold of his thoughts. This time, there was more than those desolate details that kept calling him back to Chaco year after year—more than the mysterious roadways webbing the desert like veins of Texas hardpan, ten meters wide, up to fifty kilometers long, some paved with packed earth or broken pottery and some bordered by stones or earthen berms, all for a civilization that didn’t have wheeled carts or any other apparent need for a road.

  The mystery involving Chaco’s elaborate roadway system intrigued Peet. He set out years ago to determine its purpose with the theory that the roads were created with spiritual symbolism in mind. It was validating his hypothesis that proved difficult, if not impossible to do. Nonetheless, he studied maps created by Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanners and surveyed landscapes where no evidence of a roadway could be seen with the naked eye. He followed traces of linear sections that defied the broken terrain by descending gullies and climbing windswept knolls, all in keeping with the arrow-straight courses darting out of Chaco.

  Then there was the short segment of roadway carved into nearly a half mile of sandstone bedrock running directly parallel to the Great North Road. The segment dove down a sixty-meter embankment which the Anasazi scaled with only the use of hand and footholds notched out of the face of the cliff.

  Peet remembered the steepness of that cliff. He remembered the feel of the rope in his hands as he rappelled down to the footholds. He could still feel the heat radiating from the rocks, smell the blood roasting under the sun—

  “Dr. Peet?”

  He snapped his head up as though he’d just been clipped under the chin. He found Lori standing in the doorway of his office.

  “Yes?” he asked, setting the potsherds aside.

  Lori winced as though saddled by a vain thought and plopped herself down in the chair opposite his cluttered desk.

  “Something troubling you, Lori?”

  “I think Dr. Friedman’s summary conclusion is wrong,” she said rather abruptly.

  Peet’s chair creaked as he sat back. “About Quetzalcoatl?”

  Lori shook her head. “No. I’m sure he’s right about that. But it’s the idea that the effig
y was traded to the Anasazi that I have a problem with.”

  “Well, Dr. Friedman has been involved in Mesoamerican studies a long time. You’ll need good, hard evidence to discredit him.”

  “That’s just it. I have nothing to prove otherwise. But something tells me that the effigy couldn’t have been traded to the Anasazi.” She shook her head as if unsure she believed her own words. “It’s a gut feeling I have.”

  Peet had learned to heed Lori’s gut several years ago. She seemed to possess an uncanny ability to sniff out pieces of the Anasazi puzzle. There was built within her an understanding of the culture that somehow surpassed education and study. What she had was instinct, something Peet had never found among anyone in his profession, not even within himself. It impressed upon him that if anthropology could be considered an expression of art, then Lori had talent.

  “There must be something that’s turned you against the trade theory,” he said.

  “There is. The effigy itself.”

  Lori was a bright young lady, and serious—a mild overachiever with an obsessive interest in ceramics. Few students possessed her insatiable hunger for archaeology and as Peet sat there studying her composure carefully, he found himself anticipating her analysis.

  Lori’s gaze dropped to her lap. “The effigy was too…” Her brow furrowed as she sought the word she needed. “It was too involved to have been a trade good.”

  “How so?”

  She leaned forward now, her notebook tightly cradled in her lap. “If the effigy was created in central Mexico like Dr. Friedman believes, then those people would have traveled hundreds of miles south to collect the jade from Guatemala. And we know turquoise of this quality doesn’t exist in Mexico so they must have traveled over a thousand miles north to collect it from the southwest, not to mention the distances they must have traveled to the coasts to gather the shell they used in the effigy’s eyes.”