Ancient Enemy Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Lukens, Mark

  Palmer hated going out of town nowadays. He used to love it when he’d been a younger agent and full of adventure and energy. Now he was just counting down the days until retirement. And when he retired he was going to get as far away from the horrors he’d seen on this job. Maybe he’d go somewhere way up in Wyoming or Montana. Somewhere far away from people.

  Ten dead bodies. Torn apart? By what?

  But there was more to it than that. Cardenelli wouldn’t be calling him and involving him in this case if there wasn’t something odd about these deaths.

  An image of his dream flashed through his mind; he saw the piece of flesh he’d been carefully washing in the metal sink. He could hear the man’s panicked voice in the dream coming from the office as he stared at him in horror: “What are you doing?” the man had screamed at him. “Why are you doing that?”

  And then Palmer had looked down at his hands in the sink, he’d seen what he was doing, and he couldn’t answer the man’s question. Why had he been doing that? Why was he washing a piece of flesh off in a sink? Whose flesh had it been? What had it been?

  He pushed the thought away as a chill crept over his skin, giving him the shivers. It was just a bad dream. Dreams didn’t have to make sense.

  Before he even realized what he was doing, he twisted off the cap of the vodka bottle and took a small sip. He winced as he swallowed the liquid down. A few sips of alcohol should push the fragments of the nightmare all the way away.

  He got up and walked over to the sliding glass door that led out to the balcony. He slid the door open and the bitterly cold Colorado air stung his exposed skin as soon as he stepped out onto the balcony. But he ignored the cold, his mind already on the job, on the mystery he would be asked to solve.

  Palmer had been with the FBI for nearly twenty years now. He’d trained at Quantico and started out in the Baltimore office for a few years. But when an opportunity came up to join the Behavioral Science team, which specialized in serial killers, he jumped on it. He passed the rigorous tests and exams, and he was finally enrolled in the training program. A year later he was working on the worst murder cases in the Maryland, D.C., and Virginia areas. Sometimes he worked as far south as Miami and as far north as Boston. He was called in on the bizarre cases, the hardest ones to crack.

  Five years later an opening came up in the Denver office, and he requested the transfer. He had grown up on the east coast his whole life, and the idea of the west had always appealed to him: the clean and dry air, the rugged mountains, the desolate and wide-open spaces. He thought the crime out west would be less heinous compared to the cities of America’s east coast … but crime was the same nearly everywhere now.

  So he and his wife Teresa and their daughter packed their bags and moved to Denver.

  That was twelve years ago.

  Teresa left him a little over a year ago. Their daughter was in college now. At least Teresa had waited until their daughter moved out before she left him. She kept the house in the suburbs they’d bought, and she magically had a boyfriend as soon as Palmer packed his stuff and moved to this condo, which was closer to the downtown office.

  He’d been in this condo well over a year now, and he still hadn’t even fully unpacked yet—half of his stuff was still in boxes stacked up in the spare room. The place was a mess; it lacked a woman’s touch, a woman’s organization. It also lacked the feel of human interaction; it still looked like what Palmer had thought it would be at the time: just a temporary place to live until he and Teresa got back together. But they hadn’t gotten back together, and now this condo was a cave where Palmer hid away in the darkness when he wasn’t out chasing down the worst criminals America had to offer.

  He had become the cop cliché. His wife couldn’t handle his brooding; she couldn’t handle his silent focus on the horrors of his day. She couldn’t handle his drinking, his mood swings, his depression, his cynical views of the world. She wanted someone happier, someone who was “there” with her. He couldn’t be that man for her so she’d found a replacement as soon as their daughter was gone (or even before their daughter had left for college, he suspected).

  Teresa was a good woman and she deserved better than him. He hoped she was happy with Gary.

  Palmer came back inside and shut the sliding glass door. He went to the kitchen to start the coffee maker. He needed to get dressed and get to the airport.

  CHAPTER 5

  Farmington, New Mexico

  Special Agent Palmer landed at the small airport in Farmington, New Mexico an hour before dawn. A man in a white button-down shirt with a black suitcoat slung casually over one shoulder sauntered up to him as soon as he was off the plane.

  “Special Agent Palmer?” the man asked.

  “Yeah,” Palmer answered.

  “Agent Klein,” he said and offered a hand in greeting.

  Palmer shook the man’s hand. Klein’s hair was buzzed short and he wore glasses with dark frames. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing a Marine Corp tattoo on one muscled forearm. The man was a few inches shorter than Palmer and he had a slight build, but Palmer could tell that Klein was the kind of man who went out of his way to compensate for his height and build.

  “I was supposed to have a rental car waiting for me,” Palmer said as Agent Klein rolled down his shirt sleeves and buttoned them.

  “We got one for you. It’s at the office. I’m going to drive you there.”

  Palmer just nodded as the man shrugged into his black suitcoat.

  “No bags?” Klein asked as they walked towards the exit doors.

  “Just my carry-on.” Palmer lifted up the duffel bag he carried in his hand. He had an extra change of clothes inside along with his laptop computer. He also had a small travel bag with his toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, and other bathroom supplies inside. And of course he’d brought along two pints of vodka in plastic bottles.

