by Mark Lukens
“You sure about what you saw in there?” Begay asked when he was in front of Randy.
“I would not bring you out here in the darkness if I was not sure about this,” Randy told him.
Begay waited a moment like he was studying Randy and then he finally nodded. He had a large flashlight in his hand, it looked a lot like the one Randy had used when he had entered the cave only hours ago. The officer with the long hair had an even bigger flashlight with him that he held by a pistol grip handle.
Begay turned to his officers. “Let’s go check it out.”
They walked to the mouth of the cave and Begay stopped at the generator. He looked back at Randy who hadn’t moved too far away from his horse. “You try this generator?” Begay asked Randy.
“I didn’t touch anything.”
Begay looked back at the generator, studying it for a moment. He slipped on a pair of latex gloves, stretching them over his big hands. He pressed the start button a few times but nothing happened. He checked the gas tank. “Full of gas,” he muttered.
He tried the button a few more times but the generator didn’t even try to start. “I guess it’s not going to work.” He sighed and turned his flashlight on and looked at the officer with the big flashlight. “Lead the way with the light.”
Randy watched the officer with the biggest flashlight lead the men into the cave. Begay was right behind him and the other officer was the last man in. And then the mouth of the cave swallowed the men up in its darkness.
The minutes seemed to drag by as Randy waited by the cottonwood tree. His horse wasn’t too happy about coming back here. He fed his horse a treat to try to keep him calm, but he was still jumpy. But he seemed a little calmer with more people around.
Fifteen minutes later the three officers hurried out of the cave. Their tan faces seemed to have grown a few shades paler, and their eyes were wide with shock. One of the officers had his pistol in his hand like he might have to use it at any second. He scanned the ridges around them for any activity. Captain Begay rushed towards his Ford Bronco.
“What do you think happened in there?” Randy asked as he hurried over to catch up with Begay.
“This is an FBI matter now,” Begay grumbled. “I’m afraid you’re going to need to leave.”
Randy didn’t like the abrupt shove off from Begay, but at the same time he was happy to leave this place.
PART I
SUNDAY
CHAPTER THREE
Denver, Colorado
Special Agent Palmer knew the day was going to be a bad one as soon as his eyes popped open in the darkness.
It was the dream … the terrible dream.
For a few seconds, Palmer didn’t know where he was, but then he realized that he was in his condo, in his bedroom, in his bed. It was still dark—either it was still the middle of the night or very early in the morning. Fragments of the nightmare clung to him, but the images were fading fast into the darkness of his subconscious, never to be retrieved again.
His heart was beating fast … racing, thumping hard against his breastbone. He was a little shaky. Something had frightened him terribly in the dream, causing him to wake up.
But what had it been?
He couldn’t remember.
This wasn’t a typical experience for him. He usually didn’t remember dreaming at all, and he could probably count on one hand the nightmares that he’d had in his life. And he’d never woken up from a dream and felt like … like this. A feeling of overwhelming dread and despair.
He lay there very still in his bed for a moment longer, trying to get his breathing and his heartrate back down to normal. For a split second he wondered if he was having a heart attack. He was lean and in decent shape for a forty-six year old man, but he also drank too much and he’d smoked cigarettes for years.
It wasn’t a heart attack. He dismissed that wild thought immediately. There was no pain in his chest, arm, or anywhere else in his body. His heart was just beating fast, like he’d been running at a full sprint. And he was scared … he couldn’t deny that. He’d known fear many times in his life as an FBI agent: he’d had guns pointed at him, he’d been attacked by criminals, attack dogs, and he’d been in car chases, so he knew what fear felt like. And he was afraid now. Afraid of something he’d seen in his dream … something he’d felt.
He tried to remember the dream before it dissolved away into nothingness. In the dream he’d been inside of some kind of building … an unfamiliar place. The building was huge, a maze of hallways and rooms that seemed to go on forever. He was walking down one of the wide halls with his service pistol gripped in his hand. The floor was striped with lines of sunlight that shined out of the open doors of each of the rooms. He looked into each room as he passed by, glancing in through the open doorway. Each room had beds, chairs, rugs, and other furniture … normal stuff. But there seemed to be something that was slightly off about each room. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, like the room was slightly out of square, or the furniture was placed at odd angles, like everything was just out of kilter somehow.
But why was he so afraid in the dream?
He seemed to think that he’d been following someone through the building, searching for someone, an invisible enemy that he couldn’t find, someone extremely dangerous, and he knew he needed to be careful.
The hallway morphed into a gigantic warehouse that was filled with all different kinds of furniture and appliances for as far as he could see, a lot of it so close together that there weren’t even aisles to walk through. The layout of the furniture and appliances didn’t make any sense to him. In the distance he saw the doorways to the other rooms that he’d been passing by, but they were so much farther away now that he was suddenly in the middle of this vast room.
He heard a voice calling to him from another direction. It was a man’s voice, and the man was alarmed, yelling at him.
Palmer turned towards the other side of the room where the voice was coming from. He saw a man in another room at the far end, maybe forty yards away across the sea of furniture. The man was dressed in some kind of dark pants and a white dress shirt and tie. He was leaning back in an office chair in front of the desk so he could stare out through the open doorway. He stared at Palmer with wide eyes of shock, his mouth hung open.
