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Praise for the National Park Mystery Series

“Graham’s winning fourth National Park mystery uses Yosemite as a backdrop for a host of shady dealings and dangerous power struggles. This zippy tale uses lush descriptions of natural beauty and twisted false leads to create an exciting, rewarding puzzle.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“As always, the highlight of Graham’s National Park Mystery Series

is his extensive knowledge of the parks system, its lands,

and its people.”

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Intriguing . . . Graham has a true talent for describing the Rockies’ flora and fauna, allowing his readers to feel almost as if they were trekking the park themselves.”

—MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE

“Graham has crafted a multilevel mystery that plumbs the emotions of greed and jealousy.”

—DURANGO HERALD

“Graham has created a beautifully balanced book, incorporating intense action scenes, depth of characterization, realistic landscapes, and historical perspective.”

—REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE

“Masterfully plotted in confident prose, Arches Enemy is not only an adventurous and fascinating mystery you can’t put down, it delivers important insight on ancestral cultures and their sacred lands.

Scott Graham proves yet again that he is one of the finest.”

—CHRISTINE CARBO, author of

A Sharp Solitude: A Glacier Mystery

“A winning blend of archaeology and intrigue, Graham’s series turns our national parks into places of equal parts

beauty, mystery, and danger.”

—EMILY LITTLEJOHN, author of

Shatter the Night: A Detective Gemma Monroe Mystery

“One part mystery, one part mysticism, one part mayhem—

and all parts thrilling.”

—CRAIG JOHNSON, New York Times bestselling author of

Land of Wolves: A Longmire Mystery

“Filled with murder and mayhem, jealousy and good detective work—an exciting, nonstop read.”

—ANNE HILLERMAN, New York Times bestselling author of

The Tale Teller: A Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito Novel

“Only the best novelists have the gift of propelling readers into the middle of artfully crafted adventures, and with Yosemite Fall, Scott Graham once again proves he belongs in the very first rank.”

—JEFF GUINN, New York Times bestselling author

of The Road to Jonestown

“Engrossing . . . a glorious portrait of one of the most compelling landscapes on earth. Graham clearly knows the territory.

A topnotch read.”

—WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER,

New York Times bestselling author of This Tender Land

“What an extraordinary ride! You know when a reader says they couldn’t put the book down? Yellowstone Standoff is one of those rare books . . . a tour de force.”

—WIN BLEVINS, New York Times bestselling author of Going Home

“Yellowstone Standoff takes man versus nature—and man tangled up with nature—right to the brink of wild suspense.”

—MARK STEVENS, Colorado Book Award-winning

author of Lake of Fire: An Allison Coil Mystery

“One of the most engaging mysteries I’ve read in a long while . . . delivers it all and then some.”

—MARGARET COEL, New York Times bestselling

author of Winter’s Child: A Wind River Mystery

“Get ready for leave-you-breathless high country southwestern adventure.”

—MICHAEL McGARRITY, New York Times bestselling

author of Residue: A Kevin Kerney Mystery

MESA VERDE VICTIM

Also by Scott Graham

in the National Park Mystery Series

Canyon Sacrifice

Mountain Rampage

Yellowstone Standoff

Yosemite Fall

Arches Enemy

A National Park Mystery

by Scott Graham

TORREY HOUSE PRESS

Salt Lake City • Torrey

MESA VERDE VICTIM

This is a work of fiction set in a real place. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First Torrey House Press Edition, June 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Scott Graham

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-23-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-24-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952009

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Cover art “Intersecting Planes” by David Jonason,

www.davidjonason.com

Interior design by Rachel Davis

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are in homelands of Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.

About the Cover

Acclaimed Southwest landscape artist David Jonason painted the Mesa Verde scene that appears on the cover of Mesa Verde Victim.

Combining a keenly observant eye and inspiration drawn from a number of twentieth-century art movements, including Cubism, Futurism, Precisionism, and Art Deco, David Jonason achieves a uniquely personal vision through his vivid, dreamlike oil paintings of the American Southwest. Jonason connects on canvas the traditional arts and crafts of the Southwest’s native tribes with the intricate patterns in nature known as fractals. “For me as a painter,” he says, “it’s a reductive and simplifying process of finding the natural geometries in nature, just as Navajo weavers and Pueblo potters portray the natural world through geometric series of zigzags, curves, and other patterns.”

“Intersecting Planes” is used by permission of The Jonason Studio, www.davidjonason.com.

To the many archaeologists working to preserve Ancestral Puebloan history across the Southwest, with gratitude

Prologue

Mesa Verde, Colorado

September 1891

Joey Cannon sliced through the roof of the hidden vault with the blade of his shovel. At first sight, the concealed chamber looked coffin-sized.

The sixteen-year-old stood on the uncovered mud-and-thatch roof of the buried vault. He was neck deep in the crater he’d dug over the last several hours, having deepened and widened the cavity by turns, tossing shovelfuls of soil and pebbles over his shoulder in dusty arcs. It was long past nightfall, his kerosene lantern low on fuel and sputtering. Sweat streamed in runnels down his back. His palms were blistered, the muscles of his arms and shoulders crying out for relief.

He had until midnight, not a second longer, to unearth the rumored cache. If, after centuries in hiding, the artifacts waited as Gustaf Nordenskiöld insisted, and if Joey reached them in time, he was to wrap them in cloth, stow them in his saddlebags, and set off for the train station thirty miles to the east, descending the rocky trail from the dig site, changing horses at the Mancos livery in the pre-dawn darkness, and galloping over Mancos Divide to reach Durango by mid-morning. There, he would add the treasures to the boxcar already loaded with objects gathered from Mesa Verde by Gustaf over the last two months. Joey would collect the reward pledged by the Swedish explorer-scientist, and the train would chuff away to Denver, the artifacts bound ultimately for Stockholm.

Joey paused to wipe his brow with the sleeve of his coarse work shirt. The pungent scent of piñon and juniper wafted off the clifftop above. The hour was late, the minutes ticking past. He tucked the tail of his shirt into his canvas work pants and straightened his suspenders, thumbing them over his shoulders. He took a bite of dried meat from the strip of jerky in his pocket, resettled his bandanna over his nose, and resumed the process of breaking into the vault, bent on discovering the hidden cache in time—and thereby setting a new course for his life.

He’d toiled since childhood on his family’s root-vegetable farm. The small plot of land on the banks of the Mancos River was to him a place of endless tedium. Plant, irrigate, weed, repeat, year after monotonous year, with little opportunity for formal schooling. For as long as he could remember, he’d lived with the desire to pursue a genuine education, something, anything, beyond the bits of writing he managed for himself at night, by lantern light, after evening chores and before he fell exhausted into the narrow bed in the loft he shared with his younger brother Carl.

Local girls ignored him, batting their eyes instead at the wealthy sons of ranchers and store owners. Soon enough, however, the girls would know their mistake. The money he’d already earned from Gustaf plus the sizable bonus the Swede promised for the secret cache of artifacts would enable Joey to buy a ticket to Denver and find a job in the big city, there to pursue the studies the money would afford him.

Brown-haired, mustachioed Gustaf, in his early twenties, had stopped by the Cannon farm several weeks ago. Seated on his gleaming roan, the Swede had inquired of Joey’s father in stilted English as to the availability of a laborer unafraid of hard work. Joey’s father offered up his oldest son for a share of Joey’s earnings. As Joey loped away on Gustaf’s extra mount toward the green mesa looming two thousand feet above the Cannon farm, he directed a triumphant glance back at his siblings, chief among them Carl, a year younger and equally determined to escape the hardscrabble life he shared with Joey in the Mancos Valley.

In Gustaf’s employ, Joey worked his way across the plateau with the three other members of the Swede’s hired excavation team, moving from one ancient, abandoned, stone-and-

mortar housing complex to the next. Prehistoric people had constructed the multistory dwellings deep in the plateau’s canyons over many centuries, until the people had deserted the mesa en masse for unknown reasons, leaving an abundance of their worldly goods behind. With his fellow workers, Joey collected and packaged in straw-filled crates the ancient people’s abandoned possessions—finely crafted clay pots and mugs; clothing and jewelry, including beaded turquoise necklaces, deerskin blankets, and turkey-feather shawls; projectile points, knife blades, and hide scrapers flaked from obsidian; and spiritual fetishes and children’s toys fashioned from wood and clay to resemble rabbits, ravens, great horned owls, and bighorn sheep. Joey and the other hired hands also removed human remains interred in midden piles below the abandoned complexes—perfectly preserved skulls and full skeletons of adults, and the corpses of infants wrapped in blankets and tucked in reed baskets.

Gustaf rode back and forth between the plateau and his suite in Durango’s Strater Hotel, assessing the team’s progress during his visits to the remote canyons that cut straight down into the top of the sandstone plateau, and communicating by letter and telegram while in Durango with his primary financier, his father, the famed baron and noted Arctic explorer Adolf Eric Nordenskiöld.

At the height of the collection process, Gustaf was detained in his room at the Strater, accused by local authorities of the theft and attempted removal of cultural items from the United States. But the young Swede’s wealth and connections resulted in his release after only a few hours. His succinct telegram home, the contents of which he shared with Joey, said it all: “Much Trouble Some Expense No Danger.”

Brief though it was, Gustaf’s detainment spurred him to move up the departure date for his return to Europe—and to single out Joey for the solitary mission in the heretofore unexplored canyon on the far west side of the plateau, culminating in tonight’s hurried dig.

Midnight was less than an hour away when Joey broke through a layer of dried mud and intertwined sticks with the tip of his shovel, punching into the chamber at the bottom of the depression he’d dug over the preceding hours. He twisted the shovel, ripping apart the thatched twigs to create a blade-wide opening through the roof of the vault beneath his feet. He squatted and reached through the opening into the concealed chamber, his arm disappearing to his elbow. Sweeping his hand back and forth, he captured only air in his extended fingers. He lay on his stomach and extended the full length of his arm through the opening. He grinned as he swung his arm through the stale air of the vault. This had to be the secret chamber Gustaf sought.

Joey’s fingers struck something stone-like standing upright in the hidden space. The unseen artifact toppled over with a quiet clink.

He withdrew his arm. The stale odor of must seeped from the vault. Thatched willow branches, sheered by his shovel blade, formed a ragged edge around the mouth of the opening. He gripped the thatched branches and tugged. A portion of plaited sticks and dried mud the size of a dinner plate came away in his hands. He tore off additional chunks of sticks and mud.

