Tres Leches Cupcakes (5 page)

“Stop digging for the day,” he barked while scanning the growing crowd. “We’re done here. The vans leave in ten minutes. Stow the tools and load up.” He turned to Margo and pointed. “You,” he said, then turned to point at Sadie, “and you, stay for the police.” He turned back toward the trailer and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He took a breath and dialed a number.

“I prefer bones,” Margo said softly, drawing Sadie’s attention. “Old, dry bones.”

“Have you found bodies before?” Sadie asked. “I mean . . . like this.”

Margo nodded. “Sort of,” she said. “In Arizona, a junkie tried to break into a trailer left on the dig over the weekend. We found him Monday morning—overdose. It’s a sight and a smell you never forget. This one’s been in the ground long enough that the smell’s worn off, I guess. I’ve never found anyone recently . . .
buried.
”

“I wonder how long he’s been in the ground,” Sadie said.

“Months at least,” Margo said, nodding at the only portion of uncovered skin that was visible: a hand that was sunken, dry and discolored.

Sadie had to look away. She’d seen a documentary on the rate at which bodies decompose based on climate and covering, but she couldn’t remember what they’d said about deserts.

“Whoever brought him here had to know this was a burial site, right?” Sadie said, waving toward the other graves in section three. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

“I guess so, huh?” Margo commented, walking around the grave and cocking her head to the side. “We should finish digging him up. Get a better look at him.”

Sadie immediately shook her head. “It’s a crime scene now. We’d contaminate it. Plus Bill said to stop digging.”

“They’re going to bring in a bunch of cops to dig him up. You and I can do a better job.” She didn’t wait for an answer, just dropped to her knees and grabbed her trowel, digging around the side of the body. It was easier digging than the other graves—the dirt hadn’t solidified around the body. Sadie looked toward the trailer. Where was Bill?

“I really think we should leave it alone.”

Margo didn’t answer as she kept digging.

Sadie shifted her weight and realized that despite her objections, she was itching to drop down into the dirt beside Margo and dig too. Her own reaction surprised her. It had been just six months ago that a run-in with a dead body had lit the tinderbox of anxiety and depression Sadie had been trying to ignore. She’d returned home to Garrison soon after, and in the months since that time, had made great progress in coming to terms with what her therapist had deemed post-traumatic stress disorder. She still had her moments—still had nightmares now and again—but she’d learned that staying busy and not becoming too self-focused had helped her stay ahead of most of her problems with it. An occasional Xanax helped too.

That she wanted to help dig up a body, when accidentally running into one had been so overwhelming last April, was odd but she hoped that it meant she’d made more progress than she’d realized. And yet, the “success” of her curiosity aside, this
was
a crime scene.

She was only mildly aware of the rest of the crew loading up in the vans that would take them back to Santa Fe until the first van pulled away, leaving a cloud of dust behind. She expected the next one to leave soon after, but the engine didn’t start up. She looked from Margo—still digging—to the trailer—Bill was still inside—and then to the second van just as someone called out, “Looks like we’ve got another one!”

Margo looked up from her work, caught Sadie’s eye, and together they hurried toward the area almost directly across from them in section three.

Shel, a crew member Sadie had profiled on her first day, stood on the perimeter of the dig site, almost at the head of a . . . well, a head. He was leaning on his shovel and looking appropriately shocked by what he’d uncovered. Another crew member was pacing back and forth in front of the grave, and Sadie suspected he was the one who’d shouted out the discovery.

Shel continued to stare at the body for a moment, and then quickly dropped his shovel and walked away from the dirt-covered hair and decomposed face showing above the ground. Sadie couldn’t be sure, but she thought he pulled a phone out of his pocket before he disappeared around the parked van.

Bill showed up a moment later and swore again. Pushing his hand through his hair, he ordered everyone out of the van and told them to grab shovels and verify that every as-yet-untouched grave contained Anasazi bones. “If there are more fresh bodies out there, I want the police to deal with them all at once.”

Sadie waited for someone to object, but no one did, which meant she had to. “This is a crime scene, Mr. Line,” she said as crew members climbed out of the van and grabbed shovels. He turned to look at her and put his hands on his hips. Not a good sign. A few of the crew hung back, but others took off toward the remaining mounds of dirt. Sadie took a breath and pulled together her confidence. “We can’t dig anymore.”

“Until the cops get here, it’s my dig.”

Sadie shook her head with more force, losing some of her anxiety in the face of his . . . wrongness. “You can’t do that,” she said. “It’s illegal and it can mess up the pending investigation. We need to leave everything as we found it. We may have already accidentally destroyed evidence. But there won’t be anything accidental about us continuing to dig now that we know.”

“My dig,” he repeated with clipped words. “And my freaking bonus that just went down the toilet. Salvage archeology is already the redheaded stepchild of any development like this.” He waved his hand at the raw desert surrounding them. “All the construction company sees is that they have to waste time and money on what, to them, is as important as dirt. This”—he pointed at the body Margo had gone back to digging up—“is their worst nightmare because what was already a pain in the neck just got ten times worse.”

“I hardly think
this
is all that fond of being a part of it either,” Sadie said, waving at the bodies they had unearthed. “These bodies are not supposed to be here and—”

Bill turned away and headed for his trailer, dialing another number on his phone.

Sadie hurried after him. “This is a big mistake, Mr. Line,” she said as she marched in an attempt to keep up with his long strides. “A terrible, horrible mistake.”

She stopped in her tracks as an awful crunch sounded to her left. She spun around and saw Kyle Langley, whom she’d researched just the night before, pull his shovel out of what was obviously a grave of antiquity, the dirt barely rounded above the flat desert.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Margo yelled, jumping up from where she’d been excavating and storming toward Langley.

