Canyon Sacrifice (19 page)

He adjusted the strap on the compact set of night-vision goggles Rachel had retrieved for him from her patrol car at camp in anticipation of the nighttime exchange. The goggles weren't standard ranger issue. Rather, Rachel used them during her adventure races and kept them in her ranger duffel between competitions. He centered the goggles' binocular-like eye ports over the bridge of his nose. A ghostly, gray-green, infrared image of the darkened Backcountry Information Center settled into focus in the middle of the three-quarters full parking lot. The building was deserted, but even at this late hour the parking lot was alive with tourists making their way to and from their cars.

The selection of such a busy site for the exchange puzzled Chuck. How was he to make the swap for Carmelita with all these people around? The scene had been far different ten years ago when he'd won the contract to assess the expanse of grass and sage that was the proposed site for the information center.

The meadow never served as a regular gathering place for the Anasazi. But because of its location less than two hundred yards south of where Bright Angel Trail dropped off the South Rim into the canyon, it had served as a staging and encampment area for the hordes of prospectors in the late 1800s who ultimately learned the canyon was devoid of any large deposits of precious metals. In the wake of their departure, the prospectors left piles of trash along the South Rim that were sifted and resifted over the intervening decades by amateur treasure hunters who carted off anything of interest—brass bridle rings, unbroken bottles, discarded letters, and the like.

Chuck's initial survey of the site, completed with Donald's assistance, revealed the locations of two such debris piles in the
meadow. After Donald returned to his regular ranger duties, Chuck excavated the first of the two piles. It contained but one item of marginal interest, a century-old, mildew-riddled canvas tent wrapped around a pair of wooden support poles.

The second debris pile, at the southwest edge of the meadow, turned out to be much smaller than the first. Someone had put a match to it at some point so that its remains consisted of ashes, chunks of blackened wood, and a few strips of charred burlap and canvas. Chuck moved outward from the center of the pile, digging and screening as he went, until he no longer encountered ashes or other signs of trash left behind by prospectors a hundred years ago. Just before he set about refilling the shallow hole he'd created, he noticed a splash of color, rose-petal red against the brown earth, at the very bottom of the hole. He froze, staring.

The spot of red, out of place at the bottom of the debris pile, had a natural tone to it that suggested the use of plant dye for coloration rather than modern chemicals. He set to work over the spot of color, loosening dirt with his fingertips, his breaths becoming more excited with each handful. He switched to a small paintbrush and within minutes uncovered a few coal-black turkey feathers strung together with yucca thread dyed solid red.

He set his camera on a tripod, aimed it into the hole, and programmed it to take pictures at one-minute intervals while he worked. He remained crouched in the depression, exposing the find using ever-smaller implements, as hours passed and afternoon gave way to dusk, then dark. He kept at it late into the night, using shielded spots for light, as he unearthed an extraordinary, thousand-year-old Anasazi burial shroud that somehow had ended up at the bottom of a hundred-year-old mining debris pile.

The majority of burial shrouds fashioned by the Anasazi were crude affairs made of turkey-wing feathers tied together with
undyed yucca fiber. Only a handful of shrouds, collected across the Colorado Plateau early in the twentieth century before burial sites were declared almost entirely off-limits to archaeologists, were finer than that. They featured threadwork of plant-dyed cord that served both to hold the feathers in place and demarcate simple geometric patterns. Yet the more Chuck uncovered of the shroud, the more he recognized its workmanship as a significant step above even those well-crafted shrouds.

He dug a trench around the shroud and continued the painstaking work of uncovering it feather by feather. When midnight came and went, he grew too exhausted to continue. Afraid to let the shroud out of his sight, he spent an uncomfortable few hours sprawled at the edge of the hole before starting in on the excavation again at dawn, using a tiny paintbrush to sweep minuscule bits of dirt and ash from the feathered sides of the shroud into the surrounding trench.

