Birthright (17 page)

“Ah, nothing. Nothing, sweetie. They . . .must've left some letters out.”

“How come they wrote stuff on the truck? How come?”

“I don't know. I'll have to ask.”

“Well, what have we got here.” Leo wiped his hands on the legs of his khakis and walked over to greet them. “You look like a young archaeologist.”

“I can dig. I brought my shovel.” Ty waved the red plastic shovel he'd insisted he'd need.

“Well then. We'll put you to work.”

“This is Tyler.” Lana breathed easier as his attention was diverted from the obscenities. “Ty, this is Dr. Greenbaum. I hope it's all right. Callie said I could bring him by sometime. He's been dying to come back.”

“Sure it is. Want to come along with me, Ty?”

Without a moment's hesitation, Ty reached out, leaning from his mother's arms into Leo's.

“Well, I've been replaced.”

“Grandparent pheromones,” Leo said with a wink. “He knows he's got a sucker. We've got a nice collection of spear points and arrowheads over in the knapping area. Interested?”

“Actually, I am. But I need to speak to Callie first.”

“Just come on by when you're done. Ty and I'll keep busy.”

“Can I have a bone?” Ty asked in what he thought was a whisper as Leo carried him off.

Lana shook her head, then skirted mounds and buckets on her way toward the square hole where Callie worked.

“Hey, pretty lady.” Digger stopped work to give her a wink. “Anything you want to know, you just ask me.”

He was standing in another square, but leaped out nimbly to catch her attention. He smelled, Lana noted, of peppermint and sweat and looked a bit like an animated mole.

“All right. What is it you're doing here with . . .” She leaned over to look in the hole, noted it was dug in geometric levels. “Are those bones?”

“Yep. Not human though. What we've got here's the kitchen midden. Animal bones. Got us some deer remains. See the different colors of the dirt?”

“I guess.”

“You got your winter clay, your summer silt. Flooding, get me? The way the bones are layered shows us we had us a settlement here, long-term. Gives us hunting patterns. Got some cow in there. Domesticated. Had us some farmers.”

“You can tell all that from dirt and bone?”

He tapped the side of his nose. “I got a sense for these things. I've got a lot of interesting artifacts in my trailer over there. You wanna come by tonight, I'll show you.”

“Ah . . .”

“Digger, stop hitting on my lawyer,” Callie called out. “Lana, get away from him. He's contagious.”

“Aw, I'm harmless as a baby.”

“Baby shark,” Callie called back.

“Don't you be jealous, Callie sugar. You know you're my one true love.” He blew her a noisy kiss, gave Lana another wink, then dropped back down in his hole.

“He offered to show me his artifacts,” Lana told Callie when she reached her section. “Is that an archaeologist's version of the old-etchings ploy?”

“Digger'll flash his artifacts at the least provocation.
He's a walking boner. And for reasons I've yet to fathom, he bags women with amazing regularity.”

“Well, he's cute.”

“Christ, he's ugly as the ass end of a mule.”

“Yes, that's why he's cute.” She looked down at Callie's work. “What happened to your Land Rover?”

“Apparently somebody thought it would be entertaining to decorate it with a variety of crude remarks and suggestions. I figure one of Dolan's men.” She shrugged. “I let him know it this morning.”

“You've spoken to him about it.”

Callie smiled. She thought Lana looked as fresh and pretty as a high school senior out on a summer picnic. “You could call it speaking.”

Lana angled her head. “Need a lawyer?”

“Not yet. The county sheriff's looking into it.”

“Hewitt? More tortoise than hare, but very thorough. He won't blow it off.”

“No, I got the impression he'd cross all the
T
's. I know he was going to speak to Dolan.”

“However sincerely sorry I am about your car, the more complications for Ron Dolan right now, the better I like it.”

“Glad I could help. Since you're here, I've got a question. Why do people iron jeans?”

Lana glanced down at the carefully pressed Levi's she wore. “To show respect for the hard work of the manufacturer. And because they show off my ass better when they're pressed.”

