Effigies (7 page)

Don’t breathe so hard
, she told herself, as if she believed that her mind could control her body’s autonomic nervous system. When her breathing quieted, she wondered what other powers her mind possessed that she didn’t know about.

Her vision and hearing and sense of smell sharpened in response to danger, obeying prehistoric instructions buried in her DNA. Things that she would never ordinarily have noticed assaulted her now, sometimes painfully. This must be how Joe, with his woodsman’s gifts, felt all the time.

She could hear the creak of the fabric in Calhoun’s pants every time he bent a knee and took a step. She couldn’t smell him—only Joe had senses that refined—but she could smell something acrid. What was it?

Smoke. It was smoke. Was she smelling the remnants of the pot that Calhoun had been enjoying a few hours before, still clinging to his clothes? No, it was simple wood smoke.

Calhoun’s boots continued to crunch through the underbrush.

How long he looked for them Faye couldn’t say, though she did know that the flashlight’s beam played more than once over the bark of the tree that hid her. Only the sound of sirens in the distance saved them. Calhoun fled deeper into the woods.

Minutes passed while they listened to their rescuers’ sirens approach. When Calhoun was out of earshot, Faye risked a peek behind her. Much deeper into the woods was a prickle of orange light so faint that she would never have seen it without her adrenaline-enhanced vision.

Faye and Joe knew the law had arrived when the sirens stopped growing closer. So far from the road that they couldn’t even see the law officer’s flashing lights, Faye and Joe let the screaming sirens atop the now-stationary cars lead them to their rescuers. When they emerged from their hiding place, they found only an empty house, an idling tractor, and a silent pickup truck.

One officer stated the obvious. “He’s on foot.”

Oka Hofobi, Davis, and their father rushed up, hauling hunting rifles. “We heard the racket,” Oka Hofobi started, but he was interrupted by a six-and-a-half-foot-tall deputy who said only, “We’ve got no need for armed civilians.” The three Choctaws hung their rifles on their pickup’s gun rack, but they didn’t leave until they were told to go.

“Sheriff Rutland—” Faye wheezed, surprised to feel her breath leave her again.

“She’s on her way.”

Neely Rutland would probably be gratified to know how safe that made Faye feel. She made a mental note to tell her.

“Look, there may be someone else out here tonight,” she told the big deputy who seemed to be in charge. “I saw a campfire way out in the woods.”

“Can you get us there?”

Faye looked up at the stars as if they could give her directional guidance, but in the end, she would have had to say “No,” if Joe hadn’t interrupted.

“I can take you.”

Well, of course he could. Joe could probably tell them what kind of wood had been used to build the campfire, just by the smell. Or by the color of the glowing embers.

Faye realized how hard she and Joe had run during their escape when she saw how long it took to reach the campfire. They found its dying embers at the edge of a sizeable clearing planted in rows of lush, healthy marijuana plants.

The man who had built the fire was no longer seated on the well-worn stump beside it. He was sprawled on the ground nearby. Faye recognized him, even with his face half-obscured by blood, by his clothes and his size and his iron-gray hair. The ragged wound across his neck and the blood soaking into the ground around his head told Faye everything she needed to know about what had happened here. His throat had been slit, and the implement lying on the ground beside him was surely sharp enough to do it. The sleek stone knife looked like it would do a very efficient job of cutting a man’s trachea open. Its single cutting edge was bloody.

The tall deputy nodded to the other lawman, before whipping out his radio to alert Sheriff Rutland. The smaller deputy started resuscitation, but Carroll Calhoun was surely dead.

Faye tried to make sense of the crime scene. Had Mr. Calhoun built the fire, then left it long enough to chase her and Joe with a tractor? Had someone been waiting for him when he returned? Or was this someone else’s campfire? Had he surprised someone who killed him rather than let him report the illegal crop?

One thing was certain. His killer hadn’t had much time to flee. As if reading her mind, the tall deputy and his colleague began a routine search pattern, shining bright lights at their feet to illuminate any tracks the killer had left.

