Dale opened the camper door, and the hinges complained as he stepped inside, followed by Dusty. Dale cradled a black-on-white ceramic pot in his hands, the heavy sandstone cap still in place. The trailer rocked as they came to stand over the table.
“We just lifted it out of the grave. Ready?” Dale asked.
“Ready.” Maureen turned on the battery-driven light of her portable microscope.
Dale settled the round-bottomed pot on a fabric donut, a device used to support either human skulls or fragile pottery.
“I have plenty of bags.” Stewart reached into his back pocket and produced a roll of translucent Ziplocs.
“Good.” Maureen opened her dissecting kit and removed a scalpel, then she studied the dark brown wax. “The wax apparently once covered the entire top, as though the person who sealed it melted the wax and poured it over the metate cap.” Brown splotches mottled the cap, filling the depressions in the stone. “My God,
there are dermatoglyphics in this wax. I’m going to try and pry the wax around the edges loose so we don’t destroy them.”
“What?” Stewart raised a blond eyebrow.
“Fingerprints,” Dale said. “If Maureen is correct that these women were murdered, the prints probably belong to the killer.”
“Well,” Maureen said, “in that case, the murderer was a woman.”
The camper went silent. The hot wind outside seemed suddenly loud, shrieking and whimpering as it rocked the camper.
Maureen frowned at their stunned faces. “What’s the matter?”
“A woman?” Dusty whispered in awe.
“I can’t say that for certain yet, of course, but look at the palm width demonstrated by these fingerprints.” She pointed. “It’s small. The size a woman, or a child, would make. Maybe a small man, but I doubt it.”
Maureen took her scalpel, and carefully pried on the sandstone cap. It didn’t budge. “This stuff is like concrete.”
“It’s had eight hundred years to harden.” Dusty said. “Here, let me help.” He reached out, grasped the sandstone cap, and wrenched it free with a twist.
Maureen barely caught the pot before it spilled. “Good Lord, Stewart! Who do you think you are, Indiana Jones in the tombs of Venice? Too bad you didn’t have a stick of dynamite and jackhammer, eh? Maybe some rare thousand-year-old fabric to make a torch so you could melt it off?”
Dale gave Dusty a reproving look, then picked up the sandstone cap, and held it to the lantern light. “Open a Ziploc for me, William. We can probably obtain good pollen, phytolith, and maybe even some macrobotanical samples from the protected surface within the wax ring.”
Stewart opened a gallon Ziploc, allowed Dale to slip the cap inside, then promptly “zipped” the bag closed.
Maureen tipped the pot to the light, and frowned at the contents. At first glance, the stuff looked like shredded jerky. A thin gray layer of mold gave it a silvery look.
Dale peered at it, and shook his head. “I thought it might be food or precious gifts for the afterlife. Apparently not.”
Dusty took a Sharpie pen from his green T-shirt pocket and labeled the bag containing the stone cap. “It still might be food.
Shoshoneah tribes in the Great Basin and Plains dried squirrels and rabbits and then ground them up on metates. Sort of a flaked meat. The prehistoric precursor to hamburger.”
“Give me a minute and I’ll settle this discussion.” Maureen used forceps to lift a thin brown strand from the pot, then pulled scissors from her dissecting kit, and clipped off a tiny sample. She dropped the rest of the strand back into the pot and fixed the sample to a slide. “Let’s see what we have here.”
She started at ten power and grunted.
Dale said, “What?”
“Muscle tissue,” she replied.
The memory of striations on some of the earlier burials caused her forehead to line.
“What are you thinking?” Stewart asked.
“Hold on.” She rummaged through her kit, located a test tube, a small vial of clear liquid labeled “Human Juice,” and a length of string wrapped around what looked like a heavy cigar tube.
“What’s that?” Stewart asked.
“This is my traveling physical anthropologist’s down-and-dirty field lab. Dale, I need a
clean
porcelain surface. Have you got a saucer? A plate?”