He directed his lantern through the enlarged opening and into the chamber. The toppled artifact lay on the dusty floor of the vault beneath him, amid a dozen more of the objects lined upright on the bottom of the small room. He drew an exhilarated breath. The reward and the new life it promised him were nearly within his grasp.

He placed his lamp in the dirt at the bottom of the depression and swung his feet into the opening to the chamber, preparing to shimmy into the secret vault. Clods of dirt rolled past him, tumbling down the side of the cavity he’d dug into the floor of the alcove, and the sharpened blade of an ax struck the top of his head. The ax cleaved his skull, parting bone and brain matter in a powerful, deadly blow.

Joey’s killer slid to the bottom of the depression and withdrew the blade of the ax from Joey’s head with a slippery snick. Joey’s body slumped sideways and lay twitching. The man tugged Joey’s feet from the chamber opening and dropped into the hidden vault in Joey’s place, crouching with his leather satchel over his shoulder and Joey’s flickering lantern in his hand.

The lantern illuminated the low-roofed vault lined with the priceless artifacts sought by Gustaf—and others. The man filled his satchel with the objects and hoisted himself out of the chamber. He lifted Joey’s inert body to a sitting position and shoved. The teenager’s corpse slithered through the opening and flopped backward to the floor of the chamber with a muted thump.

The man wedged the plate-sized portions of sticks and mud back over the opening, resealing the secret vault. He climbed out of the neck-deep depression and set about refilling it with Joey’s shovel. Dirt and pebbles poured down the sides of the cavity and gathered atop the closed chamber. The stick-and-mud thatching, back in place over the opening to the vault, disappeared beneath the cascading debris as the man transformed the chamber, shovelful by shovelful, into Joey’s unmarked grave.

1

I hate this, I hate this, I hate this!” Rosie Ortega screeched. She squeezed her eyes shut, her hands gripping the rope affixed to the seat harness belted around her plump waist as she descended on auto-belay to the base of the indoor rock-climbing wall.

Chuck Bender wrapped her in a bear hug. “You did fine up there,” he assured her.

“No, I didn’t,” she cried, stomping her foot on the padded gym floor. Tears pooled in her eyes. She wriggled from Chuck’s grasp and tore at the climbing rope knotted at her waist. “I barely got off the ground.”

Other climbers in the gym averted their gazes as Chuck helped twelve-year-old Rosie free herself from the rope.

“Carm’s so good,” she blubbered, her lower lip trembling. She pressed her knuckles to her walnut-brown eyes. “I hate her,” she said to the floor.

“I heard that,” fourteen-year-old Carmelita called from where she clung to molded-resin holds thirty feet overhead, working an inverted route extending across the ceiling from the top of the wall.

Chuck craned his head at her. “Your sister didn’t mean it.”

“Yes, I did,” Rosie declared, looking up. “Well, the good part, anyway.”

“That much would be right,” Chuck told her. He massaged the back of her neck below her mane of curly black hair billowing from the bottom of her climbing helmet. “Your sister is good at this sport. Which is a problem for me, too.”

Rosie’s watery eyes widened. “For you?”

“I’ve always been a rock climber for the fun of it. Nowadays, though, climbing is a big-time sport, with everybody making it into a massive competition. And, like you said, it just so happens Carm’s pretty good at it.”

“Because she’s so skinny,” Rosie pouted.

“Just because,” Chuck said. “But you and I have to remember we’re climbing for fun when we’re messing around down low on the wall.”

She stomped her foot again. “I want to do something else for fun. Something that’s just for me.”

“Hmm.” Chuck cocked his head at her and closed one eye. “I kinda like that idea. Maybe you and I can come up with something different for you to do while Carm’s spending all her free time here at the gym, zipping around the ceiling like a spider monkey.”

“I’m not a monkey,” Carmelita exclaimed from above. Her dark ponytail hung long and straight down toward the floor from the back of her helmet. “That’s racist.”

Chuck grinned up at her. “I said you climb like one. Sheesh.”

Carmelita lost her grip and fell a few feet from the ceiling before her rope caught her. “You’re so culturally inappropriate,” she admonished Chuck as she swung back and forth beneath the holds.

She shook out her chalked hands while the auto-belay engaged and the rope automatically unspooled, lowering her to the ground.

Chuck fixed her with a teasing smile. “Let me get this straight. You’re labeling me a culturally inappropriate white man even though I married a Latina woman and have been stepfather to her two hotshot Latina daughters for the last five years?”

“O . . . M . . . G,” Carmelita announced breathily. “I can’t believe you just called Rosie and me ‘hot.’ That’s so totally and completely wrong.”

“I didn’t say ‘hot.’ I said ‘hotshot.’”

The corner of Carmelita’s mouth twisted. “It still has the word ‘hot’ in it.”

Chuck sighed but maintained his grin. “The two of you are handsome. How’s that?”

“Better. Still judgmental, though.”

“I’m just trying to let you know how proud I am of you.” He spread his hands. “But I can’t win, can I?”

“Nope.”

He glanced at the clock mounted on the wall above the climbing gym’s front desk. “It’s about time to head for home. Mamá will be coming off her shift in a little while. I need to get started on a culturally inappropriate dinner for us.” He dipped his graying head at Carmelita and smiled. “How about tacos?”

She groaned. “You’re awful.”

“Grrracias,” he said, giving the r an extra-hard trill.

“You’re . . . you’re . . . incorrigible.” She added a matching trill to the double r of the English word, offering up the slightest of smiles.

Chuck put his chalked hands to his stomach, leaving matching white prints on his blue T-shirt. “Got me.” He pointed at her shiny black climbing tights. “The way you use such big words, you’re getting to be too smart for your britches, you know that?”

Carmelita’s skin-hugging tights rose to her waist. Her burgundy top featured the Durango Climbing Team logo across its snug chest. The top was sleeveless and cut high across her midriff, baring her flat stomach and the smooth skin of her shoulders.

“That’s my plan for world domination—using my prodigious intelligence to rule the planet,” she said.

“Ooo, scary,” said Chuck. “But I imagine you’ll hold off taking over the world until later this afternoon, after your all-

important run, right?” He reached behind her head and gave her ponytail a yank.

“Hey,” she protested, ducking away. “You’ll get my hair all chalky.”

“Lo siento,” he apologized. “What are you up to now, twenty miles a day?”

“Five. Well, sometimes seven. All on dirt trails to protect my knees. Coach Tania says the climbing-running combo is good—upper body, lower body.”

“Sounds like you’re totally dialed in, as per usual. All that’s left, it would seem, is for you to take over the world and dial things in for everybody else on the planet, too.”

Chuck crossed the room to his soft-sided gear duffle. The navy bag rested on the floor next to Rosie’s purple duffle and Carmelita’s burgundy climbing-team bag. He toweled the chalk off his hands, pulled his fleece top over his head, and changed from climbing shoes into sneakers. He retrieved his phone from the bag. Its screen lit up with text messages the instant he turned it on.

WHAT IS HAPPENING AT YOUR PLACE??? read the most recent text, from Beatrice Roberts, the elderly widow who lived next door to the house Chuck had picked up in Durango’s historic Grid district a decade ago, several years before marrying Janelle Ortega, the then-single mother to Carmelita and Rosie, after a whirlwind romance.

He scanned the other texts in backward time order.

The second-most recent: If this is the phone of Chuck Bender, please contact the Durango Police Department immediately.

Again, minutes earlier: If this is the phone of Chuck Bender, please contact the Durango Police Department immediately.

Ten minutes before that, an initial message from Beatrice: Chuck are you there? Do you know anything about the sirens?

Shoving his phone into the pocket of his climbing sweats and waving for the girls to follow, Chuck sprinted for the parking lot.

* * *

He sped south on Main Avenue minutes later, hands locked on the wheel of his big, blocky, Bender Archaeological crew-cab pickup truck. Carmelita sat opposite him in the front seat. Rosie hunched forward on the rear bench seat behind

Carmelita, peering past her sister’s shoulder. It was midday, the second Saturday in October, the cloudless sky brilliant blue, the temperature edging into the low seventies, the leaves on the cottonwoods lining the primary thoroughfare through town golden yellow.

“What’s going on?” Carmelita demanded as Chuck blasted through a caution light well above the speed limit.

“We’re about to find out,” he said through gritted teeth.

Turning off Main into the Grid neighborhood, he slung the pickup around tight corners, left, right, left again.

“Whoo-hoo!” Rosie cheered from the rear seat, flopping from side to side with the swerving truck.

Chuck slid around a final corner and roared onto their block. Several black-and-white Durango Police Department sport-utility vehicles crowded the street ahead. The police SUVs were parked at haphazard angles in front of the house, their bar lights flashing.

Chuck slammed the truck to a stop in the middle of the street, hopped out, and ran for the house.

Janelle had left home at five that morning for a fill-in paramedic shift with the Durango Fire and Rescue Department, taking the place of a full-timer who needed the day off. Her shift wasn’t over yet—but what if she’d returned home for some unknown reason while he and the girls were at the climbing gym?

He charged up the sidewalk. A twenty-something police officer in uniform blues, brass badge gleaming on her chest, stepped off the covered front porch of the house. The officer’s skin was the color of mocha, her dark brown eyes lined with black makeup.

“Slow down,” she warned Chuck, raising her left hand as she crossed the front yard. Her right hand hovered above the pistol holstered at her waist.

Inscribed on a tag beneath her badge, her last name, Anand, identified her as East Indian, an anomaly among Durango’s mostly white citizenry interspersed with Latinos and Native Americans.

“This is my house,” Chuck said as he reached her on the sidewalk, aiming his chin at the one-and-a-half-story brick Victorian behind the young police officer. His throat was tight, his breath constricted. “My wife.”

“You’re Mr. Bender?”

“Yes.”

“ID.”

“What?”

“I need to see some identification.”

He slapped his hands to the side pockets of his sweats. “I left my wallet in my bag in the truck.”

“You’ll have to go get it.”

“Not a chance.” Chuck shoved his way past the officer.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, following him.

He yanked his phone from his pocket. Its screen glowed with the texts from the police department. He waved it behind him at her as he walked. “I came as soon as I saw these.”