  They left the airport and stepped out into the frigid air. Klein was a fast walker; he was a man of pent-up energy, Palmer could tell.

  They got in Klein’s car and he started it.

  “You want to stop for some coffee? There’s a McDonald’s along the way. It’s open twenty-four hours.”

  “Yeah, sounds good,” Palmer said. A few sips from his bottle of vodka sounded better, but he would take the coffee for now.

  Ten minutes later Klein pulled up to the drive-through window and paid for their coffees. Palmer dumped two creams and five sugars into his. He had a feeling this was going to be one very long day.

  *

  As he rode in Klein’s car down the ribbon of blacktop that split the sleepy town of Farmington, Palmer had time to reflect on what he’d read on the plane, the preliminary report downloaded to his phone from Debbie.

  These were the details that they had for him so far about the murder case on the Navajo reservation: a group of archaeologists had received permission to excavate some kind of cave in a remote corner of Navajo land, where these scientists believed a small Anasazi settlement may have stood seven hundred years ago. And now they were all dead.

  Along with the sparse specifics of the case, Debbie had sent him some background information on the Anasazi. They were a large group of Native Americans who had lived in the southwestern United States from about 1100 to 1400. Supposedly they had migrated north from what is now Central America and Mexico. The Anasazi seemed to have been a very advanced culture compared to other tribes in that area at the time. They were masters of pottery, farming, and they built large cities and wide roads, while most other Native American tribes at the time were more nomadic, hunting and gathering, following food sources from place to place. Some of the cities the Anasazi built were incredible (and Debbie had supplied a few photos in the report), and the remnants of some of these cities had stood the test of time, many of them still standing today.

  But eventually the Anasazi seemed to have abandoned the cities and the roads they had built in New Mexico and Arizona, moving north into southern Co
lorado and southern Utah, where they built more cities, some of them carved right into the sides of sheer rock cliffs or in the mouths of giant caves. These cities were marvels of architecture for their time.

  Not long after the Anasazi built these highly-defensible cities, they seemed to have just walked away from them, much like they had done before when they’d been farther south. They left behind their pottery, many of their weapons, their buried dead. Archaeologists have found evidence of battles at these northern cities, and even signs of cannibalism. Some scientists and historians believe that the Anasazi were driven away from these cities by other tribes, and others believe that weather conditions such as drought caused them to flee, while other scientists believe that there was internal strife among the Anasazi that led to infighting. But most scholars agree that the Anasazi migrated south again, and either intermingled with or became the Hopi and/or the Pueblo Indians. But no one really knew for sure.

  Apparently this group of archaeologists, led by a man named Jake Phillips, had discovered a new Anasazi settlement inside the mouth of a cave that had been hidden for hundreds of years.

  And now all of these archaeologists at this dig site were dead. All of them slaughtered.

  There were five scientists, four grad students, and a Navajo guide in the list of victims Debbie had sent to him. The report included their names and a brief background of their careers. This group had been working with grant money supplied by the University of New Mexico. Jake Phillips had also reached out to another archaeologist, a woman named Stella Weaver who worked out of Arizona State University at the moment; she was an expert on the Anasazi culture with some wild theories about their possible extinction that didn’t seem to be sitting too well with most of academia. In the report Palmer had read about her, it was claimed that she was fueling conspiracy theories just to get published.

  So, Palmer thought as he rode in the passenger seat and stared at the city buildings as they passed them, we have the archaeologists and grad students, and then we have Stella Weaver. There was also the Navajo guide with them—a man named Jim Whitefeather. He was fifty-four years old, an expert tracker and survivalist. That was eleven people altogether. But there were ten dead, according to the report.

  Klein glanced at Palmer as he drove. “We’ll get your car at the office. Then you can follow me out to the dig site.”

  Palmer didn’t say anything.

  “There’ll be a few officers from the Tribal Police waiting for us,” Klein continued even though Palmer hadn’t answered him. “One of them, a man named Captain Begay, he’s a real piece of work.”

  Palmer just sipped his coffee. He didn’t know what “a real piece of work” meant and Klein didn’t bother expounding on it. Palmer couldn’t wait to be alone again.

  “We can refill our coffees at the office,” Klein said.

  Palmer could tell that Klein wanted to ask questions about what had happened at the dig site; he was itching to ask why a specialist like Palmer had been sent down from Denver to Farmington in the middle of the night.

  “What kind of details did they give you about this case?” Klein finally asked.

  “Ten dead. Five archaeologists, four student assistants, and one Navajo guide.”

  “All of them dead?” Klein asked and chuckled like he couldn’t believe it. “How?”

  “They weren’t perfectly clear on the cause of death,” Palmer said. “We’ll know more when we get there.”

  Klein just nodded as he pulled into the parking lot of a non-descript, one story building. “Here we are.”

  CHAPTER 6

  FBI Branch Office—Farmington, New Mexico

  After a quick trip to the bathroom and a refill of his coffee, Palmer got into his rental car and started it. He waited for Agent Klein to pull out of the FBI office parking lot first, and then he followed him. They drove through the town of Farmington, which was waking up a little more as the sun peeked up above the horizon to the east. And fifteen minutes later they were traveling through the desert.

