Empire of Dust (10 page)

She shook her head. Well, that was good, anyway, Damon thought. Maybe she could just stick her stupid head out the window like a dog, and get a whiff as they passed each crossroad. "No," she said. "We need to go back to where I started . . .
then
start again. I have to stop everywhere . . . wherever there's a possibility He might be . . . I mean, it's no use in getting it—
if
I can get it—where there's no road. But He could be anywhere . . . in any direction."

Oh, Jesus. He thought about all the exits they had passed, and all the different directions off all of them. First to backtrack and start over, and then to stop and get out and let her get the vibes or the message or the radio waves or whatever the hell it was that she was picking up . . . it was going to take days, maybe even weeks. Damon started to think that maybe he had made one large economy-sized mistake when he had offed Ezekiel. His sister was apparently not in the same Daniel Boone league.

"Shit," he muttered, and then swung a fist at the side of the van. "
Shit!
" No one said anything about his outburst, though Ted shifted angrily, as though he wished he had the balls to. But Damon had quickly won most of them over to his side. Rodney seemed to be standing by him, and that muscle helped. "You can't go backward?" Damon asked Jezebel.

"No, I
can't
!" she shouted at him. "And who the hell are you to get pissed off at
me
?
I'm
the one who can talk to the Divine, not you!"

It was, Damon realized later, one of those defining moments that dictate where the power lies. But at the time he acted purely out of instinct, walking up to her and putting his face so close to hers they nearly touched.

"And what the hell does that make you, Jezebel? A tool, that's all! A vessel! Your brother not only had greater power than you, he was a
leader
. But you not only have a mere fraction of his ability, you snivel when you fail. You cry and cower and want to give up. Well, I won't let you do that to
them
!" He waved a hand, indicating everyone who was watching. "And I won't let you do it to me, and I won't let you do it to yourself!" He stepped back from her, pleased at the way her face had gone pale and her head had dropped slightly in submission.

"Now, you pull yourself together," he went on in a softer voice. "We'll take a rest, and then we'll turn around and go back the way we came, and stop whenever you want. We'll do whatever we have to do to help you find the trail of the Divine. But we expect you to be strong. Only strength will do it. If you already think you're beaten, we'll never find the one we seek. Be strong, girl. Be as strong as Ezekiel would have wanted you to be."

Her face started to tremble, and he held up a hand. "No! Let his name and his memory put steel in you, not bring you to tears. You do this for
him
, if not for us."

Jesus, he thought, it sounded like bad melodrama. But it had the desired effect. Jezebel's lower lip stiffened, and she straightened her head. "All right?" he asked her, and she nodded sharply. "Let's go, then." Damon turned and looked again at the others. A few, Ted among them, seemed restless, as though they wanted to protest Damon's control of the situation.

But how could they? He had taken matters in hand and dealt with them, and now they were ready to proceed again. They were once more on the trail of the Divine. How could they protest anything that gave them that result?

They couldn't, and Damon walked to the van and opened the door for Jezebel. It was not so much a gesture of courtesy on his part as it was tucking away a very valuable item that he owned.

T
ony, Laika, and Joseph met promptly at 9 o'clock, had breakfast in the coffee shop, and drove to Winslow Memorial Hospital, on the northeast side of town. There they asked to see the hospital administrator, a Dr. Ward, to whom they showed their false credentials, which identified them as being from the Division of Special Investigations of the National Science Foundation. "We've been sent," Laika said, "to investigate the condition of the body of Philip Lynch, the hiker who was found."

"Ooo. . . ." Ward said, as if she had mentioned something indelicate. "That's going to be difficult. You see, we released the body to the custody of the family, and, uh . . . well, considering the circumstances, they chose to have it cremated."

Laika closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at Ward. "You didn't receive any request from the foundation to hold the body until we arrived?"

"Well, yes, but not until two days ago. The body had already been cremated here in Winslow, and the ashes sent to the family in Tucson. I'm sorry."

"We'd like to talk to the medical examiner, then. I assume an autopsy was done. Were photos taken?"

"Uh, I'm not really sure, you'd have to ask Dr. Petrie."

Dr. Martin Petrie looked like what Tony imagined as a desert rat prospector. He was in his sixties, and his white beard was in sharp contrast to his deeply tanned skin. "Damn goofiest thing I ever saw," he told them in his office. "The man looked mummified. If I'd have come across him in some ruins, I'd have sworn he was a sevenhundred-year-old Indian corpse. But don't take my word for it. . . ." He opened a desk drawer, took out a large envelope, and handed it to Laika. "See for yourself."

The three of them looked at the photos. Some were close-ups and others were shots of the entire body lying on a steel autopsy table. There was also a series of photos of the body, clothed in a T-shirt, shorts, and boots, lying in the sand.

"Those are the police photos," Petrie said.

Laika looked up at the man. "May I see the autopsy report?" Petrie handed a couple of stapled papers across the desk to her, and she quickly looked through them. "'Cause of death unknown,'" she read. "There were no signs of any wounds or blunt trauma?"

"Not that I could find," Petrie replied. "Would've been hard as hell to spot any bruises on that skin, though—you can see it's like dried leather. But none of the bones beneath were broken, and the skull was intact . . . there was just no
juice
left in the man."

"His weight was twenty-two pounds?" Joseph asked in disbelief.

"Like I said, just like a mummy."