She huffed as she trailed him across the front yard. When he neared the porch, she said, “Not that way. Around back.”

Changing course, Chuck put his shoulder to the faded wooden gate at the side of the house, slamming it open and striding along the narrow passage beside the head-high wooden fence separating the house from Beatrice’s house next door.

“What can you tell me?” Chuck demanded over his shoulder to the officer.

“I’m on perimeter.” She jogged to keep up. “You’ll have to talk to the others.”

They reached the back of the house. A single-car garage filled one corner of the compact backyard. In the other corner, the branches of an apple tree extended over a fallow, raised-bed garden.

Between the garage and garden bed, the gate that led through the back fence to the rear alley stood open. On the cracked asphalt of the alleyway, framed by the open gate and covered by a white sheet, lay what was, based on its shape, clearly a human body.

Chuck came up short in the middle of the yard, staring through the gate.

The body lay on its back. Red stains spotted the sheet, which stretched over the human form from head to toe. A sizable stomach pressed the sheet upward at the middle.

Chuck quaked at the sight of the corpse, his legs growing weak with a combination of relief and horror. The dead body was not Janelle; it did not have her slender frame. But who was it?

He resumed walking toward the back gate, his eyes locked on the body. A uniformed police officer stepped from the alley into the yard and swung the gate closed behind her, blocking his view.

The officer was Sandra Kingsley. Like Chuck, she was in her mid-forties. She was tall and willowy, her sandy brown hair falling from her Durango Police Department ball cap to her chin in a blunt-cut bob. “It’s okay, Chuck,” she said, stopping in front of him. “It’s not her.”

“Who is it, then?”

She hesitated. “I can’t say.”

“But you know,” he said in response to her hesitation.

She tipped her head forward, the brim of her cap momentarily hiding her luminous, green eyes.

“I know who it is, too, don’t I?” Chuck asked.

She nodded again, a quick dip of her dimpled chin. Her gaze moved past him to the house, where another officer exited the back door. The officer was even younger than Officer Anand. Peach fuzz covered his upper lip and acne pocked his cheeks. A shock of auburn hair showed beneath the visor of his ball cap.

The boyish officer descended the three wooden steps from the rear of the house, the screen door swinging shut behind him. He hustled across the backyard and through the rear gate.

Sandra said to Chuck, “It appears everything started in your house.”

“In my . . . in our . . . ?”

“In your study, to be exact. It’s a mess in there.” She fixed him with unblinking eyes. “Did you have anything in there someone might have wanted?”

He glanced past her in the direction of the body in the alley beyond the fence. “I’m an archaeologist. What could I possibly have that would be cause for that?”

“You’ve made some big discoveries over the years, headline-

making stuff. Everybody in town knows it.”

“I never keep anything of value in my house, ever.”

“It would seem someone thought otherwise.”

“Can I see?”

She pursed her lips, frowning. “You can’t go inside, but I guess you could peek in the window. Maybe you’ll spot something.”

Chuck climbed the steps to the back door. Gripping the doorframe, he leaned sideways and peered through the window into the small room at the back of the house that served as his office. Inside the room, his scarred oak desk was swept clean. Spiral notebooks, photographs, a desk lamp, notecards, and pens and pencils that normally sat on the desktop or filled the desk drawers were scattered across the hardwood floor, along with his laptop and monitor.

Opposite the desk, the drawers to his two file cabinets were pulled open, their contents strewn on the floor with his desk items. A framed picture of Janelle and the girls had been lifted from the wall and lay on the floor as well.

Chuck cursed. He pushed himself upright from the window. “You’re right,” he said with a shake of his head as he returned to Sandra in the yard. “It’s a mess in there.”

“Somebody was looking for something.”

“Obviously.”

“And . . . ?”

“I have no idea. My laptop is still there. You’d think they’d at least have taken that.”

“Think harder. It would appear somebody thought something in your study was worth killing over.”

He pivoted at the cry of “Chuck!” from Janelle.

She rounded the rear corner of the house and rushed to him.

“Thank God, you’re okay,” Chuck said to her as they embraced.

She stepped back. She wore her Durango Fire and Rescue

uniform—navy shirt and black cargo pants with large side pockets. Her smooth, olive face was lightly made up. Her black hair, long and straight like Carmelita’s, was corralled in a bun at the back of her neck. Her cheeks were drawn and sallow. A sheen of perspiration shone on her forehead.

“Carm and Rosie are out front,” she said. “The officer wouldn’t let them come back here with me.”

Chuck’s eyes strayed to the rear fence. “For good reason.”

She followed his look. “I heard he’s in the alley.”

“He?”

Sandra ticked a forefinger back and forth in warning, but Janelle continued nonetheless.

“It’s all over the police radios,” she said to Chuck. “That’s why Mark—” her shift supervisor, Mark Chapman “—sent me home.”

“I’m glad he did.”

With the girls growing older and increasingly independent, Janelle had been accepting every offer of fill-in shifts that came her way, seeking to impress Mark and the other Durango Fire and Rescue supervisors enough to win the next full-time position that opened up with the department.

She took one of Chuck’s hands in hers. Her voice shook. “It’s Barney, Chuck. They’re saying it’s Barney.”

“Barney? That’s insane. Are you sure?”

Barney Keller was a senior archaeologist for Southwest

Archaeology Enterprises, one of several firms in town that, like Chuck’s one-man company, performed site surveys as well as full-on digs throughout the archaeologically rich Four Corners region surrounding Durango, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah met.

Chuck had worked with Barney on a number of combined-

firm contracts over the years. But Barney was more than just an occasional work partner to Chuck. He was one of Chuck’s few close friends, a harmless teddy bear of a guy, jovial and kindhearted. In the years since Chuck had become husband to Janelle and stepdad to Carmelita and Rosie, he credited Barney’s wise counsel with helping him tamp down the hot-headedness he’d displayed all too often during his many years as a bachelor. Barney and his wife, Audrey, had raised a son, Jason, in

Durango. Jason was in his mid-twenties now, living in Denver.

“Barney doesn’t have an enemy in the world,” Chuck said.

“He couldn’t,” Janelle agreed. “Plus . . .” Her voice trailed off. She let go of Chuck’s hand and shot a sidelong glance at Sandra before looking away.

Chuck knew what Janelle was thinking. “Plus, Clarence,” he finished for her. He turned to Sandra. “Assuming that really is Barney Keller out there, I want you to know two things. First, to repeat: no one would ever want to hurt Barney. Everybody loves him, me included.”

He paused.

“Second?” Sandra urged.

“Second is that Clarence Ortega, Janelle’s brother, has been doing a lot of work with Barney over the last few weeks.”

Chuck whirled to Janelle. Clarence’s rotund frame matched that of the corpse beneath the sheet in the back alley. “Have you talked to him? Is he okay?”

Janelle tapped her phone, stowed in the side pocket of her pants. “I called him. He’s at his apartment. He’s fine.”

Chuck pivoted to Sandra. “Barney’s company, Southwest Archaeology Enterprises, has won just about every contract in the area the last few months. They’ve taken on a number of new workers as a result. Clarence is one of them.”

“I’m sorry I can’t confirm what your wife has heard,” Sandra said to Chuck. “But any information her brother can provide will be helpful.”

“Which means,” Janelle said, leaning toward Sandra, “you haven’t arrested anyone yet.”

Sandra lowered her head, an almost imperceptible dip of her chin, but kept her gaze on Chuck. “I can’t officially comment.”

Janelle’s jaw muscles tightened. “Of course, you can’t.” She clapped a hand to her mouth, her eyes growing big and round. “I just remembered,” she said. “Barney’s wife, Audrey.”

She reached for her phone.

Sandra lifted her hand to Janelle and said to Chuck, “We’ll get someone over to the house. It’s better to tell her in person.” She lowered her hand. “We’ll need to do a round of questions with you and your wife before—”

“This might help, Kingsley,” a police officer broke in as he entered the yard from the back alley. The officer closed the gate behind him. He was in his thirties, as fit and trim as Chuck but broader at the shoulders. Unlike Chuck’s clean-shaven face, a clipped brown mustache covered the officer’s upper lip. Prominent cheekbones and a squared-off jaw gave him a boxy look.

The police officer carried a ziplock evidence bag. He raised the clear plastic bag as he stopped at Sandra’s side, facing Chuck and Janelle. A three-inch-by-five-inch picture postcard, bent and crumpled, rested in the bottom of the bag. The officer flipped the bag so the creased front of the postcard faced outward. Fresh splotches of blood, bright red in the afternoon sunlight, stained the front of the card.

Chuck gawked at the card, his mouth falling open.

“I take it you recognize this,” the officer said, his eyes on Chuck.

“It’s from my study.”

“Any idea why a murder victim would be clutching it in his hands?”

“None whatsoever.”

“What’s it a picture of?”

Chuck pointed at the front of the card. “You mean, who.”

2

Half an hour later, their house declared off limits to them as the investigation into Barney’s murder got underway, Chuck, Janelle, Carmelita, and Rosie crowded into the cramped living room of Clarence’s one-bedroom apartment, on the ground level of a two-story complex facing busy College Avenue on the edge of the Grid.

“Please, sit,” Clarence said, sweeping crumbs off the sagging sofa and worn easy chair that filled the small front room.

Janelle settled on the couch between Carmelita and Rosie. She gathered the girls close, her arms around their shoulders, the sofa slumping beneath their weight.

Chuck perched on the edge of the torn, vinyl recliner in the corner of the room. Outside the front window of the apartment, a length of rusted, wrought-iron railing separated the narrow entryway from the courtyard of the complex. Clarence stood with his back to the window. He wore a flannel shirt over a black T-shirt. Stud earrings glittered in his lobes. His dark hair, as long and silky as his sister’s, cascaded down his back nearly to his broad hips. He snugged the waistline of his faded jeans to the base of his protruding belly.

“Speak,” he said, his eyes alight.

Janelle filled him in, her sentences clipped, as if reporting by radio from the scene of a Durango Fire and Rescue call. She concluded, “The police asked us a few questions and asked us to leave. They wouldn’t let us inside. I don’t know when we’ll be allowed back.”

Clarence swept his hand through the air, taking in his tiny apartment. “My castle is your castle, for as long as you need it.” He blinked back tears. “Barney? Are you sure?”

Chuck gripped his legs with his hands, his fingers digging into his sweats. “Sandra did everything but say it flat out.”

