One Grave Less (2 page)

Patia, the black-haired woman standing behind him, grinned as if she thought the injuries were funny.

“Please accept my sorrow and take soup.” He gestured to the child and said something in Spanish to her.

The little girl approached and stuck out her hands, holding the soup bowl. Her face had no expression, but she made eye contact. The woman was surprised at how that one gesture lifted her spirits. She reached for the bowl. The man put a hand on the little girl’s arm, holding her back.

“You must be good.” He stared at his prisoner with a hard black gaze. “Make trouble for me, I make trouble for you. Understand?”

She nodded. He released the child and she took the bowl of soup from the little girl’s hands.

“Good.” He grinned broadly. “See, we friends.”

He lifted a satellite phone from a hook on his belt and made a call. It took a while to go through. The prisoner sipped the soup from the bowl. It was surprisingly good. The man moved away and spoke into the phone—Spanish, at first—something about May 3. The prisoner’s Spanish was almost nonexistent. He changed to English. She strained to listen with her head down, as if interested only in her soup.

“
Sí
, I have her. I am looking at her now.
Sí
, forensic anthro-pol-ogist from Georgia, U.S.A.,” he said. “She ask many questions about the bird feathers. She wanted to know everything about them.”

Patia nodded, as if verifying what he was telling the person at the other end. Patia’s eyes gleamed brightly as she looked at the captive, who, for her part, was feeling a great deal of confusion.

When he finished his conversation, he said, “Everything is okay. You be good.”

He rose and walked away with Patia. The child tagged along. Of the three, only Patia looked back. Her face wore a sly grin of triumph.

At nightfall the prisoner was curled into a ball in the center of her cage, trying to hide her exposed skin from mosquitoes. She opened her eyes at the sound of someone approaching from the jungle side of her cage. Whoever was advancing was quiet. She barely heard the sound. But it was there. She froze, holding herself rigid, mentally preparing for a fight, an attempt at escape.

“Miss.” It was a delicate whisper.

In the deep jungle shadow illuminated only by slivers of moonlight was the child who had given her the soup.

“Be still, please. They should not see us,” she said.

Her English was surprisingly good.

The prisoner nodded.

“I will help you to get free if you will take me to my mother,” the girl said.

“Who are you?” the captive whispered.

“My name is Ariel Fallon. Diane Fallon is my mother. Do you know her?”

 

The impossibly steep steps of Chichén Itzá’s Kukulkan pyramid rose in front of Diane Fallon.

Remarkable
, she thought.
It looks so real
.

The brown-gray-white-green fake stone had the same mottled appearance as the original.

Visitors will love it
.

But Diane found it frightening. It brought horrible images up from her memory. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and put a hand on her chest, as if that would slow down her pounding heart.

She’d seen the display many times as it was being built, approving the plans along the way, feeling no apprehension, believing that the step-by-step process was desensitizing her to its effect on her emotions as the rising structure gradually took shape. But here, alone before the finished monument, the large presence filled her with dread and sorrow.

The pyramid was a facade. It was the entrance to the new Mayan special exhibit scheduled to open in just two weeks at the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History where Diane was director. The entry into the exhibit hall was via a passageway through the lower steps of the pyramid. The artifacts on display in the exhibit were on loan from Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology.

As she looked into the dimly lit passageway under the pyramid, the quickening of her pulse and her sense of dread accelerated. The Mayan ruins looked too much like the ruins where Diane had hopelessly searched for her daughter after the massacre in South America.

Diane had worked for the human rights organization World Accord International, collecting evidence of crimes against humanity. She and her team excavated mass graves, interviewed frightened witnesses, and exposed secret torture rooms, accumulating a mountain of evidence of the atrocities committed by dictator Ivan Santos. During his rule he’d massacred thousands of the native population, along with anyone who either disagreed with him or got in his way. He was deposed eventually, but he and his illegal army continued a reign of killings and intimidation against his enemies. Even out of official power he was still a dangerous man, and he was out there somewhere.

