Tears of the Jaguar (11 page)

“He’s right,” said Miller. “But I want another detailed video shot of the tomb as it is now before anyone starts working in here.”

“A good idea,” Rylands acknowledged with a cool smile.

It took ten minutes to get the cameras back in and to shoot their sad little documentary. They all stood silently out of shot while Bowerdale shot the video and Miller added commentary in a pathetic voice: “This is where the fabric bundle was. This was the location of the gold rod and the red crystals.”

Idiots.
The only thing they’d saved was the one stone that the Mexican deputy—Aguilar—was analyzing back at the lab. Still, he had his bones, and that was what mattered. And now that he came to think about it, as they stood around like mourners at a
funeral—mourners who had been cut out of the will at the last second—it was kind of funny. Actually, it was the perfect image of what had happened in archaeology, people like him moving into the light while the dirt guys, baffled, resentful but knowing they were beaten, gave ground.

They need you now, Chad,
he thought.
Ain’t that something?

No trinkets to play with. No jewels. Just bones. Bones only he could read.

It was Bowerdale who first noticed that Eustachio was missing. The elderly Mayan was invariably on site by sunup and he had never been this late. Bowerdale decided to drive over to the village himself without discussing it with anyone. He had to get away from Rylands and the tomb anyway, just to clear his head. By the time he got back, everyone would have realized the same thing, but in the intervening half hour or so, he’d get the jump on finding the guy. Maybe he knew something.

He told Miller he was going back to Valladolid, which was a mistake, because Stroud woke up and said she wanted to go back too. She had nothing to do so long as “that bone man” was in there, and she wanted to get out of the heat. She could search the pictures they had already taken for glyphs that might help identify the body in the tomb.

Once they’d climbed back up the ladder and started for the van, James—the idiot who had let all this happen—said he wanted a ride back as well so he could lie down.

“You’ll still be stupid when you wake up, you know,” Bowerdale snarled, but the kid came along anyway.

So what should have been a half-hour trip tripled. He dropped James off at the dorm beside the lab, gave Stroud a cursory tour and set her up with a computer stuffed with images from the new site. When he had spent enough time sauntering leisurely around the lab that Aguilar told him to get out from under his feet, he bolted back to the van and hit the road.

Bowerdale’s Spanish was so-so and he had only a few words of Yucatekan, but he could tell the village was already buzzing with the news. He asked for Eustachio, but his son—a fat, lazy-looking guy called Juan—kept dodging. Didn’t know where he was. Hadn’t seen him leave. Assumed he was at the site. In fact, said Juan, not quite looking at him, he probably was. It was a big place.

“Isn’t that his bicycle?” said Bowerdale.

Juan stared stupidly at it like he’d never seen it before, and shrugged. He guessed so.

“So an old man with a limp walked over to the site?” said Bowerdale.

“Guess so,” said Juan, his eyes flashing over to his wife. She was too old to be pretty exactly, but she had a stillness and thoughtfulness Bowerdale liked. Maybe later he could find a local girl to bring back to his hotel.

“You seen him?” he asked her, in English.

“
No hablo ingles
,” she lied, her eyes returning to the pot she was stirring.

“Where’s your motorbike, Juan?” he said, splaying his arm and miming revving the throttle with his right fist. “Your
motocicleta
. That big black thing you have.”

Juan lied fluently, but too fast. Among the stream of Spanish, Bowerdale caught “
taller de reparación
.”

“Oh, it’s in the shop,” he said, smiling. “And where’s that?”

Another half glance flicked toward his wife, then Juan told him it was in Valladolid. They couldn’t fix it in the village. It needed parts.

“Yeah?” said Bowerdale. “What’s up with it? Clutch? Carburetor? Cam cover gasket?”

Juan smiled and shrugged. He just rode it, he said. He didn’t know how it worked.

“I guess you can explain all this to the police,” said Bowerdale. “
La policia
, yeah?”

Juan’s smile flickered, then held.

Bowerdale gestured to a cabana across the street. “That where he sleeps?”

Juan nodded.

Bowerdale walked over to the dirt-floored structure and peered inside. The old man’s son seemed happy to let him look, so Bowerdale didn’t bother. He took a couple of steps back toward Juan and his wife, giving them one last look. He thought she smiled slightly, before going back inside. Now Bowerdale had Juan to himself. He met the man’s eyes and raised a crooked finger, beckoning. The Mayan hesitated, glancing behind him, then crossed the street to where Bowerdale stood.

“You find out where your father went,” said Bowerdale. “Then you let me know, OK?”

As he spoke, he plucked out his wallet and unfolded several hundred-dollar bills. Juan glanced around nervously, but his eyes were hungry, and he took the money, pocketing it quickly.

“Good man,” said Bowerdale.

He got back in the van and drove down to Valladolid, but before he reached the lab his cell phone rang. It was Miller.

“Where the hell are you?” she demanded. “I’ve been calling for an hour.”

“Couldn’t get a signal,” he said.

“I thought you were in Valladolid?”

“I had to take the van in,” he said. “The brakes needed adjusting. Maybe new pads.”

“They seemed fine to me.”

“I only noticed on the road back.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, steamrolling him—luckily. “You need to get back here. Rylands has found something.”

