The Antiquities Hunter

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  None of them were nice thoughts.

  Dad’s surprise suggestion was the biggest, shiniest ball of the bunch. Was Dr. Cruz Veras a dedicated journalist with a cannon for an arm, or was he part of a potentially deadly tag team?

  The debriefing was painful because we exited it with more questions than answers. Ellen asked, again, if Rose wouldn’t rather forego the Anasazi trial, and again, Rose respectfully declined.

  “I’m not a coward and I’m not a quitter,” she told her boss. “I can’t believe these yo-yos mean to kill me. I think they just want to frighten me, and figure a woman should be easy to intimidate. Well, they’re barking up the wrong woman.”

  That surprised laughter from both Ellen and me and significantly lightened the mood.

  Ellen grimaced. “What about the Bridges sting? No one would blame you if you wanted to opt out and let Greg head it.”

  “Hell, no,” Rose said. “I’m looking forward to the Bridges sting. That hotdog has been thumbing his nose at the Park Service for years, but this time, I think we’re going to get him. But, I am willing to accept a little extra backup.”

  And so I found myself temporarily assigned to the National Park Service as an agent-in-training. At least that would be my cover to all but Greg and Rose. And in the coming week, I would be in Arizona working the sting.

  Chapter 6

  My Lunch with Alvie

  For the next two days I saw neither burgundy Hondas nor green LeBarons. I continued to poke at the INAH, hoping to make contact with whomever counted as Cruz Veras’s superior. After several frustratingly brief forays, I finally played a card I wasn’t sure I should; I introduced myself to the admin as an American National Park Service agent and asked if I could speak to the head of Dr. Veras’s department. I was informed that Dr. Veras was the head of his department.

  “Then who can I escalate this to?” I asked. “This is a matter of the utmost importance. I . . . I think Dr. Veras’s life might be in danger.” From me, if he turned out to be dirty.

  “I’m sorry,” the admin told me. “Could you repeat that?”

  I all but ground my teeth. “I have reason to believe Dr. Veras is the target of a gang of blackmarket antiquities hunters.”

  “Please,” the young man implored me, “leave me your name and number and I will bring this to the appropriate persons.”

  Well, damn. I fibbed that I couldn’t leave my name and number because I was an undercover agent on assignment (sort of true) and couldn’t blow my cover.

  After that stinging failure, I tried a different tack. I took a photo of Cruz Veras and used Google’s lovely image tracking app to ask “who is this?” Every hit I got informed me that this was Dr. Cruz Sacramento Veras, PhD, yada, yada, yada. Except for the hits that insisted it was Antonio Banderas.

  Frustrated in that, I sent an email to Dr. Veras that was short, pithy, and one I hoped that would elicit a response.

  Dr. Veras, I wrote, it appears you are a man of many talents: journalism, archaeology, and espionage to name but a few. I saw you at the headlands on Wednesday, still stalking Rose Delgado. Was the man who threatened her your associate? Lack of response to the contrary will be taken as a “yes.”

  I then started packing for my trip to Arizona with clothing the weather widget on my iPhone indicated was appropriate, then settled back to enjoy my Friday night.

  On Saturday I had lunch with Alvie at a Chinese restaurant on Sutter. The street in front of the restaurant was in a perpetual state of repair. This did not seem to hurt business. In fact, I suspected that many lunch-goers simply took one look at the big trench just up the street from the restaurant’s front door and figured they need go no further for sustenance.

  “Arizona?” he asked over dim sum, his expressive, slightly nasal voice clearly conveying surprise. “Why Arizona?”

  “’Cause that’s where the action is,” I answered. “I’ve been hired to do a little sleuthing for Rose’s organization.”

  “Rose is a park ranger.”

  “Rose is a park service agent. There’s a difference. Rangers tell people not to feed bears. Agents tell people not to dig up other people’s ancestors.”

  He nodded. “Didn’t I hear you mention that someone dug up one of Rose’s ancestors not that long ago?”

  “Last winter. Her great-grandmother.”

  “That’s harsh. So her gramma might be an exhibit in a museum someplace?”

