Darkwind: Ancient Enemy 2 (3 page)

What time was it?

A glance at the alarm clock next to his bed told him it was three o’clock in the morning.

He craved a drink but he tried to fight the urge. He should try to get back to sleep, but he thought sleep might be nearly impossible now. Maybe he would make some coffee.

He jumped when his cell phone rang. He grabbed it from the cluttered end table next to his bed and looked at the number. It was Cardenelli, his supervisor.

What was he doing calling in the middle of the night?

An emergency of some kind.

And it was always something bad when Cardenelli called him in the middle of the night.

Denver, Colorado

“Y
es, sir,” Palmer said into his cell phone.

“Palmer,” Cardenelli barked. “I need you to get to the airport right now.”

“Where am I going?”

“Down to New Mexico. Small town called Farmington. I’ll have a rental car ready for you there. It’s a long drive from there to the dig site.”

“Dig site?”

“It’s on the Navajo Reservation. Some bodies were found at an archaeological dig site.”

Palmer sighed. “Why me? Isn’t there someone down there who could—”

“Agent Klein will meet you there. But I need you down there with him on this one. This one is … it’s a little strange.”

Palmer didn’t say anything. Strange was his area of expertise.

“A captain of the Navajo Tribal Police in that area, a man named Begay, will be there, too. He’s the one who called it in. The Tribal Police are the only ones besides us involved in this right now—no county or state police.”

“Well, it’s Navajo land,” Palmer said. “It’s their bodies …”

“FBI handles murders on Indian Reservations. And these bodies aren’t all Navajo.”

Again Palmer didn’t respond.

“It’s a group of archaeologists, maybe some grad students. Ten of them in all.”

“Ten bodies?” Palmer asked, a little surprised.

“Yeah. We’re going to try and get some info from the universities in the area, see if we can get some IDs on these people. See if any have been reported missing.”

“How were they killed? Shot?”

“That’s the strange part,” Cardenelli said. “From the way Captain Begay described things … well, it’s just a little hard to believe.”

“What do you mean?”

“He said some of the bodies were … cut up … or torn apart …”

“Maybe an animal—”

“No, I already asked him that. He was adamant that it wasn’t any kind of animal attack.”

“Then someone
murdered
all of these scientists at the dig site? All ten of them?”

“That’s what you’re going to go down there to find out. I’ll send you all the info I have so far. You can read it on the plane. A forensics team will be there by the afternoon. They’re driving over from the Albuquerque office so they’ll be several hours behind you. I’ll get Debbie to get any other info that you need.”

“Yeah.”

“Palmer, I want you to keep those Tribal Police away from the scene when you get down there. Who knows how badly they’ve already corrupted it. When you get down there, talk with them, see what they know, but then I want you to take over.”

“What about Klein?”

“Agent Klein is … well, let’s just say that the very best agents aren’t sent to Indian Reservations.”

Palmer had heard of that before. It was a well-known punishment in the Bureau to be sent to Indian Reservations.

“Captain Begay asked for our assistance, and it’s going to be our case now. You’re in charge when you get down there. You make sure you let them know that.”

“Got it.”

Cardenelli hung up without a good-bye and Palmer hung up and set his phone down on the nightstand next to his service pistol. He switched on the lamp and saw the nearly empty pint of vodka next to the lamp; it was perched close to the edge of the table. He was craving that drink even more right now. He’d drank too much vodka last night, not anticipating going to work today. Maybe a few nips with his coffee would take the edge off of the hangover.

Palmer hated going out of town nowadays. He used to love it when he’d been a younger agent and full of adventure and energy. Now he was just counting down the days until retirement. And when he retired he was going to get as far away from the horrors he’d seen on this job. Maybe he’d go somewhere way up in Wyoming or Montana. Somewhere far away from people.

Ten dead bodies.
Torn apart? By what?

But there was more to it than that. Cardenelli wouldn’t be calling him and involving him in this case if there wasn’t something odd about these deaths.

