Tears of the Jaguar (10 page)

“OK,” she said.

“You have a photographer on site?” he asked.

“One was supposed to arrive today,” she said. “A Brit. But he pulled out, and his university is sending someone else. It may take another day or two to get him here. In the meantime, Bowerdale will take charge of the pictures and video.”

It was all good, she thought. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. There was something
off
about the tomb. The gold, those weird
gems. She suddenly wished she wasn’t there at all, that she was back at the museum where she could simply orchestrate exhibits and manage advertising and personnel—the stuff she was good at. She envied Steve Powel in his office with his family pictures and trophies.

“How’s your daughter doing?” she asked, thinking of the blonde girl with the sparkling red pendant necklace whose image saturated his office.

“I’m sorry?”

“The skating. Any major contests lately? I know how passionate families get about that stuff.”

“Oh right, yes,” he said. “No, nothing major on the calendar right now. Just the usual.”

Memories floated up, distracting Deborah for a moment.
Having to sit for hours at the rink before and after school, trying to read while Ma told her instead to help stitch those loose sequins back on. Trying to shut out the blaring music as Rachel worked through routine after routine, while her coach modeled each spin, each impossible jump, until there’d been that one double axel when Rachel had twisted and fallen like a marionette with its strings cut—

“It must be a lot of work for you,” Deborah said, snapping back into the moment. “All that driving to training and competitions.”

“It’s what any good father would do,” he said.

Just then, the van pulled up in front of the lab, and Deborah hurriedly finished the call. Moments later, all three of the people she’d just been discussing so reverently with Powel were coming toward her, dragging luggage and squinting at the sun. She’d suggested they stop at the hotel in Valladolid first, but all three had wanted to come directly to the lab.

Deborah introduced herself and immediately started talking too fast. She worried that if she stopped, one of them would ask her something she couldn’t answer. Aguilar and Bowerdale emerged from the lab to shake hands. Aguilar knew Rylands, though their greeting was professional, almost brusque. Predictably, Bowerdale knew them all.

Within a few minutes, everyone except Aguilar had piled into the van and Deborah got on the road to Ek Balam. She didn’t mind driving. It gave her the chance to fully check out each one of them in the rearview mirror.

Chad Rylands, the wunderkind osteologist—tenured at thirty and a full professor just a few years later—was businesslike to the point of rudeness. He wasn’t interested in Deborah or anyone else for that matter. He just wanted to get to the site to “see how badly you’ve screwed things up.” Deborah bristled and he added, “No offense,” in a voice that said he didn’t care one way or the other.

He looked out of the van window and said, “Someone always screws things up where bones are concerned. I spend half my life doing damage control.”

He had bright blue eyes, a blue that was deep and hypnotic, like the water in the
cenote
now that the rubble and dirt had drifted to the bottom. But they were hard, unsmiling. He should have been a handsome man, Deborah thought, with his chiseled features and strong, rangy body, but there was something cold about the man that immediately put her off. He was a store window mannequin with the brain of a computer and the personality of a kitchen appliance.

The women couldn’t have been more different from each other. Krista Rayburn was young and brimming with energy and
enthusiasm. She had a tanned round face—pretty in an ordinary sort of way—and dirty-blonde hair that she wore in a ponytail that made her look younger still. She couldn’t have been more than two or three years Deborah’s junior, but she could have passed for a student, maybe even an undergraduate. She smiled a lot. When Deborah had introduced herself, Krista had flashed that sunny smile and said, “My! Aren’t you tall?” Deborah said that yes, she supposed she was, and Krista said, “Awesome,” patting her arm as if congratulating her on a job well done. Then she’d thanked Deborah repeatedly for the “opportunity” as if she had won the lottery, rather than being the author of the closest thing to a definitive book on Mayan environmental archaeology.

Marissa Stroud was the strangest of the lot. She was in her midfifties, Deborah guessed, and wore her graying, wavy hair long. It constantly fell in her face, but the woman would just stare through it, like it was a veil, and it was all Deborah could do not to reach forward and part it for her. Stroud was big, not fat so much as solid and powerful. She wore a long brown skirt and faded floral blouse with a tie at the throat, and clutched a stained and battered rucksack. Between her awful outfit and her brownish, uneven teeth, it was clear that here was a woman who paid absolutely no attention to her appearance or what people thought of her. Deborah wanted to like her for that, but she wasn’t what you would call warm, and she had a way of staring at people that unnerved them. After meeting her, Deborah found it easy to believe the rumor of her leaving her husband and child so that she could spend more time in the field, but harder to imagine how she had gotten married in the first place. Maybe there was someone for everyone after all.

Ha!
laughed her mother’s voice in her head
.

If Stroud looked ill-kept, her résumé was anything but. A few decades ago, experts had been able to read little of Mayan glyphs beyond proper nouns and calendars, but things had changed drastically of late, and a whole new picture of the Mayan world had begun to emerge. Stroud had been part of that revolution, and her name was all over every monograph on the subject. She was also an authority on royal regalia, European as well as Mayan, and her popular history of royal jewelry had received that rarest of accolades for academic work, a review in the
New York Times
.

