Travelers (Nel Bently Books, #1)

by V. S. Holmes

  She dropped the shovel in the pit and stepped over the hole to raise the screen. The sound of dry, rocky earth against 1/8 inch metal mesh drowned out everything except Nel's pounding heart and the hot breath billowing in her lungs. She paused, rough hands brushing through the pile of pebbles and potential flakes. Nothing. She flicked the examined rocks onto the back dirt pile and was about to lift the shovel again when Mikey's whistle shot up the hill.

  She shielded her eyes. He waved her over to Henri's unit. His mouth was thin and his brow furrowed. Fuck, what now? This site is a mess as it is. She grabbed her field book and jogged down the slope. “What's up?”

  Mikey jerked his chin at the unit. Henri crouched on the edge, eyes wide and trowel pointing at the bottom of the level. “Dr. Bently, I think we've got something big.”

  The soil was not the uniform brown that the B horizon should have been. Instead a dark stain covered one full corner and disappeared into the wall. Nel leaned down, scraping some of the dirt into her hand. She ground it between her fingers, tilting her palm so the light caught on the tiny grains of silt and sand. It was dark and slick, as if someone had spilled cooking oil. She sat back on her heels. Preservation of bodies only happened under the most ideal circumstances. Usually, all that was left were bone fragments and residual grease from ancient decomposition.

  “Yeah, this is big alright.” She glanced up at Henri. “I'm putting Chad with you—not because you're doing poorly, but because he has more experience with this. You're going to go down by 5cm levels now, and stop at anything unusual. Bone will be like dry tan clay. At each level, please map in the staining and anything you find.”

  “This is a burial, isn't it?”

  “It's something, that's for sure. Can't say if it's human or not, but my money's on yes, especially with that point above it. Could be that was a grave good.” She grinned. “You just put this site on the map.”

  THE HEAVY ENVELOPE survived only until Nel’s door latched behind her. She tore it across the end and tugged the tri-folded composition results from safety. She peered at them, lips thinning. Spectroscopy results were hard to understand on the best of days. “Complex hydrocarbons? Magnetized metal dust?” None of the molecules looked familiar. She wasn’t a chemist, but she could recognize the spectrometer’s readouts depicting charcoal, various rocks and metals. “Ugh, this is a mess!” She grabbed her cell and dialed the lab. “Could I have Dr. Danilo Salinas. This is Dr. Bentley.” She flipped through the other pages, finding similar results.

  The line clicked. “Salinas’s Taco Stand.”

  Nel wasn’t in the mood for his usual jokes. “Just got the results. What the hell am I looking at?”

  “Lemme pull up the data so I can walk you through it. Alright, got it. The control samples you sent are the usual — actually looks like a remarkably clean site. Came back with your local dirt make-up for that strata — silica, trace clays. The kicker was the black stuff. It’s metal, almost completely, and the composition is from all over. We isolated it and ran some other fun tests — it’s extremely light, but magnetized somehow. The black stuff is metallic, and it's got some sort of petroleum residue.”

  Nel stared at the report, phone held between her ear and shoulder. “This isn’t fucking right.”

  “Sorry, Nel. We ran it three times. Looks like you got a contaminated site. We’re running the dates and we’ll get them to you as soon as possible, but at this point it’s just a formality. I very much doubt the paleos had rocket fuel.”

  She hung up without saying good-bye. Danilo took a bit too much enjoyment from her difficulties. He could join Los Pobladores and I probably wouldn’t notice a difference.

  FOURTEEN

  TWO DAYS OF CAREFUL excavation sat mapped on the table, along with several dozen little bags. She brushed a hand over the fragment of femur. Fifteen thousand years and this is all that's left of a living, breathing person. Someone with hopes and dreams. someone who had friends, family.

  “You alright, Nel?” Chad leaned on the tent leg.

  “Humbled, is all.” The bones were anatomically modern human, enough left to show naturally decaying edges. And a few wounds that never healed. She pointed to the map that had each bone located. “Some of these look like they might be perimortem.”

