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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries (11 page)

BOOK: Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries

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Rain Crow’s ruined face became a mass of conflicting emotions.

“Our prophet is dead!” one of the Fire Dogs called. “This must be paid for in blood! He told us the rest of us would live! I, for one, am not afraid!”

Another called, “If we die, we will take
twice
our number of these suckling weasels with us!”

Rain Crow’s warriors started forward with fury in their eyes.

The fools wanted this! Browser knew he was about to die, but took a stand in front of the Mogollon. “Rain Crow! You will have to go through me if you want to start this madness!” He raised his war club and crouched, ready to defend the Fire Dogs from his own people. Catkin positioned herself slightly to his right, breathing hard, ready for the coming assault.

“Enough!”
A thin reedy voice ordered in Mogollon. “Lay your weapons down! Now!”

Browser shot a look over his shoulder. The old Mogollon slave had stepped out ahead of the Fire Dog warriors. One by one, he pointed his finger at them. Browser couldn’t believe it as the Fire Dogs, expressions tortured, placed their bows and war clubs on the ground.

Stone Ghost braced his knees and stood his ground
in front of Rain Crow. “Tell your warriors to drop their weapons, War Chief.”

Rain Crow lifted his club as if to strike the old man down.

A surge of adrenaline pumped through Browser as he stepped in front of the defiant Stone Ghost.

“You know me, War Chief,” Browser said calmly. “You have seen me in battle. If there is war here today, it will start with the two of us, old friend.” He let that hang for half a heartbeat, then added, “But it doesn’t have to, Rain Crow. Don’t you wish to know who did this, and why they want you to kill these people? Let us end this madness and find out what truly happened here. These people are not your enemies!”

Rain Crow’s lopsided face contorted with the barest of smiles. “You had better be right, Browser. A man who stands up for these murdering reptiles can’t afford many mistakes.”

“No, he can’t.” Browser turned to the Sunrise warriors. “Lower your weapons. There will be no fighting today.”

They hesitated, waiting for Rain Crow’s orders. He nodded to them, and bows and clubs were slowly lowered.

The old Mogollon man stepped forward, his demeanor different from the meek and mild facade he had assumed the day before. Head high, he took Browser’s measure, and then cast a suspicious glance at Stone Ghost. “You are both most unusual for your kind.” His voice held only the slightest trace of Mogollon accent. “For a moment, I thought they were going to kill us despite our surrender.”

“They were supposed to.” Browser took in the old man’s worn cloak and the faded red blanket that hung from his shoulders. He didn’t look like a revered elder. His face, lined and thin, had a prominent nose. Tangled strands of snowy white hair fell over his ears.

“Gray Thunder is dead,” the young woman reminded
in a trembling voice, and sobbed when she asked, “It is just as he said! The prophecy—”

“Hush!” the old Mogollon barked, eyes blazing with fury. “Guard your tongues!”

Stone Ghost moved awkwardly through the crowd. Despite the cold, his wrinkled face had beaded with sweat. He stopped before the stricken young Mogollon woman. She might have seen twenty summers, a muscular and attractive woman, her blue war shirt barely hiding her female figure. She had a delicate face with a pointed nose. Her hair was pinned tightly in a warrior’s bun. “What is your name, child?”

“Clay Frog, Elder.”

“Clay Frog, may I look at Gray Thunder? Perhaps I can tell what happened.”

She glared back and forth between him and the gathered Sunrise warriors who stood around talking in low voices.

When she did not answer, Stone Ghost turned to the old Mogollon man. “We wish to know who did this as much as you do. Gray Thunder brought us a message. If he is dead, it is because of what he wished to tell us.”

The old man’s hard brown eyes fixed on Stone Ghost. “I have heard of you, Stone Ghost. You have a reputation for investigating things like this. Let us look together.”

The young woman grudgingly gave way at the old man’s gesture. Her eyes were fastened on Browser again, looking at him as though in a special reverence. Why? Just because he had placed himself between the Mogollon and the Sunrise warriors?

Stone Ghost walked to the doorway, pointing at the scuffed snow. “Nephew? Come. Tell me what you see?”

Browser moved forward and knelt.

“The snow has been completely disturbed, as if dragged to hide tracks.”

Stone Ghost turned to the young woman. “Clay Frog, was there no guard at the door?”

She swallowed hard. “Yes. Myself and Acorn. He’s … in there.” She gestured to the door with a tortured expression. “I had to leave, Elder. It is my time of the moon. I wasn’t gone but maybe one finger of time. Just to my quarters. I came right back, I swear! But I—I found … found …”

Only then did Browser run a quick count and realize that only nine Fire Dogs clustered around them. He reached for the door hanging.