During her work in the area, Diane and her crew often stayed at a mission just across the border in Brazil. Her team shared food, blankets, and medicine with the sisters running the mission in exchange for their hospitality and a safe haven. Over the years the mission had taken in countless refugees running from cruel regimes.

One day, outside the mission compound, a tiny girl who couldn’t have been three years old emerged at the edge of the forest. She appeared, as if just birthed by the jungle. She was defenseless and alone. It was a miracle she had survived to find her way to them.

She was dirty and crying, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence—there were many orphans. But this little girl was different. Diane remembered that as soon as the little girl looked at her, she smiled through her tears. Diane picked her up and carried her into the mission and took care of her for the next two and a half years. The sisters who ran the mission tried to find the little girl’s parents or relatives, but no one came forward. Diane spent all her free time with her and, as time passed and still no relatives were found, decided to adopt her. She gave her the name Ariel Fallon. Then the massacre occurred.

Tears welled up in Diane’s eyes and spilled onto her cheeks as she remembered Ariel’s raven hair and velvet dark brown eyes. She couldn’t count the number of times she cursed herself for not just taking Ariel out of there to a safe place, even if it meant smuggling her into the United States or . . . or just someplace that was safe. Diane had the connections to do it. But she wanted to do everything legally. That was what she and her team always did—they followed the rule of law. If she had been a good mother, she told herself over and over, she’d have taken her daughter to safety.

Diane sat down on the bench near the wall and put her head in her hands, regretting all the death that had come from revealing the dictator’s atrocities. She shivered as the memories swept through her mind—Ariel’s bloody little shoes, her CD player that Santos left in the compound playing the child’s favorite songs. So much blood everywhere . . . but few bodies. He had carried most of the bodies away, probably to one of many hidden mass graves.

She hoped that somehow Ariel had managed to slip away and hide in the Incan ruins or in the jungle. Diane had run through the bush yelling for Ariel, searching deep within the ruins, heedless of the dangers, until her friends had dragged her away.

Diane lifted her face from her hands, wiping the tears off her cheeks. She looked back up at the facade.
This is absurd
, she thought.
I’ve replayed the horror in my mind a thousand times. I’ve been over it and over it. Why again now? What the hell’s wrong with me?
But she knew. It was her engagement to Frank. She was feeling guilty about her upcoming marriage . . . about her happiness. Deep inside her a little demon said she didn’t deserve to be happy, because Ariel was not there to share it with her. Diane stood and took a breath.
I have to keep moving forward with my life
, she said to herself.

The daytime lighting switched to night, startling her out of her thoughts. With only floor lights providing illumination, the facade was now bathed in long shadows, adding stark drama to the fake edifice. Diane shivered again.

When she first heard the moan she thought it was her imagination, or maybe her own tortured voice escaping her in the dark. She stopped a moment and listened. There it was again . . . a soft moan, a whisper, a wheeze . . . a person.

Diane called security on her cell and asked for the daytime lighting to be turned on again and for an officer to bring a first-aid kit to the Mayan exhibit, just in case. She listened as she walked through the short fake-stone-lined tunnel to the room beyond.

The room was like a cave—dark, rocky-looking. The false rock and empty glass pedestals that would hold the artifacts stood like shadowy stalagmites. Suddenly the room lit up as the lights came back on, and the analogy was gone. Diane was standing, from all appearances, in a Mayan ruin. The exhibit designers had done an outstanding job.

The thought popped into her head that the sounds might be of an amorous nature. If that were the case, there was going to be some embarrassment. Diane stood in the entryway looking and listening.

“Is someone in here?” she called out.

Quiet. No shuffling sounds of people scrambling for their clothes. Diane walked in, listening, looking behind the soon-to-be-filled pedestals. Maybe she had imagined it.

