"Mrs. Begay?" Laika said, and the woman nodded. Laika went on to introduce their party and apologize for their coming at such a sad time, but that in the interests of science and to prevent other deaths similar to Mr. Begay's, it was imperative that they be allowed to examine the body before it was buried.
Mrs. Begay shook her head and looked pointedly at the wooden box in the station wagon. "The coffin is nailed down. It cannot be opened again."
"Mrs. Begay," Laika said, "I can't stress too strongly the importance of this. Now, we represent the government, and—"
"No," Mrs. Begay said flatly, shaking her head. "You mean nothing here. This is Navajo land. The People's affairs are not your affairs. What happened to my husband is between him and the gods, that is all."
"She's right," one of the men said. He was the biggest and probably the youngest, and wore a tan sisal cowboy hat and a red-and-white striped shirt. "You have no authority here. Why don't you stop bothering my aunt on the funeral day of her husband? The coffin is nailed down, and it stays that way, that's all. Leave us in peace, now."
Mrs. Begay turned and walked back into the house, and the men turned away from the three operatives and sipped their drinks. Laika, followed by Joseph and Tony, started walking back toward the car, but she turned and moved a few steps closer to the station wagon and the wooden coffin inside it. They stopped near enough for Tony to see the big nails in the coffin. The men on the porch were watching them warily.
"Want me to steal the wagon?" Tony said softly to Laika.
"Sure," Joseph said, "and start another Indian war."
"Let's go," Laika said, walking to the car and getting behind the wheel.
"Why don't they have the coffin inside?" Tony asked.
"Looks like a wake, but without the main attraction."
"As I recall, the Navajo have a traditional fear of the dead," said Laika. "They don't like a dead person inside the house. In fact, they try to get them outside if they're definitely going to die."
"Tenderhearted," said Joseph.
Laika shook her head. "It's just their belief. They like to have someone else bury the dead, too. Odds are whoever's driving that station wagon isn't part of the family." She sighed. "We'll head out of town and stop up on that butte overlooking it. From there we can see where the coffin goes."
"What, you mean to find the cemetery?" Tony asked.
"Right."
"And what good'll that do?" Then it hit him. "No way. You're kidding, right?"
"We have to see one of these bodies, and if the family won't cooperate. . . ." She shrugged. "It's necessary."
"One little problem," Joseph said. "Getting caught doing something like that on Indian land? Our covers would be busted for sure. No government agency is supposed to operate around here without permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs."
"Hell, Joseph," Laika replied, "we're not even supposed to be operating in this
country
, so it's a little late to worry about such niceties now. Besides, we'll cover him up again. No one will even know we were there."
Tony didn't like the thought of rifling a fresh grave. It almost seemed like sacrilege to him. Still, he wouldn't buck Laika on this. She was right. They had to see what the hell they were up against.
They drove onto the butte, from which they could see the house. In less than an hour, the people came out and piled into the cars. One of the older men on the porch walked to the station wagon, closed the tailgate, and started the procession, which seemed to head straight out into the desert. The ops followed.
Three miles north, the cars turned onto another dirt road even less traveled. Tony could see the cemetery about a half mile away. "Good enough," Laika said. "Tony, where does this road come out?"
Tony consulted the maps. "Joins a paved road in three more miles."
"All right," Laika said, driving on. "That's how we'll come back after dark."
I
n Gallup, Laika, Tony, and Joseph bought two shovels, a small digging iron, and a crowbar, then had dinner. They returned to their motel, where Tony got an infrared camera and three pairs of goggles.
When it grew dark, they drove back out to the reservation and came down to the cemetery road from the north, the long way around, so that they would not have to go through Red Water. The road to the cemetery blended so well into the desert that Tony, who was driving, would have missed it had Laika not told him to turn.
It was the saddest graveyard Tony had ever seen. The natural vegetation was sparse, mostly sagebrush and yucca, with an occasional clump of rabbitbrush, its yellow flowers closed tightly against the chilly night. A withered juniper stood at the entrance, next to a wrought-iron gate that seemed never to have been attached to a fence. Tony thought there once might have been a sign above it, but now there were only rusty bolts.
There were hundreds of graves, the more recent ones covered with foot-high mounds of earth. Small decorative picket fences, only a few inches high, surrounded many of the graves, and plastic flowers adorned most of these. The sun and dry air would have leached real flowers dry in a day. Although there were a few actual gravestones, most of the markers were metal plaques stuck in the dirt with names and dates spelled out with snap-in letters.
There were even a few faded plastic toys on what Tony assumed were children's graves.
There was no sign of a caretaker's house nearby, and although they could see an infrequent car pass on the dirt road a half mile away, they felt confident that there would be no more visitors until morning. In fact, the few passing cars seemed to speed up as they drew nearer to the cemetery. Maybe Laika had been right about that fear of the dead, Tony thought.
They found Ralph Begay's grave easily enough. It was near the back of the cemetery, and the earthen mound was darker than those of older graves. There was only a wooden stake with Begay's name written on an attached piece of brown cardboard. With little ceremony, they began to dig.
Uncovering a grave, even a fresh one, was a tough job. Tony and Joseph were sweating by the time they had finished bringing the mound to ground level. "What I wouldn't give for a backhoe," Joseph muttered, as his spade dug into the clods of dirt.
Laika took her turn, too, and after an hour the blade of her spade scraped against the wood of the coffin. "This is a helluva time to say it," Joseph said from where he sat on the edge of the grave, "but I think the batteries in my goggles are failing. It's a lot darker than it used to be."
