Artifacts (4 page)

Chapter 4

Faye and Magda hunkered on the floor of the airless equipment shed, hiding from the media. Faye wiped the sweat off her neck and scanned the shelves. “You know there’s a laptop computer and a couple of data loggers missing.”

“Of course. I inventoried the shed as soon as you found Sam and Krista’s boat. Either they stole the equipment, planning to sell it and run off with the money—”

“Not likely,” Faye interjected. “They’ve been trusted with far more expensive equipment in the past.”

Magda bristled. “They’re good kids. They wouldn’t steal.”

“Well, you suggested it.”

Magda spoke with her hands when she was nervous, a dangerous habit in such close quarters. “I didn’t suggest it seriously. I was just getting to the point. Someone else took the equipment. Sam and Krista may have gotten in the way of a petty thief.”

Faye gave a small nod. “So what’s our plan?”

“The Marine Patrol has been called,” Magda said. “If the kids are floating in the Gulf, they can surely find them better than we can.”

“Their parents?”

Magda pressed her lips together and nodded. “And the sheriff.”

“What’ll he do?” Faye asked. “He’ll search the island, but we can do that. We should be doing that now.”

“It’s a small island. If they were here—”

“They could be here, out of sight somewhere. The island is small, but it’s overgrown. They could be hurt, right now, and we’re not looking for them.”

Galvanized, Magda said, “Yes. We can find them. What is archaeology if it isn’t the science of finding hidden things? You and your crew can search the eastern half of the island. I’ll take my crew west. Let’s use the hill as a dividing line.”

Faye nodded and took a first aid kit off the shelf.

Magda smeared a gob of sunscreen over her peeling and freckled nose—field archaeology is not an optimal career for a fair-skinned strawberry blonde—and the familiar activity seemed to help her reassume her familiar, cocky persona.

“A steak dinner says my team finds them,” Magda asserted.

“Steak? At Wally’s?” Faye asked.

“Better than Wally’s. Lots better than Wally’s.”

Faye said, “Then you’re on,” and they plunged outside into a hungry pack of reporters.

The students in Faye’s charge were calm, considering the circumstances, yet she felt that their composure would evaporate the second she displayed any emotion that wasn’t ice-cool. They accepted her as a leader because Magda did. Faye was still amazed every time she found the skills to function in that capacity. Apparently she’d always had them, but Magda was the only person who’d ever noticed.

Faye divided her side of the island into three sectors and sent a pair of students to search each one. They fanned out from where she stood, atop the highest point. Her breathing controlled, Faye turned one step at a time until she had spun completely around.

Where were they? Faye was a finder, the winner of every childhood Easter egg hunt. For lack of a better idea, she decided to start in the area scheduled for excavation that morning. Neat rows of orange plastic surveyor’s flags gridded over that piece of ground, evidence that Sam and Krista had been there. Faye walked among the flags like a slalom skier in slow motion, looking for a clue or at least a little inspiration.

Anthony Perez was enjoying his notoriety as the only journalist, on an island overpopulated by journalists, who had gotten footage of Faye’s dramatic discovery of the missing students’ boat. He was a small man, but his reputation grew larger all the time. Anthony stood again in the spot where he had seen Faye rushing away from her colleagues, drawn toward the water where her discovery waited for her. The woman had intuition. This was something he trusted.

He was not surprised to find her in the same spot, wandering around like someone who almost remembered where she had left her glasses. He would have been a fool not to hide and watch.

Crouching behind a live oak, he watched her move through the underbrush, stooping now and then to examine something on the ground. Footprints? Maybe.

When she squatted and started scraping at the pervasive mat of leaves and pine needles, he knew what she’d found, but still he waited to be sure. When she put her hand to her mouth and began digging with precise, rapid strokes, he got his confirmation. He hightailed it to fetch his cameraman, who was standing among all the other journalists waiting to find out where the missing kids were. Anthony Perez, ready to grab his second scoop of the day, knew exactly where they were.

Faye started at one end of the hastily covered grave, knowing she would find either faces or feet. It was a fifty-fifty shot and she was sort of hoping for feet.

Fate handed her a face, Sam’s face, a broad, full-lipped face with a day’s growth of beard. There was dirt caked around his eyes and mouth and she wanted to wipe it away, as if it would make him more comfortable, but she couldn’t take the time. The grave was big enough for two.

She dug to Sam’s right and was rewarded, if that’s the proper word, with another face. Krista was barely recognizable, her freckles obscured by powdery white sand.

Faye screamed for someone to get Magda, then she kept screaming because it seemed the right thing to do. A rustle alerted her to the cameraman rushing up behind her and she threw her body over her dead friends, refusing to move aside so their fate could be recorded for the evening news.