“Good to know. I see Leo's dragooned Ty-Rex.”

“It was instant attraction, on both sides.” She looked at Callie's work. Suppressed a shudder. “Those aren't animal bones.”

“No, human.” Callie reached for her jug, poured iced tea into a plastic glass. “Male in his sixties. Almost crippled with arthritis, poor bastard.”

She offered the tea, chugging it down herself when Lana shook her head. “We're getting some intermingling with this area. See this.” Callie tapped a long bone with her
dental pick. “That's female, about the same age though. And this one's male, but he was in his teens.”

“They buried them all together?”

“I don't think so. I think we're getting scattering and intermingling here due to changes in water level, in climate. Flooding. I think when we get deeper in this section, likely next season, we'll find more articulated remains. Hey, Leo's got Ty digging.”

Lana straightened and glanced over to where Tyler was happily digging in a small pile of dirt with Leo beside him. “He's in heaven.”

“That pile's been sieved,” Callie told her. “Twenty bucks says Leo plants some stone or a fossil he has in his pocket so the kid finds it.”

“He's a nice man.”

“He's a patsy for kids.”

“While they're occupied, I need to talk to you.”

“Figured. Let's take a walk. I need to stretch my legs anyway.”

“I don't want to leave Ty.”

“Believe me,” Callie said as she dusted herself off, “Leo'll keep him occupied and happy.” She headed off, leaving Lana no choice but to follow.

“I have a little more information on Carlyle.”

“The investigator found him?”

“Not yet. But we did find something interesting. While practicing in Chicago and Houston, Carlyle represented couples in over seventy adoptions. Duly decreed through the court. This most certainly comprised the lion's share of his practice
and
income. During his time in Boston, he was the petitioners' council in ten adoptions.”

“Which means?”

“Wait. During his practice in Seattle, he completed four adoptions. Through the court,” Lana added. “We're now under one per year. What does the pattern say to you?”

“The same as it's saying to you, I imagine: that he found it more profitable to steal babies and sell them than to go through the rigmarole of the system.” Callie walked into the trees that ranged along the curve of the river. “It's
a reasonable hypothesis, but there's not enough data to prove it.”

“Not yet. If we can find one of the adoptive parents who recommended him to a friend or to someone in a support group, someone who went to him but whose petition and decree weren't filed, we'll have more. There'll be a trail. No matter how careful he was, there's always a trail.”

“What do we tell those people, if we find them?” Callie demanded, and booted at a fallen twig. “Do we tell them the child they raised was stolen from another family? That they never legally made that child theirs?”

“I don't know, Callie. I don't know.”

“I don't want to involve other families. I can't do it. At least not at this point. Those people made families. It's not their fault that this bastard twisted that, twisted something as loving and honorable as adoption into profit and pain.”

His profit, Lana thought. Your pain. “If we find him, and what he's done comes out . . . Eventually—”

“Yeah, eventually.” She looked back toward the dig. Layer, by layer, by layer. “I can't see eventually. I have to take it as it comes.”

“Do you want me to call off the investigator?”

“No. I just want him focused on finding Carlyle, not putting a case together for what happens after we do. We'll deal with that . . . when we deal with it. She wrote me letters.” Callie paused, watched a fat jay spear through the trees. Deeper in the woods, a woodpecker hammered like a maniac while across the road, the hound lay in his usual patch of sun and slept.

“Suzanne wrote me letters every year on my birthday. And she saved them in a box. I read one last night. It broke my heart, and still it doesn't
connect
to me. Not the way she needs it to. She's not my mother. Nothing's ever going to make her my mother.”

She shook her head. “But there has to be payment made. We find Carlyle, and he has to pay. He and whoever else was part of it. I can do that for her.”

“I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if someone took Tyler from me. And I can't. I can't because it's too
terrifying. But I can imagine that finding you again is both a tremendous joy and tremendously painful for her. I don't know what else you can do than what you're doing. And what you're doing is both very kind and very brave.”

Callie laughed, but there was no humor in it. “It's neither. It's just necessary.”

