The Mauling at Kinnickinick Pueblo

by Charles Williamson

  “My sweet, I know you work for the customer contact and sociability since we don’t actually need the money from our jobs. Of course, you should change jobs if it makes you happier. Isn’t your current boss the sixth one in four years? She seems nice enough, but how long will she be around before they send her to a larger town?”

  Margaret smiled and nodded. “I’ll be home late tomorrow because I’m going for the job interview, but the branch manager at the Arizona-owned bank sounded like the job was mine if I wanted it. There is plenty of stew to warm up if you get home and are hungry.”

  Mike smiled realizing she had already decided to move but wanted him to feel involved in the decision. “Good luck tomorrow. I hope you get the new job and love it.”

  Before bed, Mike spent a few minutes looking up ground penetrating radar. The devices looked a lot like aluminum boxes hung below a frame. They reminded him of an old-fashioned push lawn mower. The metal boxes were the sort of thing that would be easy to carry in a two-wheeled cart pulled behind an ATV. One article he read had a photo of a radar unit being used for archeological work in the country of Jordan. He checked on Amazon and found that they could be purchased online from about $5,000 to about $10,000 dollars. He wondered if anyone could loot enough to pay for one. He did a quick search of an auction site for historical artifacts from the Southwestern United States. After seeing the high prices for many ancient artifacts, he decided that the looters would have no trouble in recouping their investment in the equipment.

  Chapter 8

  When Mike reached his office the next morning, he found an email from Special Agent Linda Surrett. “Mike, I have forwarded an email address and fax number list that includes every business and individual who the FBI believes deals in the type of artifacts looted during your murder case. The Hopi Tribe of Arizona requested that we prepare this list for you. The request came directly from the highest levels of the Interior Department and was listed with an urgent timeframe. It seems you’ve made friends with the Hopi tribal leaders. In my experience, this is the quickest that any such request has ever been completed. Good Luck, call if you need anything, Linda.”

  By ten o’clock that morning, Mike had sent every antiquities dealer in the United States a set of two similar drawings and photos. He was surprised at how closely the photos and drawings from Amber Whittier resembled the drawing made by Elder Weaver. In his email transmission, Mike included a message warning that dealing in these items might make the person an accessory after the fact in a homicide.

  Mike put Sean to work looking for anyone who had purchased ground-penetrating radar in northern Arizona, and then called the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office to see who was handling the looting that occurred over the winter down in the Verde Valley. After a series of transfers, Mike was connected to Deputy Matthew Waldrop who was assigned to the Camp Verde unit of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Mike had met Matt a couple of times over the past five years, but they had only a nodding acquaintance.

  “Captain Damson, I was considering phoning you today. I read about the possible homicide at the Sinagua ruin up on Anderson Mesa.”

  “Please call me Mike. Matt, I’ve learned that there was a rash of looting of ruins in the Yavapai County parts of the Verde Valley this winter. I’m trying to determine if there is a connection.”

  “So far we have found four sites where there’s been recent digging. We have no idea what if anything was found and removed. The Forest Service installed video cameras to monitor two of the sites, but I personally think it’s unlikely the looters will return to the same locations. Sheriff Smith is not willing to waste many resources on this case. We have no clues, no leads, and no way to monitor hundreds of sites spread around roadless sections of the National Forest. I was told to leave the case to the Forest Service unless they turned up something more tangible.”

  “That makes sense, but in my case there is also a homicide of a decorated Marine who was honorably mustered out only last December.” Mike knew that Matt Waldrop had also served as a Marine in Iraq.

  “Mike, I’ll help in any way that I can, even if my time is off the books, but our end of this investigation has led nowhere. There are over three hundred Sinagua sites in Yavapai County and probably as many up in Coconino County. They range from single grain storage structures to a large town like the one at Tuzigoot National Monument, which had more than one hundred and ten separate rooms. There could be a dozen other looted pueblos in the Verde Valley and we wouldn’t know it yet. Only about ten percent of the most important sites have volunteers regularly monitoring them, and the volunteers check them only quarterly. Hell, I know of a hilltop site only four hundred feet behind my house in Camp Verde. Kids go there regularly to smoke pot and look for arrowheads.”