“Careful, Nephew,” Stone Ghost said, pointing at the blood that had discolored the ground inside the doorway. To the woman, he said, “Did anyone else enter this room after you discovered the murders?”

“No, Elder. You arrived just after I called out.”

Browser stepped inside and the odor nearly overwhelmed him. He knew what he would see before his eyes adjusted. Stone Ghost and the old Mogollon man stepped through behind him.

“The dark spots on the wall”—Browser pointed—“are blood and offal.”

“That is Acorn,” the Mogollon elder said and swallowed hard.

The corpse was naked. His head had been crushed with a war club, and a wide cut gaped across the hollow of the ribs under the sternum. When the assailant had removed Acorn’s genitals, it was not the hacking of battlefield rage, but a precision cut, perhaps with an obsidian blade. Instead of a tongue, the tip of the man’s penis protruded from between his bloody lips. Blood had been used to paint dots on the arms and legs, a mockery of the usual burial pattern of stars.

The old Mogollon man moved to the second body. Gray Thunder lay on his back in the center of the room. Terrified eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling poles. Blood was everywhere.

A fist seemed to tighten in Browser’s belly. “Uncle? Do you see what I do?”

“Yes. It’s the same, isn’t it?”

Browser nodded.

The Mogollon elder braced himself against the wall to keep from reeling. “What are you talking about? What’s the same?”

“See those tracks?” Stone Ghost pointed to the dark smears where someone had circled the body, stepping in the blood. “We saw this in Talon Town nearly a sun cycle ago.”

“Yes,” Browser said, “and your prophet’s belly was cut open, the intestines pulled out. I see them there, in the corner. The killer slung them around like a rope. The same way that ‘The Two’ did with my warrior’s body in Talon Town.”

Browser straightened. Even Gray Thunder’s body was laid out the same, his right arm extended, his left bent behind him. “Uncle,” he said softly. “How can this be happening again? I killed Ash Girl. I thought I killed Two Hearts.”

Stone Ghost walked around the room for several moments, carefully studying the bodies, the bloody footprints on the floor, and the grisly streaks on the walls. He turned to Browser. “Nephew, how many people were allowed to see the room where Whiproot was killed before it was cleaned up?
Who
saw it?”

CHAPTER 11

Kachina Street, Albuquerque, New Mexico

MAUREEN WATCHED DUSTY’S face as he tried to sort through the conflicting emotions. They had to be similar to her own, that sense of loss, of anger, of denied grief.

Dusty paced up and down Dale’s living-room floor. The afternoon sunlight through the picture window gleamed in his blond hair and beard. She could see the muscles bunching under his white T-shirt as he smacked a hard fist into his palm. “What are we supposed to do? Just sit here and wait?”

“That’s traditional for victims’ families,” she told him. She couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with her hands; they kept clenching and unclenching, so she clasped them in her lap. “But I know it’s hard to do.”

“What was he doing at Chaco?” Dusty demanded. His blue eyes blazed as he paced. “Did he go there to meet someone? I can’t figure this out.”

Maureen had called the FBI’s Albuquerque Field Of fice and been shunted through several secretaries until one finally told her that they could give her no information at this time and that an agent would be in touch.

Maureen steeled herself. “Dusty, we’re not going to know anything until they decide to tell us. Look at it from their perspective. Someone died at Chaco under suspicious circumstances. Would you give information to the first person who called your office?”

“We ought to go up there.” Dusty stopped short, a
half-crazy gleam in his eye. “Come on. Get your purse.”

Maureen stared at him. “Dusty, this isn’t a movie where you can go off and involve yourself in an investigation. Real police work doesn’t function that way. Believe me, you work through channels, or they arrest you and put you in jail. It’s called interfering with an investigation.”

Some of the crazy gleam faded from his eyes. Through gritted teeth he said, “I can’t stand this, Maureen. I have to do something!”

She walked to him and searched his face. He seemed to be keeping his expression stoic by sheer force of will. “I’m so sorry, Dusty. He was my good friend, too. But be patient. We’ll find out what this is all about.” She placed a hand on his arm and discovered he was shaking. Maureen tightened her grip.

They stood like that for several seconds; then Dusty turned and put his arms around her. She didn’t know if he was offering solace or seeking it. It didn’t matter. She slipped her arms around his waist and held him. There was a good deal of comfort in the feel of his broad chest and the steady rhythm of his breathing.

The ringing of the telephone separated them. She followed Dusty through the arch and into the kitchen where he picked up the phone on the breakfast bar and said, “Hello.” Then, “Maggie, thank God! What’s this all about? What happened to Dale?”