An image of his dream flashed through his mind; he saw the piece of flesh he’d been carefully washing in the metal sink. He could hear the man’s panicked voice in the dream coming from the office as he stared at him in horror: “What are you doing?” the man had screamed at him. “Why are you doing that?”

And then Palmer had looked down at his hands in the sink, he’d seen what he was doing, and he couldn’t answer the man’s question. Why had he been doing that? Why was he washing a piece of flesh off in a sink? Whose flesh had it been?
What
had it been?

He pushed the thought away as a chill crept over his skin, giving him the shivers. It was just a bad dream. Dreams didn’t have to make sense.

Before he even realized what he was doing, he twisted off the cap of the vodka bottle and took a small sip. He winced as he swallowed the fiery liquid down. A few sips of alcohol should push the fragments of the nightmare all the way away.

He got up and walked over to the sliding glass door that led out to the balcony. He slid the door open and the bitterly cold Colorado air stung his exposed skin as soon as he stepped out onto the balcony. But he ignored the cold, his mind already on the job, on the mystery he would be asked to solve.

Palmer had been with the FBI for nearly twenty years now. He’d trained at Quantico and started out in the Baltimore office for a few years. But when an opportunity came up to join the Behavioral Science team which specialized in serial killers, he jumped on it. He passed the rigorous tests and exams, and he was finally enrolled in the training program. A year later he was working on the worst murder cases in the Maryland, D.C., and Virginia areas. Sometimes he worked as far south as Miami and as far north as Boston. He was called in on the bizarre cases, the hardest ones to crack.

Five years later an opening came up in the Denver office and he requested the transfer. He had grown up on the east coast his whole life, and the idea of the west had always appealed to him: the clean and dry air, the rugged mountains, the desolate and wide-open spaces. He thought the crime out west would be less heinous compared to the cities of America’s east coast … but crime was the same nearly everywhere now.

So he and his wife Teresa and their daughter packed their bags and moved to Denver.

That was twelve years ago.

Teresa left him a little over a year ago. Their daughter was in college now. At least Teresa had waited until their daughter moved out before she left him. She kept the house in the suburbs they’d bought, and she magically had a boyfriend as soon as Palmer packed his stuff and moved to this condo, which was closer to the downtown office.

He’d been in this condo well over a year now and he still hadn’t even fully unpacked yet—half of his stuff was still in boxes stacked up in the spare room. The place was a mess … it lacked a woman’s touch, a woman’s organization. It also lacked the feel of human interaction … it still looked like what Palmer had thought it would be at the time, just a temporary place to live until he and Teresa got back together. But they hadn’t gotten back together and now it was a cave where Palmer hid away in the darkness when he wasn’t out chasing down the worst criminals America had to offer.

He had become the cop cliché. His wife couldn’t handle his brooding; she couldn’t handle his silent focus on the horrors of his day. She couldn’t handle his drinking, his mood swings, his depression, his cynical views of the world. She wanted someone happier, someone who was “there” with her. He couldn’t be that man for her so she’d found a replacement as soon as their daughter was gone (or even before their daughter had left for college, he suspected).

Teresa was a good woman and she deserved better than him. He hoped she was happy.

Palmer came back inside and shut the sliding glass door. He went to the kitchen to start the coffee maker. He needed to get dressed and get to the airport.

Farmington, New Mexico

S
pecial Agent Palmer landed at the small airport in Farmington, New Mexico an hour before dawn. A man in a white button-down shirt with a black suitcoat slung over one shoulder sauntered up to him as soon as he was off the plane.

“Special Agent Palmer?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” Palmer answered.

“Agent Klein,” he said and offered a hand in greeting.

Palmer shook the man’s hand. Klein’s hair was buzzed short and he wore glasses with dark frames. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows revealing a Marine Corp tattoo on one muscled forearm. The man was a few inches shorter than Palmer and he had a slight build, but Palmer could tell that Klein was the kind of man who went out of his way to compensate for his height and build.

“I was supposed to have a rental car waiting for me,” Palmer said as Agent Klein rolled down his shirt sleeves and buttoned them.

