The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries (34 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries
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“Are you kidding?” Sylvia answered. “I loved those stories. After one of her tales, I’d pull the blankets over my head and fall fast asleep.”
“You must have been suffering from oxygen deprivation. No normal child would sleep after a story like that.”
Sylvia took a sip of her Pepsi. “I didn’t have oxygen problems until she started telling us vampire stories. I slept with a sheet wrapped around my throat until I was eighteen.”
“And discovered baseball bats,” Dusty supplied.
“Right.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t choke—”
“No, Dale,”
Maureen said sharply, “that’s
not
what I mean.”
Dusty looked over at them. Maureen and Dale stood behind the table in front of Maureen’s tent. Two lines of skulls, and carefully laid out long bones, covered the fake wood veneer top. Dale had come in about sunset, the trailer full of groceries, drinks, and ice. He’d spent his years in tents. These days, he always arrived at an excavation with the old Holliday Rambler trailer in tow.
“Look here, Dale. See these fractures?” Maureen said. “They’re all on the right side of the skull.” The white lantern light profiled
her oval face, and flashed in her dark eyes. Her long black braid draped the front of her light green shirt. The silver strands glittered. “These skulls come from burials on the easternmost side of the site. There’s a pattern here. As you can see, each fracture is in a different place, as if he started at the linea temporalis, and worked his way back.”
“The site as excavated,” Dale pointed out. Deep wrinkles etched his elderly face. He wore a faded pair of jeans, and a red-and-black-checked shirt with pearl buttons. His dusty fedora—the kind Bogart always wore in the movies—sat on his head. About the same height as Maureen, his thick gray hair and mustache contrasted sharply with her dark complexion. “There may be more burials we haven’t found yet. And, besides, you can’t prove it’s a pattern.”
“Oh, yes, I can. The statistical probability of finding this order of fractures—”
“A
probability,
Maureen. Nothing more.” Dale propped his hands on his hips.
Maureen frowned at the top row of skulls. All of them had been carefully placed in Ziploc bags to avoid contamination.
“True,” Maureen said, “but based upon what I’ve seen so far, I can also hypothesize a cause. I wouldn’t do it in print. Yet. But I’d tell you, Dale.”
Dusty balanced his Guinness bottle on one knee. “I don’t get this. If someone’s killing slaves, they whack them wherever it’s convenient.”
Maureen looked up. “If you’ll grace us with your presence, Stewart, I’ll show you why that’s hogwash.”
Dusty rose and walked wide around the fire. When he stood opposite Maureen and Dale, he could see that Maureen had left the front of her tent open. Inside lay folded clothing, a microscope set up on a stack of books, and a carefully rolled sleeping bag. He unwrapped a finger from the warm beer bottle. “I’d zip my tent if I were you. This time of night, scorpions, spiders, sidewinders, anything could crawl into your bed. I’m not sure what effect they’d have on you, but I’m sure they’d think you were seriously infringing on their personal space.”
“That’s interesting, Stewart,” Maureen said, as she stepped over and zipped her doorway closed. “You can’t imagine how a human being might feel sleeping with a poisonous creature, but you know exactly how poisonous insects and reptiles feel sleeping with human beings. That sums up your character, doesn’t it?”
Sylvia snickered, and when Dusty glared at her, she pretended to be choking on Pepsi. She coughed and slapped herself on the back. “Nasty. The carbonation I mean.”
Dusty braced a hand on the corner of the table and nonchalantly gestured to the skulls with his bottle. “You were saying about the fractures, Doctor?”
Maureen walked back to the table. “I’ve arranged these skulls in order of the burials, moving east to west across the site. Notice that the first two skulls show cranial depression fractures on both sides and in two different planes.”
“I see that,” Dusty said. “So?”
“
So,
the killer didn’t know what he was doing. The blows were random. But look at these.” Maureen tapped the bags that held the fourth and fifth skulls. “These women were only struck on the right side of the skull, and these three”—She touched skulls in the bottom row—“were only struck on the left side of the head.”