Janelle nodded in confirmation. “Before I got off my shift, a couple of officers said his name over the police radio. They referred to him only as ‘the victim’ after that.”

Rosie sniffled. “I’m scared.”

Janelle pressed Rosie’s head to her shoulder. “It’s okay. We’re safe. We’re all together now.”

“Sandra?” Clarence asked Chuck.

“Kingsley,” he admitted.

“She’s . . . ?”

“Yes,” Chuck said, the word short and sharp. “She or someone else from the department will be here soon. They’ll be asking you for a list of everyone you’ve worked with lately.”

Clarence hugged himself around his broad middle. “Me?”

“I told her what you’d told me—that you’d worked with Barney more than anyone else at Southwest Archaeology Enterprises.”

A cloud passed across Clarence’s eyes. “Barney,” he moaned. “There isn’t . . . wasn’t . . . a nicer guy in the whole world.”

Chuck nodded, a grim up-and-down movement of his chin. “Whoever did it got away—for now, at least.” He smacked his fist into his palm. “I want to get them. For Barney. For Audrey

and Jason. And for us, too.” Reaching from the chair, he caressed Rosie’s shoulder. “You have every right to be scared, pequeña. They broke in to our house. They killed a friend of ours in our back alley.”

Clarence frowned. “I’m still not sure why you’re saying the police are going to come here to talk to me so fast.”

“They’re putting together a list of persons of interest. Sandra said someone from the department will be over here as soon as they’ve got the scene secured.”

Janelle leaned toward Chuck from between the girls. “You really think they’ll consider Clarence a person of interest?”

“They’ll consider everyone who’s been working with Barney a person of interest.” Chuck looked at Clarence. “Where have you been today?”

Clarence loosened his arms from around his stomach. “Right here, earning me a few extra bucks. The dig they’ve got me on in Cortez is shut down for the weekend.”

“That’s the one for the new subdivision on the edge of town, right?”

“Sí.”

A land swap between the neighboring town of Cortez and Canyons of the Ancients National Monument had provided additional development acreage for the growing municipality. Southwest Archaeology Enterprises had won the contract to perform the required archaeological survey on the swapped land.

“I’ve been working on the project online today,” Clarence continued. “Cataloging.”

“Have you done any emailing?”

“A few back-and-forths with Michaela.”

Michaela McDermott was the owner of Southwest Archaeology Enterprises.

“During the last few hours?”

“All day, off and on, since breakfast.”

Chuck shifted in his seat to face Janelle. “Clarence’s alibi should be solid. The time stamps for the emails on his computer will take care of it.”

Rosie lifted her head from her mother’s shoulder. “I liked Barney. He came to my concert.”

Janelle rested her nose in the thick nest of Rosie’s curls. “I remember that,” she said into Rosie’s hair. “He came to your school choir recital. Audrey came, too.”

With Jason grown and gone from Durango, Audrey and Barney included the school events of the children of friends on their social calendar.

Janelle raised her head from Rosie’s hair. “Audrey’s probably all alone at their house,” she said to Chuck. “We should get over there.”

“Maybe she’ll know something.”

“If she’s even capable of talking.”

Clarence put a hand to his round belly. “What about me?”

Chuck rose from his chair. “You need to stick around. The police will be here soon. No use looking like you’re trying to hide from them.”

“What’d they ask you?”

“About what you’d expect. How well we knew Barney. Any idea why someone would break in to our house.” Chuck didn’t mention the postcard; he was still processing that piece of information himself. “They’re going to want the names of people you know who’ve been working with him.”

“The names of other archaeologists?”

“Barney’s death has archaeology written all over it.”

Clarence’s eyebrows rose high on his forehead. “That’s what I can’t figure out. The murder of an archaeologist for archaeological reasons? Are you kidding me?”

“Not just for archaeological reasons. For money, if I were to bet.”

“You really think . . . ?”

“You know as well as I do how bad things are getting these days, all around the world, including right here in the US.”

“You really believe they’d come here, to Durango? You think somebody killed Barney because of some black-market deal gone wrong?”

“I think something along those lines is a strong possibility.”

“Barney seemed like a totally straight-arrow dude to me. I don’t see him being involved in anything illegal.”

“Neither do I, to be honest. But I can’t think of anything else at this point.”

“On account of the break-in?”

Chuck nodded.

“How do you suppose that plays into it?”

“I don’t have any idea. Not yet, anyway. It’s too soon. You just have to tell the cops everything you know, anything you can think of.”

Clarence rolled his shoulders. “When Michaela first hired me, she teamed me with Barney so I could learn from the ‘old pro,’ as she called him. But I’ve worked with plenty of other Southwest Archaeology people over the last few weeks, too. She’s got four or five digs going right now. She’s been sending me wherever she needs me from week to week, even from day to day sometimes.”

Janelle leaned forward. “Like my part-time gig with Durango Fire and Rescue,” she said with a nod. “I never know when I’m going to get a shift, from which substation.”

“Exactamente,” Clarence said to her. “Except, unlike you, I’ve been getting full-time hours from Southwest Archaeology. It’s boom times for SAE.”

Chuck caught Clarence’s eye. “How many of Michaela’s archaeologists do you figure you’ve worked with?”

“Six at least. Maybe more.”

“But with Barney most of all, in Cortez.”

“That’s right.” Clarence shook his head, the silver studs in his ears reflecting the sunlight streaming through the window. “The whole thing with him being murdered, it’s . . . it’s mind blowing.”

“We don’t have any choice but to wrap our minds around it, though. Somebody just killed him, in broad daylight, behind our house.”

“Who found him?”

“Neighbors, according to the police.”

“What was the cause?”

“No one’s saying yet.” Chuck pictured the bloodstained sheet covering Barney’s body in the alley. “Someone covered him up—whoever found him, I guess. From what I saw, it looked like a knifing.”

“Eww,” said Rosie.

Janelle looked at Chuck. “I’m still trying to figure out the card from your files.” She turned to Clarence. “Barney was holding it when he . . . when he died.”

Clarence’s eyes flashed from Janelle to Chuck. “Card? You didn’t say anything about that.”

“I was getting there,” Chuck said.

Carmelita’s brow furrowed. “What was on it?”

“It was an old postcard,” he explained to her, “from way before you were born. It had a picture on it of one of the most incredible archaeological discoveries in the history of North America. Hardly anyone remembers the discovery nowadays, though.”

“How come?”

“Social consciousness, I guess you could say. On account of how we’ve learned to be more respectful of indigenous people in general, and Ancestral Puebloans in particular.”

Rosie sat up straight, waving her hand wildly in the air. “The Ancestral Puebloans!” she exclaimed. “We’ve been studying them in school.”

“As you’ve been learning,” Chuck said to her with a nod, “Mesa Verde, west of here, was the center of their civilization a thousand years ago. After they abandoned the region, their stone villages in the canyons there survived because they were built under overhanging cliffs, out of the weather.”

“That’s why it’s a national park.”

“You got it. Most of the places Ancestral Puebloans lived were out in the open, so their houses and villages wore away over the centuries and were covered up by dirt and plants. But there were a few other places besides Mesa Verde where Ancestral Puebloans lived under cliffs—one of which was just a few miles north of Durango.”

“Whoa,” Rosie said. “Right here, where we live.”

Janelle tapped the face of her wristwatch with her fingertip, her eyes on Chuck. “We need to get over to Audrey’s.”

He turned to the girls. “Your Uncle Clarence knows the story of the postcard.”

Clarence inclined his head. “Falls Creek.”

Chuck nodded. “The classic Anthro 101 case study.” He turned to Carmelita and Rosie. “I’ll finish telling you about it on the way across town.”

A Durango police SUV approached Clarence’s apartment complex as Chuck drove the big Bender Archaeological pickup out of the parking lot. Janelle sat opposite him in the passenger seat, the girls in back. He resumed the story of the postcard as he steered the truck away from Clarence’s building.

“Archaeologists excavated the Falls Creek site north of Durango in the 1930s. By then, the villages under the Mesa Verde cliffs had been cleaned out, starting with Gustaf Nordenskiöld from Sweden in 1891. He shipped artifacts and human remains from Mesa Verde to Scandinavia, where they were held up until just a little while ago. After Nordenskiöld finished his excavations, other early archaeologists swooped in. So did looters. When the easy-to-get artifacts were gone from Mesa Verde,

archaeologists and looters turned their attention to lesser-

known Ancestral Puebloan sites to keep on learning or stealing whatever they could.”

Carmelita caught Chuck’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Like Falls Creek?”

“Yep.”

Rosie rubbed her hands together. “And that’s when they made their big postcard discovery, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Chuck told her. “The first thing we archaeologists do when we’re studying a site is survey it and collect any artifacts left above ground. Next, we dig into the site layer by layer, cataloguing new items we unearth as we go. That’s called stratification. It lets us learn what was going on at a site decade by decade, sometimes even year by year. Stratification is something Nordenskiöld, the archaeologist from Sweden, actually helped invent. Around here, early archaeologists were particularly interested in the trash heaps, called midden piles, Ancestral Puebloans left at the foot of their villages.”

They crossed Main Avenue and entered the Crestview neighborhood on the west side of town.

“By the time of the Falls Creek excavation,” Chuck said,

“archaeologists knew Ancestral Puebloans had used their middens as cemeteries, burying human remains right along with their trash. That might seem odd to us, but it was perfectly normal for them. Every now and then, archaeologists came across protected, crypt-like spaces containing human remains in the middle of the trash heaps. The corpses in those spaces often were adorned with personal possessions—turkey-feather shrouds, fur cloaks and blankets, necklaces and bracelets, even toys left with the bodies of children.”

“What about Falls Creek?” Rosie asked. “You said they dug up one of the most amazingly amazing discoveries ever in the whole world there.”

“They did.” Chuck turned onto the quiet street leading to the home of Barney and Audrey. “Except, they made the discovery above ground, with no digging into a midden pile required.”

Rosie bounced up and down in her seat. “What’d they find?” she asked breathlessly.

Chuck widened his eyes at her in the mirror. “Mummies.”

3

Chuck rolled the truck to a stop behind a Durango police SUV already parked in front of the home of Barney and Audrey. The house was a 1950s rancher in a line of similar

single-story homes, all with attached one-car garages and

postage-stamp-sized front yards. The houses backed up to Overend Park, the sprawling forest park, webbed with trails, that skirted the west side of town.