He put the point of the shovel in the dirt again and hurried to step on it before she reached him. The lizard tattoo on his forearm moved with his muscles as he pushed down on the shovel.

Margo wasn’t fast enough to prevent the secondary crunch.

“Bill told us to dig,” Langley said.

Margo grabbed his shovel, pulling it away from him with surprising force. She swung the shovel up and grabbed the other end of the handle, holding it in front of her with both hands like a bow stick. Sadie had trained with bow sticks during her self-defense class, but she’d never mastered the weapon; she’d hurt herself enough times with it that the teacher suggested she concentrate on her hand work.

When Langley grabbed for the shovel, Margo pushed it toward him, catching him in the chest, and causing him to stumble backwards. “What the—”

“You’re not digging for rocks!” she yelled, taking a step toward him, which caused him to fall back another few steps. “You just crushed a skull, you idiot.”

“Bill told us to dig,” Langley said again, but some of his fervor was gone. His eyes darted back and forth as though looking for someone to back him up. Sadie was the only person close enough to do such a thing.

Margo was still advancing toward Langley, who was looking at her as though she were a crazy woman. Afraid she was going to hurt him, Sadie hurried forward and put a hand on the shovel’s handle. “Margo,” she said in a reassuring tone. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay!” Margo said, rounding on her and causing Sadie to be the one to backpedal. “These are people. They deserve respect!”

“I know,” Sadie said, putting her palms out in a placating gesture she hoped would calm Margo down. “He’s caught up in the energy, that’s all.” She looked around for Langley, wanting him to confirm her defense, but he had scurried over to join a friend who was digging up another mound. Sadie clenched her teeth as she scanned section three and saw at least a dozen people digging. She hoped Bill got in big trouble for this.

“It’s not okay,” Margo said again, but with a catch in her throat that drew Sadie’s attention back to her. Tears filled her eyes as she stared down at the sloppy dig marks Langley had left behind. She fell to her knees at the graveside and, with her hands, began pulling at the dirt, gently uncovering a delicate, small human skull, the top crushed.

The reverence and sorrow of Margo’s movements seemed out of place following her anger with Langley. Sadie knelt down beside her, staring at the eye sockets that had once belonged to someone’s child before looking up at Margo. Silent tears ran down her cheeks as she carefully removed the skull from the ground. There was something more than archeology and respecting this grave behind Margo’s tears.

“Get me a bag,” Margo said, wiping at her eyes with a dirty hand and leaving tracks across her cheek. She hadn’t put gloves on before extracting the skull. It was against procedure to handle anything without gloves on, but everything happening on the site right now was against procedure.

Sadie pulled a plastic bag from her pocket and held it out toward Margo.

“Grid 33,” Margo said, reciting the cataloging information without taking the bag.

Sadie pulled out her Sharpie and wrote down the grid information, the item description, the date and time, and noted Margo as the digger, then held the bag open so Margo could place the skull inside it. She then reached into her other pocket and handed Margo a pair of vinyl gloves—she always carried extra of everything.

Margo put the gloves on before carefully picking up every tiny piece of bone broken off by Langley’s shovel and adding it to the bag.

“I’m not leaving until she’s up,” Margo said quietly, drained, as she went back to digging.

“Okay,” Sadie whispered back. “I’ll help you.” She looked at the rest of the crew, still digging, and gave up the fight to preserve the crime scene, opting instead to be very clear in her report of what Bill did to create the chaos. That was information the BLM would certainly be interested in.

Margo continued to cry as she dug out the jaw, and then the clavicle. She moved with incredible efficiency, and Sadie kept up with the labeling and bagging, only stopping once to return to the original grave, now fully uncovered to show the man’s plain blue sweatshirt, to gather Margo’s tools. Then she took a moment to text Pete what had happened.

When Sadie returned, Margo was brushing away dirt from the exposed pelvis with her gloved fingers—tender and soft as though not wanting to hurt the ancient bones. She was still crying.

“Margo?” Sadie said, putting the tools down beside her new friend. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, tears dripping off her face and into the dirt. “I just want her out of the ground. I want to make sure no one hurts her again.”

“Okay,” Sadie said, removing another bag from her pocket and wondering what was behind the emotion. It was more than this body, Sadie felt sure of that, but Margo seemed too fragile to answer any questions right now.

They continued digging and cataloging for another thirty minutes. Sadie could not have been more relieved when an approaching cloud of dust in the distance announced the police. She finished filling in the information on the bag she had in hand, then stood and hurried it over to Roberto just as the squad car pulled to a stop.

She pulled out her phone to see if Pete had responded to her text. He had, and she read the words twice.

Don’t say anything about the undercover work. Stick to your story. I’ve made a call to the BLM contact. I can’t believe this.

Sadie let out a breath and deleted the text in case the police wanted to look at her phone. She slipped the phone back into her pocket.
You and me both.

Chapter 5

Sadie gave her statement to the police late Thursday afternoon and was then driven back to the carpool location along with the remaining crew. It was a surprisingly quiet drive; no one wanted to be the one to broach the silence and by the time the D&E van pulled into the parking lot, the opportunity was lost.

The story was on the news that night and there were a few follow-up notes about it over the weekend. On Saturday, the police reported that initial forensics had confirmed both bodies were male, Hispanic, and possibly illegal immigrants. Both had been killed by a gunshot to the head at point-blank range. The men didn’t match any missing persons reports filed in the last six years, and they hadn’t been buried at the same time, however, both murders were estimated to have happened within the last year. Further testing would be needed. In the meantime, the public was asked to inform police if they had any information. By Monday, the story of two bodies dug up from an ancient burial site was old news.