  “Tell me about the four locations that you’ve discovered. Was the digging in a single place, or did they make many small holes looking for anything valuable?”

  There was a pause as Matt considered the question. “Mike, I have only been to one of the sites, although I have photographs from the Forest Service of the other three. I’ll email you copies as soon as we’re off the phone. All four seem to show a single attempt to dig straight down. All we found were holes with a pile of dirt next to them. Of course, we don’t know if the diggers were successful in looting artifacts. All four seemed to indicate that they were dug by hand with shovels, not by some type of backhoe or other heavy equipment. My boss thinks it’s some teenagers out to find pots as souvenirs or druggies trying to support their meth habits. He’s not happy with us spending time looking for someone who digs holes. Since we have no way of knowing if anything was actually removed from the holes, I can’t even prove a crime even occurred. I mean, how would they even know where to look. The holes are four to six feet straight down into the midden or other soft soil areas without any evidence of probing around the areas.”

  “We’re currently looking for any local owners of ground-penetrating radar units.”

  “Radar? That never occurred to us. They may have already taken many valuable things, but I still have no way to trace anything because we have no idea what was looted. Some sites in the Verde Valley are in private hands. They’re on ranches and farms, and artifacts from them can enter the market legally. Unless you catch someone in the act, there seems to be no possibility of a conviction.”

  “Matt, do you know how to reach all four sites?”

  “Sort of. I have their coordinates.”

  “Will you send those coordinates to me with the photos? If this is actually a ring of looters looking specifically for Sinagua artifacts, they must have a way of selling them. They are quite possibly the same people who looted a grave at Kinnickinick Pueblo and killed that young man.”

  “I’ll send them, but Mike these places are often very difficult to reach. The Native Americans who built them seem to want to occupy some of the most difficult to reach cliffs and hilltops, maybe for defense. I ended up falling twice when I went to the single ruin that I did investigate. If you go, wear gloves, sturdy boots, and long pants that resist thorns and snakebites.”

  “Thanks for your concern, but I was actually planning to Google the sites not hike to them. Please let me know if other looting is reported. Thank you for your help Matt.”

  A few minutes later, Mike received the email from Matt with the photos attached. Although all four sites were smaller than the excavation hole of the tomb at Kinnickinick Pueblo, the holes looked similar, hand dug with a mound of dirt left next to the hole. Two of them seemed to be in the area of the softer soil associated with agricultural areas or burial sites. The other two indicated that the looters had dug right into the center of a room within the pueblo walls. Mike was annoyed to see a number of walls, which had survived eight hundred years, had been knocked aside to reach whatever the looters were looking for.

  The Sinagua Tribe of pre-Columbian Native Americans had used an inventive method of taking advantage of the scarce rainfall. They built rock walls acro
ss the usually dry washes. These check-walls captured the dirt in the runoff during the summer monsoon season and the winter snowmelt. The check-walls prolonged the dampness in the soil in the area upstream and allowed them to grow crops in the arid high desert. The Sinagua villages always had a flowing creek, spring, or a seep nearby for drinking water during the dry seasons, but their crops of corn, beans, and squash were exceptionally drought resistant and needed little irrigation. The Sinagua were exceptionally good at dry land farming techniques.