“I do.” He unsnapped the latches on one of the cabinets. Reaching in, he pulled out a plastic bag of china saucers. “I bag them straight out of the dishwasher because I don’t like the taste of mouse droppings. Will this do?”
“Fine,” she said. She turned the saucer over and set it on the table in front of her. From her kit, she took a rag and two more small plastic bottles. “Bleach,” she explained, and dripped two drops inside the ring on the bottom of the saucer. “Stewart, I see a roll of paper towels hanging from the bottom of the cabinet behind you. Unroll three squares, and give me the forth. Tear it off by holding it at the corners, and don’t let it touch anything as you hand it to me.”
Stewart obeyed, frowning as he handed her the fourth towel. “I want you to explain this to me.”
Maureen took the towel by the edges and curled it into a cone so that the unhandled portion of the towel made the point. “All right, the center of the saucer is glazed, and, for the most part, protected
from scratches. There might be a fingerprint, so I’ll use the bleach, and spread it around with the clean paper towel. Bleach denatures protein.” As she spoke, she used the towel to swab the interior surface. “We’ll leave that to set for a moment. Stewart, hand me another towel. Same procedure.”
He carefully ripped another clean towel from the roll and handed it over.
Maureen used the towel to wipe the saucer bottom clean. “Now,”—she dribbled a little liquid from the second plastic bottle—
“we’ll apply distilled water and ask for yet another paper towel.”
“You must have stock in a paper mill,” Stewart said and gave her another towel.
“No,” Maureen said, “I’m doing my best to minimize contamination.”
She scrubbed the surface with the latest paper towel. “I’m trying to remove any of the remaining bleach.” She squinted at the gleaming surface. “That’s as good as we’ll get out here.” With the forceps she lifted the bit of tissue from the microscope slide and dropped it into the center of the plate. “Now comes the fun part.” She carefully cleaned the scalpel handle and used the metal butt to mash the bit of tissue flat. For long minutes, she rocked the rounded end back and forth, flattening the bit of tissue. Finally, she picked up the test tube, unstoppered it, and used a needle from her dissecting kit to flick bits of pulverized tissue onto the scalpel blade, then she dropped them into the test tube.
“All right, we have a sample in the test tube.” She lifted the little vial marked, “Human Juice.” “This stuff is an antihuman antigen. It reacts with human tissue. I carry it around because it often comes in handy in the field.”
She carefully measured out two drops, and set it aside. She added distilled water, stoppered the test tube, and dropped it in the weighted cigar-shaped holder. “Science time, archaeologist,” she said to Stewart as she handed him the tube. “You’re a big muscular man. I want you to go outside, let out the string to its full length and spin the tube around your head for the next five minutes while Dale and I make ourselves a cup of coffee.”
Stewart lifted his brows, hefted the weighted holder, and asked, “Why don’t you do this?”
“Because I’ve done it before. You haven’t.”
“Right,” he nodded. The camper door squeaked as he stepped outside. Wind slammed the door closed.
Dale gave her a smile and lit a match. When he turned on the gas burner, blue flames burst to life.
Maureen leaned back, and smiled. “God, this is fun, Dale. I haven’t enjoyed myself this much in years.”
Dale’s gray mustache quirked. “You and Dusty seem to have come to an agreement of sorts.”
“Of sorts.” She tilted her head, and watched Dale pour water into the coffeepot. “He’s a curious character. One minute he seems like a perfectly rational adult, and the next minute he displays the emotional development of a twelve-year-old. What’s the thing between him and Ruth Ann?”
Dale dumped coffee into the old fire-blackened pot, pushed the lid down, and glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Did he tell you about that?”
“Not much. Just that his father committed suicide in an asylum.”
Dale set the pot on the flames and turned around. He folded his arms and leaned against the counter. “That’s more than he’s told anyone in years, I think.”
“Why did she leave?” Maureen lowered her voice, glancing cautiously at the door.
