Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  “But the one I found over there,” he said, nodding toward the door, “is different.”

  He gently raised the second spine for their inspection. It was much more polished, and the difference between the two was instantly visible.

  Krista, who had flushed at his rebuke, went quiet and stared at the spine, her eyes prickling.

  “But the site has been tainted,” said Deborah Miller. It clearly pained her to say it, so Krista managed an encouraging smile to the project leader. “Maybe whoever stole the other artifacts dropped it.”

  “Fished it out of the groin of the skeleton,” said Rylands, “but didn’t bother to get the other one that is still there or disturb the bone bundle that was on top of them, and then dropped it on the way out? No.”

  “Was it on the video we shot when we first opened the tomb?”

  “Not on the floor, no,” said Rylands. “But it was...here.”

  He pointed at the video monitor to a bundle, the one that had disappeared. It had contained, they said, a handful of strange red stones, a carved and polished length of wood, a ring, and a gold rod with a dove on the end, though in the video the bundle was still rolled up, about eighteen inches long and tied with bright thread. The fabric had moldered, though not as badly as Krista would have expected given the tomb’s age, and you could see a dozen or so small ivory-colored objects showing through the bundle: bones. Lying with them, poking out through the decayed fabric was a black, needlelike spine.

  “So the thief took the bundle and the spine fell out,” said Bowerdale. “The fabric was shot and it fell apart when he picked it up. So?”

  Rylands had fast-forwarded to footage of Bowerdale unwrapping the bundle. One of the red stones fell out and the light fluctuated as they searched for it.

  “Have you found any of those small bones as well?” said Deborah Miller.

  Krista watched Deborah Miller wince at the video, the appearance of amateurism as Bowerdale fumbled for the dropped gemstone. She understood why Miller had made the decision to lock the site down till the lab was ready to bring everything in. The thought that it had, in fact, been the wrong decision—a disastrous decision—pained her for the other woman.

  “Two,” said Rylands. “Also close to the door. There may be others that fell into the cenote as the thief went up the ladder.”

  “And?” said Bowerdale, who was getting impatient.

  “And that’s odd,” said Rylands. “A thief breaks in and steals gold and gems. That makes sense. But why take a bundle of bones, particularly if you aren’t going to take the main skeleton?”

  “Are you sure the two bones you found aren’t from the main skeleton?” said Krista, pushing back into the conversation.

  “Of course I’m sure,” said Rylands, dismissive.

  “Why?” said Krista.

  “Look at them,” he said, nodding to where he had set them beside the monitor. “Look at the pictures. They are totally different.”

  She had to admit he was right. The small bones from the bundle were paler than the royal skeleton.

  “Could they have been better preserved by the wrapping?” she ventured.

  He shook his head.

  “Fabric isn’t my area,” he said, “but I’d say that the bundle shouldn’t be there at all.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Bowerdale. They were all staring at the video monitor as the pictures scrolled across the screen.

  “I mean that the bones look different from the main skeleton for the same reason that the fabric is still there: we’re looking at two internments maybe a thousand years apart.”

  “They reopened the tomb for another burial,” said Deborah to herself. “But there’s only one corpse. Did they remove the older one?”

  “I’ll have to do some tests,” said Rylands, “but I’m almost sure they didn’t. The skeleton we have is probably late pre-Classic, contemporary with the construction of the structure. They left it there when the tomb was reopened, which was long after the present acropolis was built on top of it.”

  “So where’s the second body?” said Krista. “Or are those animal bones? Something small, like a monkey or...”

  “Oh no,” said Rylands, and he was smiling now. “The bones are human. It’s premature to guess, but I’d say that the tomb was reopened—which would have been a huge undertaking—relatively recently. No second skeleton was buried. Only this bundle.”

  “Containing?” Krista pressed the point, but she didn’t like how much Rylands was enjoying this. Something was coming.

  “Containing a stingray spine, which—as we all know,” he replied with a pointed look at her, “is one of the supreme Mayan symbols of self-sacrifice; and a gold ring that you can just see there, which looks like it has a design on it. Intricate. Maybe heraldic.”

  “Heraldic?” said Krista. “Like a class ring or something?”

  “Maybe,” said Rylands. “Not my field. Looks like a coat of arms.”

  “Not Mayan,” said Deborah Miller.

  “Not ancient Mayan,” said Rylands. “If it’s postconquest, though, who knows? It could be Spanish. But the ring isn’t the interesting part. The bones are the interesting part. They always are. The ring is on a finger.”

  “And?” said Krista, pressing the point. She was tense, and a part of her didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “You can’t really get a sense of scale from the video,” said Rylands, “but it’s clear from the bone piece that was left behind. The ring finger is very small. Someone opened this tomb long after it was first sealed up, and among the things they put inside it was the hand of a child.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “How recently was the hand put in the tomb?” asked Deborah.

  Rylands had spent the rest of the afternoon carefully dismantling the skeleton while the rest of them had packed up their equipment and returned to Valladolid for the night. Deborah had been itching to ask the question and cornered him in the lab the moment he got in.