“What are you doing?” the man yelled as he stared at him in terror.
Palmer didn’t recognize the man, and he didn’t understand what the man was asking?
“Why are you doing that?” the man screeched, and his eyes dropped down just a bit—like he was looking down at something in Palmer’s hands.
Palmer looked down at his own hands in the dream. He didn’t have his gun anymore even though he didn’t remember holstering it. He stood in front of a gigantic metal sink that he didn’t remember seeing before in this room. A tall curved faucet hung over the sink which was big enough to wash a large dog inside of it. The water from the faucet was running. He had something in his hands down inside the sink, washing it in the water. He saw the blood running down his hands, carried away by the running water, the blood turning pink from the dilution of the water.
In his hands was a piece of flesh the size of a softball, part of an organ torn from a person’s body. It was soft and it was still warm.
And then his mind went blank. He couldn’t remember anymore. That must’ve been when he’d woken up with his heart jackhammering in his chest and his breath caught in his throat.
But there was more to the dream, he felt sure of it. Something else had happened after he was at the metal sink washing off that piece of flesh, something he couldn’t remember now … something he didn’t want to remember.
This wasn’t like him. He never had nightmares like this. He never woke up from sleep in the middle of a panic attack.
He sat on the edge of his bed and swung his bare feet over the edge of it. He was cold even though he knew the heat was on. He still felt shaky and his heartbeat and breathing still hadn’t s
lowed down to a normal rate yet.
What time was it?
A glance at the alarm clock next to his bed told him it was three o’clock in the morning.
He craved a drink but he tried to fight the urge. He should try to get back to sleep, but he thought sleep might be nearly impossible now. Maybe he would make some coffee.
He jumped when his cell phone rang. He grabbed it from the cluttered end table next to his bed and looked at the number. It was Cardenelli, his supervisor.
What was he doing calling in the middle of the night?
An emergency of some kind.
And it was always something bad when Cardenelli called him in the middle of the night.
CHAPTER FOUR
Denver, Colorado
“Yes, sir,” Palmer said into his cell phone.
“Palmer,” Cardenelli barked. “I need you to get to the airport right now.”
“Where am I going?”
“Down to New Mexico. Small town called Farmington. I’ll have a rental car ready for you there. It’s a long drive from there to the dig site.”
“Dig site?”
“It’s on the Navajo Reservation. Some bodies were found at an archaeological dig site.”
Palmer sighed. “Why me? Isn’t there someone down there who could—”
“Agent Klein will meet you there. But I need you down there with him on this one. This one is … it’s a little strange.”
Palmer didn’t say anything. Strange was his area of expertise.
“A captain of the Navajo Tribal Police in that area, a man named Begay, will be there, too. He’s the one who called it in. The Tribal Police are the only ones besides us involved in this right now—no county or state police.”
“Well, it’s Navajo land,” Palmer said. “It’s their bodies …”
“FBI handles murders on Indian Reservations. And these bodies aren’t all Navajo.”
Again Palmer didn’t respond.
“It’s a group of archaeologists, maybe some grad students. Ten of them in all.”
“Ten bodies?” Palmer asked, a little surprised.
“Yeah. We’re going to try and get some info from the universities in the area, see if we can get some IDs on these people. See if any have been reported missing.”
“How were they killed? Shot?”
“That’s the strange part,” Cardenelli said. “From the way Captain Begay described things … well, it’s just a little hard to believe.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said some of the bodies were … cut up … or torn apart …”
“Maybe an animal—”
“No, I already asked him that. He was adamant that it wasn’t any kind of animal attack.”
“Then someone murdered all of these scientists at the dig site? All ten of them?”
“That’s what you’re going to go down there to find out. I’ll send you all the info I have so far. You can read it on the plane. A forensics team will be there by the afternoon. They’re driving over from the Albuquerque office so they’ll be several hours behind you. I’ll get Debbie to get any other info that you need.”
“Yeah.”
“Palmer, I want you to keep those Tribal Police away from the scene when you get down there. Who knows how badly they’ve already corrupted it. When you get down there, talk with them, see what they know, but then I want you to take over.”
“What about Klein?”
“Agent Klein is … well, let’s just say that the very best agents aren’t sent to Indian Reservations.”
Palmer had heard of that before. It was a well-known punishment in the Bureau to be sent to Indian Reservations.
“Captain Begay asked for our assistance, and it’s going to be our case now. You’re in charge when you get down there. You make sure you let them know that.”
“Got it.”
Cardenelli hung up without a good-bye and Palmer hung up and set his phone down on the nightstand next to his service pistol. He switched on the lamp and saw the nearly empty pint of vodka next to the lamp; it was perched close to the edge of the table. He was craving that drink even more right now. He’d drank too much vodka last night, not anticipating going to work today. Maybe a few nips with his coffee would take the edge off of the hangover.
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 fiery 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 it was a cave where Palmer hid away in the darkness when he wasn’t out chasing down the worst criminals America had to offer.
H
e 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.
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 FIVE
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 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.”