Chuck turned to the girls in the back seat. “They found a bunch of mummified human remains at Falls Creek.”

“The postcard has a picture of mummies on it?” Rosie asked.

“Actually, the card has a picture on it of one mummified person in particular.”

Carmelita unbuckled her seatbelt and scooted forward. She folded her forearms on the top of the front seat and rested her chin on them. “Like from Egypt?”

“Exactly like that,” Chuck said. “The air is so dry here in the Four Corners that the body was almost perfectly preserved, the same way the desert dryness in Egypt preserved the mummies there.”

“And they made a picture postcard of it?”

“Of her, yes. Lots of them, in fact. They named her Esther and took her around the country on a big tour, like a carnival attraction. After that, they put her in a glass case in the Mesa Verde National Park Museum so everybody who visited the park could look at her.”

“That’s so gross.”

“The whole thing is pretty awful by today’s standards,” Chuck agreed.

“But you had one of the postcards of the mummy in your files.”

“There’s an argument for keeping things like the postcard around to remind ourselves not to do anything like that ever again. In Esther’s case, it took a lot of years, but they finally stopped displaying her, and they stopped selling the postcards of her, too. Eventually, her body was returned to where it was found.”

“And after that, everybody forgot about her?”

“Mostly, yes. She’s at peace now. At least, that’s how I feel about her. But she’ll always be at risk. Her corpse is one of the most perfectly preserved examples of mummified human remains ever found on this continent. She’s worth a lot of money to grave robbers if they ever were to find out where she was reburied. They’d love to dig her up and sell her into some rich person’s private collection. But she was a real, live human being. She deserves our respect, even our reverence, instead.”

Janelle reached past Carmelita and put her hand on Chuck’s arm. “Just like Barney was a real, live person,” she reminded him.

Chuck killed the engine. In the sudden quiet, he stared out the window at the home of Barney and Audrey. How could

Barney possibly be dead? And why had he been clutching a picture postcard of Esther, taken from Chuck’s study, when he died?

Janelle climbed out of the truck. “Vamanos,” she said to Chuck through the open passenger door. “You’re the one who said we have to move fast, for Barney’s sake.” She tipped her head in the direction of the house. “And for Audrey.”

Chuck clung to the steering wheel. “This just makes it so real.”

“It is real.”

He turned to the girls. “Audrey needs us right now, okay?”

Carmelita lifted her chin from her arms and looked at him with steady eyes. “I’m ready.”

“So am I,” said Rosie.

Sandra Kingsley answered when they rang the front doorbell. She stepped back from the open door, a clipboard in her hand, her eyes sweeping past Janelle and the girls and settling on Chuck.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, addressing only him. “I need to get moving, but I didn’t want to leave her alone.” She raised the clipboard. “She gave me a few more names in addition to the ones you provided. I need to start making some calls.”

“How is she?” Janelle asked.

Sandra gave Janelle the briefest of glances. “She’s in shock, as you’d expect.” She returned her gaze to Chuck. “She called her son. He’s on his way, driving from Denver, which will take a while. I’m sure others will be here soon, but you’re the first.”

Janelle addressed Sandra, her voice cool. “Thank you for the update.”

Sandra slipped past Janelle, Chuck, and the girls without answering. Leaving the porch, she headed down the walkway to her car.

“And so it continues,” Janelle said beneath her breath, watching the officer depart. She turned to the front of the house, squared her shoulders, and said to Chuck, “Ready?”

Audrey sat on a brick-red leather sofa in the front living room. A pair of matching recliners on either side of the sofa faced a flat-screen television affixed to the wall. A glass-topped coffee table with shiny brass legs sat between the couch and television set, and a woodstove squatted in one corner of the room. An arched opening lined with adobe brick led to a hallway and on to the kitchen and dining area at the back of the house.

Audrey looked up from the couch as Chuck entered the room with Janelle and the girls. She was a stout woman, with a double chin and gelatinous cheeks. She wore dark slacks and a knit sweater. Her dusky blond hair draped limply to her shoulders, and tears streaked the thick makeup on her face. She took shallow breaths, nearly panting.

Audrey had cheered louder than any other spectator at the Four Corners Open, Carmelita’s most recent sport climbing competition at the rock gym last month, and had embraced Carmelita in a smothering bear hug after her victory. At

Rosie’s end-of-the-school-year choir concert in May, Audrey had cheered just as loudly for Rosie’s brief, off-key solo. Now, however, Audrey sat in silence, her hands pressed into her

lap.

Janelle knelt at Audrey’s side, between the couch and coffee table. “Audrey,” she said softly. “We’re so very sorry.”

Audrey tugged her hands from between her legs and clasped Janelle’s hands in hers, squeezing them until her knuckles turned white. “Jason is on his way,” she said. Then, a single, grief-stricken word: “Barney.”

“We’re here with you now, for as long as you need us,” Janelle assured her.

Audrey shook her head vehemently, several hard twists in quick succession. “I won’t cry,” she said. “That just won’t do. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.” Her eyes burned with sudden fury. “Right now, I just want to get the motherfucker who did this to my Barney.”

Rosie, standing next to Chuck, inhaled sharply and grabbed Chuck’s hand.

Carmelita walked to the opposite side of Audrey from her mother and laid her hand on Audrey’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

Audrey grasped Carmelita’s hand, attaching herself to both Janelle and Carmelita. “You’re a sweetheart,” she said to Carmelita. She looked up from the couch at Rosie. “I’m sorry, dear. I shouldn’t have said that bad word. But I’ve never . . . I’m not . . .”

“That’s okay,” Janelle soothed. “We gave the police every name we could think of, too.”

“They broke into your house,” Audrey said, her voice trembling. “That’s what the police said.”

“That’s where Barney was when . . . that’s where it happened.” Janelle paused. “What was he doing there? He didn’t call. We . . . Chuck . . . didn’t know he was going to be there.”

“That’s just it,” Audrey said. “I haven’t the faintest idea. That’s what I wanted to ask you, in fact.” Her voice steadied. “He went out for coffee, his regular afternoon jolt. He said he’d be back in a jiff. That’s how he put it—in a jiff.” She plucked her hands from Janelle and Carmelita and covered her mouth with them, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, dear. Maybe I will have to cry after all.”

“Cry as much as you need to.” Janelle rose from the floor to sit beside Audrey on the couch. “But, if you can, what did the police officer say to you?”

Audrey resettled her hands in her lap, her eyes on the coffee table. “She barely told me anything about what happened. Just that there’d been a break-in at your house and that Barney was . . . he was . . .” She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “She wanted names. I gave her all I could.” She turned to Janelle. “Including Clarence’s, of course. Maybe he knows something that will help. He was friends with Barney. He’s friends with everybody, just like my . . . my . . .” She blinked. Tears coursed down her cheeks. Again, she took Janelle’s hands in hers. “Barney thought the world of Clarence. Every time he said your brother’s name, he just smiled and smiled.”

“What about the others?”

“No one else was as friendly with Barney as Clarence. I’m sure it was the competition between all of them for work hours. Or maybe it was just the opposite—too much work for everybody these last few months. One or the other. That’s how it

always is with SAE, feast or famine. Not enough hours, then way too many. For years, I told Barney he should find something dependable to do, like me at the hospital. I’ve never once regretted being a nurse. I’ve got my regular hours, and I make decent money, too. But he loved what he did. He said he couldn’t imagine giving it up. He said he felt like a kid at Christmas every time he showed up at a new dig site. He promised me he’d find something that paid better and had predictable hours if the work ever got old. But it never did, not for him.”

She released Janelle’s hands, dug a tissue from the pocket of her sweater, and swabbed her nose with it. Tucking the tissue in her sleeve at the wrist, she lowered her face into her hands and sobbed, shoulders heaving.

Rosie looked at Janelle with frightened eyes.

Janelle mouthed, “It’s okay,” to her.

Chuck’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Audrey lifted her face from her hands as he checked its screen. He held his phone up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll take this outside.”

“Jesus Christ, Chuck,” Samuel Horvat said over the phone as Chuck stepped onto the front porch and closed the door behind him. “What in God’s name?”

Like Barney, Samuel was another of Michaela McDermott’s

longtime archaeologists. Chuck had worked with him on many occasions over the years. His name was one of those Chuck had given to Sandra, along with the names of several other Southwest Archaeology Enterprises employees.

Chuck rested a hand on the porch railing, his phone to his ear. “What have you heard?”

“That there was a break-in at your place, and that somebody killed Barney.”

“Bad news travels fast.”

“I can’t believe—” There was a break in the call, dropping Samuel’s next words, before he finished with, “—to me, anyway.”

“I lost that,” Chuck said. “Where are you?”

Samuel spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “Mesa Verde . . . western edge of Chapin Mesa . . . spotty signal . . . texts, a whole bunch of them.” A soft hiss filled the line. “I’m so sorry, Chuck,” Samuel said over the hissing noise. “I loved Barney. I know you did, too.”

“We all did.”

A middle-aged woman walked past the house on the sidewalk. A white poodle strained at the end of a neon-pink leash in front of her. A mountain biker in skintight shorts pedaled down the street, hunched over her handlebars.

“Why are you calling me?” Chuck asked.

The sound of Samuel taking a deep breath joined the hissing on the line. “You have to see something. You have to come out here, Chuck. Right now.”

Chuck ended the call and reentered the house, finding Janelle and the girls alone in the living room.

“Audrey went to the bathroom,” Janelle explained from the couch. She pointed at Chuck’s phone, still clutched in his hand. “Who was that?”

“Samuel Horvat.” He paused. “I need to go to Mesa Verde.”

“You what?”

“He said there’s something he wants to show me.”

Janelle’s mouth formed a hard, straight line. “You honestly think, with what’s just happened, that you’re going to leave us here in town and head all the way out there?”

“He already knew about Barney and the break-in. Whatever he wants me to see is related to Barney’s . . . to the murder. He said he doesn’t dare send pictures over the phone, that I have to see it for myself.”

“That’s nuts, Chuck.”

“You and I agreed on the need to move fast.”

“We agreed on the need for the police to move fast. There’s a big difference.”

Audrey appeared in the arched opening at the back of the living room. “Who won’t send pictures of what?” she asked, her words muffled as she blotted her nose with a tissue.