  “I can’t say without further tests, some of which are going to have to be done elsewhere,” he answered, eying Bowerdale, who had just appeared in the doorway. “We don’t have the equipment. We might want to consider DNA, even carbon dating. That will take time and money.”

  “All this may be a bit moot, wouldn’t you say?” said Bowerdale, his voice booming.

  “What do you mean?” Deborah asked.

  “I mean what you think I mean,” said Bowerdale. He used his bulk to shield them from anyone else who might be listening, and his voice dropped. “This may well be a police matter.”

  “No chance,” whispered Rylands.

  “The decay is too extreme for this to be a recent crime,” said Deborah.

  “Define recent,” said Bowerdale. “This didn’t happen a few days or weeks ago, but I’m used to seeing bones that are a thousand years old, and all I can tell you for sure is that these ain’t them. Right, Rylands?”

  Rylands looked away, not liking the option, then nodded.

  “They may be a few hundred years old,” he said, “or a few months. Until we know what sort of shape they were in when they were placed there and have a better sense of the conditions for preservation inside the tomb, we can’t say more than that. The tomb is late pre-Classic, maybe 200 CE. One set of bones are contemporary with that date, the others are a lot later.”

  “Thus spake the bone man,” said Bowerdale. “So until we have a clearer idea of just how much later that hand is,” he went on, “I don’t know if we are looking at an archaeological site or a crime scene.”

  “I have to contact the local police,” said Deborah, thinking aloud.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” said Bowerdale. “Talk to the police and the site is going to be shut down for weeks, maybe longer. They will screw everything up. All these people will have to go home, and I wouldn’t bet on you being able to get them back. In the meantime, the trail of whoever took the artifacts from the tomb will go as cold as anything in this godfor
saken country ever gets, and you’ll never see the contents of that tomb again. Ever.”

  “So what would you have me do?” said Deborah. She hated asking for his advice but in this case felt like she needed it.

  “Sit on it,” said Bowerdale. “Tell nobody anything. And I mean, anything. Don’t let Aguilar e-mail his buddies with fun facts about bundles of hand bones. Don’t talk to the press or the cops. Alert them to a theft at the site, by all means, get them looking for the artifacts, but say nothing about those bones.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” said Deborah.

  “You’re the field director,” said Rylands, fixing her with his deep-blue eyes. “You always have a choice.”

  He got up suddenly and left the room, and after a long, watchful silence, Bowerdale did the same. Deborah stood at the window and watched the traffic in the street below, wishing she knew what to do next.

  Child sacrifice was well known among the ancient Maya, perhaps because they were considered purer than adults, perhaps because they were considered expendable—particularly if they were orphans or slaves taken after battles. Dismemberment was also well known, but it was usually heads that were cut off, the skulls flayed and buried together under important buildings, like those placed beside the royal skeleton they had found. Deborah could think of no instance in which a hand had been found in circumstances like these. And even without Rylands’s professional hunches, she had known there was something wrong about that tomb from the first moment they went in. It was and was not a pre-Classic burial.

  Deborah sighed, but she really did not have a choice: choose not to pursue the possible murder of a child for fear of disrupting the already disrupted dig?

  Please.

  She had been more than disappointed about the theft, overwhelmed by a sense of colossal failure, but this was different, was, in fact, almost like reaching clear air after a storm. It lifted her above her misery and humiliation and gave her a sudden clarity.

  The hand of a child.

  It had been placed there, it seemed, long after human sacrifice had vanished from the Mayan way of life. She thanked God she had no choice. What kind of person would have? Deborah didn’t know if she would ever have children, didn’t feel especially comfortable with even her sister’s kids. Yet she remembered what it was to be one, remembered the vulnerability, the powerlessness (freak!), the sense of being at war with even her own mother, and she felt an unexpected but powerful surge of pity for the child whose hand had been placed in the tomb. She pulled out her phone, looked at it for a moment, and dialed 065. When the switchboard operator answered, she asked for the police.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Alice was surprised to find that she wished the new people had never come. She had been looking forward to seeing some fresh faces, but now that they were here she wished she had the jungle ruins to herself again, even if they freaked her out from time to time. Stroud was a sideshow freak, Rylands was a card-carrying asshole, and Krista Rayburn acted like she was doing cereal adds on TV.

  The theft had changed everything, of course. A few hours ago, they looked like they were en route to the cover of Newsweek. Now? Who the hell knew. They’d brought in these experts who—apart from Rylands—now had nothing to do, and Miller had called the cops about the missing kid bones, so the site was locked down. There was nothing to do but sit around in the blazing heat, waiting for the cops to tell them they could go back to the dorm. And tomorrow? More of the same. Maybe she should just leave, go to the beach or something.

  James was more pathetic than ever. He clearly felt stupid for being the one who had got himself thumped, and was moping about. She had sat with him for a while, but he didn’t want to talk, and at one point she thought he was actually crying. Well, if he thought she was going to play mommy until he felt all better, he had another thing coming.

  She had climbed the rounded terraces of the oval palace, which was the southernmost major structure on the site, and sat at the top, watching the iguanas in the grass and smoking. Once in a while she saw some of the cops wandering about, but otherwise the place was deserted.