In addition to the red thread that had caught his eye, other thread colors appeared as he worked—three distinct shades of green, two yellows, and an additional burnt-orange tone of red. All were sewn together in interlocking geometric designs and a descending series of fanciful twists and intricate knots that appeared to replicate, in Chuck's mind, the plunging waterfalls and fern-bedecked grottoes of the sort hidden in the farthest reaches of the canyon.

As he picked and brushed, Chuck imagined what had transpired with the burial shroud. Maybe a prospector came across the shroud wrapped around the shoulders of an Anasazi corpse somewhere deep in the canyon. Unable to resist its finery, the prospector removed the funerary covering from the corpse and hauled it out of the canyon to the South Rim. Superstition caught up with the prospector—perhaps he turned his ankle or cut his hand and became frightened that bad juju cast by the shroud had caused the accident. Rather than reunite the shroud
with its corpse deep in the canyon, he took the easy way out, burying it in the debris pile and setting the pile on fire.

A century later, Chuck worked to uncover what the prospector hadn't managed to incinerate, relying on a toothpick to remove the last of the dirt and ash bit by bit until well past noon on the second day. Chuck called in Donald when, late that afternoon, the artifact was ready to come out of the ground. Together they lifted the shroud and laid it gently on a clean, white, cotton sheet. They hoisted the sheet by its corners, creating a makeshift sling, and carried the artifact straight to the South Rim Museum, where they knocked unannounced on the door to the display-preparation room at the back of the building. Upon entering, they centered the sheet on the brightly lit preparation table in the middle of the high-ceilinged room and let the sheet corners fall away so the shroud lay alone on the table. Jonathan and Elise Marbury clutched each other, their eyes locked on the shroud. Then they gave Chuck and Donald hearty backslaps.

Weeks of study by the Marburys followed. Not until Chuck's dig was long completed and construction of the Backcountry Information Center well underway did the curators hold a press conference that amounted to a coronation ceremony for the shroud, with Chuck in attendance as an honored guest. At the press conference held outside the museum, with the shroud displayed in a glass case at their side, the Marburys took turns preening before a small phalanx of video cameras arrayed in a half-circle before them. The press conference lasted more than an hour as Jonathan and Elise worked, page by page, through the thick media packet they'd produced, stepping on each other's sentences as they provided ever more detailed observations about the artifact.

Modern-day archaeological ethics decreed that, except in rare circumstances, all human remains uncovered during digs were to be covered back up and left undisturbed. It came as no
surprise, then, that as news of the shroud's discovery spread in advance of the press conference, there were those who questioned Chuck's decision to remove the funerary item from its resting place—even though the mining-debris pile was not a burial site, and the shroud did not constitute actual human remains. Among the questioners were the members of a band of Navajo activists including Marvin Begay, then a Window Rock High School student already supporting the advanced-Anasazi-culture cause.

The activists showed up at the press conference to protest the shroud's disinterment and public display. They gathered in a cordoned-off area across the parking lot from where the Marburys made their announcement, pounding on a large wooden drum and wailing in the
Diné
tongue. The Marburys welcomed the protest. The activists' long muslin shirts, fringed leather pants, and beaded moccasins made for good television footage, and their mournful chants, used as filler between sound bites from Jonathan and Elise, gave the story of the shroud a dramatic and compelling edge.

“No such thing as bad publicity,” Elise told Chuck. To this day, she and Jonathan referred to the shroud as the most noteworthy of their displays in the South Rim Museum, where Rosie and Carmelita had seen it only yesterday.

Beneath the juniper, Chuck pushed the night-vision goggles up on his forehead and glanced at his watch. It was almost time. He steadied his breathing and kept his eyes on the parking lot. The top of the hour came and went. 10:05. 10:10. His heart rate increased with each passing minute. Why was nothing happening? He was about to leave the shelter of the forest and show himself at the locked door of the Backcountry Information Center when Janelle's phone gave the elongated buzz of an incoming, single-party text. The message was from the 505 number now familiar to Chuck.

end of rr y. 15 min. alone
, the text read.

