Effigy (6 page)

So where in the hell
is she?

He should have known to push the issue when Lori refused to let him pick her up. Now, he supposed she was thinking that was a smart move on her part. But Lori wasn’t enough of a player to go back on her word, especially to an old friend. Nevertheless, he didn’t like being played a fool, especially on a Wednesday night when, aside from a couple of regulars playing a shoddy game of pool in the corner, the bar was empty. There wasn’t even a stranger around with whom he could salvage the rest of his night.

Smart move, Lori, he thought. Or perhaps it was stupidity on his part to have chosen the bar in the first place. It wasn’t like he had plans of getting smashed. He knew Lori better than that. But he’d hoped to at least loosen her up, to give her a taste of the life she’d been whiling away behind books.

Books and dirt. That was no life for a girl with Lori’s personality. She was unlike any other girl he’d known. In fact, she was the exact opposite. He supposed that’s why she affected him the way she did. She didn’t party. In fact, she was a total bore when it came to fun. Nobody was closer to her than her work and that, Derek found, was curiously sexy. She was proficient at playing hard to get without even realizing she was playing the game at all.

Plus she was a total babe.

It was uncharacteristic of Derek to be attracted to the earthy type. Lori had a natural look, perhaps the only girl he knew whose appearance might actually be hindered by makeup, if that was possible, and that made her all the more intriguing.

But Derek wasn’t intrigued sitting alone there on a rickety barstool. Leaving his money on the bar, he finally walked out to his sporty Honda coupe. He hadn’t even developed a decent buzz for his trouble.

With Lori still on his mind, he pulled out of the parking lot and took a detour through campus. He immediately spotted her Subaru parked at the library, just where it had been earlier that day. The building was dark so he knew she couldn’t still be in there. He drove around the museum, but to no surprise it too was dark. He continued to the only place he thought she might be and sure enough, there in a first story window of the anthropology building, he spotted a light.

Surely she didn’t forget their date over some school project, did she?

Derek parked in the empty lot beside the building and tried the front doors but they were locked. There was, however, a crack in the blinds on the lab window and he peered inside.

Just as expected, he spied Lori draped in a long white lab coat. She wasn’t alone, however. Another frocked researcher stood beside her and together they were hunched over something between them on a lab table.

How could she possibly study this late on summer break?

He stood there indecisively in the darkness. Should he just turn around and go home? It seemed like such a pointless move considering his impulse to break through the window and beat the living shit out of that son-of-a-bitch who cheated him out of his date.

The couple straightened from their work and Lori’s partner shuffled away. Derek waited. If nothing else, he wanted a good look at the competition.

The guy began to turn. Derek could see his cheek. His chin. His nose. Everything was coming into profile.

Derek hesitated. He’d seen that profile before.

It can’t be!

When Lori’s partner turned around, Derek found himself looking at none other than Quickie Peet.

He backed away from the window.

Not a smart move, Lori.

Not smart at all.

Citlalpol

Agent Armando Diego tossed the riot baton onto the table and glared at Mario Sanchez groaning and writhing in blood at his feet. There was a rattle in the little man’s chest when he breathed. Dust floated in the stale air around his trembling body.

Diego stepped in closer, his boots shuffling over the sandy floor of the abandoned farmhouse. His patience for protocol interrogations had reached its limit. The entire day had been wasted trying to get information out of this piece of shit and Diego was tired of beating around the bush.

“Where were you on March 21st?” he asked.

The man on the floor whimpered. “I already told you. Many times.”

“Tell me again.”

There was only Sanchez’s ragged breathing. Diego slipped the toe of his boot underneath his chin and lifted it off the floor.

“
Chichen Itza
,” the New Ager gasped. “I was in
Chichen Itza
.”

Diego bent over Sanchez. He could smell the stench of his sweat. There was a sweetness mingling with it. The salty-sweet smell of blood.

“Why weren’t you at the equinox meeting with your followers?”

“I was! I was!”

From what Diego was told, it had been easy arresting Sanchez, or Citlalpol, or whatever the hell his name was. The pathetic little man didn’t even give a fight. It was getting information out of him that proved difficult.

Sanchez could have passed for a farmer easier than he would a serial killer. It was highly unlikely that a man of his light build could overpower the healthy young victims chosen by the Equinox Killer. But that certainly didn’t rule out the chances of someone else killing under his orders. If Diego could uncover the motive behind the three gruesome homicides, then perhaps he would find the killer.