  The ancient Sinagua built their villages using whatever stone was local to the area. In some places they were stacked sandstone, in others they were blocks of limestone, and up near Flagstaff they were combinations of volcanic basalt and sandstone. What they had in common was the same construction technique. Walls of uncut stone were clinked with clay and roofed with pine or juniper beams. They often had very small entrances that would have required the resident to crawl into the room, probably to keep out the winter cold. The rooms always had some type of air circulation so a small fire could be used to keep warm, but most cooking, weaving, basket making, pottery manufacturing, and other day-to-day activities occurred in open plazas and ceremonial spaces or even on the roofs of their dwellings. After seven or eight hundred years of being abandoned, the wooden support posts and roofs were usually gone, but the stonewalls had often remained standing. In some cases, the pueblos had open areas for dancing and for a type of ball game that, four hundred years later, was observed by the first Europeans to reach the Aztecs of Mexico.

  Google Maps could not tell Mike what he most wanted to know about the four sites, whether there were ATV tracks. He was especially interested in one that was pulling a two-wheeled car that might have contained a ground-penetrating radar unit. Most sites were on rocky hilltops or next to rugged stone cliffs, where there might be no visible signs of the passage of an ATV a month or two later, but one ruin was on a hill that seemed to be surrounded with clay deposits that might retain an imprint if it was made while the soil was wet. The winter in the Verde Valley saw about half of the annual precipitation.

  Mike walked to the map room, actually a hallway with a row of geological survey maps. He found the site he was looking for. It was called Beaver Fort Pueblo or in some older records, the Black Hand Pueblo. Some very early residents of the Verde Valley had marked the location of a small spring with a black handprint. The print and many petroglyphs and pictographs added over the centuries in the area probably preceded the Sinagua pueblo by a thousand years or more, but no one knew for certain. Petroglyphs were very difficult to date accurately. Mike had seen many similar petroglyphs sites on his hikes with Margaret. There were dozens near Sedona. Any natural spring in the desert was something that even the most ancient of visitors, such as the Clovis Point hunters, the first humans to leave proof they came to Sedona, would have looked for because permanent sources of water were rare in the arid highland chaparrals of the Verde Valley.

  Mike spent a few minutes finding what he thought would be the best way of reaching the remote hilltop location of the Beaver Fort Pueblo. It was about two miles from the nearest Forest Service road, but there was no direct route. His actual hike would be about three miles, and involve some nontechnical climbing up a smooth sandstone slope. Men on ATVs would have used a much longer route of about six miles. The area at the top of the hill was sparsely wooded with piñon and juniper rather than dense stands of ponderosa of the higher elevations around Flagstaff. Desert shrubs and cactus surrounded the base of the hill. He thought Margaret might enjoy the hike with him. She was in excellent shape and a six mile round trip would be no big deal for her. They would go Saturday morning when they were both normally off work. He knew Margaret would not be willing to miss mass on Sunday without a very compelling reason. That made him remember that she might be turning in her notice at the bank in Sedona where she had worked since a few weeks after they moved to Sedona five years earlier. He decided that until he saw the Beaver Fort, he would continue his current project of following the trail of artifacts that might have been looted at Kinnickinick and other sites.

  Mike seldom called Margaret at work, only in an emergency or when she was on a break. The bank’s management frowned on any personal phone calls while an employee was working, and in Margaret’s job she usually had a line of customers waiting. He called his wife’s cell and left a message. “Call me when you have a break.”

  Mike spent the next hour on performance reviews, a task he took seriously but regretted the time it took when he was on a case. Margaret called at noon. She sounded very upset. “They escorted me out of the branch like I’d embezzled something. People were staring at me as I walked out under guard with a few personal belongings.”

  “I’m so sorry my love. There has never been a more honest and loyal employee. They had no need to embarrass you. Why the hell did they handle it that way?”

  Margaret’s tone was one of sadness mixed with anger. “They wanted to protect their records. My manager tried to convince me to stay, her boss tried again, and the regional manager tried to talk me out of moving to a competitor. They wanted to move me to a direct sales job on incentive pay at the branch in the Village of Oak Creek where they’d recently fired someone. After I said no to the boss’s boss’s boss, my manager told me that I did not need to stay for the two weeks’ notice period in my resignation letter. She cautioned me not to remove anything but my personal items. She even looked through my small box of personal effects to make sure there were no customer records. I didn’t even take a fricking paper clip.”