  “Think they met an untimely end?”

  “Maybe. They were buried, that's for sure. I'm curious to see what that point brings back—if it was unused it might have been a grave good.”

  “When will the data come back?”

  “Should be waiting for me when we get back. Danilo promised to push it through after ruining my day on Tuesday.” She collected the bags and tucked them carefully into her pack with the maps.

  Chad snorted and helped her pack away the rest of the day's finds. “That guy has too much fun messing up our days. I assume you're going to expand the unit on all sides?”

  “Yeah, on Monday. I'm just glad we got all this out before the weekend. I'd hate to leave something so precious for Los Pobladores to fuck with.” She clipped the tool box closed and hoisted it onto her shoulder with her pack. “Mikey, you coming?”

  He was still bent over the total station, glasses perched like a mayfly on his nose. “I want to get this thing re-calibrated. I’ll hike down in a few.”

  “K. I got something to show you, though, so come see me when you get back.”

  He waved absently, showing he’d heard, fingers already twirling the various pegs on the yellow case. Nel shoved the Jeep into first and rumbled down the road. Between weird residue and malfunctioning equipment, her site was setting a record for strange.

  NEL LEANED BACK IN the chair. It creaked softly in the warm night. The screen door banged as the students traipsed out for their nightly drinking.

  “Remember that?” Chad eased himself into the chair beside her.

  “I do. Now I’m too lazy to bother getting spiffy. I’ll settle for a dirty-beer and a quiet porch.”

  He nodded and tipped back his gin and tonic. “Do you ever miss it?”

  “Hell no. At least, I don’t miss the bar scene. I could use a little fun though.”

  “CRM is good for that. I like the crew mentality. Everyone cooks and drinks together then passes out at 9:00.”

  Nel laughed. “I do miss the food. Damn, you remember Carl’s Bar-B-Q?”

  “Fucking heaven. One of my favorite humans.”

  They were silent for several moments, listening to the buzz of insects and street lights. Nel tilted her head back, eyes closed. “Damn, today just took it out of me.” A frown shadowed her face, but she didn’t open her eyes. “Mikey come home yet?”

  “No. No surprise, though. He was pissed at the total station. He tried to recalibrate it twice today.”

  Nel groaned. “That thing sucks. Sometimes I miss just measuring off the datum.”

  “It’s a great tool, but technology is rough.” He drained his drink.

  After a moment Nel stood and stretched. “I’m going to go shower and maybe nap.”

  “What’re you having for dinner?”

  Nel shrugged. “No idea. It’s almost too hot to eat. I’ll knock if I’m headed out. When you see Mikey, send him my way.”

  NEL STARED AT THE OPEN email. The protein analysis glared up at her from the screen. She had seen tools with caribou, rodent, even bear. She'd never expected the tool to be positive for human proteins.

  She quickly forwarded the data to Mikey and Martos before flicking open her phone. Her brows snapped together when her call went straight to Mikey's voicemail. “Hey, Mikey, it's me. Just wondering where you got to. Protein analysis is back, got something interesting you need to see. Come find me when you're back.”

  She hung up then dialed Martos. He was often in the office late.

  “Dr. Martin de Santos.”

  “Hey, it's Bently.”

  “Ah, how're things going?”

  “Alright. Had some local color, but nothing we couldn't handle.” She hesitated. She ha
dn't mentioned the encounter with Los Pobladores on the highway yet and had a bad feeling it would get her funding revoked. “Got some news for you. We got a body.”

  “In situ? How intact? Is it a burial?”

  Nel laughed. “I've sent you all the details. Looks like it's a burial and fairly intact. Close to a hundred bones. Got them all mapped in now. I'm thinking it wasn't a natural death, though.”

  “Broken bones?”

  “There's some perimortem damage, yeah, but more than that. We found a point just above it, which was unusual for grave goods. I got the analysis back and It's positive for human protein, Martos.”

  “What?”