  “Or in some private collector’s basement.”

  “Wow.” He shook his head, no doubt trying to clear the image of a sweet, old Hopi grandmother mounted on someone’s wall like a hunting trophy. “Does it strike you as odd that you have so many friends who deal with dead people and their stuff?”

  “Not until you mentioned it.”

  He toyed with his baos for a moment, pushing them around the little plate with his chopsticks, then said, “That was a close call the other day.”

  “Huh?”

  “At the headlands. The guy with the S&W nine mil. Good thing somebody has a live arm and dead aim.”

  I stared at him. “Was that . . . you?”

  He smiled. “I’m not Clark Kent, unfortunately. But I did see the whole thing go down. So did your dad. I take it he didn’t say anything.”

  “Not a peep. What do you mean, you saw it go down?”

  “I mean, Ed got it into his head that you weren’t going to have adequate backup. So he made sure you were covered by a contingent of SASH operatives.”

  Oh, so they were “operatives” now. “I didn’t see any of you.”

  The smile deepened, prodding a dimple into view on his left cheek. “Yeah, your dad’s still got it.”

  I pushed my plate aside, suddenly uninterested in food. “Where were you guys positioned?”

  “All over. Ed was down on the beach. Uh, Claude Trevor was just around the bend in the trail about nine or ten yards from where Rose went over the side. I was behind you on the hillside.”

  “Higher up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see where the stalker came from, then? He completely bypassed Rosie’s team. Although why . . .”

  Alvie lowered his eyes. “Maybe they got made. I mean, I suspected the guy with the easel. But then, I knew he must be an agent because I knew it was a sting. The stalker wouldn’t.” He shrugged.

  “What about the guy with the easel?” I wanted to know.

  “His palette. There was no Phthalo green on it. But there was on the seascape he was puttering with.”

  “No Phthalo green. Seriously?”

  “Well, and I could tell he was armed. It was the way his sweater hung. Most people wouldn’t notice either of those things, but the stalker might notice the bulge in his sweater if he was a pro.”

  “You think that might’ve tipped him?”

  “Not really. If it was me—the stalker, I mean—the presence of someone who was armed, and that I suspected might be undercover would put me off the job completely. And I sure as hell wouldn’t pull a gun out in broad daylight.”

  “So our wannabe assailant wasn’t too bright.”

  Alvie shrugged. “Or his real intent was to terrorize. Or he didn’t think Easel Guy was suspicious. Like I said, I knew he had to be a plant. Also, Sherlock here.” He pointed a thumb at his chest. “I’m trained to be observant and a detective fiction buff. I could look at anyone in this room and find something ‘off’ about them . . . whether it really is or not,” he added, self-deprecatingly.

  “Okay, I’m impressed,” I told him, then asked, “From your vantage point could you see who threw down on the guy?”

  “There was someone in the rocks at the top of the hill, but I didn’t get a good look at him. In fact, I thought it was one of the SASH Squad, but when we did some recon, I realized it must’ve been one of yours.” He studied my face. “Or not.”

  “Why’d you think it was one of the SASH guys?”

  “Giants baseball cap. A couple of the guys were wearing them. G
ood contextual camouflage.”

  That didn’t prove our hurler was Cruz Veras, but he’d been wearing a Giants baseball cap when I first saw him, leaning against his car all confident and cool.

  I asked Alvie a few more questions about their beach surveillance, then lapsed into ruminative silence. Alvie, God bless him, is used to that. He put up with it patiently until the main dishes arrived, then drew me out with some tales from the Crypt—the coroner’s office, that is. That perked me up a bit. There’s nothing like a few bizarre autopsy anecdotes to pull a woman out of a funk.

  We wandered down to Union Square after lunch and tooled through Macy’s which, in my book, is as much fun as Disneyland. I bought a new bathing suit and a totally ridiculous pair of spike-heeled sandals for no other reason than that Alvie stopped to admire them. To reciprocate, Alvie bought a moleskin shirt in a color he never wears.