He listened for a moment, and then grabbed for the notepad and pen that lay beside the phone. He said, “Uh-huh,” several times as he scribbled furiously. “He was where?” More scribbling. “I don’t get it.”

Maureen watched his frown deepen.

“That’s crazy,” he said, but he sounded confused. “Upside down? His feet sticking out?” He wrote on the pad again. “No. I don’t have the faintest idea.” He gave Maureen a serious look. His blue eyes seemed to burn from an inner fire. “No, Maggie. I don’t know. Who’s
in charge? I see. Can you spell that?” He carefully printed out letters on the notepad. “Maggie, give me the details again. Maureen is going to want to hear them.” He propped the phone against his ear as the pen danced across the paper. “Should we come up there?” A pause. “Okay. Thanks, Maggie. We’ll be here or at the office for the next couple of hours. If you can’t get us there, try the cell phone. I’ll make sure it’s on.”

He hung up and stared into emptiness for a moment before meeting Maureen’s eyes. “Okay, here’s what Maggie knows. Someone called the park superintendent, Rupert Brown, remember? I told you about him. The caller told Rupert that some white man had fallen through a hole in the past. That his head was sticking into the Fourth World.”

Dusty frowned at his notes.

“The Fourth World?”

“I assume it has some allusion to the Pueblo Creation stories. Sometimes there are three underworlds, sometimes four. It depends on the tribe. Maggie had found Dale’s truck earlier and was looking around on her lunch hour. Brown got the call and got worried, so he was doing the rounds. They were searching around the small houses out by Casa Rinconada, and Maggie saw human feet sticking out of the dirt.”

Maureen’s chest hurt. “His feet? I don’t understand.”

Dusty threw the pen down on the pad, and clenched his teeth, as though struggling with himself. “I don’t either. Maggie was very explicit about this. Dale was buried upside down in a hole. Whoever did it left his feet sticking out. Someone … someone murdered Dale.” He swallowed hard. “For a reason. This is a ritualistic killing.”

The first sensations of suffocation, that dreaded constriction of the throat, began to rise, cutting off her air. “Why?”

Images of Dale flashed through her mind: John, Dale, and her, sitting on the porch of her house overlooking
Lake Ontario; Dale teasing them on their wedding day; Dale at her dissertation defense at McGill, and the celebratory bottle of LaBatt’s he’d bought her afterward in that little dingy pub run by that charming Quebecois couple.

For so much of her life, Dale had been there. If not physically present, his influence had still permeated her existence. Now, once again, she felt another huge hole being torn in her soul. Another piece of her had been ripped out. First John, then her mother, and now Dale.

She slid into one of the kitchen chairs and dropped her head into her hands. She hadn’t felt like this since that terrible night when she had walked in to find John’s body sprawled lifelessly on the kitchen floor.

“Nothing is forever, Maureen,”
she heard Dale’s soft voice speaking across time from that day when she had met him at the Toronto airport. Dale had canceled a meeting in Washington in order to attend John’s funeral. Doing so had probably cost him an appointment on a presidential advisory board. It had been rumored that it would have been a springboard into the Smithsonian and from there perhaps to a political appointment high in the U.S. Department of the Interior. God knows, the Americans needed some voice of sanity when it came to their cultural resources.

No, nothing was forever. As a physical anthropologist specializing in human osteology and paleopathology, she, of all people, understood that. But to have Dale murdered? That changed the equation from the inevitable failure of a heart, or the potential of cancerous cells gone riotous, to the unnatural realization that someone’s act of will had snuffed Dale’s life away and discarded his body in a manner meant, no doubt, to demean. And, as in all such cases, it led her to scream out: Why?

“Come on, Maureen,”
Dale’s gentle voice came from her memory.
“Humans have been killing other humans for the last two million years. It’s part of who
we are as a species. You know this, so stop fooling yourself, and get around to figuring out the problem.”

The problem.

She pushed up from the table and found her way to the bathroom to blow her nose. When she’d finished, she glanced at herself in the mirror. She looked as bad as Dusty. Her strain showed in the tight lines at the corners of her eyes and in her clenched jaw.

But standing here surrounded by Dale’s things: a razor, shaving cream, a bottle of aspirin left open on the counter next to the sink, his toothbrush in a glass—she could feel the warmth of his soul clinging to them like the fingerprints she knew covered their surfaces, and it helped a little.

She washed her face. Time to get back. She had just lost a friend and mentor. Dusty, for the second time in his life, had lost a father.

Steeling herself, she dried and stepped out into the hallway. In the living room, she grabbed up her purse. “Come on. There is something we can do.”