Who wanted Calhoun dead? Well, maybe Faye had, a little bit, if she were to be perfectly honest. And the rest of the archaeological team. And the entire Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. The man hadn’t done much to attract friends lately.

She wondered if she would be considered a suspect in the killing. Sheriff Rutland would be a fool if she didn’t investigate a woman who was nearby when the crime occurred. Especially one who’d had two, maybe three run-ins with the victim. Faye wasn’t overly concerned. She had the utmost respect for the truth, and the truth was that she’d had nothing to do with Calhoun’s death.

She could handle being under suspicion. She was innocent and she believed in the integrity of the law. Still, there was one thing that bothered her. No one other than Faye and Joe and Sheriff Mike McKenzie, back home in Florida, knew that Joe had once killed a man with a stone implement, but if she ever breathed a word of that truth to anyone, Joe would be in serious trouble now.

Sweet Jesus. Joe probably had his pockets full, right this minute, of deadly sharpened rocks that he’d made himself. Flintknapping was simply what he did, and he carried his treasures with him everywhere. If he were searched, then Joe would be headed for questions and accusations and maybe even jail. If he escaped arrest tonight, but Sheriff Rutland learned later about his special skills, he would again be in jeopardy.

She was Joe’s alibi for this killing, just as he was hers. If she were sheriff, she wouldn’t believe either of them, not for a minute. Faye knew she could take care of herself. If it came down to it, she could hire a lawyer who would help her say the right things to law enforcement and in court. Joe, on the other hand, didn’t know how to tell anything but the truth. A crafty prosecutor could trick him into hanging himself.

Faye would be damned before she’d let that happen.

Chapter Seven

Sheriff Rutland marshaled her resources with aplomb. Neshoba County couldn’t have much more than a dozen sworn officers but, in Faye’s inexpert opinion, Neely Rutland knew how to make good use of what she had. She had quickly found a well-traveled dirt track through the woods that was just barely wide enough for the SUV carrying the county’s spanking-new mobile crime lab, then she’d told an investigator to note the track’s presence in the site sketch. Perhaps Calhoun had used it to bring in a tractor to cultivate the field of contraband where he was found dead.

Armed with powerful lights, Neely had searched for footprints herself along the track before allowing the mobile lab’s tires to obliterate any evidence. No prints were found, but Joe wasn’t surprised.

“Mr. Calhoun wouldn’t have wanted people to see him walking out to his own private field of pot. That wide-open trail is almost as big as a road. I bet he only used it when he had to move something big, and I bet he didn’t do that any more than he had to.”

Joe’s theory sounded good to Faye, but it led naturally to a disappointing situation. The rest of the wooded area was heavily carpeted with leaves and pine straw. Maybe, if Neely and her staff were damn good, they could find where the killer had walked, but they’d have to be damn lucky to find a spot of bare ground big enough to retain any prints. Then, they’d have to distinguish those prints from the ones Faye and Joe and the deputies had left on their way to discovering the murder site. Not to mention the ones Calhoun left while he was hunting Faye and Joe. Plus the ones he’d made on his last trip out to the marijuana field where he’d died.

Faye and Joe sat together in matching lawn chairs that had been thoughtfully provided by the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department. There had been a nervous heartbeat’s worth of hesitation on Neely’s face while she decided what to do with the two of them. They were witnesses, and she might need them. They were also potential sources of contamination that she didn’t dare allow near her crime scene. And her crime scene had no obvious boundaries. It could theoretically extend all the way to town and beyond, getting bigger every second that the killer was able to flee.

Even worse, the moonless night was surely obscuring critical clues. Neely was working against time. While she waited for the sun to rise, blood was soaking into the soil and drying. Footprints were being obscured by falling leaves and by the feet of nocturnal animals. The killer was receding into the darkness, footfall by footfall, until reaching a car that could travel hundreds of miles before dawn.