"Same with me," said Laika. "I think we can use flashlights in the grave, though. There shouldn't be a glow, and if there is, maybe people driving by will think it's just another ghost."
Tony, next to her in the grave, grunted his agreement. He didn't like this any better than he had liked their nocturnal visit to the graveyard in New York City, when they had uncovered a crypt that held not corpses, but a living, though extremely elderly, priest, entombed there as punishment for his attempt to free the prisoner they had sought. Under the trees or out in the desert, a graveyard was the one place that gave Tony the creeps. He wasn't afraid of anything or anybody living, but the dead were another matter.
They all took off their goggles, and Laika, standing on top of the coffin, turned on a flashlight and got a foothold in the earth at the end of the open grave. "Open it, Tony," she said.
He fit the curved end of the crowbar under the lip of the coffin lid and strained upward. The nails shrieked as they were jerked out of the wood, and all three of them jumped at the sound. They looked at each other and smiled uncomfortably. Then Tony reached down and opened the lid, pulling it up and propping it against the dirt sides of the grave, while Laika shone the flashlight inside.
"My God," Joseph said softly, as close to a prayer as he ever came. The man inside the coffin had been dressed in a white shirt and clean denim pants. Someone had wrapped a bandanna around his neck. He wore no shoes or socks.
But it wasn't his clothing that elicited Joseph's comment. Rather, it was the condition of his corpse. The flesh was uniformly brown, not the natural tan of a desert dweller, but the dark, muddy brown of an exposed tree root. The texture was similar to a root's as well, fissured and dried. But unlike a root, the skin showed no signs of ever having held an ounce of moisture.
Tony had seen many bodies, and the unpleasantness of such contact had always come from the smell of the fluids and gases issuing from the tissues. In the case of Ralph Begay, however, there were neither fluids nor gases. The corpse did indeed look like that of a mummy.
The eyelids had tightened and pulled open, revealing the sunken eyes. They looked, Tony thought, like white raisins, with little bugs where the pupils had been. The lips had drawn back from the teeth, and even though they had been poorly taken care of, they appeared obscenely white as they protruded from the brown gums.
"Like jerky," Joseph said. "What the hell happened to this guy?"
Laika snorted, unamused. "Total dehydration." She knelt by the body and undid the shirt buttons, then drew back the cloth. "Look, not a sign of burning. There's no charring, no ash, no sign of spontaneous or nonspontaneous combustion." She closely examined the man's neck and chest. "I don't see a sign of an entry wound anywhere here. Come on, Tony, help me get off his pants—I want to check the whole body, just in case. Joseph, hold the light."
Ralph Begay's naked body weighed so little that Laika turned it easily in her hands. Every now and then Tony heard crackling sounds, though whether it was the dry flesh cracking or the bones breaking, he wasn't sure.
"I think we can rule out vampires and
chupacabras
," said Laika. "No signs of puncture wounds, not even small ones. Even if there were, that wouldn't explain why even his bones are dry. What could suck out the marrow, along with every other drop of moisture?"
"A
super chupacabra
?" Joseph suggested.
"Let's get a few tissue samples. And then some photographs."
"It's bad luck to take pictures of the dead," a voice said.
They had all looked up at the first word, and now saw a tall Indian, shading his eyes against Joseph's flashlight with one hand and holding his own light with the other, which he now turned on and shone at the three of them. He was wearing a dark-colored cowboy hat, a denim jacket over a blue work shirt, and jeans. A badge shone over his breast pocket.
"Not specifically photos," he went on, a smile playing over his heavy lips. "But anything connected with the dead is out of bounds. Especially the kind of thing you're doing here."
The three operatives looked at each other and then back at the man. Tony had a gun, but he didn't feel threatened enough to go for it, especially since the man was wearing a badge. The decision might be made to protect their covers by killing this stranger, but it was Laika's to make, not his, and he knew she would try every other option first.
"Let me introduce myself," the man said in his deep voice. "I'm
Officer
Joshua Yazzie, tribal policeman." He tapped his badge and smiled. "And who might you be, and why are you digging up graves?"
Laika straightened up and reached for her wallet, Tony was relieved to see, rather than her concealed pistol. She took out her NSF ID and handed it up to the big man. "I'm Dr. Kelly, and this is Dr. Tompkins and Dr. Antonelli."
Yazzie looked over the ID and handed it back. "If you're here on archaeological business, you're a little premature." Then he frowned and eyed the corpse of Ralph Begay. "Though from what I see of that poor guy, maybe not. At any rate, maybe you'd like to climb out of there so we can discuss this on even ground."
As they got out of the hole, Yazzie went on. "And let me warn you, it had better be a good story. Grave robbing on Indian land, whether it's fresh graves or old ones, falls under federal jurisdiction, and if you had permission to do this, I think we'd have been informed of it, and I don't think you'd be doing it in the dead of night."
"Did you see our light?" Laika asked.
Yazzie nodded. "I don't believe in ghosts, unlike many of the People."
"I thought
you
were one, at first," said Tony, trying to make conversation. "You crept up on us pretty quietly."
Yazzie shrugged. "Hey, I'm an Indian, right?" Then he chuckled, a throaty sound like a lion's warning rumble. "Now, who's got the best reason why I shouldn't turn you over?"
Standing by the side of the grave, Laika explained how Begay's strange death was the second in a week, how they had been unable to examine either of the bodies, and how this was a desperate attempt to observe one of the victims. "Victims of what?" Yazzie asked.