She screamed for Magda, over and over, and the tough little archaeologist came running, yelling at the reporters, cursing them, whapping at them with a handy tree branch. Fearing for their equipment, Anthony Perez and his cameraman beat a swift retreat.

As they left, Faye unbuttoned her shirt, saying, “I’ll be damned if those reporters will climb a tree and use a telephoto lens to get a picture of this.”

Magda helped Faye spread her shirt over the spot where the students’ faces peered up from the dirt, then, out of solidarity, laid her own shirt atop Faye’s. The two of them stood vigil together, in their brassieres, until the sheriff came.

Chapter 5

The afternoon heat, the boat’s side-to-side wallow, and the fact that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast had combined to bring Faye to the point of seasickness. It had been an interminable day and it wasn’t over.

Sheriff Mike McKenzie and his investigation team had worked efficiently through the morning, herding everyone on Seagreen Island onto a patch of sand near the dock before sending a search crew to fan out over the island. From her vantage point, she had watched technicians lifting fingerprints off the storage shed and searching Magda’s crew boat.

Her nerves had stretched a little thin when they searched her skiff, not so much because she thought the killer might have concealed any evidence there, but because she had things of her own to hide. Would they wonder why she kept topographical maps of all the Last Isles stashed, along with her navigational charts, in coolers to keep them dry? Would they notice the shovels and trowels and sieves and brushes and dental picks stored aboard her skiff, and wonder why she didn’t just use the tools the university provided? What if a tiny antique bottle or rouge pot that she’d dug out of the ground had rolled up behind the coolers and lodged there, waiting for the investigators to find it and wonder why she took her work home with her? It seemed that none of these questions struck the searchers. They poked through her skiff for a few short minutes, then moved on.

They had rifled through the audiovisual equipment on the TV reporters’ boat with more care, then turned their attention to the sleek speedboat that had carried Senator Kirby and his entourage. Faye figured the searchers were focused on finding the missing laptop and data loggers, but they were empty-handed when they stepped onto the dock the last time.

About noon, she saw Sheriff McKenzie turn to the undersheriff and heard him say, “It’ll take all day to do a complete search of this island, probably longer. We can’t hold all these people that long, and it’s ill-mannered to make them wait in this blasted heat. You take charge here. I’ll take the witnesses back to the office and make them comfortable while they wait their turn to be interviewed. No way our boat can hold them all, so we’ll use theirs.”

Faye did as she was told, but it had felt wrong to leave Sam and Krista to the tender ministrations of the forensics investigators. It had felt wrong to allow herself to be herded onto the university’s rented boat along with Magda and her coworkers and ferried back to land. The students accepted their enforced cruise easily, since they rode the same boat to and from work every day.

From its deck, Faye watched Seagreen Island and her skiff recede. Without her skiff, she had no way to get back to Joyeuse tonight, but she had ignored it. She didn’t like to call the investigators’ attention to the fact that she didn’t ride to work with the others. They might then begin to wonder where she lived that made a mullet skiff more convenient for commuting than an oversized power boat.

Faye, Magda, the students, the sheriff, his chief investigator, and their staff overwhelmed the tiny convenience store and grill at Wally’s Marina. The shabby little place was just the same, but the events of the day made its seediness surreal.

Faye had spent many hours at Wally’s, but today the shiny colors of the potato chip bags hit her wrong. The greasy odor of the morning’s bacon was off. The faces around her—Liz at the grill, the hobby fishermen poring over bait, the teenager eating a late lunch—were mostly familiar, but they were nonetheless strange. Somebody had shot two vigorous young people dead that very morning, and that somebody could be in this room. Or in any room.

Wild suppositions about why Sam and Krista were killed had begun fouling the air before their bodies were even found. Burglary had been dismissed as a motive within minutes. The killer didn’t take enough stuff. Besides, a simple burglary gone wrong didn’t set the imagination aflame. Most of the students leaned toward a botched drug deal. Many of them used drugs themselves and harbored a healthy fear of the people their habits forced them to deal with. And those who maintained a more chemical-free lifestyle were attracted to any theory that blamed the victims for their misfortune and fostered their illusion of safety.

Faye, who couldn’t have afforded drugs even if she’d been attracted to them, had no illusion of safety. However Sam and Krista died, whoever did it, the fact remained that someone had committed murder. No matter the reason for the crime, no one was safe in the vicinity of someone who had once violated that taboo.

“The vans are here,” the sheriff announced. “There’s room for everybody. We’ll bring you back here to your cars as soon as we’ve taken your statements.”