“We got one for you. It’s at the office. I’m going to drive you there.”

Palmer just nodded as the man shrugged into his black suitcoat.

“No bags?” Klein asked as they walked towards the exit doors.

“Just my carry-on.” Palmer lifted up the duffel bag he carried in his hand. He had an extra change of clothes inside along with his laptop computer. He also had a small travel bag with his toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, and other bathroom supplies inside. And of course he’d brought along two pints of vodka.

They left the airport and stepped out into the frigid air. Klein was a fast walker; he was a man of pent-up energy, Palmer could tell.

They got in Klein’s car and he started it.

“You want to stop for some coffee? There’s a McDonald’s along the way. It’s open twenty-four hours.”

“Yeah, sounds good,” Palmer said. A few sips from his bottle of vodka sounded better, but he would take the coffee for now.

Ten minutes later Klein pulled up to the drive-through window and paid for their coffees. Palmer dumped two creams and five sugars into his. He had a feeling this was going to be one very long day.

• • •

As he rode in Klein’s car down the ribbon of blacktop that split the sleepy town of Farmington, Palmer had time to reflect on what he’d read on the plane, the preliminary report downloaded to his phone from Debbie.

These were the details that they had for him so far about the murder case on the Navajo reservation: a group of archaeologists had received permission to excavate some kind of cave in a remote corner of Navajo land where these scientists believed a small Anasazi settlement may have stood seven hundred years ago. And now they were all dead.

Along with the sparse specifics of the case, Debbie had sent him some background information on the Anasazi. They were a large group of Native Americans who had lived in the southwestern United States from about 1100 to 1400. Supposedly they had migrated north from what is now Central American and Mexico. The Anasazi seemed to have been a very advanced culture compared to other tribes in that area at the time. They were masters of pottery, farming, and they built large cities and wide roads while most other Native American tribes at the time were more nomadic, hunting and gathering, following food sources from place to place. Some of the cities the Anasazi built were incredible (and Debbie had supplied a few photos in the report) and the remnants of some of these cities had stood the test of time, many of them still standing today.

But eventually the Anasazi seemed to have abandoned the cities and the roads they had built in New Mexico and Arizona, moving north into southern Colorado and southern Utah where they built more cities, some of them carved right into the sides of sheer rock cliffs or in the mouths of giant caves. These cities were marvels of architecture for their time.

Not long after the Anasazi built these highly defensible cities, they seemed to have just walked away from them, much like they had done before when they’d been farther south. They left behind their pottery, many of their weapons, their buried dead. Archaeologists have found evidence of battles at these northern cities, and even signs of cannibalism. Some scientists and historians believe that the Anasazi were driven away from these cities by other tribes, and others believe that weather conditions such as drought caused them to flee, while other scientists believe that there was internal strife among the Anasazi that led to infighting. But most scholars agree that the Anasazi migrated south again, and either intermingled with or became the Hopi and/or the Pueblo Indians. But no one really knew for sure.

Apparently this group of archaeologists, led by a man named Jake Phillips, had discovered a new Anasazi settlement inside the mouth of a cave that had been hidden for hundreds of years.

And now all of these archaeologists at this dig site were dead. All of them slaughtered.

There were four scientists, four grad students, and a Navajo guide in the list of victims Debbie had sent to him. The report included their names and a brief background of their careers. This group had been working with grant money supplied by the University of New Mexico. Jake Phillips had also reached out to another archaeologist, a woman named Stella Weaver who worked out of Arizona State University at the moment; she was an expert on the Anasazi culture with some wild theories about their possible extinction that didn’t seem to be sitting too well with most of academia. In the report Palmer had read about her, it was claimed that she was fueling conspiracy theories just to get published.

So, Palmer thought as he rode in the passenger seat and stared at the city buildings as they passed them, we have the archaeologists and grad students, and then we have Stella Weaver. There was also the Navajo guide with them—a man named Jim Whitefeather. He was fifty-four years old, an expert tracker and survivalist. That was ten people all together. Ten people. All dead, according to the report. Torn apart.