Carver checked his watch. His left hand shook. Blaming it on the copious amounts of caffeine, he shoved it in his pocket and exited the bathroom.
The eighteenth-story hallway stretched out before him. Agents and support staff were arriving, making their way to their desks and offices. None of them acknowledged him. They stole wary glances from the corners of their eyes before finding something pressing in need of their attention, be it straightening case files or a crooked mouse pad, or even plucking lint from their jackets. He couldn't blame them though, for were their situations reversed, he would have undoubtedly done the same. It didn't take very long for word to travel, especially in high profile cases where a mother and father were forced to watch their daughter slowly asphyxiating in a presumed live-feed web broadcast, hoping against hope that someone would reach her in time, only to learn she had been dead all along.
Her name had been Jasmine Rivers and she had wanted to be a dancer. She had been abducted somewhere along the half-mile route between Mountain View Middle School and her house two weeks prior, sixteen days before her thirteenth birthday.
At the end of the stoic white corridor, he veered into a shorter hallway and passed through the polished oak door at the end. The gold placard adorning it read: M. Stephen Moorehead, Special Agent-in-Charge. The receptionist rose with a curt nod and disappeared through the closed door behind her desk, her silhouette barely discernible through the tempered glass beside it.
Carver sat in the black leather chair to the right of her desk and tried to lose himself in the saltwater tank on the opposite wall to keep from imagining the conversation to come, but the jerky respirations of the lionfish and loaches spurred the onslaught of memories...a child gasping for air in the very same manner until finally slumping to the cold concrete floor.
He closed his eyes to stall the tears. When he opened them again, all trace of emotion was gone.
They say pride comes before the fall, but he had never paused long enough to contemplate the heights. Professionally, he had been invincible. Every perpetrator upon whom he had set his sights was now either behind bars or dead. Every single one of them. Even the last. He had earned the reputation of a tracker. There wasn't a trail he couldn't follow, regardless of how cold, from his humble start investigating check fraud, to interstate drug trafficking, and finally to violent crimes.
The office door opened with the click of a dry swallow.
"Special Agent Moorehead will see you now," the receptionist said, resuming her post behind the desk, attempting to busy herself until he passed.
"Please close the door behind you," Moorehead said. He gestured toward a matching set of chairs. "Have a seat."
Carver eased into the room and sat in the closest chair, facing his superior across a glass-topped desk adorned with a flat-screen monitor, keyboard, and a single framed picture facing outward: Moorehead shaking hands with the second President Bush. It was tilted at just the right angle for Carver to see his own haggard reflection. It was no wonder everyone shied away. His formerly close-cropped sandy blonde hair was a little too shaggy, his face pasty, ghostly blue eyes sunken into dark pits of weariness, echoing the fact that he hadn't slept more than a couple of hours in a stretch for weeks.
"Thank you for coming, Special Agent Carver," Moorehead said. His no nonsense manner matched his appearance. Rich brown hair slicked back and to the left. Just the right tan. Smooth shave. Chocolate eyes with lashes that may or may not have been touched with liner. Perfectly tailored Turnbull and Asser suit. The kind of man who could just as easily stand apart from a crowd as blend into it.
"Yes, sir," Carver said, looking beyond the SAC through the window. A bank of cotton candy clouds battled the sun for supremacy while a flock of pigeons swirled through the nothingness beneath. The reflection of a dark shape passed across the glass at the same time that Moorehead's eyes ticked away from his and to the corner of the room behind him.
He had recognized Moorehead's discomfort from the moment he had stepped through the door, but between being lost in self-pity and assuming the Special Agent-in-Charge's nervousness was in anticipation of the pending discussion, he had allowed his defenses to fall.
Carver turned just enough to see the man, who now stood behind him, without allowing the man to witness the momentary expression of surprise that crossed his face.
"Special Agent Carver," Moorehead said. "Allow me to introduce Special Agent Hawthorne."