  “Yep. Looks like we've got us a murder weapon.”

  FIFTEEN

  NEL WOKE WITH A START. The hammering was not in her head, but on the door downstairs. She knew that knock — someone official. “Son of a whore, I don’t want to deal with vandals today.” If Los Pobladores did something bad enough to get the attention of the cops, they were in for trouble. “Probably trashed the Jeep again.” She tugged on her dig clothes from the day before and hurried downstairs. Being Saturday morning, everyone else was thankfully still in bed. Whatever new mess she had to handle was better done in private.

  The officer downstairs was one she recognized from the year before when she filed for her local permits. The heavy-set man behind him was wearing the official uniform of the Policia de Investigaciones.

  She stopped on the stairs. “Fuck, Munoz, what now? I’ve told you a thousand times, there’s no use pressing charges. You agreed with me about it last time.”

  The officer’s grim lines deepened. “Nel, please.”

  “Dr. Nel Bently?” The other man stepped forward.

  “Yeah?” She crossed her arms. As a rule, she disliked anything bigger than the local governments.

  “You got a digger named Servais?”

  “He’s my site manager, yeah. I haven’t seen him this morning, but I can go get him. What’s up?” A door opened and shut above her. A moment later Chad appeared a step behind her. Nel flashed him a weak smile.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Dr. Bently, but Dr. Servais is dead.”

  The still air roared in Nel’s ears. The stairs pitched under her feet and suddenly she was sitting and Chad’s hands were on her shoulders. “I’m sorry?”

  Munoz pressed a glass of water into her hand. “Some local boys found his body off the main road a few miles out of town. Looks like homicide.”

  Nel abruptly remembered why she disliked big-city cops. The further they were from actual people the further they were from reality. Words like “homicide” and “investigation” meant nothing when your best friend was dead.

  SIXTEEN

  NEL STARED OUT THE window. The air was warm, the sun high, and the sky clear. She suspected if it were any other day, it would have been called beautiful. The fact remained, however, that it was the day after her best friend died. Such a day could never be called beautiful. Martos had once said she and Mikey were a perfect pair, one the energetic version of the other — driven and patient, passionate and caring.

  Martos had been right in his descriptors, but he had been wrong in one thing. She wasn’t driven. She wasn’t passionate. She was angry. It wasn’t the hot, sudden anger of adolescence, or the tired trope of the lesbian, angry at being misunderstood. It was the slow, steady heat of the earth’s core. It drove her studies and fueled her curiosity. Mikey’s death punched a hole through the thick shell she carefully curated to contain her rage. It spewed, unchecked and aimless into every thought and action. Mugs and plates and the case for the total station’s back-up battery dotted the floor, victims of her fury.

  There were a thousand things she had to do, she supposed. A thousand things that would burn the minute she touched them. So, instead, she sat.

  It took three attempts before she realized the pounding was not the pulsing of her anger, but Chad’s knocking. She cleared her throat. “What.”

  His words were shapeless humming through the wood, and when she didn’t answer, he cracked the door and tried again. “We need to talk to the crew. I’d do it, but they know you better. Or, at least, it’s your job and not mine.”

  She heard the door open farther and the sigh of the bed as he sat. “Please, Nel. This sucks, but they don’t know what’s going on and they’re scared. The cops want to talk to you and Martos called and said you weren’t picking up.”

  She cleared her throat again. It was tight and her eyes stung. I must have caught a cold. “We’ll have to send them home. If the cops let them.”

  “Yeah. I know.” She surged from her chair. “I’ll text them to be home for lunch.” Her fingers stilled their tapping across her phone’s keyboard. Chad still waited in the doorway. “What?”

  “They’ve shut down the dig. Pulled your permits for auditing.”

  Nel froze by her desk. It was the obvious outcome. She had known the moment Munoz said “homicide” their work would stop. Hearing it in Chad’s soft, careful words, a voice more disposed to joking and beauty, made the reality sharp. “I’ll call the precinct, ask when the kids can leave, then I’ll talk to them.”