As Faye allowed herself to be herded once again, she scanned the faces of the people she passed. They all looked so ordinary. If she had to guess which of them was capable of murder, it would be the black-eyed man in the corner. He was just standing there, waiting for the cashier to ring up a loaf of bread and a can of potted meat, but he stood out among Wally’s rubber-necking patrons because he refused to rubber-neck. His casual stance was studied and he did not gawk at the grim-faced procession walking single-file and silent in the sheriff’s wake. There was a stillness to his face that did not speak well of him.

Nguyen did not like the way the dark-skinned girl looked at him as she passed, as if she could hear what he was thinking and was appalled by it. He wished the cashier would quit ogling the sheriff’s parade of witnesses and take his money. He needed to get back out to Water Island and dismantle his worksite before somebody stumbled onto it. Even though he was working miles away from Seagreen Island, the Marine Patrol and the Sheriff’s Department would have cops crawling all over the Last Isles and he didn’t want to abandon his equipment or his finds. If he got out there quickly, the search wouldn’t yet have fanned out wide enough to catch him in its net.

He watched the cashier amble over to the redheaded hag working at the grill, probably planning to share a bit of gossip about the double murder. Nguyen had no time to watch a couple of rednecks jaw at each other. He walked out, leaving his potted meat and bread on the counter.

Stuart Sheffield was aware that his neighbors hated him. They hated his rusty singlewide. They hated the ramshackle roofover that covered the trailer’s leaking shingles and sheltered two porches, front and back, where he stored broken stuff that he didn’t feel like hauling to the dump. They especially hated every scrap of trash that could be seen from the road (including Stuart himself, who sat drinking beer on the front porch with daily regularity), because they felt the condition of his home lowered their property values and made them look like rednecks by association. And they were right.

Nevertheless, Stuart liked his environment precisely the way it was. He lifted a beer can in tribute to every car that drove past his private paradise, listening all the while for the sound of real estate prices tumbling. He particularly enjoyed the fact that his choice of careers gave him plenty of idle time to annoy his neighbors, because a man in his line of work could afford to work very rarely indeed.

He would be working this week for a change and the anticipation vibrated in his chest, just as his cell phone had vibrated in his pocket not an hour before. It still tickled him to mate the tiny phone with his teeny palmtop computer, bringing the World Wide Web to his very own porch. E-mail was a beautifully anonymous way to deal with the kind of people who hired him and Stuart had just snagged himself a new client.

The job was practically in his backyard—he could drive there in a couple hours, easy—so tonight he’d be a guest of the Panacea Palace Motel, and his new client would be footing the bill. The household staff of the Panacea Palace would make his bed and cook his meals and swab out his toilet, while he focused all his attention on finding a tall, broad, pony-tailed man with a tall, broad price on his head. The man and his companion—a slender, dark adolescent boy—had been seen digging in the Last Isles and, although his new client was stingy with information, Stuart inferred that the Last Isles weren’t safe places to dig. With appropriate coercion, Mr. Ponytail would lead him to his young friend so that Stuart could conveniently kill them both and make enough money to forget about working. This job would pay him so much that he could look forward to simply sipping beer on his front porch every day for a year.

“I think Sheriff McKenzie was trying to get rid of us,” Magda said, as she sat in her car in the parking lot at Wally’s. She looked too tired to crank it.

“No. Not us,” Faye said, leaning in the window to say good-bye. “He was trying to get rid of
you
. He’s been trying to get rid of you all day.”

“Well, I told him everything I knew about the kids and what happened to them. He was supposed to tell me everything he knew.”

Faye rubbed at a stiff cord of muscle in her neck. “I don’t think that’s the way it works.”

“The kids’ parents aren’t here yet. Somebody had to light a fire under the cops.”

Faye grimaced, remembering how Magda had leaned over the crime scene tape all morning until they dragged her ashore, bellowing instructions to the investigators on proper handling of their forensics samples. “I bet those guys do a better job of tracking their chain-of-custody forms next time.”

Magda shrugged and found the energy to crank the engine. “Where’s your car?”

“My car’s no help. I left my skiff at Seagreen Island when we came in on the sheriff’s boat and I can’t get back to the
Gopher
without it. I’m stuck ashore till morning. Maybe Wally will let me sleep on his boat.”

Magda grunted. “Wally works his boat hard. It’s dirty and it smells like fish guts. Want to grab a burger and bunk on my couch?”

“In Tallahassee?”

“No, genius. Even Dr. Raleigh, my department chairman, agrees a daily drive to and from Tallahassee would be a tough commute. The university keeps a few cottages and a trailer in metropolitan Panacea for researchers working at the marine lab there. The cottages were full, so I got the trailer.”

“You say that as if it’s a good thing.”

“The trailer has a satellite dish.”