lips flattening into a hard line. “It’s true?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I didn’t want to believe it, but the texts kept coming. That’s why I called you.”
Chuck turned his attention to the two women on the far side of the depression. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Kyla Owens,” the young woman introduced herself. “You’re Chuck Bender, as in Bender Archaeological, right? I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Kyla’s brown hair was long and shaggy, falling past her shoulders from beneath the flat brim of a trucker’s cap she wore low over her eyes. She was of medium height, stocky and thick limbed.
Samuel caught Chuck’s eye from the bottom of the cavity. “This is Kyla’s first time out West. She’s a bit of a legend considering her age—Princeton undergrad, Yale PhD, now finishing up a post-doc fellowship at Harvard.”
Kyla’s face flushed. “I’m honored to be part of the team.”
“She’s been out here for a couple of weeks, doing some research for her fellowship advisor. She’s been working in the Collection,” Samuel said, using the nickname for the Mesa Verde National Park archives, complete with row upon row of
climate-controlled artifact storage cabinets, in the research wing of the Visitor and Research Center.
The older woman leaned forward from where she stood at the edge of the depression next to Kyla. “I am Ilona Koskinen,” she said with a thick Scandinavian accent. Her platinum-blond hair was parted down the middle. Bangs covered her forehead like a white picket fence, ending at her bleached-blond eyebrows. “I have come here from the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki.”
Samuel asked Chuck, “What exactly happened in Durango?”
“What have you heard so far?”
“Not much. No one seems to know anything.”
“I don’t know all that much myself.” Chuck related what he knew to Samuel, Ilona, and Kyla, keeping his account brief, and concluded to Samuel, “Then you called.” He looked over his shoulder toward Durango. “To be honest, I’m kicking myself right now for having driven all the way out here.”
“This won’t take long,” Samuel assured him. “Come on down here with me. Like I said on the phone, you have to see this with your own eyes.”
The SAE archaeologist stepped aside, revealing a dark, oval-shaped opening the size of a manhole cover at the bottom of the depression. Pie-sized chunks of thatched sticks and mud leaned against the side of the cavity.
“Someone already opened this up at some point in the past,” Samuel said. He pointed at the pieces of thatching. “Those had been set back in place over the opening. Kyla says they came right out when she pulled on them.”
Chuck slid into the depression and stood over the dark opening with Samuel.
Rosie jumped up and down at the cavity’s edge. “I want to see, too! Can I, please? Can I?”
The soil gave way beneath her feet and she tumbled down the side of the depression. Chuck caught her and placed her upright beside him.
“Oops,” she said. She combed dirt from her hair with her fingers.
“Sorry about that,” Chuck said to Samuel.
“Um, yeah, sorry,” Rosie said, her eyes on the opening at the bottom of the cavity.
Samuel waved off her apology with a flick of his hand. “No harm, no foul.” He held her gaze. “Have you ever seen a dead body before?”
“I’ve seen a dead goldfish.”
He glanced at Chuck. “Okay with you?”
Chuck placed his hands on Rosie’s shoulders. “She’s a pretty tough cookie.”
Samuel crouched next to the opening and crooked his finger for Chuck and Rosie to do the same. They squatted beside him and he aimed a powerful flashlight into the opening.
“Holy shit,” Rosie exclaimed.
6
I mean,” Rosie revised, “holy shoot.”
Chuck looked into the opening along with her. He sucked a sharp breath.
Samuel’s flashlight illuminated a human corpse visible from the shoulders down. The corpse lay on its back on the dusty floor of a crypt-like space at the bottom of the depression. Cracked leather suspenders extended from the waistline of thick cotton pants that covered the lower half of the body. Beneath the suspenders, a coarse shirt covered the top half of the body. A thin layer of dust coated the corpse. The head of the body was cut off from view by the ragged edge of the opening.
Chuck attempted to make sense of the scene before him. The suspenders and clothing clearly dated the corpse to the late 1800s, but the body lay in a vault that, just as clearly, dated from the time of the Ancestral Puebloans who’d populated Mesa Verde hundreds of years prior to the nineteenth century.
Samuel angled the flashlight, aiming its beam at the corpse’s head. “This is where it gets creepy.”
Chuck squatted lower, peering into the opening. Rosie crouched closer to the bottom of the depression beside him.
“Geez,” she said, putting a hand to her mouth.
Chuck stared at the corpse’s head, lit by the beam of Samuel’s flashlight. The skull was cleaved down the middle, nearly in two. Remnants of closely shorn brown hair clung to the split cranium of what appeared to be a male. His skin was still attached to his skull, his ears shriveled on either side of his head. His teeth showed between lips that were dried and cracked and drawn back along the jawbone.
Bile rose hot and burning in the back of Chuck’s throat. For the second time today, he was looking at the body of a murder victim.
“What is this?” he demanded of Samuel. “Who? How is this even possible?”
Samuel aimed his flashlight at the Finnish woman, Ilona, standing above them at the edge of the depression. “You’ll have to ask her.”
Ilona raised a hand, shielding the light from her eyes.
Chuck looked up at her. “You’re here because of Gustaf Nordenskiöld, aren’t you?”
She lowered her hand. Her Nordic-blue eyes glittered in the beam of light. “That is a fast understanding you have just made.”
Chuck rose from his crouch. “A man was killed today in Durango. A friend of mine.” Rosie stood up beside him. He squeezed her arm. “Our friend.”
“I am sorry about your friend,” she said. “I have just arrived in your country. I am here as a scientist, to perform a study.”
Samuel lowered his flashlight. With the beam of light removed, the afternoon sun silhouetted Ilona from behind, her face now a pale moon in deep shadow.
Samuel