Instead of drawing lines around her crime scene prematurely, Neely had taken a logical approach to dealing with Faye and Joe. She’d had a technician thoroughly search a few square yards of ground for footprints and blood spatters and fibers and other stuff Faye couldn’t even imagine. Then, having found nothing, the technician had strung crime scene tape around the area and plunked two lawn chairs inside for the comfort of their star witnesses.

At least they were calling them witnesses and not suspects. Faye was working hard at looking relaxed and…well, innocent. Because if somebody got the bright idea of searching Joe, the walking arsenal of stone weapons, then they were in serious trouble. Fortunately, Joe was so good-hearted that he didn’t even know how to look guilty.

Neither do sociopaths
, said the pitiless and logical voice inside Faye’s head.

It was intellectually interesting to watch a crime scene investigation up close. The body was lit by floodlights, and a photographer was recording its condition and its surroundings. A technician searched the soil around the body, while Neely and the rest of her staff took their systematic search of the surrounding woods farther away every minute. Fatigue and disappointment were apparent in the technician’s voice when he said, “The bastard swept his prints away. The brushmarks are obvious.”

Then he looked at Faye and Joe, and her mouth went dry. Approaching the yellow tape that enclosed them, he said, “We’ll want casts of both your prints.”

Faye wanted to ask why, but figured that the question would make her sound guilty. She hoped Joe didn’t ask it. Fortunately, the technician delivered the answer without hearing the question.

“If we find he missed brushing away any prints here in the clearing—or if we find any in the woods, which I guess is a long shot—then we’ll need to make sure they don’t belong to people that we know were here.”

So they both dutifully stepped in some soft soil and waited for the tech to place a form around each of their prints. Watching him mix something gloppy in a plastic bag, Faye had asked, “Plaster of Paris?” only to see him shake his head.

“Dental stone works better.”

They went back to watching the photographer work, which was only slightly more interesting than watching dental stone dry.

A flashlight beam emerged from the dark woods. Its light played briefly across Faye’s eyes, waking her from a vivid dream. She had slept, her torso leaning awkwardly against the plastic arm of the lawn chair. Joe, whose uncanny control of his physical body seemed to include the ability to be awake or asleep at will, sat alert and relaxed beside her.

Reality was echoing Faye’s dream. She had seen herself sitting in the spot where Calhoun now lay dead, but she hadn’t been in utter darkness. The clearing had been lit by a roaring fire, as it was now being lit by the first light of dawn. In the dream, a flashlight beam just like this one had emerged from the trees surrounding the small patch of light. Such a beam must have been one of the last things Calhoun had seen, only there had been a killer holding that flashlight. Empathy for the dead man shivered through her.

Neely flipped off the light in her hand and let it drop to her side. She didn’t look like a woman who had successfully tracked down a killer, so Faye knew that the night-long search had been unsuccessful.

“Maybe the forensics folks will turn up something useful.” She smoothed back the frizzy brown hair that had escaped from her ponytail and looked at Faye and Joe. “Tell me again what you saw last night. And I swear I’ve forgotten why you said you were out here in the first place.”

“We were planning to sit out here and watch the mound, like you did the night before. We didn’t know whether you were planning to do that again—”

“Actually, I was. I just hadn’t gotten out here yet. It looks like I would have found Calhoun tearing the thing down when I did eventually arrive.”

“Yep,” Joe said, with his usual economy of words.

“Why, exactly, did you decide it was your job to help me do
my
job?”

Joe’s answer was as quick as it was politically incorrect. “I don’t like to see a lady be a target.”

Faye cringed at Joe’s suggestion that the sheriff might be a damsel in need of protection.

“I wasn’t out here alone, you know. I had backup. And I would have had backup when I got here last night, too.”

“Sure. I just figured there wasn’t any harm in having one more person keeping an eye out for you. I was out here the first night you were standing guard, too.”

“I know. I saw you.”

Faye had seen Joe stalk a flock of wild turkeys without catching their attention. Her admiration for Neely Rutland jumped up another notch. Admiration for the woman aside, she needed to derail this conversation. Her next obvious question for Joe would be, “Were you armed?” and Joe couldn’t afford to answer it. Not with his pockets full of stone weapons.