His expression again composed, Carver rose from the chair and turned to find himself toe-to-toe with a man perhaps ten years his senior. They were so close that had he proffered his hand it would have impacted Hawthorne's gut. Four parallel scars ran diagonally across the man's forehead from his prematurely graying hairline over his right eye to his cheek, his eyebrow little more than a mass of scar tissue interrupted by a few swatches of hair. The hazel eye itself was fixed and focused, yet it didn't track in unison with the left. His skin was tight over his concrete jaw. His black suit had quite obviously never known a rack and was cut perfectly to hide a small arsenal underneath.
Carver stood a breath away from Hawthorne, just long enough that when he took a step back to extend his hand it wouldn't be perceived as an act of submission.
"It appears you had a rough night," Hawthorne said, shaking Carver's hand.
"I've had better."
"I'm sure you have." Hawthorne's face remained expressionless. He reached under the breast of his jacket and removed a manila folder. "I believe this could be of some assistance."
Carver took the folder and leafed through the contents. All of it information regarding a man named Tobin Schwartz. Hawthorne's eyes flashed with momentary amusement at Carver's astonishment.
"So how is it you didn't know the Rivers girl would already be dead?" Hawthorne asked.
"I assumed the feed was live."
"The eyes deceive."
"I guess I should say I
hoped
the feed was live."
"Hope is nature's veil to hide truth's nakedness. Alfred Nobel."
Carver stared at Hawthorne. Who was this guy? "Sometimes hope's the only thing that can keep a little girl alive."
"And sometimes you find hope stacked like corded wood with its severed head in its hands."
"Special Agent Carver," Moorehead interrupted. "I expect your preliminary report on my desk by noon. I trust the material Special Agent Hawthorne provided should be of assistance."
"Yes, sir," Carver said.
"Special Agent Hawthorne and I have more to discuss," Moorehead said. Carver noted his SAC never made direct eye contact with Hawthorne. "You are dismissed."
"Yes, sir," Carver said, turning to exit. He glanced back at Hawthorne as he passed through the door into the waiting room. The man made him nervous. His level of confidence lent him a pompous air. There was an aura of power surrounding him which belied his rank.
And his eyebrow...it looked like it had been slashed by a tiger. What in the world could have done that to him? Carver supposed that wasn't nearly as bad as what he imagined Hawthorne must have done to it in return.
V
Sinagua Ruins
36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona
Elliot could hardly contain herself. Her feet tapped a restless beat on the floorboard of the passenger seat, her right hand fidgeting with the door handle. Dust filled her sinuses and coated her tongue, even inside the Pathfinder with the windows rolled up. The whole car was enveloped by a pale brown haze. It lurched and bounced on the warped dirt road, but Elliot was oblivious. She stared eagerly through the windshield, spotted shrubs flying past to either side, lorded over by the enormous cereus cacti and the occasional ocotillo with its long, wispy arms and stunning scarlet blossoms. Red buttes rose from the horizon, the layers of strata clearly defined as though steps leading to the heavens.
If they had really found an Inca mummy bundle in the Sonoran Desert, the implications were staggering. Like many of the great pre-European societies, the Inca had either vanished or dispersed around the time the Spanish arrived in the New World. Elliot knew better than to believe that an entire society could simply vanish from the face of the Earth. They had to have gone somewhere, and while cultures changed and adapted through the centuries, the one true constant was how they regarded their dead. Granted, burial practices metamorphose over time, but much more slowly and without significant leaps in style. The Inca were the first to mummify their dead for public display, predating even the Egyptians. The first Black Mummies were coated with manganese, their faces hidden beneath a primitive, sculpted mask. The organs were removed and the remaining skin stuffed with straw. Incremental modifications over hundreds of years led to the ritual of bundling, whereupon the corpses were eviscerated, but the rest of the body was kept intact, folded into fetal position, and bound by rope. Jars and bowls made from hollowed gourds were then filled with the treasured possessions of the deceased, maize, cotton, charcoal, and feathers, and then wrapped inside layer after layer of intricately designed and hand-woven blankets before being committed to the ground. Various mutations of this practice had been found from southern Peru through the Andes Mountains and north into modern day Latin America and Mexico. Even before their disappearance, the Aztecs came to use similar forms of mummification, suggesting a potential northward Inca migration and possible assimilation into other civilizations as opposed to extinction. Incan jewelry and artifacts were even traded by Native American Indian tribes as far north as Montana, though modern scholars contended that whatever Inca blood reached the North American continent died with the Aztec and Maya.