But she heard it again—a soft plosive sound that she might not have heard if she had not been listening so intently. She followed the sound to the back of the exhibit room.

“Is anyone there?” she asked again.

A groan. Louder this time. Behind a display case. Diane hurried to the point of origin and peered behind the case.

No lovers caught in flagrante delicto. A man was lying on his back on the floor. The entire front of his shirt was soaked in blood. There was blood splattered and smeared over much of his face. He was breathing through his mouth in short explosive puffs.

Diane knelt beside the man just as she heard the sound of footfalls coming into the room. She stretched her neck to look through the glass of the display case and saw two museum security guards.

“Over here,” she called out. “I need an ambulance.”

While one guard called for paramedics, the other knelt beside Diane with the first-aid kit. He was Rufus Diggs, a ruddy-faced, brown-haired man newly hired. Diane had liked his résumé because of his extensive paramedical training.

He opened the first-aid kit and quickly slipped on gloves, tossed a pair to Diane, and began to examine the man on the floor. The blood appeared to be coming from a wound in his abdomen. It soaked his shirt and was spreading in an ever-widening pool on the floor. Diane tried to avoid it, but it was nearly impossible if the man was to be attended to.

Security officer Diggs worked quickly cutting open the shirt and examined the gash in the man’s stomach.

“Knife wound,” he said.

Diane nodded in agreement.

“Losing a lot of blood. Hold this firmly in place,” he said, indicating a large square of gauze he was placing over the bleeding wound. “I need to check his back.”

Diane placed both hands on the gauze and held it compressed over the source of the bleeding. It quickly soaked with blood and she put another on top of it as Diggs carefully rolled the unconscious man to his side and checked him for more injuries. There did not appear to be any visible injury to his back.

The man’s cheek was bruised and his features were distorted from the smeared blood. Diane didn’t recognize him. He was young, in his thirties perhaps. It was hard to tell.

How the hell did he get in here?
she wondered.

“An ambulance is on the way,” said the other security guard.

Diane glanced his way and nodded. He was another of the new security personnel. One she hadn’t met. He was young. Diane thought he might be a student at Bartrum, the local university. His physique looked like he lifted weights in all his spare time. His gaze was traveling aimlessly around the room.

“Wait outside for the ambulance,” she said. “Don’t touch anything. This room’s a crime scene now.”

He glanced at her for a moment as if he hadn’t understood. “Oh, uh, yes, ma’am,” he said finally and went out the door.

“New guy,” said Diggs. “Real nervous on the way over here. Hadn’t expected anything like this, I’m sure. I think he’s seen
Night at the Museum
too many times.”

Diane pressed on the bandage. Blood was still squeezing up between her fingers. She put another layer of gauze on the wound and continued the pressure. Her gaze drifted around the room. She was mentally searching the crime scene. She noticed more blood on the floor several feet away, near the door to an adjoining lab and storage rooms.

It was hard to see on the dark floor, but she thought there was a trail of drops leading to where the injured man lay collapsed. Was he coming from the adjoining rooms when he fell here? If so, then, the way he was hemorrhaging, why wasn’t there more blood along his path? There were only drops.

Diane squinted her eyes as she examined the drops on the floor. It was all in the shape. The tails of the elongated drops pointed in the direction of travel. And they pointed toward the door, not away from it.

“Hell,” said Diane.

“What?” said Diggs.

“We may have another victim in the lab through that door. Take over for me, can you?”

Diggs nodded, momentarily taking his eyes off the patient, glancing at the door, then pressed his hands on the bandage as Diane took her hands away.

She slipped off the gloves, grabbed a new pair, and slipped them on. She still wore her running shoes from her earlier jog around the museum’s nature trails. She slipped them off, put them on top of the glass display case and carefully walked toward the lab, watching the floor to avoid the drops of blood. She slowly opened the lab door. It was dark inside. She flipped on the light, hoping she was not making herself a target for some maniac. She should have called security for more help.