She smelled odd, though Deborah couldn’t place the aroma. Some herb extract, perhaps, dry and dusty with a little musk. It took over the van as soon as she got in, and though it wasn’t exactly unpleasant, it made the air feel heavy, even with the AC on full blast. Rylands pulled a sour face and opened his window, but if Stroud noticed, she didn’t let on.

Deborah grinned with relief as she swung the van into the site’s parking lot. In person, this group of experts intimidated her less than she had expected, their strangeness somehow making them manageable. Perfect people—or people who seemed to think they were perfect, like Bowerdale—bothered her. Misfits, she could deal with. Misfits (
freak!
) she knew all about.

She stepped out into heat. It took her a second to realize that the person running toward them from the site entrance was calling her name, and another to realize it was Bowerdale’s graduate student, Alice. She looked frantic.

“What is it?” said Deborah. “What’s the matter?”

“Someone got into the tomb overnight,” said the girl. “We just found out. They stole everything. It’s all gone.”

Chad Rylands reminded himself that he shouldn’t be surprised by their amateurism. Still, this was incompetence on a new and appalling level. He blamed the Miller woman, who had no business running a find of this scale. At least the situation wasn’t as bad as he had feared. The thief had stolen the knickknacks, the jeweled trinkets on which so many archaeologists assumed everything depended. The good stuff, by which he meant the bones, was still there, apparently undisturbed.

As an osteologist, an expert on bones, Rylands did not practice what the old-school establishment considered “real” archaeology. Or as he thought of it, dirt archaeology: squatting in mud and poking about till you found something that you then misinterpreted, publishing your arbitrary speculations in some big-shot journal to the applause of all. He, by contrast, was a scientist and could get more real, hard information out of a handful of
skull fragments than they could out of a square mile of digging. It was hardly surprising the dirt diggers felt threatened. They ought to. They were the dinosaurs of archaeology, lumbering about with their pickaxes, while the osteologists scurried between their feet, out-evolving them.

“Why don’t you go look for your precious
artifacts
,” he said to Miller, spitting out the last word like it left a nasty taste in his mouth, “and leave me to do some actual work.”

They had climbed down the ladder and were standing in the tomb, everyone from the van ride squeezed in together. For a moment he had stood there, breathless, not daring to speak in case he gave away just how astounding the place was. He gazed almost hungrily at the masked skeleton seated in place and the sacrificial bones bundled into its lap, the adolescent heads set on the ground around it. It was magnificent. They should have stationed armed guards outside the moment they found the place.

Morons
.

The story as he understood it was that the site staff had taken turns watching the tomb because the lab in Valladolid wasn’t ready for the contents to be moved for cataloging. It was an idiot move. If there was half the gold and precious stones in there that they had bragged about in the e-mails they had sent to lure him here, they should have known that the half-starved natives would try to grab what they could. Leaving a couple of dopey graduate students armed only with a cell phone that couldn’t get a signal till they climbed a hundred-foot tower at the other end of the site was beyond bush league, and he planned to let their organizers in Chicago know it.

Anyway, some idiot kid—James, his name was—had been in the tomb by himself in the middle of the night and had heard
someone coming down the ladder. He had waited them out and then, when he thought the coast was clear, went back up top to make sure they didn’t come back. Except, of course, that they hadn’t gone. They were waiting for him when he got to the top, hit him from behind with a log, and then ransacked the tomb. The kid had seen nothing and was now sitting in the shade of a tree under the acropolis with a bandage round his head and a pathetic look. While the rest of them were down here in the tomb, James was waiting for the police, though Rylands knew what that would yield.

Miller and Bowerdale were screaming at each other while Marissa Stroud stood unnervingly still, staring fixedly at the skeleton in the throne like she was trying to talk to it. The environmentalist girl looked like her puppy had been run over, but she wasn’t saying much. He wished they would all get out and let him do his job.

“You have more pictures than the ones you e-mailed me?” he said.

“What?” said Miller, who had been yelling at Bowerdale for trying to blame her for the whole fiasco.

“Pictures of the tomb,” he said, frosty. “And video. I want to see exactly how everything was before you people fucked it up.”

Miller took a breath.

“Yes,” she said. “We tried to document everything as thoroughly as possible, though the official site photographer hasn’t arrived yet.”

He considered the lights inside the tomb and the power cords running up to the generator.

“Get me a video monitor and whatever you stored the data on,” he said.

“Here?” she said, incredulous. “You can’t just watch them at the lab?”

“No,” he said simply, moving into the recessed alcove where the skeleton sat and pulling a pocket lens from his shirt. “I need it here.”

She opened her mouth as if to protest, thought better of it, and nodded.

“I’ll do what I can,” she said.

“And I need the rest of these people out of here,” he added.

“Now look here, Rylands,” Bowerdale began. “You aren’t any more important than the rest of us.”

“You’ve had plenty of time to look at what was here, Bowerdale,” Rylands countered evenly. Bowerdale was always a pompous ass but he was acting more defensive than usual. “Since most of what these people came to see isn’t here anymore, I see no reason for them to get in the way of my work. I came to look at bones. You have lost everything else, but we still have them.”