Elliot, on the other hand, believed that shy of a catastrophic, mass-casualty event, there was no way to completely sever a bloodline. As an evolutionary anthropologist, she had devoted her life and career to proving as much. The exhumation of a mummy bundle in America promised the unprecedented opportunity to compare genetic markers in samples separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles, hopefully helping to not only trace Inca blood into modern society, but possibly even help formulate theories as to what may have happened to Native American tribes like the Sinagua and Goshute, which mysteriously disappeared from the Arizona-Utah region in the fifteenth century.
But she was getting ahead of herself. She needed to distance herself from her excitement and force some semblance of clinical detachment. They needed samples of bone and fabric for carbon dating. They needed to test the composition of the soil, pray for viable DNA to compare against other samples--
"You okay over there?" Dr. Mondragon asked from the driver's seat. His dark eyes settled on her momentarily before returning to the rutted road. He had been waiting for her outside the terminal at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, and they had barely paused long enough to swing through a drive-thru before heading straight out into the desert. Her bags were still in the back and she hadn't given a thought to the coming night's sleeping accommodations. After nearly two full days in transit, trying to sleep in chairs in various airports and on one flight or another, she figured when the time finally arrived, she'd probably be able to pass out on her feet if need be.
"Yeah," Elliot said, offering him a smile. He was still the attractive older man who made the undergraduates swoon: rich black hair, thoughtfully pursed lips, and Latin tan, yet the last decade had allowed the hint of gray to creep back from his temples, and his forty-six years now showed in the lines on his forehead and faint crow's feet by his eyes. "Jetlag and adrenaline are an awkward mix."
"We could always turn back and find a motel--"
"No!" she nearly shouted.
He grinned and gave her a playful wink.
Elliot tried to relax, settling back into the seat with a sigh. "Thanks again for calling me about the discovery. This could be the opportunity I've been waiting for."
"Anytime. Not many of my former students are actually working in the field, and even fewer are doing anything of significance. Believe me, the pleasure's all mine."
Elliot wanted to make small talk, she really did, but she was too tired and her mind was focused on one thing only.
"How much farther?" she asked.
"See that small rise off to the right? The crumbled walls on top are all that remains of what we speculate to be a temple built to the goddess Tihkuyiwugti from the Post-Eruptive period of Sinagua culture, circa the mid-thirteen hundreds. We divide the Sinagua culture into Pre- and Post-Eruptive based on seismic events that led to the volcanic eruption of what is now the Sunset Cone in 1064, which truly altered everything about their lives. Prior to that point, they used wooden materials to construct their dwellings, but afterward, they built all of their structures from stone. And then sometime as late as the early fourteen hundreds, they simply vanished." He glanced over at her and shrugged. "But that really didn't answer your question, did it? I tend to go on and on unless someone stops me."
She debated asking again, but the car had begun to slow and she could see a gap in the creosote where an untended road branched to the right. They veered off and continued to the southeast.
"Dr. Mondragon--"
"Please, call me Emil. We're colleagues now after all."
"Okay, Emil. What's the prevailing theory as to the disappearance of the Sinagua?"
"The current school of thought is that they migrated to the north where water and game were more plentiful and assimilated into the Anasazi ranks. Later Anasazi cliff dwellings reflect the influence of Sinaguan style."
"But the Anasazi didn't bundle their dead."
"Nope. Some of the primary burials held bodies flexed into fetal position, but the majority were secondary burials that were essentially just piles of disarticulated bones without regard to individuality. Many were even violently broken before death, leading to speculation of cannibalism."