  A TERSE CALL TO THE police and several swigs of cold coffee later, Nel was closer to being prepared than before. She flipped open her phone and sent a mass text:

  Meet me in the kitchen in an hour. Please don't be late. Mandatory.

  Chad gathered the chairs and stools into some semblance of seating. Nel stood behind the counter, staring into the mug of coffee before her when they arrived. She couldn’t bring herself to look up until the conversation had died and the shuffling of sandals and seats had ceased. “Thank you for being prompt. This hasn’t been a good weekend. I have some bad news and some worse news. I appreciate if you save questions until I have finished.” I won’t get through this with interruptions. She cleared her throat, making sure her gaze moved from one student to the next, not really seeing them.

  “The volunteer student program at the site is terminated indefinitely. Tomorrow each of you will need to go down to the local police department. I will be driving us all. None of you are in trouble, but you will need to answer some questions about Friday as well as other things, I imagine. Please be honest. They don’t care if you’ve been drinking, if you’ve hooked up with the local boys or girls. You will all leave for home by the end of the week. I’ll help arrange your tickets and cover the cost of any issues. I will call your families this evening to explain things to them myself and answer any questions, but I suggest you call them first. They’d like to hear that you’re safe from your mouths.”

  Her gaze fell to the counter top. “I thought I’d start with the bad news, to ease you into the worse. Friday night, Mikey stayed behind at the site to fix the calibration on the total station. He never made it home. His body was found on the side of the road yesterday morning. I know many of you were closer to Mikey than you were to me, and I’m sorry that you’ve lost a valuable mentor. If you need to talk about it, Chad or I will gladly listen. If you would feel more comfortable, I can help you find someone on campus back home.” Her voice echoed monotonously in her ears, drowning out all other sounds save for the roar of blood in her head. “Please meet me down here at 7:00 AM tomorrow morning. We’ll get coffee before we arrive at the precinct. That’ll be it.”

  No one moved for a moment, and Nel cursed inwardly. She didn’t want to look at their bewildered faces. She wanted to be alone. Tentative steps approached and suddenly sunburnt arms wrapped around her shoulders.

  “Dr. Bently, I’m so sorry.”

  Nel stiffened. She wasn’t a hugger and embracing students was something they were strictly warned against, but she couldn’t bring herself to push away. “Thanks, Annie.”

  She stepped back and gave them all an awkward nod before heading for the stairs. She wasn’t ready for a wave of emotion and sympathy to break over her head. She wasn’t ready for much of anything.

  SEVENTEEN<
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  NEL'S PHONE BLINKED with three missed calls: two from Martos and a third from a number she didn’t recognize. There goes my funding. She listened to Martos first. He clearly hadn’t known when he called. With a sigh she dialed him back and waited. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Nel?”

  “Hey. Sorry, I was away from my phone.”

  “The police left a message on my work phone, but didn’t tell me what was wrong, just to call them back. What happened? Did they screw up the site? Are you all safe?”

  “The students are fine. Martos, they got Mikey.”

  “What happened? Is he out of the hospital?”

  “The cops showed up this morning. Some kid found his body on the side of the road.” The lack of reply hissed through the phone line. If it weren't for the sounds of a kitchen in the background, Nel would have thought he had hung up. “I don’t know what to do, Martos.” It was something she could admit only to him and Mikey.

  “They’ll suspend your permits, and I assume you can’t come home due to the investigation.”

  “They already have.”

  “Have you spoken to the police?”

  “Not really. I wasn’t listening much to what they said. We're going to the station tomorrow. The students have to make statements. We all do. Chad's been a help. Thanks for sending him.”

  “It wasn’t like I knew.”

  “None of us did.”

  “It's stupid to ask, but how are you holding up?”

  “Everything is distant. I’m not really in this world right now.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you two were close.”

  “So were you.”

  “Even still. If there’s anything I can do.... Do you want me to handle calling his family?”