  “I’m so sorry they treated you that way, Sweetie. You’d never steal records, but I’d assume they think you can take a lot of customers with you. You’re very well known in Sedona now, and you’re a true ace at customer service.”

  “You’re damn right I’ll take customers with me after they treated me that way. I’m at home now, but I called my new bank’s branch manager. They want me to spend the next two weeks calling every customer that I know about moving their accounts to their Arizona-owned bank. I can name at least five hundred people that I could telephone, about fifty a day. My new bank will offer them free accounts for the next six months if they move now. The owner of my new employer has no plans to force people to use Internet banking or ATMs. I’ll merely let my customers know why I left the mega-bank and joined this smaller customer service oriented one.”

  Mike knew that with both of their pensions, and the proceeds of the sale of the California house, Margaret did not even need to work. She worked because she loved the customer contact and enjoyed providing excellent customer service. He was certain she would move a lot of customers to her new bank.

  “Margaret, I would like to take you out to L’Auberge de Sedona for dinner tonight to celebrate your new job.”

  “Oh Mike, I love you. L’Auberge is so expensive, but yes, I could really use a fine dinner with the best wines. Thank you for thinking about turning this into a celebration rather than an embarrassment.”

  Mike smiled at her pleasure. The last time they enjoyed the wonderful food at the Crest at L’Auberge was on Valentine’s Day; it had cost well over three hundred dollars for two. From Margaret’s reaction, Mike knew it would be worth it.

  Chapter 9

  Just before Mike was to leave for the day, Sean came to his office to report on his search for ground-penetrating radar.

  “Mike, I could only find four of the GPR devices sold in Arizona in the past five years. I checked with both domestic manufacturers. The three large state universities each have one. The head of the Archeology program here at Northern Arizona University said they keep a careful log of the archeologist who checked out the device from their storage area. It’s never been lent to a non-professional except for a graduate student who had it for a month two years ago. It was not used at all over this past winter because of the heavier than normal snowfall in the high country. She explained that the ten thousand dollar device was paid for by private donations. It w
as not something the school would have had a budget to buy. She assured me that ASU and U of A would have similar controls on the use of their radars.”

  “Did she know why you were asking?” Mike would need copies of the three schools’ records for the file, but he had no reason to doubt Sean’s information.

  “She knew exactly why I was asking,” Sean said. “She jumped directly to asking about Kinnickinick Pueblo. Apparently she had heard through the grapevine that it might have been a Magician of the Ridge Ruin quality discovery. Her language was extremely salty when I descried what we thought had been looted. She claimed that the site would have been the find of the century if a professional excavation had been conducted. Now, even if recovered, the artifacts would not be very useful removed from their original context.”

  “You said there were four units sold?”

  “The fourth went to a name you might recognize. Jim Poole of Paradise Valley, Arizona.”

  The name sounded familiar, but Mike didn’t really know anyone in Phoenix’s most exclusive suburb. “The name’s familiar, but I can’t place it.”

  “His extended family has the largest private landholdings in the state. They have a dozen ranches around many parts of Arizona including two in Coconino County, but I thought you would know their name from the Poole Vineyards down near Page Springs in the Verde Valley.”

  “Now I remember, we tasted their excellent wine at the Sedona Wine Festival. Their label is GP Premium. It was both complex and delicious, as good as the finest California vintages, but it’s probably the most expensive wine made in Arizona.”

  The Verde Valley where Sedona is located had a dozen small boutique-style limited production winemakers and a few slightly larger ones. The wine business was growing rapidly in the Verde Valley and tasting rooms were now common. Arizona wines had been winning some national and international prizes for excellence. However, the small production runs of a few thousand cases, made GP’s brand wine expensive compared to the mass market premium wines from California.”