"Look, Doctor," Tony said, "if all the fluid was missing from his body, it had to get out somehow. Otherwise, it means he'd have suffered total dehydration over a period of less than two days, since that's when he was last seen. And that's impossible."

Petrie shook his head. "There were no wounds . . . not even a little hole where a vampire could have stuck a straw."

"You
did
check for bite holes in the neck, of course," Joseph said wryly.

"Of course," Petrie returned with the same smirk. "Nary a toothmark. But believe you me, it was something more than the desert sun that dried out this poor fellow."

"Could he have been exposed to some other source of heat?" Laika asked.

"Like a giant fruit dryer?" Petrie said. "I doubt it. Any heat intense enough to evaporate all the fluids from the body in such a short period of time would leave some sign of burning, and this guy's hair wasn't even charred, not to mention his clothes. The man just dried up, that's all."

"What about radiation?" said Joseph, thinking aloud.

"Don't see how," said Petrie. "Never heard of any kind of radiation that would do that, and even if there was, how did this Lynch fellow stumble across it out in the back country? Some scientist with a secret lab under the desert? Hell, sounds like one of those Mickey Mouse funnies I read when I was a kid. So, you starting to see why I put, 'Cause of death unknown'?"

T
he three agents visited the Winslow police station and met an Officer Bryant, who showed them the police file on the case and more copies of the photographs taken at the scene, along with the deposition of the witness who had found Lynch's body. There were no surprises.

The hiking trail on which Donald Vance had found the body ran through an abandoned ranch just south of the vast Navajo reservation. Vance had returned to town and gotten the police, who thought at first that Vance was trying to hoax them by putting clothes on an Indian mummy. But when Dr. Petrie had found that the teeth had modem amalgam fillings, and after the fingerprints had matched Philip Lynch's, they were convinced that it was no hoax.

"There's no mention of any footprints," said Laika.

"Between the time Mr. Vance found the body," Officer Bryant said, "and the time we drove back there, there was one helluva storm rolled in. If there were any footprints, they'd been washed away."

"And you found nothing at all suspicious?" she asked.

"Nothing except a dried-up body. That was sure suspicious, but I can't tell you how it got that way. You want to check the place out yourselves, I'll take you out there in the four-wheel—it's about twenty miles of dirt road."

"Fine, thanks. Dr. Antonelli and I will come with you. But I'd like Dr. Tompkins to look into another matter—those large sand designs located near here?"

"Oh yeah, those . . . you head toward Joseph City on 40, you can't miss them—about a mile east of Hibbard on the left. Though with everybody traipsing around out there, I don't know how much is left to see."

As it turned out, there wasn't much, just as there wasn't much to see on the hiking trail, up which Officer Bryant easily maneuvered the four-wheel, dodging around rocks and bumping through ruts that would have gobbled up a less sturdy vehicle. When they arrived at the site, there were absolutely no clues to be seen, and after only minutes they drove back to Winslow.

When Joseph had returned, they thanked Bryant and drove to a restaurant. There they had dinner while Joseph told them that his trip had been futile. "The designs themselves were almost all trampled away by gawkers. The only thing I learned was that they must have used something damned heavy. That wasn't just soft sand they made the patterns in—it was a mixture of soil and sand, not like sand castle sand."

"Could you tell how deep the designs were?" Laika asked.

"Like I said, they were pretty well kicked in, but there were a few places that looked to be damn near the eight inches in the report. Think we ought to report it to Skye?"

Laika shook her head. "It wasn't requested, and I don't think we should give our friend Mr. Skye any more than he specifically asks for."

"So we struck out," said Tony. "No body, and no magical UFO sand circles."

"No body," Laika agreed, "but those photographs were convincing enough. And I sure as hell can't come up with an explanation for Mr. Mummy, can you two?"

Tony smiled. "I liked the giant fruit dryer theory. That body looked like a plum after it became a prune."

"Drier than that," Joseph said. "Once I toured the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia—medical anomalies, and other similar goodies—and they had two dried bodies, cut down the middle and split apart, with all the dried organs in place. Dry as a bone. That's what those photos reminded me of. And no, I have no idea how it might have been done."

"'Been done?'" Laika said. "You're implying, then, that it was an outside act."

"Well, I doubt suicide," Joseph said, "and it hardly ranks under natural causes."

"Got it," said Tony. "The same aliens who made the designs shone the sun's rays through a giant magnifying glass.
Poof
."

Laika finally chuckled. "We're looking for
rational
explanations, Tony. I don't think Skye would want that one leaked to the press."

"Speaking of which," said Joseph, "there were plenty of tabloid toads out at the landing site, but why aren't any reporters sniffing out this Lynch death?"

"Bryant told us on the way back," said Tony. "They reported it to the press as heat stroke, and fortunately nobody had the curiosity to check the death certificate. Just another hiker who stayed out in the sun too long, happens all the time." He looked at Laika. "So what's next, boss?"

She sighed. "Unless something happens overnight, think we ought to visit Lynch's family in Tucson, see if he had any enemies, what his work was, if he had any medical condition that would make him susceptible to. . . ."

She seemed to be searching for the right word, and Tony helped her out. "Prunization."

Laika gave an exasperated laugh. "All right, for want of a better term."

"What medical condition could even begin to cause something like this?" Joseph asked, not amused. "But it seems to be the only path to follow. Okay, Tucson it is."