“That was Samuel Horvat who called,” Chuck told her. “He’s out on Wetherill Mesa, on the west side of Mesa Verde National Park.”

She lowered the tissue. “Barney spent a lot of time in the park over the years. He always loved being there. He said it was the center of his universe.”

“It’s the center of my universe, too. Samuel’s on a dig out there. I hadn’t heard of it, which means it’s been kept pretty quiet—no press releases or tours or the usual public-relations

stuff. His phone has been lighting up with texts since . . . since . . . for the last couple of hours.” He held Audrey’s gaze. “He said there’s something out there he wants me to see.”

“Then go,” Audrey said. “Go.”

Chuck tucked his phone in his pocket and turned to Janelle with beseeching eyes.

Before she could respond, Rosie said, “I want to go along.”

Janelle shook her head. “No. No way.”

“But I do,” Rosie insisted to her mother. “I want to help. And I want to see whatever archaeology stuff there is to see.”

Audrey squeezed the tissue in her hand. “You sound just like my Barney.” She dropped her chin to her chest and released a harsh cry from deep in her throat. She raised her eyes to Janelle. “I know Samuel. I trust him. You have to let them go, right now, this minute. And while they’re gone, you can do something for me.”

“Anything,” Janelle said. “Just name it.”

“The officer, Sandra, said she’d let me know when I could see Barney’s . . . his . . . the body. She said it wouldn’t be for a while. But I can’t just sit here in the meantime waiting for Jason to get here from Denver. I have to see where it happened. If nothing else, I have to check on Barney’s car, and I don’t want to go alone.”

“His car?” Janelle asked.

Chuck tilted his head to one side, squinting. The location of Barney’s car, presumably parked somewhere in the Grid, might well be informative. Had Barney parked well away from the house, attempting to keep his car’s location secret, before sneaking in the back gate and breaking into Chuck’s study? Or had he parked somewhere near the house, making no attempt to hide his car, and entered via the front door after knocking and finding no one home? That is, had Barney been complicit in the break-in? Or had he happened upon the crime while it was in progress and died trying to stop it?

“Yes, his car,” Audrey responded to Janelle. “I want to find it, and I want to go to your house, too.”

“Everything’s closed off in all directions.”

“Then we’ll get as close as we can. We can take my car.”

Carmelita stood up from the couch. “I’ll go with you,” she said to Audrey. She looked at Janelle. “With both of you.”

Rosie turned to Chuck. “And I’ll go with you.”

Janelle frowned at him. “Do you really think—?”

“We’ll be fine,” he assured her. “Whoever did it is on the run, trying to get as far away from here as they can, as fast as they can.”

“You sound awfully sure of yourself.”

“Because I am,” he said, injecting all the assurance he could muster into his voice.

4

Rosie sat with Chuck in the front passenger seat of the truck. The crew cab’s diesel engine roared as he accelerated up the highway, climbing Mancos Divide. They were twenty miles west of Durango, on their way to Mesa Verde. It was mid-afternoon, barely three hours since he’d checked his phone at the climbing gym and sped home to find Barney’s body in the alley. The sun was still high in the sky, the temperature a few ticks warmer than it had been at midday.

“Will we get to do any archaeology when we get there?” Rosie asked.

“I doubt it.”

“Awww.”

Rosie’s sixth-grade class was a few weeks into the semester-

long course on local archaeology offered each fall to Durango’s middle schoolers. She tended to be less than enthusiastic about academics in general, but the archaeology curriculum had captivated her so far. After school each day, she excitedly told Chuck and Janelle everything she’d learned in class about the many ancient archaeological wonders of the Four Corners

area.

Chuck glanced across the seat at her as he drove. In the aftermath of the break-in and Barney’s murder, he was more comforted than he’d have imagined by her presence in the truck with him.

“Well,” he revised, “we might get to do a little digging when we get there. We’ll see.”

“Goody.”

They reached the top of the divide and began the curving descent to the entrance of the national park at the foot of the towering Mesa Verde plateau. Chuck leaned back in his seat and sighed heavily.

“You’re sad, aren’t you?” Rosie said.

“Really sad,” he admitted. “Barney was a good friend of mine, and a good person. I worked with him for a lot of years.”

“Uncle Clarence worked with him, too, didn’t he?”

“A whole bunch the last few months.”

“Will the police think Uncle Clarence did it?”

“Clarence was in his apartment, working, when Barney was . . . when it happened.”

“But Uncle Clarence was alone. He said so.”

“He was sending out emails. They’ll show he was there.”

“He could send emails from anywhere with his laptop. From his phone, even.”

Chuck tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “I guess that’s right.” He shot her a look. “You’re pretty smart, you know that?”

“Carm’s the one who gets straight As.”

“There’s more to being smart than getting perfect grades.”

“Like what?”

“Like perseverance. Sticking with something and not giving up on it. That’s totally what you do. And getting along with people, caring about others. That’s something you’re really good at, too.”

Rosie wiggled in her seat. “I am?”

“You sure are.” He studied her as he drove. “You really like to move, don’t you?”

She wiggled her body even more. “Oh, yeah, baby.”

“Maybe that’s your thing.”

She stopped moving. “What thing?”

“The thing you and I were talking about. Something for you to do while Carm’s at the rock gym. Something that’s just your thing and no one else’s.”

She rocked in her seat. “This is a thing?”

“It is when you do it to a beat.”

She rocked harder, straining against her seatbelt. “Bop, bop, a loo bop, a bop bam boo!” she sang out.

“That’s it.” Chuck grooved in his seat along with her. “I was thinking of dancing. You wouldn’t have to climb up high on a wall and across ceilings or anything like that. Dancing is about staying on the ground and moving to the music.”

Rosie swayed from side to side and tapped her foot on the floorboard. “I like that idea.”

“Plus, you’d get to do it with other kids, which would be fun for you because you’re such a people person. You like people, which makes them like you back. It’s a good trait to have, a smart trait, one I’m trying to learn from you.”

“You’re trying to learn from me? Wow.” Rosie settled back in her seat. “But somebody killed Barney. I don’t like them. I hate them.”

“The police will get them. I’m sure of it.”

“Or we will.”

“That’s why we’re on our way to the park—to see if there’s anything we can learn that might help the police do their work.”

He turned south off the highway and drove past the Mesa Verde Visitor and Research Center, which rose from a broad sagebrush flat beside the highway. High above the center, the crest of Mesa Verde was rimmed with the dark green piñons and silvery green junipers that gave the plateau and park their shared Spanish name.

The Visitor and Research Center was constructed of sandstone blocks and exposed beams to resemble a traditional Ancestral Puebloan housing structure. A wall of windows on the building’s east side provided a commanding view of the La Plata Mountains north of Durango. Groves of aspen trees blanketed the upper slopes of the craggy peaks. Many of the trees were yellow with fall as the crisp, cold September nights ushered in the change of seasons.

Rosie pointed at the building as they passed. “We’re going there on a field trip after we learn everything.”

“I’ve been meaning to take you there myself,” Chuck said. “You’ll like it. There’s a museum where they explain how Mesa Verde was the first national park ever established to protect the works of mankind instead of nature. Plus, there are windows to watch the curators do their work in the research side of the building. That lets visitors know Mesa Verde was created specifically to help preserve the indigenous history of North America, which is to say, it’s all about what I do for a living—archaeology.”

“And it’s what we’re learning alllll about in school.”

Chuck nodded. “You got that right.”

He showed his national park pass to the ranger in the entrance booth and began the winding climb up the park road to the top of the plateau, swinging the big pickup around the road’s tight turns as they ascended. Cars and recreational vehicles streamed by in the opposite direction, descending from the plateau toward the park’s sole entry-exit point as the end of the day approached.

Rosie wet a tendril of her curly hair between her lips and pulled it straight with her fingers. When she let go, the tendril tightened back up like a spring beside her ear.

The scene unfolded out the windshield as they climbed: the gray clay face of the plateau rising to the green border of the mesa top, the Mancos Valley spread below, a patchwork of alfalfa fields and grass meadows broken by rocky ridges. In the middle of the valley sat the small town of Mancos, its handful of streets set close beside the Mancos River.

The park road reached the crest of Mesa Verde four miles from the entrance station. As he always did at this point, Chuck slowed to take in the stunning view. The green-carpeted plateau slanted southward away from them, a tilted tabletop of piñon and juniper trees thirty miles across from east to west and twenty miles from north to south. The mesa fell away to the brown, high-desert scrublands of the Ute Mountain Ute reservation on the Colorado-New Mexico border. Canyons cut deep into the mesa top every couple of miles. The canyons ran from north to south, their vertical walls of buff-colored Cliff House Sandstone aglow in the afternoon sunlight. Puffy, white cumulous clouds sailed across the blue sky overhead.

“Why are we slowing down?” Rosie asked.

Chuck pointed through the windshield. “Look.”

“At what?”

“Just look. What do you see?”

She shrugged. “Nothing.”

“That’s right. There’s nothing here—no houses, no shopping malls, no skyscrapers—which means there’s everything here.”

“Like what?”

“Like everything that made me want to be an archaeologist.”

He waved his hand at the canyons, worn over the eons into the sandstone surface of the mesa. The gorges began near the top of the slanted plateau as narrow fissures a few feet across. Eroded by runoff from thunderstorms and melting snow, they widened and deepened as they wound their way south, walled by cliffs that sliced straight down into the sloping mesa. Out of sight in roofed alcoves at the bases of the cliffs, long-abandoned Ancestral Puebloan villages faced out to the flat canyon bottoms.

“I first came here, to Mesa Verde, on a school trip when I was a kid, just like the one you’ve got coming up,” Chuck explained to Rosie. “When the school bus came up over the top of the mesa to where we are now, I remember being blown away by the view—the piñons and junipers covering the top of the mesa in dark green, the light brown desert to the south, and, best of all, the shadowed canyons hiding their secrets.”

“Secrets?”

“You’ve been learning about how the canyons here were home to thousands of people a long time ago, right? Just think what it was like back then—smoke rising from cooking fires deep in the canyons, farmers tending their crops, teams of workers building earthen dams and digging irrigation ditches to capture the little water that fell from the skies. There would have been potters firing clay urns in red-hot coals, flint knappers chipping away at chunks of obsidian, jewelry makers stringing necklaces with turquoise beads they’d traded for all the way from the Sonoran Desert.”

