The Scorpion's Tail (Nora Kelly #2)(10)
Fountain nodded. “If you walk far enough out of town, you’ll come to what’s left of the cemetery. A dozen tombstones with the same date are all in one corner. Of course, there are no bodies in the graves.”
They passed through the town and came to a scattering of buildings nearer the edge of the mesa, with worn adobe walls and vigas lying splintered on the ground. Watts brought the vehicle to a halt beside one, and they all got out.
“I followed a pillar of dust to that cellar hole over there,” Watts told them. “Can you see, beyond those other buildings, where the opening is?”
He walked in the direction he’d indicated, and the other two followed.
“After I’d cuffed and stabilized Rivers,” he said, “I crawled in to see what was important enough to shoot me for. He’d cleared off the top of a skull, along with a hand. Another fifteen minutes, and he’d probably have yanked everything out of the ground and driven away.”
Corrie pulled a headlamp out of her gear bag and put it on, along with nitrile gloves and a face mask. “I’m going to take a look in there, if you don’t mind—alone.”
“Be our guest,” said the sheriff.
Corrie got down on her hands and knees and peered in. Splinters of sunlight striped the dark space. The cellar was still roofed, although it was caved in on the left. The basement had half filled with windblown sand. She could see where Rivers, the relic hunter, had crawled in, leaving his footprints everywhere. Quite obviously, he had dug a number of holes. Up against the wall to the right, where the most serious digging had taken place, she could see the cranium the sheriff had mentioned, along with the bony hand and the withered sleeve of a shirt and, partially covering that, a duster or oilcloth raincoat.
She crawled down and removed her camera, shooting a full set of images in the interior space. There was just enough headroom to walk around while hunched over. Approaching the bones, she knelt again, took a fresh set of pictures.
The first thing she noticed on closer observation was that the remains consisted of more than bones; there was still a lot of mummified flesh adhering to them. She pulled out a brush from her kit and whisked away the loose sand from the cranium and exposed the arm, with its ropy beef-jerky muscles that rattled like dry corn sheaves as she brushed. She could even see a downy coat of hair on the forearm, which, despite her training, she found faintly disgusting. Further brushing exposed more of the clothing, including a gingham shirt underneath, falling off in strings. The hand sported a gold ring on its pinkie finger.
Peering closely, she saw the letters JG engraved on it. Clearly this was an item Rivers hadn’t been able to take before the sheriff caught him.
She cleared sand from around the skull and found more of the rotting duster turned up around the man’s neck—it was definitely a man, judging from the clothing and the fringe of hair encircling the bald skull.
Corrie stopped. Getting these remains out of this pile of drifted sand was going to be a serious job. If he was a murder victim and she dug out the bones herself, she’d compromise the integrity of the evidence. Her background was in forensic anthropology; she wasn’t trained as an archaeologist. She was qualified to analyze the remains in her lab but didn’t have the expertise to dig them up properly in the field. On the other hand, if she called in the FBI’s field Evidence Response Team, dragging them and their van all the way out here, three hours each way from Albuquerque over terrible roads, only for them to discover it was an accidental death … she would look like an idiot. What she needed, it seemed obvious, was an archaeologist who could excavate the bones in a proper manner.
She thought of Nora Kelly.
Kelly was a senior curator at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute. Corrie had worked with her before—their collaboration, although unanticipated, had ultimately expanded into Corrie’s first, and only, important case.
And it had been a success, as well. Her first—and only.
Crouching next to the skeleton, Corrie thought about the idea. Kelly had been supervising a dig in the Sierra Nevada a few months back when Corrie intruded on her camp, investigating a case involving murder and grave robbing. She and Kelly had locked horns initially, and the woman could be a pain in the ass at times—stubborn and a bit full of herself—but she was certainly qualified. If it came down to it, she would make a good expert witness. And Corrie was pretty sure Morwood, who knew Kelly from the same prior case, would approve of bringing her in. Kelly had what he would have called “sand.”
Besides, the woman owed her one.
After taking a final round of photos and slipping the ring into an evidence bag, she came back out, blinking in the bright September sun. Watts and Fountain were standing there, chatting. They looked toward her.
“So what’s the deal?” asked Watts, removing his hat and mopping his brow.
“Well,” said Corrie, “we’re going to need a little extra help here. I’m going to bring in a specialist to excavate the remains—just in case it’s a homicide.”
“Why a specialist?” Fountain asked. “If it’s murder, whoever committed it is long dead.”
“That may be the case, but we have to preserve the integrity of the evidence—and that means bringing in a professional archaeologist. And the sooner the better, too.” She pointed to the ring. “This might not be the only valuable item.”