  The police were a weird mixture, a couple of young, beefy guys in blue fatigue pants and white shirts toting honest-to-God machine guns, a couple in rumpled military dress uniforms with peaked caps, and one guy in a suit. He did all the talking, though there wasn’t much of that. Alice had given her statement, not that there was much to say, and they had waved her away but told her not to leave. So here she was, getting sunburned and watching lizards. Quality time.

  She saw the new guy come walking in past the great four-way triangular arch cut from blocks of honey-colored stone. He was wearing khaki pants and a white Oxford shirt and carrying a duffel bag over his shoulder. Even at this distance you could tell he was buff. He had dark, wavy hair and a slight tan. He paused at the arch, climbing the wide steps at its base to get a better look around, then he was walking again. He was halfway across the central court area when he saw her. He hesitated and then raised a hand.

  “Hello,” he called. “Are you with the dig?”

  He had an accent. A Brit, perhaps, or an Aussie. Alice liked Aussies. She had known a few exchange students from Melbourne back in school: serious party guys. She raised a nonchalant hand and nodded. She sure as hell wasn’t going to shout. He seemed to think about it for a second and then started climbing up. It was a hard climb, like all these damned pyramids, but he managed them with athletic ease.

  “Hold it,” she called as he reached the halfway point. “I’ll come down.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette and navigated the stairs carefully, trying not to look too cautious. The guy was cute, and it wasn’t like she had anything better to do than try to make a good impression.

  “Looks like I’m going to have to work on my mountain goat skills,” he said, as she got down. “Hi. I’m the cameraman. Nick Reese.”

  “Alice,” she said simply, taking his hand and shaking it once. “I’m a graduate student working with Dr. Bowerdale, the surveyor. You probably know him.”

  “Bowerdale,” said the man. “Right. Yeah.”

  He had brown eyes and a bit of stubbly shadow around his mouth and jawline, kind of like David Beckham wearing his “scruffy” look. Handsome but not clean-cut. She liked that.

  “You’ll be wanting to talk to Deborah,” she said, adding, “Miss Miller,” when he looked uncertain. “I’ll take you to her.”

  “Brilliant,” he said. “Thanks. Is it always this hot?”

  “Always,” she said. “I’d say you get used to it, but you don’t. It sucks, pretty much.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You might want to get yourself some shorts,” she said.

  “I don’t really do shorts,” he replied, smiling.

  “You’re a Brit?”

  “Guilty as charged. What gave it away, the accent or the aversion to shorts?”

  She laughed. The day was looking up.

  They walked past the ball court and she watched him scanning the site.

  “Impressive,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, as if realizing it for the first time. “It’s pretty cool, I guess.”

  “Old news to you, no doubt,” he said. “But this new find sounds extraordinary. Is it all Miss Miller says it is?”

  Alice snorted disparagingly.

  “Well, it was,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He was still smiling, but he looked suddenly different, careful somehow. Wary.

  “Oh you won’t have heard yet,” said Alice, enjoying the knowledge. “Yeah, we found this new tomb. Pre-Classic. Super old. Full of all kinds of cool stuff.”

  “And?”

  There it was again, an urgency the smile couldn’t quite hide.

  “It got robbed,” she said, smirking.

  “What?”

  He had stopped on the grass and was now quite still, staring at her. Suddenly, he seemed not just well-built, but physically intimidat
ing. His eyes were so cold that it seemed ridiculous that they’d been bantering just moments before. Alice took a step back.

  “Robbed,” she repeated, her tone less jokey now. “Someone got in and lifted a bunch of stuff last night.”

  “Everything?”

  “Not the bones or the grave goods,” she said, “but they took the jewels. And there was this bundle of bones that they say is a kid’s hand, and that was taken too, so the cops are here, but...”

  She stopped talking and watched open-mouthed with surprise as he turned his back on her and walked away fast and with purpose, as if he knew exactly where he was going. He was heading for the acropolis.

  So much for a hot new boy toy, she thought. She’d never seen anyone change in manner quite as fast as the photographer had the minute he sloughed off that friendly smile.

  She started trotting after him, feeling her interest mount. Alice’s first real boyfriend had been capable of transformations like that—though they usually happened right before he started hitting her. She didn’t want to end up in another relationship like that one. But there was no denying the guy was hot.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Deborah watched the plainclothes cop from Merida. He let the captain with his braided cap strut about, ordering the other uniforms around, but he was in charge of the actual investigation, and he moved with a careful, professional slowness. He spent an hour in the tomb, another in front of the video monitor studying the footage of what had been there before the break-in, and two more listening to their statements. Meanwhile, he had one officer take measurements of the tomb entrance: they were going to put up a lockable steel door.

  “For how long?” Deborah had asked in Spanish.

  The detective tipped his head on one side and frowned, but he wasn’t really considering the question.

  “Until we know what we are investigating,” he replied in English. He was about her age, more Latino than Mayan, and crisply professional, though he wore some kind of fragrant oil in his curly black hair. “If it’s a murder, the tomb will stay closed for some time. Weeks, perhaps. I cannot say yet. Our resources are limited. We may need your help.”