“Ms. Jarvis says this place was a totally happening scene,” Rosie concurred.

“Your teacher, right?”

“Yep. She says it was like a big city, except spread out in all the canyons.”

“Until just like that—” Chuck snapped his fingers “—it wasn’t. No more smoke from cooking fires. No more farming or building houses or making jewelry. The Ancestral Puebloans abandoned everything they’d built here, everything they’d created. Imagine how heartbreaking that must have been for them. How devastating.”

Rosie stuck out her jaw. “It would have been really sad.”

“I agree. That’s what hit me the first time I came here as a kid. Mesa Verde seemed like it would have been such a cool place to live. When I learned that the people had left everything behind, and that they had just taken off, I couldn’t believe it. Why would they leave such a beautiful place? It made no sense to me. I had to find out. As an archaeologist, that’s the kind of question I’ve been trying to answer ever since.”

“Ms. Jarvis says they left because it stopped raining.”

“That’s part of it, for sure. Probably the biggest part. The drought stressed the Ancestral Puebloans and other peoples living in the area, which led to fighting between them.”

“Wars, you mean?”

“Not big wars. But smaller fights, yes. The archaeological record is fairly clear on that—the towers built by Ancestral Puebloans at high points along the canyon rims to keep a lookout for raiders, plus the defensive positioning of their villages, deep in the canyons, protected by cliff walls on three sides and stone roofs above. In a way, the Ancestral Puebloans probably became victims of their own success. They got really good at homebuilding and farming, which would have made them targets because of how successful they were. They were sedentary. That is, they lived in one place, here on the mesa. That means nomads—people who moved from place to place all the time—could attack them and try to take everything they’d worked so hard for.”

Rosie turned to Chuck in her seat as they followed the main park road down the sloped mesa top.

“At the beginning of the drought,” Chuck continued, “the Ancestral Puebloans would have been able to fight off the marauders. But the drought went on for years. The Ancestral Puebloans’ crops probably would have failed, which would have made them poorer and hungrier and less able to defend themselves. At the same time, the nomadic people would have been more desperate, too. In years of normal rain, they hunted wild game and gathered nuts and berries for food. But the drought reduced the amount of game. The same for nuts and berries. So the nomads most likely would have turned to raiding the Ancestral Puebloans and their corn-filled granaries. In response, the Ancestral Puebloans would have had to devote more people to protecting their food stores, leaving fewer of them to tend their crops and maintain the dams and irrigation ditches that were critical to their survival as the drought dragged on. Each year things would have gotten worse—less food, less water, more attacks. The Ancestral Puebloans would have been under siege and starving, unable to care for their farms, their children, themselves.”

“So they left,” Rosie said, her eyes downcast. “That’s the sad part.”

“Based on the best information we’ve been able to put together, they had no choice. Mostly, they joined other sedentary societies living to the south along the banks of the Rio Grande, which had water flowing in it year-round, even in dry years. They joined other societies just emerging in the Southwest like the Ute and Hopi people, too. The Ancestral Puebloans’ civilization here on Mesa Verde may have dispersed, but they brought their skills to the societies they joined, and helped those societies succeed in the generations that followed.” He gazed at the broad expanse of the plateau stretching away to the south, cut by canyons. “In the meantime, their villages were abandoned and falling into ruin in the bottoms of the drainages here on the mesa.”

“Until you came along to dig them up.”

“I got here pretty late in the game. Lots of other archaeologists were fascinated by Mesa Verde way before I was. There’s so much to be learned here—how to cope with extreme weather changes, and how to get along, or not get along, with one another in stressful times. To me, that’s why archaeology is so important, because there’s so much to be learned from what others went through long before we arrived on the scene.”

“I just think it would be cool to dig up all the pottery and treasures and stuff.”

“That, too. But it has to be done with total awareness of whose the stuff was—the Ancestral Puebloans’—and for their modern-day descendants.”

“The Native Americans,” Rosie said. “The indignant people. That’s what Ms. Jarvis calls them.”

“The indigenous people,” Chuck corrected her with a nod. “Sounds like Ms. Jarvis really knows her stuff. She’s definitely up to date with her terminology.”

“She says the word ‘Indian’ is old-fashioned.”

“She’s right. In the same way, the Ancestral Puebloans used to be called the Anasazis, but not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“To the Navajo people, Anasazi means ‘ancient enemy.’ But Navajos see the Ancestral Puebloans as their ancestors, not their enemies. Plenty of Native Americans don’t like the term ‘Ancestral Puebloan’ either, though, because puebloan is a Spanish word, and Spaniards showed up here in the Southwest and ruled Native Americans by force five hundred years ago.”

“That all sounds pretty confusing.”

“That’s because it is confusing. Which is part of what I love about archaeology—all the different peoples involved, and all the awareness you have to have of everybody’s different points of view and why they feel the way they do.”

“Barney loved archaeology, too, just like you, didn’t he?”

Chuck clenched his teeth as he guided the truck down the road. “That’s why we’re here.”

The main park road descended through the piñon-juniper forest from the crest of Mesa Verde to a long finger of the plateau known as Chapin Mesa. Deep canyons on either side of the thin finger of land contained the park’s principal concentration of Ancestral Puebloan villages, including Spruce Tree House, Cliff Palace, and Balcony House. Half a mile before the start of Chapin Mesa, a secondary road branched off the main road. Chuck turned onto it as instructed by Samuel. Instantly, the traffic died away. The deserted road headed west past the heads of Navajo, Wickiup, and Long Canyons on the way to Wetherill Mesa, a slice of tableland between deep gorges on the park’s remote western boundary.

The road was narrow and curvy, the driving slow and arduous. Chuck cursed to himself as he gunned the truck on the few straightaways and braked through the countless turns. He never should have left Janelle and Carmelita on their own back in town to drive all the way out here. Why in God’s name had he agreed to head for the far reaches of Mesa Verde only three hours after Barney’s murder in Durango?

5

The secondary road turned south after ten miles onto Wetherill Mesa, aiming for a handful of small Ancestral Puebloan villages known as Badger House, Long House, and Kodak House. Rather than follow the road to the villages at the southern tip of Wetherill Mesa, however, Chuck turned west yet again, still following Samuel’s instructions, leaving the pavement for a dirt road headed toward the park’s western

border.

Dust billowed into the air behind the truck as he drove a mile through the forest to a turnaround spot and graveled parking area at the end of the graded dirt track. Samuel’s black Ford pickup sat in the parking area between a pair of late-model vehicles—a silver mini SUV and a lime-green subcompact. The two vehicles were unfamiliar to Chuck, their shiny newness indicating they most likely were rental cars.

Chuck nosed his truck to a stop beside the subcompact and climbed out. A well-maintained hiking trail led south from the parking area. He helped Rosie down from the passenger seat and headed away from the trail with her into the untracked piñon-juniper forest to the west.

“Where are we going?” Rosie asked as she hiked behind Chuck through the patchwork of shade and sun created by the outstretched branches overhead.

“To a canyon.”

“But there’s only a bunch of trees.”

“Just you wait. We’re walking on Mesa Verde, which is a big, flat chunk of sandstone with just enough soil on it for trees to grow. Sandstone is one of the softest kinds of rock there is. It crumbles and washes away wherever water runs across it.” He glanced back at her as they walked. “You can probably guess what that leaves behind.”

“Canyons!” she cried.

“Exactamente.”

They emerged from the forest after ten minutes onto a sunlit bench of beige sandstone. The stone shelf ended abruptly twenty feet from the edge of the forest, falling straight down into a hundred-foot-deep canyon. The opposite wall of the canyon, a vertical cliff of matching tan stone, faced them a few hundred feet away. Here and there, boulders worn from the mesa top rested on the edges of the facing cliffs, poised to tumble to the floor of the canyon as the process of erosion gradually enlarged the gorge over geologic time.

“It’s deep!” Rosie exclaimed, striding toward the edge of the cliff.

“Not so close,” Chuck said, hurrying after her and grabbing her hand. “There’s lots of loose stuff, big boulders and little pebbles, ready to fall into the canyon at the slightest touch. It could take you with it if you’re not careful.”

He peered down into the walled canyon. Ponderosa pine trees grew from the sandy bottom of the gorge, their needled tops nearly even with the canyon rim. Bunchgrass and thickets of scrub oak sprouted among the ponderosas in the canyon bottom. A narrow defile, ten feet deep and walled with sandy soil, cut down the middle of the canyon floor, channeling water that flowed into the gorge when rains came to the plateau.

Maintaining his grip on Rosie’s hand, Chuck walked with her along the sandstone shelf to the head of a narrow cleft in the flat stone rim of the gorge as Samuel had directed. The cleft sliced steeply downward, a rock-walled slot descending all the way to the canyon floor.

Rosie smiled and clapped her hands as she looked down the chimney-like passage. “This’ll be fun.”

She entered the slot first, pressing her hands to the facing rock walls as she descended. Chuck followed close behind, ready to steady her if she stumbled. But she scrambled over chockstones and slipped past mountain mahogany bushes growing in the cleft without difficulty, reaching the bottom of the slot in less than five minutes.

Chuck followed Rosie out of the cleft and onto the flat floor of the gorge. The chink of a shovel striking soil echoed up the canyon to where they stood.

“Hear that?” he asked Rosie. “Maybe we’ll get to do some archaeology after all.”

“Bazunga.” She looked up at Chuck and explained, “That means ‘great.’”

The digging grew louder as they hiked down the canyon along the base of the cliff. High above their heads, the ponderosas thrummed as the afternoon breeze coursed through the trees’ long needles.

Rounding a bend in the canyon, they came upon a dirt-floored, stone-roofed alcove eroded into the base of the canyon wall. The shadowed recess faced southwest from the bottom of the cliff, the overhanging roof shielding the dirt floor beneath it from rain and snow. Two women stood facing Chuck and Rosie on the far side of a depression dug into the floor of the cavern-like space. Samuel Horvat wielded a shovel in the neck-deep depression, the back of his head visible above the alcove floor.

At the appearance of Chuck and Rosie, the older of the two women crossed her arms over her narrow chest, observing their approach with piercing, electric-blue eyes. She was short and slight, weighing no more than a hundred pounds, and looked to be about Chuck’s age, in her mid-forties. She wore dusty white sneakers, khaki slacks, and a cotton jacket over a bright white, button-up shirt.