“You're wrong, but I won't waste my time arguing with a client. Which is why I won't point out how unnecessary it was for you to have me draft this.” She slid the paperwork out of her shoulder bag. “The statement refusing any part of Suzanne's or Jay Cullen's estates. You need to sign it, where indicated. Your signature needs to be witnessed.”

Callie nodded, took the papers. They were, at least, a definite step. “Leo'll do it.”

“I'd like to advise you to take a few days to think about this.”

“She's not my mother, not to me. I'm not entitled to anything from her. I want you to take a copy of this and deliver it, personally, to Douglas Cullen.”

“Oh, damn it, Callie.”

“Whether or not you shove it down his throat is your option, but I want him to have a copy.”

“Thanks a lot,” Lana replied. “That's going to really help me get him to ask me out again.”

“If he blows you off because of me, then he's not worth your time anyway.”

“Easy for you to say.” Lana fell into step as Callie started back toward the dig. “You've got a guy.”

“I do not.”

“Oh, please.”

“If you're talking about Graystone, you're way off. That's over, that's done.”

“Pig's eye.”

Callie stopped, tipped down her sunglasses to stare over the rims into Lana's face. “Is that a legal term?”

“I'd be happy to look up the Latin translation so it sounds more official. I like you,” she added, and shifted her shoulder bag as they began to walk again. “So we'll call it
an honest observation, with just a touch of harmless envy. He's gorgeous.”

“Yeah, he's got looks.” She shifted her attention to where he crouched with Sonya over a section drawing. “Jake and I are associates, and we're working on tolerating each other enough so we can be in the same room without coming to blows.”

“You seemed to be doing fine in that area the other night. I know when a man's looking at a woman as if he'd like to slurp her up in one big gulp—hence the envy. I'd catch my husband looking at me that way sometimes. It's something you don't forget, and I saw it when Jake looked at you.”

How did she explain it? she wondered as she watched Jake give Sonya an absent pat on the shoulder before he rose. She watched him stride toward the spoil, sling Ty up, hang him upside down until the kid nearly busted a gut laughing.

He was as good with kids as he was with women, she mused. Then, annoyed with herself, she admitted he was just good with people. Period.

“We've got a primal thing. Sex was—well, we were damn good at it. We didn't seem to be much good for each other outside the sack.”

“Yet you told him about this.”

Callie tapped the papers against her thigh as they walked. “He caught me at a vulnerable moment. Plus you can trust Jake with a confidence. He won't go blabbing your business around. And he's a demon on details. Never misses a trick.”

H
e missed with Ronald Dolan. The man was dug in and dug deep. He'd tried every angle he could think of during their late-afternoon meeting. First the united male front, with a touch of amusement over Callie's performance that morning.

She'd fry his balls for breakfast if she knew he'd
apologized for her, but he needed to get back on some level footing with Dolan. For the good of the project.

Then he tried charm, the deity of science, patience, humor. Nothing budged Dolan from the trench he'd decided to stand in.

“Mr. Dolan, the fact is the County Planning Commission put a hold on your development, and for good reason.”

“A few weeks and that ends. Meanwhile I've got a bunch of people out there tearing up my property.”

“A dig of this nature is very systematic and organized.”

Dolan snorted, kicked back in his desk chair. “I come out there, I see a bunch of damn holes. Lot of college kids pissing around, probably smoking dope and God knows. And you're digging up bodies, hauling them off.”

“Remains are treated with both care and respect. The study of prehistoric remains is vital to the project.”

“Not my project. And a lot of people around here don't like the idea of you messing with graves. All we've got is your word they're thousands of years old.”

“There are conclusive tests—”

“Nothing conclusive about science.” Dolan made a fist, then jabbed out with his index finger as if shooting a gun. “Changes its mind all the time. Hell, you scientists can't make up your mind when you figure the world began. And you talk to my wife's old man, he'll give you plenty of reasons why the whole evolution business is bunk.” He gave his suspenders a snap. “Can't say I disagree.”