  They traveled west on U.S. Highway 64 for a while, and then they eventually turned south on U.S. 491. The scenery was amazing. Palmer had pictured a desert in his mind before coming down here—and this place could be called a desert, but it was teeming with vegetation and so many colors. The rising sun drove back the darkness and the layers of rock brightened up with the morning light, seeming to subtly change colors as the sun rose higher.

  As he drove, Palmer took a few sips from his pint of vodka he had slipped out of his duffel bag. He stayed pretty far behind Klein’s car to make sure the agent couldn’t see him stealing nips from the bottle. The alcohol helped him relax.

  After well over an hour they pulled onto something called Indian Road 96 and drove down the two lane road for a ways until Klein’s car slowed down and pulled onto what looked to Palmer like a dirt trail down into the canyons. The road was bumpy, and Palmer had to navigate around pot holes and washouts. Rock walls rose up on both sides of him for much of the drive, but eventually those walls opened up to a gigantic canyon. Small rocks and sand pelted the undercarriage of his rental car as he drove. This was definitely truck country, but so far his sedan was doing okay. They drove around a bend and then Palmer saw the dig site in the distance. Closer to the dirt road was a line of vehicles parked down a sharp decline near a large stand of trees and gigantic bushes. They drove past the vehicles lined up below them and continued on around to the canyon floor, down a less steep decline, and then the trail meandered back towards the group of vehicles.

  Beyond a sea of brush and rocks, Palmer saw three vehicles parked in a tight group right in front of the two temporary trailers. Two of the three trucks were obviously Navajo Tribal Police vehicles, and the other one was an old Ford Bronco. The three men all stood in front of the Ford Bronco, all of them watching Palmer and Klein as they drove towards them.

  Palmer glanced over at the line of trucks near the stand of trees as he drove past the trail that led to the parking area. There was a Ford 350 with a camper on back, a heavy-duty Dodge Ram, a Ford Expedition with oversized tires, and a rusty Chevy van. The line of vehicles seemed undisturbed, except that two of the trucks had their hoods up in the universal sign of a broken-down vehicle. He also noticed that there was a large space in between two of the trucks where another vehicle must have been parked before. There was what looked like gouges in the dirt where a pair of back tires had peeled out in the sand until they caught traction. It looked like the vehicle might have driven right up the steep incline and onto the dirt road that led out of here. Eleven people had been listed as being here at this dig site, but only ten dead bodies were reported. Maybe the eleventh person, the possible killer, drove away in one of these trucks.

  He filed these bits of information away in his mind as he drove the sedan over the bumpy trail through the scrub brush that led to the two trailers, which sat end to end. Both trailers resembled motor homes, both about thirty-five to forty feet long. A tent with one canvas wall rolled up had been erected not too far away from the trailers—closer to a rock canyon wall in the distance that rose up to the sky, its jagged peaks a dark contrast against the peaceful blue morning sky.

  Palmer parked his car farther back from the three police vehicles, right beside Klein’s black sedan, and then he cut the engine. He got out and pocketed his keys and then grabbed his coat from the back seat. After slipping his coat on, he stuffed his hands into a pair of black leather gloves. He checked his coat pockets to make sure he had his cell phone, some plastic baggies, and a few pairs of blue nitrile gloves with him.

  “Captain Begay,” Agent Klein said as he walked towards the big man. He wasn’t exactly trying to hide his distaste for the captain.

  “Agent Klein,” the big man answered and nodded slightly. Neither man offered a hand in greeting. The large man’s narrow eyes shifted to Palmer.

  “Special Agent Palmer,” Palmer said and pulled out his ID and badge. He flipped the leather wallet open in a practiced m
otion, showing his credentials to Captain Begay.

  “Begay,” the large man said and extended a gloveless brown hand to Palmer.

  Palmer shook the man’s hand and it felt like his hand had been squeezed in a piece of machinery for a second.

  Begay was a big man, easily three or four inches taller than Palmer’s five foot eleven inches, and he outweighed Palmer by over a hundred pounds. He had a wide face that had been tanned and wrinkled by the relentless desert sun. His mane of dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. He wore plain clothes, but he had a police belt with a sidearm, walkie-talkie, and a leather pouch for a pair of handcuffs. Over his plain clothes he wore the same kind of green coat that the other two officers wore. They all had Navajo Tribal Police patches on their shoulders and a small nameplate on the right front pockets of their coats.

  The other two officers were both tall and much younger and leaner than Begay. They stared at Palmer, both of them closer to the Bronco, which Palmer guessed was Begay’s vehicle. The two officers didn’t stare at him with the animosity that Palmer had expected. Instead, he saw shock and fear in their dark eyes.

  They had seen something bad here.

  Palmer looked around for a few seconds, taking in the landscape. He noticed that what he’d thought had been a sheer rock wall in the distance actually had a vertical slit in it that was the mouth to some kind of cave. Another canvas tent, this one without walls, had been set up near the mouth with a generator underneath it. Piles of shrubbery and brush that had been cut away from the mouth of the cave were piled up on each side of the entrance to the cave, well out of the way.