Effigy (12 page)

Diego’s eyes suddenly flared to life. “The hell you will.”

“The hell I won’t!”

“And just who do you plan on sending after your killer if you do?”

“That won’t be your problem.”

Diego sneered. He nodded his head in what may have been a strategic move toward a checkmate, but Escaban wasn’t about to go on the defensive.

Diego slapped his hands on the armrests of his chair and sprang to his feet, coming chest to chest with him. Escaban faintly detected coffee and cinnamon on his breath. Evidently, the agent hadn’t spilled all of the coffee in his lap.

“Well,” Diego said. “With any luck, your Equinox Killer’s already dead. In my experience, criminals such as this tend to die by their own hand.”

Escaban wasn’t amused. “In the end I’m sure they always do.”

Diego slipped toward the office door and flung it open. He took a step, but paused in the doorway.

“Just keep one thing in mind.”

Escaban tightened his arms across his chest. “What’s that?”

“You know nothing about me.
Nothing.
”

Salt Lake City

Lori stepped out of the shower and winced when she found her reflection in the full-length vanity mirror hanging in Dr. Peet’s master bathroom. Even amid the thick, dripping steam there was no avoiding the sight of her battered arms. Despite the soreness in her left hip there was no bruise, but her legs were the color of over-ripe bananas. Her ankle was still swollen—walkable, but it pained her to carry weight.

She looked like she’d been run over by a Mac truck. No, scratch that. She looked like she’d been run over by a black or blue Ford Taurus.

Lori quickly dried and wrapped herself in the fresh towel Dr. Peet had hung on the hook behind the door. She spotted his combs and shaving cream on the counter by the sink and noticed his toothbrush, alone in a dual brush holder.

She swiped the moisture from the mirror above the sink and scowled at the dark rings beneath her eyes. It had been a long night, one that felt like a hazy dream until she woke up on her professor’s couch this morning. Now, as she scrutinized herself before the misty mirrors of Dr. Peet’s bathroom, Lori’s mind was thinking clearly again. The lab storage was destroyed, the effigy stolen, and they had yet to solve the date of the Mayan hieroglyph.

When she stepped out of the bathroom, she paused in the middle of Dr. Peet’s bedroom. The bed hadn’t been slept in. Earlier, she’d found him asleep at his computer. He must have succumbed to his exhaustion sometime after she’d crashed over his only volume on ancient calendar systems—sometime after he must have draped a blanket over her on the couch.

She found his closet and opened the door. Long-sleeved cotton shirts and khakis were lined on wire hangers. She spotted three pairs of jeans and Dr. Peet’s multi-pocketed safari field vest. There were a couple t-shirts Lori had never seen him wear and a sport coat she never knew he owned. There were only two pairs of shoes on the floor, his leather everyday shoes and a pair of waterproof Gore-Tex boots that he wore in the field.

It was awkward going through someone else’s wardrobe but Dr. Peet had insisted, and just as he’d said, she found three blouses hanging in the back of the closet. She picked one, a yellow and white summer blouse that looked her size, and took it off the hanger. Her jeans, now draped over a chair, had been washed of the dirt and blood and, except for a small hole in the left knee, were almost like new.

As she dressed, Lori spotted a picture framed in rustic barn wood sitting atop the dresser. A younger Dr. Peet stood in the picture, his arm around a young woman and they stood amid the decaying remains of an abandoned mountain copper mine. The couple was smiling. Lori would have considered it a vacation photo were it not for the craggy, large-brimmed hat crowning the woman’s head, the tiny dentist’s pick in her hand, and the Gore-Tex boots on Dr. Peet’s feet.

* * * *

With a groan, Peet pulled the smoking pan of bacon and grease from the stove’s burner and dropped it into the sink. He opened the kitchen window to a cold drizzle outside. The air was refreshing and wet but he knew it would take hours to cleanse the house of the smell of burnt bacon.

Ten years and he still couldn’t cook a decent breakfast. But then, he rarely had cause to try. He sighed inwardly as he pulled a coffee mug from the cabinet. At least he could still brew a palatable pot of coffee.

He wandered back into his den where he’d removed layers of books, trade journals and various stray digging tools from the IBM he hadn’t looked at in years. The computer hummed as lively as ever with the calendar program pulsating on the screen.

It occurred to him earlier this morning that if he searched the computer with fresh eyes that he might find the strange snake-like date symbol that had escaped him the night before. After less than five minutes of scrolling through the ancient Mayan calendar he realized that his eyes weren’t the problem. He hadn’t overlooked the symbol. It just wasn’t there.

He took a sip of his coffee, still staring at the computer screen. As sluggish as he’d started the morning, he needed a jolt of caffeine to get his blood moving, and that’s when he heard Lori’s irregular footsteps shuffle into the doorway behind him.

“How’s the ankle this morning?” he asked, noticing an untitled file on the computer screen.

“Tight,” Lori said. “But it’ll loosen.”