  Alvie is one of those rare men who actually enjoys shopping. I can’t imagine why there aren’t more of them, because shopping is about as close to our hunter-gatherer roots as the urban male (or female) is going to get. The facial expression of a woman exiting Macy’s during the height of the sale season is indistinguishable from that of a lioness sitting on a fat water buffalo carcass on the savanna.

  When Alvie dropped me off at home, I told him I’d had a great time (which was true) and we should do it again (which I meant). This encouraged him to ask about dinner sometime next week. He was disappointed to hear I’d be in Arizona for an indeterminate amount of time but took a rain check, and gave me a friendly peck on the cheek before folding himself into his Volvo and driving away.

  In my home office I discovered two things. One was that Mom had let herself into the houseboat and left me a message on a sticky note: Come tell me.

  She meant lunch with Alvie, of course. I was expected to give a blow-by-blow account of any romantic subtext. I had two choices: make something up, or tell the truth and be roundly disbelieved.

  The second thing I found was an email message from cveras@iahm.org. It said simply: No.

  No what? No, I’m not the Cruz Veras you want? No, I’m not a man of many talents? No, I didn’t throw the dirt clod? No, the stalker isn’t my associate?

  In the middle of my quandary, the phone rang. It was Mom. The first words out of her mouth were: “Tell me all about it.”

  Chapter 7

  Sting

  We flew to Arizona Sunday morning—Rose, Greg, Rodney, and me. We were incognito—Rose and Greg posing as a married couple on vacation; Rodney and I pretending to be college students bound for a university-sponsored dig near Sedona. I didn’t see anyone who looked like the Headland Stalker; neither did I see Cruz Veras.

  I was getting more paranoid too, I realized. Every aging linebacker or slender Banderas look-alike drew my immediate attention.

  We touched down at Sky Harbor a little after noon, grabbed a bite of lunch, then went by the Heard Museum to pick up a satchel of “trade goods”—artifacts that would be used as part of the sting. The flat, dry air—like the flat, dry landscape—was a shock after the cool, moist atmosphere of home. Within minutes of landing, I felt as if I was being mummified.

  We drove to a budget motel in the suburb of Glendale where we settled in to prepare for the upcoming meeting and wait for the arrival of two additional agents on loan from the Phoenix field office. Rose and Greg had chosen as the “sting suite” a second floor room in a wing of the rambling motel that was shielded from the main road by its fellow wings. (I’m convinced that it must’ve looked like a cubist octopus from the air.) While Rose and I put identifying code numbers and tracking dots on the artifacts in unobtrusive places, Greg and Rodney went to the room next door to set up their surveillance equipment.

  While they were gone, agents Frakes and Padilla checked in. At first glance, I could see this was the Brute Suit Squad. Both large men were nattily dressed in the latest from Yves Saint Bernard. It was their assignment to perform the arrest and the interrogation, playing the traditional game of Good Cop/Bad Cop.

  “Which is which?” I asked.

  “I’m the Good Cop,” Ramon Padilla told me, and smiled as if to prove it. The smile transformed his round, bulldog face into something disturbingly cherubic.

  I glanced at Chuck Frakes, who looked like an ex–prize fighter—not somebody I would have dared call Chuck. “Bad cop?”

  He nodded curtly. Then smiled. Not at all cherubic. Disturbing, nonetheless.

  “I live for interrogations,” he informed me in a monotone.

  “So how does it go down?” I asked.

  “Greg will escape,” Padilla said. “Rose gets arrested.”

  I nodded. “So that the undercover agents stay undercover.”

  “You got it.”

  “Rose says you’ve been after this guy for a while. How come you’ve never stung him before?”

  Padilla sighed. “It’s not for lack of trying. He’s gotten really good at hiding behind other dealers, for one thing. We set up a sting, but someone else shows up to take the fall. If anybody shows up at all.”

  “One time,” Rose recalled, “the fall guy was a college journalism student who thought it would make an exciting project for the school news rag to be in on an illegal artifact sale. He got more excitement than he bargained for.”

  “You busted him?”

  “Yep,” said Padilla cheerfully.

  “He got probation and community service,” explained Rose, shooting the other agent a quelling glance. “And a slightly different angle on his feature story than he’d planned. Fortunately for him, the judge was inclined to reward naiveté with lenience.”