But as he lay there crumpled and bleeding on the floor, Sanchez didn’t look like a leader of any sort of cult, much less the instigator of murder. His nose was swollen twice its size and he was still moaning, his breaths gurgling deep within his chest. Yet, he still hadn’t cracked.

Diego wasn’t expecting such an uncooperative nature when, tired of playing by Escaban’s rules, he stole the New Age leader from his cell in the middle of the night and brought him to an abandoned farmhouse he often reserved for drug investigations. If he was going to suffer through Escaban’s personal campaign to avenge his nephew’s death, then Diego was going to do it his way.

“I’ll ask you again,” Diego growled. “Why weren’t you in
Teotihuacan
with your followers? They told us you were nowhere to be found.”

In painstakingly slow movements Sanchez rose to his elbows, then his knees. His head hung, his face was a smear of blood. An eye was swollen shut.

“We were supposed to meet in
Chichen Itza
, not
Teotihuacan
.”

“According to your followers, you always meet in
Teotihuacan
.”

Sanchez sat there, breathing.

Diego landed a vicious uppercut with his boot, flinging him against the spattered adobe wall. The energy transfer felt welcoming, even arousing. A pleasing sense of PJF nostalgia seeped into his pores.

Sanchez swallowed and the gurgling returned to his chest. The son-of-a-bitch could drown in his own blood for all Diego cared. He snagged the New Ager’s shaggy hair and pulled his face up to him.

“Answer me!” Diego demanded. “Don’t make me get my stick!”

Sanchez’s swollen lip quivered; a shredded lump of flesh nearly detached from his face. Diego wondered what the New Agers would think of their Citlalpol now.

He shook him.

“Speak up! Was it your idea to go to
Chichen Itza
?”

The man weakly shook his head. Diego felt slightly rewarded. Now he was getting somewhere. All it took was knowing
how
to ask the right questions.

“Who told you to go there?”

Sanchez moaned. “Gas… Gasp…”

Diego loosened his grip, allowing him more air, but the frail man only collapsed. Diego stepped away, allowing him to crumple back to the floor. To his surprise, Sanchez gathered what was left of his strength and propped himself up on his trembling arms. His nose nearly touched the floor.

“Who did you meet in
Chichen Itza
?” Diego demanded.

Sanchez wheezed. Diego bent down to catch his faint whisper. “Cat…”

“Who?”

The gurgling was growing stronger.

“Answer now or I’ll get my baton!”

Sanchez lifted his grotesque face and focused his good eye on Diego. His lip quivered again and with a tongue he’d nearly bitten in two, he wheezed, “Acatzalan.”

Laboratory

Lori rubbed the strain from her eyes as she stepped away from the microscope. The lab room was dark save for the narrow florescent strip hovering above the microscope counter and the halo of lamplight spilling across the nearby lab table. There was something strangely comforting about those two islands of light. Their seclusion kept her mind focused, keeping a world of distractions hidden in darkness.

She tossed her notebook atop the geologist’s reference guide lying beneath the table lamp and sat down. If she was anything more than an amateur geologist, the process of sorting and identifying the intergrown crystals within the jade may not have taken so long. But finally, she was convinced she had it right.

Geology had its uses in archaeology. Stratigraphic layers of earth were often essential in dating archaeological sites. The way erosion and soil movements changed the provenience of artifacts also had to be taken into consideration. But what Lori found most essential was her knowledge of soil and mineral types when evaluating the material and temper of Anasazi ceramics. That finer geological element was central to her dissertation, and now it was proving useful for picking the effigy apart, mineral by microscopic mineral.

Leaning into the lab table, she scanned through the data scribbled in her notebook. Primary mineral—jadeite, in combination with analcime and white mica. The effigy was not made of just any old jade, but of the purer jadeite which, according to the library book opened before her, was most likely mined from the region north of the Motagua fault in
Guatemala
.

Interesting, but what good was the information?

She retrieved two reports from her three-ringed binder. The first was a photocopy of the report received from Radco Analytic who had performed the radiocarbon date on the shell in the effigy’s eyes. The test results simply read,

Radco-173225 1820+/-75BP*

*radiocarbon years pre-adjusted for reservoir effect on isotopic composition of marine sample.

Lori flipped the page to a photocopy of Dr. Friedman’s preliminary report. She scanned down the data until she spotted in bold print:

SUMMARY OF INTERPRETATION.