“Another man. His name was Carter Hawsworth. He was out here studying social structure at Zuni Pueblo. Ruth offered to show him around. Professional courtesy, you know. Sam was working in Blanding, Utah, at the time. When he got back a week later, Ruth had a one-way ticket to Cambridge. She waved it at him when he walked through the door.”
“That quick?”
Dale nodded, reached into his pocket for his pipe, then went through the careful ritual of filling the bowl, tamping it down and lighting it with a match. After puffing it alight, he looked at her from the midst of a hazy blue cloud. “Sam worshiped that woman. Her betrayal destroyed him.”
“If their marriage could be broken that easily, what ever got them together in the first place?”
“Oh, who can say? I think Sam was new and exciting to her. They came from the same roots, old money, East Coast high society. She was young, out on her own for the first time, and here was this handsome young archaeologist living a romantic life in field camps. She was pregnant before they were married and, from her perspective, trapped, because Sam wasn’t going back East to a university. He’d virtually come to blows with his parents when he turned down a teaching job at Harvard and left for what they called ‘The Wild West.’ Sam was a field man, one of the best. His soul would have died in a university.”
Maureen laced her fingers on the table. “How old was Dusty when this happened?”
“He’d just turned six. For most of those years, Ruth had endured. She never showed him the kind of love that a child needs to survive. I remember one night in December”—he gestured emphatically with his pipe stem—“I came over to show Sam a curious artifact I’d found and couldn’t identify. Dusty was four. He’d done something, I never knew what, but Ruth had locked the boy in the basement. It was pitch black down there and icy cold. He’d been there since early morning. I could hear him screaming her name, telling her he was sorry, begging her to let him out.” Dale blew out a stream of smoke. “I couldn’t stand it, Maureen. I had to leave.”
Her heart clutched up. “Why didn’t Sam do something?”
“He was a good man, Maureen, but he wasn’t a strong man. I think he knew, even then, that he was going to lose Ruth, and was trying so hard to keep her that he let her do things to his son that no sane man would have.” He paused and frowned at his pipe. “After she left, Sam disintegrated before my eyes. He attempted suicide three times the first month. He couldn’t take care of himself, let alone a six-year-old boy.”
“Was Dusty there?” She shot a glance at the door and lowered her voice. “When he tried to kill himself?”
“Every time.”
“My God.” Maureen bowed her head. “That’s why you committed him and took Dusty?”
He nodded. “Somebody had to. I called Sam’s parents, and they didn’t want him. I tried to find Ruth’s parents, but couldn’t. I
didn’t know it at the time, but they’d both been killed in a car accident the same week that Hawsworth showed up at Zuni. I’m sure Ruth was dazed, hurting—”
“That’s no excuse …”
Dusty opened the door and stepped in, followed by a filthy Sylvia. Her green T-shirt and khaki shorts were covered with dust. Half-moons of mud arched beneath her armpits. She’d pinned her brown hair up, but wet brown locks straggled around her freckled face.
Dusty panted slightly as he walked forward. “That’s more of a shoulder workout than I’d have thought.”
“Careful Dusty,” Maureen warned. “Don’t shake it up.”
“Of course not, Doctor. I may have never acted as a centrifuge before, but I’m smart enough to understand the process.”
Maureen lifted her brows in surprise. “What are you doing? Impersonating a scientist?”
He gave her a bland look. “Yeah. Right. I thought I’d give it a try. Were you convinced?”
“No way,” Sylvia said as she slid into the booth across from Maureen. “You’d be better at impersonating a woman. It wouldn’t take as much effort.”
Dusty scowled at her as he handed the tube to Maureen, perfectly upright. “I’m going to buy you a nice batch of anthrax to go with your cheezy fishies, Sylvia.”
Her green eyes widened. “Thanks, boss. After the Hez Bullah pays me for it, you can come visit me on my island.”
“After you sell it to the Hez Bullah there won’t be any islands, you dope.”
Sylvia sighed, and sank back against the booth seat. “Wow. I figured there’d be something upwind of D.C.”