  Frakes snorted.

  “So you’ve never gotten Bridges to bite?”

  “Once,” Rose said. “When we set up a sting, we often allow one clandestine meeting to go down without interference.”

  “Lulls ’em into a false sense of security,” said Padilla.

  Rose continued: “Since then, he’s shown up at a sting exactly one time. And at that one, he took one look at the goods, said, ‘Hey, this stuff is stolen!’ and left.”

  “Something tipped him?” I asked.

  Rose grimaced. “We had an overeager young newbie in on the sting. He got a little antsy. I think he made Bridges nervous.”

  “How do you find guys like Bridges to begin with?”

  “Antiquities shows, mostly,” said Padilla.

  “Antiquities shows?” I repeated. “You mean like gun shows or car shows—like that?”

  The idea that there might be a cadre of zealots who bonded over potsherds and bone fragments hadn’t occurred to me. I suppose it should have. Since a lot of archaeological prospecting is done in village middens (aka, municipal dumps), I found the concept comical, imagining an exhibition centuries from now at which anthro-geeks oohed and aahed over Campbell’s Soup cans and Budweiser bottles.

  A look at the faces of my three companions indicated that the humorous element had escaped them.

  “Exactly,” Rose said. “We go to the shows to look for antiquities vendors who seem willing to fudge on legal issues.”

  “And Mr. Bridges was willing,” I guessed.

  “Oh, you betcha,” said Rose. “I made a few plaintive noises about the paucity of Mogollon artifacts that were in circulation for purchase and he guaranteed me he could get me as many top-grade specimens as I wanted. When I asked if that wasn’t a dangerous offer, Bridges was positively gleeful. He thought the idea of ‘putting one over’ on Uncle Sam was a ‘hoot.’”

  “Joy boy,” said Frakes. I’d swear his jaw snapped shut the second the words were clear of his teeth.

  Rose’s cell phone pinged just then. It was a text from Greg telling her they were ready for the artifacts we’d been prepping. I laid them out on the bed while Rose finished the last touches on her disguise. There were about a dozen clay and wooden figurines from New Mexico, an entire wooden flute, some stone beads, a painted deer bone, and an itty-bitty little net snare that woul
d have been hard-pressed to hold a large grasshopper.

  Half an hour later, Greg was in place in the room, Rose had gone off-campus so as to make a grand entrance, and Rodney and I hunkered down amid the surveillance equipment with Padilla and Frakes. It was like some twisted reproduction of a Norman Rockwell painting—four kids gathered around the old radio, tuning into an episode of The Lone Ranger.

  At 7:05 P.M. Greg’s voice announced that Rose—aka, “Stella Vasquez”—had parked her SUV in the lot below.

  “Bridges is nowhere in sight,” he said dryly. “I wonder if he’s even going to show.”

  “You want me to wait him out?” asked Rose from the parking lot.

  “No,” said Greg. “It’s almost ten after. Come on up, just don’t hurry.”

  The next thing we heard was Rose’s voice murmuring, “Will wonders never cease?”

  “What?” Rodney asked, coming to attention.

  “He’s he-ere.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Greg, then, “Sonuvabitch.”

  “Muzzle it, Greg,” Padilla warned him. “Don’t be too happy to see him. You’ll scare him off.”

  “Stella Vasquez” and Ted Bridges converged on Greg’s motel room at roughly the same moment. She was knocking when we heard Bridges’s breezy, “Hey, baby!”

  “I’m not your baby, pops,” Rose responded.

  “I ain’t your pops, baby.”

  Greg answered the knock. After the obligatory introductions, the discussion turned to the items laid out on the bed.

  “Huh,” Bridges grunted. “Looks like a little mouse-catcher. Man, you gotta be hard up to want to trap something that small.”

  “What’s the flute made of?” Rose asked.

  Greg answered, “Willow.”

  “You got papers on it?”

  “No, but I can get them.”

  “Nice,” said Bridges. “But I seen better. What do you want for the whole batch?”

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Rose objected. “Leave some for me, why don’t you?”