She hung up, and Bowerdale threw the phone onto the passenger seat feeling caught out and no further forward.

“It’s a stingray spine,” said Krista Rayburn. “Where did you find it?”

“On the floor by the door,” said Rylands, his eyes on the video monitor.

Krista didn’t much like Rylands yet, which bothered her. She was, she thought, usually so accepting of other people, liking them for the idiosyncrasies others found off-putting, but the man was more than just rude. He was hostile, and Krista, who was unused to not being liked, felt disoriented.

Everyone assumed that being attractive made life easy. Not, Krista thought, in academia. She had realized some time ago that compliments on her appearance and youth were slightly backhanded, that they implied that she wasn’t serious or smart enough. Perhaps, she sometimes thought, if she was meaner, harder, quicker to rub her achievements in people’s faces, life would be easier. But then she would be a different person, one she didn’t wish to become.

“It’s not unusual to find stingray spines at a royal burial site even a long way from the sea,” she said. “The Maya imported the spines from the coastal regions and they had great ritual significance because they were used in bloodletting rites.”

She grimaced playfully, guessing that they would know how the spines were used. They were passed through parts of the body, the blood being caught on fabric or paper or in some kind of vessel, and offered to the gods. Sometimes thorns were used, fastened to string or rope and threaded through the tongue of the self-sacrificer, but stingray spines were particularly special.

“The barbs mean that you can’t go back once you start,” she said. “They have to go all the way through. Men usually put them through their penises. I imagine it must have been very painful.”

Martin Bowerdale raised his eyebrows at what he clearly took to be an understatement, but Rylands just gave her a withering stare.

“You done with the lecture?” he snapped. “We know what they were used for. We also know that they are usually found in the groin area of the body because they were carried in some kind of pouch there. And there is one like that on the body, see?”

He trained the beam of his flashlight inside the coffin with one hand and used the pencil in his other hand to indicate a slender spine down there among the bones and dust.

“But the one I found over there,” he said, nodding toward the door, “is different.”

He gently raised the second spine for their inspection. It was much more polished, and the difference between the two was instantly visible.

Krista, who had flushed at his rebuke, went quiet and stared at the spine, her eyes prickling.

“But the site has been tainted,” said Deborah Miller. It clearly pained her to say it, so Krista managed an encouraging smile to the project leader. “Maybe whoever stole the other artifacts dropped it.”

“Fished it out of the groin of the skeleton,” said Rylands, “but didn’t bother to get the other one that is still there or disturb the bone bundle that was on top of them, and then dropped it on the way out? No.”

“Was it on the video we shot when we first opened the tomb?”

“Not on the floor, no,” said Rylands. “But it was...
here
.”

He pointed at the video monitor to a bundle, the one that had disappeared. It had contained, they said, a handful of strange red stones, a carved and polished length of wood, a ring, and a gold rod with a dove on the end, though in the video the bundle was still rolled up, about eighteen inches long and tied with bright thread. The fabric had moldered, though not as badly as Krista would have expected given the tomb’s age, and you could see a dozen or so small ivory-colored objects showing through the bundle: bones. Lying with them, poking out through the decayed fabric was a black, needlelike spine.

“So the thief took the bundle and the spine fell out,” said Bowerdale. “The fabric was shot and it fell apart when he picked it up. So?”

Rylands had fast-forwarded to footage of Bowerdale unwrapping the bundle. One of the red stones fell out and the light fluctuated as they searched for it.

“Have you found any of those small bones as well?” said Deborah Miller.

Krista watched Deborah Miller wince at the video, the appearance of amateurism as Bowerdale fumbled for the dropped gemstone. She understood why Miller had made the decision
to lock the site down till the lab was ready to bring everything in. The thought that it had, in fact, been the wrong decision—a
disastrous
decision—pained her for the other woman.

“Two,” said Rylands. “Also close to the door. There may be others that fell into the
cenote
as the thief went up the ladder.”

“And?” said Bowerdale, who was getting impatient.

“And that’s odd,” said Rylands. “A thief breaks in and steals gold and gems. That makes sense. But why take a bundle of bones, particularly if you aren’t going to take the main skeleton?”

“Are you sure the two bones you found aren’t from the main skeleton?” said Krista, pushing back into the conversation.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Rylands, dismissive.

“Why?” said Krista.

“Look at them,” he said, nodding to where he had set them beside the monitor. “Look at the pictures. They are totally different.”

She had to admit he was right. The small bones from the bundle were paler than the royal skeleton.

“Could they have been better preserved by the wrapping?” she ventured.

He shook his head.

“Fabric isn’t my area,” he said, “but I’d say that the bundle shouldn’t be there at all.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bowerdale. They were all staring at the video monitor as the pictures scrolled across the screen.

“I mean that the bones look different from the main skeleton for the same reason that the fabric is still there: we’re looking at two internments maybe a thousand years apart.”

“They reopened the tomb for another burial,” said Deborah to herself. “But there’s only one corpse. Did they remove the older one?”

“I’ll have to do some tests,” said Rylands, “but I’m almost sure they didn’t. The skeleton we have is probably late pre-Classic, contemporary with the construction of the structure. They left it there when the tomb was reopened, which was long after the present acropolis was built on top of it.”