Dusty’s blue eyes narrowed. “Your point?”
Maureen gazed at him as if he must be stupid. “It’s right in front of your face, Stewart. Don’t you see it?”
He studied the skulls more closely. The numerous dents, and radiating fractures, shone oddly yellowish in the firelight. “I see battered skulls. Is there something more here?”
Maureen exhaled hard. “After the first two women, the blows are calculated, strategic.” She hesitated, as if waiting for him to supply the rest. When Dusty just stared at her, Maureen said, “The killer was systematically testing brain function, Stewart.”
Dale’s bushy gray brows went up. The pearl buttons on his shirt flashed as he turned. “You mean the murderer wanted to see what would happen if he struck the head in different places?”
“Of course, he did. Look at—”
“Nonsense,” Dusty objected. “You’re presuming these burials were deliberately laid out from east to west. We have no way of
determining their order. This skull with fractures on both sides may have been the last one buried, not the first. It’s more likely that the guy just had the chance to bash both of these women’s heads before they could run.”
“I’ll grant you that’s possible,” Maureen said, “but I don’t think so.”
Dusty threw up his hands. “Good God, is this what physical anthropologists call science? I’d be hounded out of the archaeological profession if I openly spouted such baseless garbage.”
Sylvia cupped a hand to her mouth, and called, “Let’s not forget those who have tried!”
“And failed!” Dusty called. “Jealousy is rampant in this profession, Sylvia. When you’re at the top you have to expect a few coup attempts.”
In a curt voice, Maureen said, “Dale, I know I’ve already given you a list of the tests I want performed on these remains, but I want you to add another one.”
“All right, Maureen. What?”
“I want a pollen analysis done of the nasal cavities. There’s some desiccated tissue in a few of these skulls. If we—”
“We have a limited budget, Doctor,” Dusty replied.
“I want to know what time of year they died, Stewart. If specimen number one has chimaja pollen in her nostrils, and specimen number two has sage pollen, we will know one died in the spring, and one in the autumn. Get it?”
He blinked. “Ah. You mean because that’s when chimaja and sage bloom. Sure. I get it. Why is that important?”
“It’s important because it might help us to determine the order in which they were interred. Is this coming into focus for you?”
“Oh, yes,” he said with exaggerated interest. “Absolutely, your worshipfulness. It’s just that the picture I see is a lot different from the one you see.” He folded his arms, and braced his beer bottle on his left elbow. “You’re hypothesizing a prehistoric serial murderer loose among the Anasazi, and I’m saying these women were all tortured by their slave masters and thrown into pits when they were no longer useful. I see it fine. You’re the one who’s myopic.”
Maureen lifted her hands as if in surrender. “If you’re going to
stick with this slave hypothesis, we should have the bone collagen tested for stable-carbon and nitrogen isotopes.”
“What in the name of God is that?”
Dale shoved his fedora back on his head. “Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios,” he explained, “can tell us what types of plants and animals the people were—or were not—eating.”
“Be serious, Dale,” Dusty said. “I can think of a dozen alternate hypotheses as to why one woman’s diet would be different from another’s. Especially if the doctor is right and they really were buried in sequence. Food shifts occur during different times of year.”
Maureen braced her hands on the table and leaned toward him. “If there’s testable collagen in these bones, Stewart, I’ll be able to tell you whether these women were eating watery corn gruel or a lavish diet of deer, turkey, and rabbit. You don’t think masters would feed their slaves the good stuff, do you?”
Wind gusted through camp, tousling Dusty’s blond hair. He shifted his weight to his opposite foot. “No.” He narrowed an eye. “You really can tell that?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.” She straightened up.
Dale watched them with shining eyes.
Maureen lowered her voice. “I also think I know where to find evidence to support my serial murderer hypothesis.”
“Yeah? Where?” Dusty asked.