Peet clicked on the new file and another calendar spread across the screen. The data appeared curiously similar to the Mayan calendar, but it was incomplete. In fact, there was very little of it to look at.

“There’s a few strips of drowned bacon briquets in the sink if you’re hungry,” he said, staring at the fractionate prelude of the mysterious calendar.

Lori chuckled. “I think I’ll pass.”

He closed the untitled file and when he turned around, he found Lori standing there, her hair wet and stringy from her shower. She had on her jeans that had somehow survived the night and managed to come out of the dryer in decent shape. Her sweater, however, had been a total loss.

Now, seeing Lori standing there in that light cotton blouse, he remembered why he’d kept it. It had been Cathy’s favorite. Comfortably delicate and feminine. A closet hanger did nothing for it, but seeing it on a woman’s body with rounded breasts filling out the front, Peet felt his breath catch in his throat. He quickly turned back to his computer.

“Is that your calendar program?” Lori asked, shuffling closer in her stockinged feet.

He focused on the screen, trying to block out the blouse. “Yeah. It tracks ancient calendar systems against the Gregorian calendar we use today. Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Greek—you name it, it’s probably in here.”

“Really?”

Lori removed a box of dirt pans from a nearby chair and took a seat beside him. She leaned in to get a good look at the computer screen, her movement casting the faintest scent of Cathy toward him. Peet turned away and closed his eyes. He suddenly felt Cathy’s presence again. In that moment, he was sitting at
her
computer, listening to
her
explain the calendar systems she’d created, but the memory was quickly washed away, overpowered by the smell of his own shampoo lingering in Lori’s hair.

“So this is the Mayan calendar?” she asked, apparently unaware of Peet’s lapse of concentration.

“Yes,” he said, pulling himself back to his senses. “Well, one of them, anyway.”

“There’s more than one?”

“There’s three actually.”

“Oh.” Lori looked slightly amused and confused at the same time. “So is this the one that everyone’s afraid will end in December?”

Peet smiled. “No. The one causing all the 2012 hype is the Mayan Long Count Calendar. That calendar doesn’t use hieroglyphic date symbols like their Tzolkin Calendar.”

“So we’re looking at the Tzolkin Calendar.”

Peet nodded.

“How does it work?”

“Well, I’m no expert, but if I remember right, the Mayans used a two hundred and sixty-day calendar, each day marked by a number and a symbol. The calendar cycle begins with One Ahau—‘Ahau’ meaning ‘Flower.’ The second day is Two Alligator, the third is Three Wind, and so forth.”

“So, One Flower is sort of like our January first.”

“For illustrative purposes, yes. When the numbers reach thirteen, they start over.”

“But the next time there’s a one, it isn’t matched with Flower,” Lori observed.

“That’s because there are twenty symbols, not thirteen. So the next time the number one rolls around, it is matched with the fourteenth symbol, Reed. It’s similar to the way that our months don’t always start on a Monday, although they do start on the first, or one.”

“So the Mayans labeled their days with these hieroglyphs,” Lori said, pointing to the picture symbols tracking in the middle of the screen. “And the dots and bars beside them indicate the number of the day?”

Peet noticed the hem of the blouse’s sleeve gracing the smooth skin of her upper arm.

“Yes,” he said, blocking the sensuous image from his mind. “One dot represents day one, two dots represent day two. Day five was represented by a bar. See here.”

He pointed randomly at July 6, 1721, named Five Jaguar on the Mayan calendar and labeled with its corresponding hieroglyph and a bar standing vertically beside it.

“Sort of like roman numerals,” Lori added. “A bar and a dot represents six and two bars represent ten.”

“Exactly.”

Lori took control of the mouse and scrolled down through the calendar. The numbers flashed by in their cycles of thirteen with the day names cycling slightly slower to the right. Beside the names were the hieroglyphs themselves, none of which resembled the snake symbol they’d found on the stationary taped to the effigy’s storage container.

Lori must have recognized the irregularity too, for she frowned, still scrolling down the long calendar. She picked up the scrap of stationary Peet had placed in front of the monitor. Her finger tapped the twin bars just to the left of the serpent hieroglyph.

“This has to be a date,” she said. “It’s ten, whatever this snakey-looking symbol represents. But why isn’t it on the calendar?”

She picked up the mouse again and continued to scroll down.

“Don’t waste your time, Lori. I’ve gone through it.”

Lori didn’t stop, and Peet watched a moment as the Gregorian dates tracked along the far right of the computer screen. Lori had managed to scroll well beyond the year 2009 and was tediously entering 2010.

“You’ve seen all the date symbols you’re going to find in this calendar,” he insisted.

“I know,” she said. “I just want to see what today’s date is on the Mayan calendar.”

Peet waited as the computer continued to scroll. Lori slowed her progress through 2011. Three hundred and sixty five days later she’d entered 2012. When she hit May on the Gregorian calendar, she clicked each day individually until she found May 17th.

“Seven Wind,” she read aloud.

Peet found the information interesting and meaningless at the same time. Lori must have also found it less than enlightening for she finally leaned back in her chair.