“Dammit,” Chuck muttered in dismay—and grudging admiration. The proposed rendezvous at the information center had been a ruse, while the new, end-of-the-railroad-wye location for the exchange was, from the kidnapper's point of view, superb.

The Grand Canyon Scenic Railroad hauled train buffs in vintage passenger cars to Grand Canyon Village from the town of Williams, sixty miles south of the canyon, each day throughout the summer months. After pulling into the village to drop its load of passengers, the train turned around on a quarter-mile-long, Y-shaped length of track that extended into a thick grove of spindly ponderosas just west of Maswik Lodge.

In response to wildfires that had ravaged northern Arizona in recent years, the forest south of the canyon had been thinned to leave nothing but widely spaced ponderosas and a smattering of piñons and junipers all the way to the park boundary—save for the dense stand of young ponderosas surrounding the railroad wye. The thick grove of young pines acted as a natural sound barrier between the village and the Grand Canyon Dog Kennel on the far side of the stand of trees. The kennel took in animals for campers, hikers, backpackers, and hotel guests. Its canine boarders, held in indoor/outdoor pens, barked incessantly, leading park officials to determine that the sound barrier provided by the thickly bunched trees between the kennel and village outweighed the fire danger the grove presented.

As a result, the end of the railroad wye provided a private setting mere steps from the Maswik room in which Chuck suspected Carmelita was being held—a perfect place to make the exchange. And by waiting until the last minute to reveal the true location of the exchange, the kidnapper left Chuck no time to survey the site in advance.

He sent off a quick
okay
text in reply and set out for the wye, angling south into the thinned forest, then west. In the
viewfinder of Rachel's goggles, the trunks of the thinned forest's soaring ponderosas stood out as black bars against a green background. He approached the end of the railroad wye from the south, slowing as he entered the dense grove of young ponderosas standing between the kennel and village. To his left, the kenneled dogs offered desultory barks and yelps. The slight evening breeze directed his scent to the east, away from the kennel, masking his approach from the dogs' sensitive noses. Chuck crept past the outlines of the small trees, their narrow trunks spaced a few feet apart. He crawled forward to where, twenty yards ahead, the grove gave way to a hundred-foot-wide clearing with the terminus of the railroad wye at its center.

The tracks of the wye extended on a raised gravel bed from the village through a narrow cut in the trees to the middle of the clearing. There they ended at a stout, four-foot-high bumper constructed of steel I-beams. The clearing was lit only by the stars and the slightest hint of illumination filtering through the trees from the village.

For a minute, two minutes, three, there was no movement in the clearing. The kenneled dogs continued their halfhearted snuffles, offering nothing in the way of excited barks that might announce the arrival of the kidnapper with Carmelita in tow.

Five more minutes passed with interminable slowness.

Surely, if the kidnapper and Carmelita were here, the two would have made enough noise to alert the dogs. Had the kidnapper, like Chuck, come alone? Was he waiting in the trees for Chuck to show himself first?

Though Janelle's phone continued its double-vibration group texts, no long single buzzes announced themselves against Chuck's thigh. He held his ground for another minute until, like a change in wind direction, the kenneled dogs began to keen uncertainly. A couple of questioning woofs. A single explosive bark. Then the dogs erupted in a full chorus of crazed howls.

T
WENTY

11:30 p.m.

Chuck spotted movement, hazy green in the goggles' viewfinder, at the far side of the clearing. A human figure dislodged itself from the cover of the trees and strode across the grassy opening and up the graveled mound to the end of the railroad tracks. The howls of the dogs reached a fever pitch as the figure stopped and stood between the tracks a few feet from the heavy steel bumper that marked the wye's terminus.

Three gunshots sounded in quick succession. Each shot was accompanied by a bright muzzle flash from the edge of the trees to the right of Chuck. Unlike the muffled explosion of the pretzel bag that had sent Chuck scrambling for cover in the canyon earlier that day, each defined crack, unquestionably that of a small-caliber handgun, sliced distinctly across the clearing.