Dusty gave her the sort of look a pilgrim would a saint. He was fishing his keys from his pocket as he headed for the door. “Where are we going?”

“Downtown, Dusty, for answers,” she told him soberly. “I want to know what happened to Dale.”

It wasn’t until they were seated inside the Bronco, and Dusty had jabbed the keys into the ignition that he saw it. Maureen watched him scowl, open the door, and bend through the gap between the pillar and door frame to pluck the little white card from under the wiper.

“What’s that?” Maureen asked.

Dusty twisted back into the driver’s seat, the card between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know. It was just stuck in there. One side’s blank and the other …” He turned it over and froze.

Maureen leaned over, seeing the blue drawing. There, in excellent detail, she could see the image of
a snake curled inside a hen’s egg. A single reptilian eye stared up from the image, as if to paralyze her soul.

Her stunned mind identified it immediately:
el basilisco!

CATKIN SAT NEXT to Browser in the great kiva in Sunrise Town, watching the crowd, feeling her heart pound rhythmically against her chest wall. The huge kiva felt like a trap.

Matron Blue Corn hunched like an old woman on the lowest tier of the northern bench. She had a sour expression on her face. They all waited for Blue Corn to call the Blessing and begin the proceedings, but she had not yet stood. War Chief Rain Crow sat just behind her, whispering in her ear. White Smoke and the other elders were arrayed to either side of her. None of them looked happy.

Every seat on the three concentric benches had been taken, and still more people crowded in the doorway, blocking the steps that led up to the cold day beyond.

There would be no quick exit from this place. Catkin kept that in mind as her eyes surveyed the crowd. If something went wrong, if there was a panic, chaos would ensue, and several people would be trampled to death.

Blue Corn shifted and seemed to be listening to her own people’s whispers. All day long, Catkin had heard the same things whispered throughout the towns:

“Gray Thunder said he would die … said he’d seen it in a Dream. Perhaps he was a prophet.”

“ … or one of the katsinas come to earth. Maybe we should have listened …”

The fools were turning Gray Thunder into a god—and he was barely cold.

Blue Corn’s face tensed as she looked around.

The great kiva’s interior had been painted red, yellow, and white with black zigzags dividing the upper and lower walls. Wall niches held the sacred artifacts common to the old gods. In the northern niche, a representation of the Blue God stood, made of straw and leather. In the western niche, Spider Woman’s sacred plants bristled. The southern niche held offerings of turquoise, polished shell, and carved jet for both the male and female Flute Players. Here and there, brightly decorated with black paint on their white surfaces, soul pots waited to be taken south to Center Place, where they would be smashed and the soul of the dead set free to run the Great North Road to the afterlife.

White plaster coated the four thick pillars that supported the roof. Catkin’s grandmother had told her that the ancestors had sanctified every pillar by placing turquoise, shell, and cornmeal in the holes before huge stone disks had been set as foundations; then the pillars had been built atop the stones. Thick ponderosa pine beams spanned the pillars to support the roof cribbing. Strips of juniper bark acted as a roof sealer. Then earth—to the depth of a man’s forearm—insulated and finished the roof. Catkin looked up. Through the thick coating of soot, she could just barely make out the shadowed poles.

Juniper popped and sparked in the sacred hearth in the middle of the kiva. The foot drums, utilized for special ceremonies and the great dances, were unoccupied, but the split-pine planks had been worn shiny by the stamping of bare feet. When dancers beat their cadence on the wood, the sound thundered down into the sounding chamber and resonated into the underworlds to the delight of the ancestors.

“This is going to be dangerous,” Browser whispered to Catkin as he looked around the ceremonial chamber. Sweat already glistened in his short black hair and across his flat nose.

“Not if Blue Corn keeps her wits,” Catkin answered. She couldn’t help but notice that the Mogollon warriors, especially that woman, Clay Frog, kept looking at Browser, whispering to each other, as they studied him with speculative eyes. Why? Just because he had stood up for them that morning?

Stone Ghost sat to Browser’s left, speaking with the old Mogollon man. Their conversation was a curious pidgin of words taken from the two languages.

Catkin leaned close to Browser and asked, “Why do you think someone wanted to kill their prophet?”

“He was murdered because he wished to tell us something about our past. The past is the most dangerous thing in the world. I told you once, Catkin, that it was all related. I am only now starting to understand just how much.”

“You mean you think their prophet was murdered because of something our ancestors—”

“We are ready,” Blue Corn called out as she rose and scanned the crowd. Silence fell. She lifted her arms and murmured the ancient prayer:

BOOK: Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries

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