Faye had always had the scientist’s love-hate relationship with intuition. She didn’t trust a conclusion that couldn’t be proved through step-by-step logic, yet she knew that she had been led to that critical first step through flashes of insight. Now, standing half-asleep in the rosy light of dawn, she knew instinctively what she needed to do.

She needed to help Neely find the real killer, whether the sheriff wanted her help or not. She had done it before when she helped Fire Marshal Adam Strahan find the arsonist who killed her friend Carmen, but this time the stakes were higher. The sooner Neely found out who killed Calhoun, the less time she would have to realize that Joe made an exceptionally fine suspect.

What expertise could she offer that would speed this investigation along? It occurred to her that she knew a lot more about stone tools than any run-of-the-mill crime lab employee would.

“Your lab probably hasn’t dealt with stone weapons all that much,” she blurted out, thinking as she talked. “It seems like it’d be important to know whether the murder weapon was ancient, or whether it was recently made.”

“I didn’t think you could get that information out of a chunk of rock. I thought you could only use carbon-dating on something that has been alive—like wood or bone.”

Nobody ever said the sheriff was dumb.

“That’s true, but there are other ways to date artifacts,” Faye said. “If I had a stone tool that I suspected was prehistoric, the first thing I’d do is look for some evidence of use-wear, so I could see if it matched known prehistoric uses. Use-wear specialists can tell whether a tool has been attached to a haft so it could be used as a knife. They can tell by impact fractures whether it was attached to an arrow and shot with a bow. They can tell if the edge has been reshaped because it got dull. Most of that stuff you have to measure in a lab, because it’s microscopic. But some of it you can see with the naked eye. Sickle sheen is one of those things.”

“I can’t let you do any of those things with my evidence right now, but I’m listening. What’s ‘sickle sheen’?”

“The edge of a tool that was used to cut grassy plants—which would include early domesticated crops—looks almost like it’s been polished. The silica in the plants is abrasive and, over time, it polishes the tool’s edge into a sheen that’s easy to see, when you know what to look for. Why don’t you stop by our work site tomorrow? We can talk about use-wear, and I can show you what sickle sheen looks like. I can show you some tools without any sheen at all, too, just for comparison. If the murder weapon has sickle sheen, then it’s pretty safe to say that the killer found an old tool and used it.”

“Which will tell us just about nothing. There’s hardly a house around here without an arrowhead collection.”

“Some information is better than none,” Faye pointed out.

Neely nodded to concede her point. “I’ll stop by the site, but it might not be tomorrow. I need to walk these woods in the daylight and see if any important clues were hiding in the dark. I don’t see that a little bit of sickle sheen will help me find a killer, but information is always a good thing.”

“You can have any information that Joe and I have got. But do you need us any more? We might be able to get a little sleep before work if we head back to the hotel right now.”

Neely dismissed them with a nod, and told them that the technician who’d taken the footprint impressions would show them back to their car. Faye walked directly in his footsteps, to avoid introducing still more prints to Neely’s list of problems. She walked casually, trying to look like an innocent woman who was in no hurry to get out of the sheriff’s sight. She willed Joe to do the same, though her biggest concern was that no one should hear the stone weapons in his pockets clicking together as he walked.

Faye went directly from the murder scene to the work trailer parked beside the Nails’ house. She wanted to separate Joe from any incriminating evidence and she wanted to do it immediately.

Unlocking the trailer door, she flipped on the air conditioner. The resulting blast stirred the dust coating every horizontal surface in the archaeologists’ workspace. Well, except for Chuck’s work table. Faye knew from personal observation that he wiped it down six times a day.

“Empty your pockets.”

Joe did as he was told. When he was finished, a fearsome collection of multicolored stone was arrayed on the table. A palm-sized spear point that looked like it was from the Middle Woodland period, except Joe had made it himself. Two tiny projectile points. A single-edged tool uncomfortably like the one that had sliced Calhoun’s neck. A sharpened piece of deer antler. An unchipped piece of rock that was probably destined to become something deadly.