The second woman was in her late twenties. She wore faded jeans and a crimson T-shirt with the blocky, easily recognizable H of Harvard University emblazoned on its chest.

An assortment of dig implements rested in the dirt beside the women—plastic hand scoops and metal trowels, a hatchet, a hammer and chisel, and stackable buckets made of heavy plastic. On a flat piece of sandstone, out of the dirt, sat a camera bag and zippered computer satchel.

Samuel tossed a shovelful of soil onto a pile of dirt at the edge of the cavity. A small cloud of dust rose into the air as the dry soil landed on the pile.

“Hey, there,” Chuck called as he approached the depression with Rosie.

Samuel turned to them. Sweat gleamed on his forehead beneath the brim of the stained felt fedora he’d worn for as long as Chuck had known him. Samuel was well into his fifties, his face deeply lined from decades of work outdoors beneath the harsh, Four Corners sun. Thick, gray hair covered his ears and tumbled from his hat down the back of his neck to his shirt collar.

Chuck stopped at the edge of the depression and looked down at Samuel. The longtime Southwest Archaeology Enterprises archaeologist wore heavy leather boots, brown denim work jeans, and a heavy cotton shirt with the letters SAE embroidered in red on its left breast, the middle A shaped like an arrowhead.

Samuel stabbed the blade of his shovel into the dirt at the bottom of the cavity and rested his gloved hands on top of the shovel’s handle. “Thanks for coming,” he said to Chuck.

Rosie stopped at Chuck’s side.

“And who might you be?” Samuel asked her.

“I’m Rosie.”

Chuck put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her to him. “She wanted to come along. She’s studying archaeology in school right now.”

“Good for you, young lady,” Samuel told her. He leaned the shovel on the side wall of the depression and said to Chuck, “I was just doing a little cleaning up. The walls were caving a bit.”

He pulled a bandanna from the back pocket of his jeans, pushed his fedora to his hairline, and swabbed his forehead with the blue cloth. He tucked the bandanna back in his pocket, repositioned his hat, and looked up at Chuck, his lips flattening into a hard line. “It’s true?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I didn’t want to believe it, but the texts kept coming. That’s why I called you.”

Chuck turned his attention to the two women on the far side of the depression. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Kyla Owens,” the young woman introduced herself. “You’re Chuck Bender, as in Bender Archaeological, right? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Kyla’s brown hair was long and shaggy, falling past her shoulders from beneath the flat brim of a trucker’s cap she wore low over her eyes. She was of medium height, stocky and thick limbed.

Samuel caught Chuck’s eye from the bottom of the cavity. “This is Kyla’s first time out West. She’s a bit of a legend considering her age—Princeton undergrad, Yale PhD, now finishing up a post-doc fellowship at Harvard.”

Kyla’s face flushed. “I’m honored to be part of the team.”

“She’s been out here for a couple of weeks, doing some research for her fellowship advisor. She’s been working in the Collection,” Samuel said, using the nickname for the Mesa Verde National Park archives, complete with row upon row of

climate-controlled artifact storage cabinets, in the research wing of the Visitor and Research Center.

The older woman leaned forward from where she stood at the edge of the depression next to Kyla. “I am Ilona Koskinen,” she said with a thick Scandinavian accent. Her platinum-blond hair was parted down the middle. Bangs covered her forehead like a white picket fence, ending at her bleached-blond eyebrows. “I have come here from the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki.”

Samuel asked Chuck, “What exactly happened in Durango?”

“What have you heard so far?”

“Not much. No one seems to know anything.”

“I don’t know all that much myself.” Chuck related what he knew to Samuel, Ilona, and Kyla, keeping his account brief, and concluded to Samuel, “Then you called.” He looked over his shoulder toward Durango. “To be honest, I’m kicking myself right now for having driven all the way out here.”

“This won’t take long,” Samuel assured him. “Come on down here with me. Like I said on the phone, you have to see this with your own eyes.”

The SAE archaeologist stepped aside, revealing a dark, oval-shaped opening the size of a manhole cover at the bottom of the depression. Pie-sized chunks of thatched sticks and mud leaned against the side of the cavity.

“Someone already opened this up at some point in the past,” Samuel said. He pointed at the pieces of thatching. “Those had been set back in place over the opening. Kyla says they came right out when she pulled on them.”

Chuck slid into the depression and stood over the dark opening with Samuel.

Rosie jumped up and down at the cavity’s edge. “I want to see, too! Can I, please? Can I?”

The soil gave way beneath her feet and she tumbled down the side of the depression. Chuck caught her and placed her upright beside him.

“Oops,” she said. She combed dirt from her hair with her fingers.

“Sorry about that,” Chuck said to Samuel.

“Um, yeah, sorry,” Rosie said, her eyes on the opening at the bottom of the cavity.

Samuel waved off her apology with a flick of his hand. “No harm, no foul.” He held her gaze. “Have you ever seen a dead body before?”

“I’ve seen a dead goldfish.”

He glanced at Chuck. “Okay with you?”

Chuck placed his hands on Rosie’s shoulders. “She’s a pretty tough cookie.”

Samuel crouched next to the opening and crooked his finger for Chuck and Rosie to do the same. They squatted beside him and he aimed a powerful flashlight into the opening.

“Holy shit,” Rosie exclaimed.

6

I mean,” Rosie revised, “holy shoot.”

Chuck looked into the opening along with her. He sucked a sharp breath.

Samuel’s flashlight illuminated a human corpse visible from the shoulders down. The corpse lay on its back on the dusty floor of a crypt-like space at the bottom of the depression. Cracked leather suspenders extended from the waistline of thick cotton pants that covered the lower half of the body. Beneath the suspenders, a coarse shirt covered the top half of the body. A thin layer of dust coated the corpse. The head of the body was cut off from view by the ragged edge of the opening.

Chuck attempted to make sense of the scene before him. The suspenders and clothing clearly dated the corpse to the late 1800s, but the body lay in a vault that, just as clearly, dated from the time of the Ancestral Puebloans who’d populated Mesa Verde hundreds of years prior to the nineteenth century.

Samuel angled the flashlight, aiming its beam at the corpse’s head. “This is where it gets creepy.”

Chuck squatted lower, peering into the opening. Rosie crouched closer to the bottom of the depression beside him.

“Geez,” she said, putting a hand to her mouth.

Chuck stared at the corpse’s head, lit by the beam of Samuel’s flashlight. The skull was cleaved down the middle, nearly in two. Remnants of closely shorn brown hair clung to the split cranium of what appeared to be a male. His skin was still attached to his skull, his ears shriveled on either side of his head. His teeth showed between lips that were dried and cracked and drawn back along the jawbone.

Bile rose hot and burning in the back of Chuck’s throat. For the second time today, he was looking at the body of a murder victim.

“What is this?” he demanded of Samuel. “Who? How is this even possible?”

Samuel aimed his flashlight at the Finnish woman, Ilona, standing above them at the edge of the depression. “You’ll have to ask her.”

Ilona raised a hand, shielding the light from her eyes.

Chuck looked up at her. “You’re here because of Gustaf Nordenskiöld, aren’t you?”

She lowered her hand. Her Nordic-blue eyes glittered in the beam of light. “That is a fast understanding you have just made.”

Chuck rose from his crouch. “A man was killed today in Durango. A friend of mine.” Rosie stood up beside him. He squeezed her arm. “Our friend.”

“I am sorry about your friend,” she said. “I have just arrived in your country. I am here as a scientist, to perform a study.”

Samuel lowered his flashlight. With the beam of light removed, the afternoon sun silhouetted Ilona from behind, her face now a pale moon in deep shadow.

Samuel directed his flashlight back into the opening. “She’s here on account of this.”

“Another murder victim,” said Chuck.

“Not the corpse. I’m talking about the hidden chamber. The crypt. It’s why Ilona invited me here, and why Kyla is here, too.”

“And me, apparently.”

“No. I asked you to come on account of the body.”

“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

Samuel directed the beam of his flashlight toward the dirt wall of the depression. “Shall we?”

He climbed out of the cavity and, reaching down, helped Rosie and Chuck clamber out after him.

Chuck stood with Rosie, facing Samuel, across the depression from the two women. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said to Samuel.

“I don’t know why Barney was killed today.” Samuel paused for a beat. “But I suspect his death might well have something to do with the corpse here in the chamber.”

Chuck turned to Ilona on the far side of the cavity. “Which means Barney’s death might be related somehow to the timing of your arrival here.”

Ilona lifted her chin. “I have no knowledge of this dead man you are speaking of.”

“And I don’t have any knowledge of you. So how about we start with who you are and why you’re here.”

“Yeah,” said Rosie, at Chuck’s side. “Let’s start with that.”

Ilona looked out at the canyon from the mouth of the alcove. The ponderosa pine trees grew tall from the floor of the gorge, their branches lit by the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Her eyes came back to Chuck and Rosie and she addressed them both.

“I am the head curator for the national museum of my country,” she said. Her command of English was strong. “Six months ago, I received a phone call from here in America. The call was from a woman named Elizabeth Mantry. She told me that her family name—her last name, as you call it—was Cannon when she was a girl, before she married. She lives in the town called Mancos, in the valley outside the national park. She told me she had information about an ancestor of her family, someone who had gone away from his home in the Mancos Valley more than a hundred years ago and never returned. Elizabeth told me she had studied the genealogy of her relatives and found a branch on her family tree that came to a sudden end. The branch was for a young man, a teenager, named Joseph Cannon.”

Ilona glanced down at the dark opening at the bottom of the depression.

“Joseph Cannon was Elizabeth’s great-great-uncle, as I think you call it,” she continued. “He was the brother of Carl, Elizabeth’s great-grandfather. Elizabeth learned all this from Joseph’s journals. Joseph and Carl lived on a farm beside the Mancos River, where they grew food to sell to the gold miners working in the high mountains. One day, Joseph, the oldest of the Cannon children, went away with a man who came to the farm looking for workers.”

The museum curator from Finland lowered her head in acknowledgment to Chuck.

“As you correctly understood, the man who came to the farm was Gustaf Nordenskiöld. You could say that Gustaf is the reason I am a curator. The Nordenskiöld family has a history that goes back and forth between the different countries of Scandinavia. Many families have such a history. Like the