Maureen pointed to the site. “If I’m right, there’s another burial between the Haze child and the woman in unit N4W6.” Firelight flickered over her face as she turned to peer at Dusty. “And she has a depression fracture just posterior to the left coronal suture, right over Broca’s Area of the brain.”
“The what?”
Maureen lifted a slender finger and tapped the side of Dusty’s temple, just ahead of his ear. “There, Stewart.”
“Hmm,” Dale said. He thoughtfully stroked his mustache. “It would be interesting to test your hypothesis. That area is, however, outside the impact area. Maggie?” he called. “What do you think?”
She massaged her forehead. “I don’t know. Let me think about it. One pit dug outside of the impact area on the instructions of the Indian monitor is annoying but understandable. Digging another
just to prove a hypothesis is going to rankle the Department of Interior bigwigs. The DOI motto is: ‘Research is a waste of taxpayer dollars. We do land management, not science.’”
“But the pit I want dug is closer to the impact area than the Haze child unit that Stewart dug,” Maureen said. “Why can’t we just excavate the gap between?”
Sylvia called, “I agree! Let’s dig it. I think Maureen’s right. This is the work of a serial murderer.”
Dusty turned toward Sylvia. A crushed Pepsi can lay at her feet. She had a Coors Light balanced on her chair arm. Brown hair straggled around her face. “Yeah? Why?”
“Well, think about it. A few blows to the head is pretty amateurish torture. I mean, the Apaches used to build fires in people’s stomachs.”
Dusty’s mouth quirked. “Did you have a point?”
“Well, yeah, boss man. I mean, look at the black slave cemeteries in the South. Some of those people were beat up really bad, and over a long period. Last year, I read about two burials, a man and a woman, who were laid side-by-side behind slave cabins in Mississippi. During their lives, they’d both had their arms broken, their legs broken, several ribs broken. The woman’s neck had even been broken once. Now,
that’s
slave torture. What torturer would just hit his slaves in the head?”
Dusty walked back, and sank into his chair before the fire. “If you want to talk about torture, nobody can hold a candle to the good doctor’s people, the Iroquois.” Dusty aimed his bottle at her. “They made torture an art. It lasted for days. I remember one entry in the
Jesuit Relations
that described the capture of a British trader. They hacked the guy apart a piece at a time. In the middle of the torture, they stuck his hands in the fire, to cook the flesh, then called the special children forward to chew the meat off the bones. As a reward for good behavior, you understand. Can you imagine watching smiling children eat you alive?”
Sylvia looked fascinated. She gripped her Coors in both hands, and said, “What I can really imagine is all the other kids in the longhouse.” In a whining voice, she said, “Oh, Dad,
he’s
got one,
I
want one.”
The fire suddenly spluttered and sparks popped. A haze of smoke rose into the night sky.
Dusty grimaced. “You are a sick woman.”
“No,” Maureen corrected. “She just doesn’t know much about the Iroquois.” She gave it the French pronunciation: Irokwah. “They were matrilineal, Sylvia. The kids would have said, ‘Oh,
Mom,
he’s got one, I want one.’”
Sylvia’s green eyes widened. “Hey, thanks for telling me. That’s the kind of mistake that could get me killed in the wrong circles.”
Dale loudly said, “Getting back to the burials, Maureen. Tell me about the irregularities I see in the squamous portion of this frontal bone. Osteophytes?”
Dusty knew the skull Dale meant. It was the burial Maureen had commented on when she’d first arrived. The crushed skull had come out of the ground in three pieces. After they’d bagged them, Maureen had spent hours looking at them through a magnifying glass. The entire inner table of the skull undulated with white lumps.
Maureen said, “This a classic case of
hyperostosis frontalis interna.
”
Dusty translated, “Which means she had one hell of an endocrine imbalance.”
Dale gave Dusty a penetrating look. “Maureen must have told you that. You’d never think of it yourself.” He turned to Maureen.

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