“True believer? I’m waiting for her to admit she’s a witch. Father Valery would just love that.”
It was a lightly foggy spring morning as we pulled out of Rose’s driveway. The chill air was permeated with that patented Bay Area perfume of brine, cedar, and eucalyptus. I kept a respectable distance behind Rose’s Toyota as we buzzed down Highway 1, trying to allow some of my pent-up tension to slip away. I had a moment of icy awareness when I thought I saw a maroon Honda pull onto the highway behind us, but as moments went by and it failed to reappear, I settled down a bit. Still, I gave the rearview mirror regular glances, feeling creepily vulnerable. Rose should have had a whole posse riding escort, not a perky little private eye (emphasis on “little”) with three amulets and a holy water blessing.
As it happened, not even a posse could have spared Rose. We were just coming up on Sharp Park when Rose’s Toyota suddenly swerved off the road. Before I could do more than pull off the gas, the car hit a grassy hummock and flipped over, rolling several times before sliding out of sight to the seaward side of the dunes.
I don’t remember pulling over, ditching the Harley, or scrambling across the sand. I only remember seeing the cinnamon-red Corolla lying upside down against a dune, its wheels spinning in a way that might have been comical in a cartoon. I slid down the hummock to the driver’s side of the car. The roof was only slightly crumpled, for which I thanked God wordlessly. The window in the driver’s side door had shattered, the safety glass crazed and beaded. Through it, I could see that the airbag had deployed. Other than that I could make out only a mosaic of green, bronze, and black cherry—Rosie’s sweater, skin, and hair.
I grasped the door handle with both hands, dug my feet into the sand and pulled, but the door frame was bent and the door wouldn’t budge. I tried again, throwing my whole weight into it. The car rocked slightly.
Frustrated and terrified, I leapt up to aim a kick at the window and caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Cruz Veras was sliding toward me down the back of the hill, reaching into his jacket pocket as he reached the bottom.
I didn’t think; I acted, pulling the Taurus out of its holster and taking aim. “I wouldn’t,” I told him.
He raised both hands. “I was going for my cell phone. To call 911.”
“I’m sure.”
“One of us needs to do it.”
“Fine. Do it. Slowly.”
He opened his jacket. I saw the cell phone peeking from the left inside pocket. I also saw the leather strap of a shoulder holster. The gun was cuddled up under his left arm.
Journalist, my Aunt Kazu’s yazoo. I kept the gun trained on him while he called in the accident, listening intently to his words, my hands shaking like a rookie’s.
Through the chaos pattern of crazed window glass, I thought I saw movement in the kaleidoscope of color that was Rose. I wavered, wanting to drop the Taurus and help her, wanting to keep Veras under the gun.
“Let me help her,” he said, slipping the phone back into his pocket. He studiously kept his hands away from his firearm.
“I don’t even know who the hell you are.”
“I’m Cruz Veras. That’s my name. Really.”
“Not a journalist.”
“Yes, but not at the moment. At the moment, I’m an agent of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City.”
“Agent?”
The kaleidoscope shifted again. I smelled gasoline.
“I have identification.” He gestured at his inside pocket.
“First ditch the sidearm.”
He grimaced, then delicately removed the gun with thumb and forefinger. It was a Glock 28—.38 caliber. I nodded toward a ragged carpet of ice plant into which he reluctantly pitched the gun. Then he pulled out his wallet with equal care and flipped it open. The photo ID within proclaimed him to be just what he had told me: Dr. Cruz Sacramento Veras, INAH agent. For all I knew he had a different ID card for every occasion. At this point, I didn’t care. Swearing silently, I holstered my gun and put my booted foot through the driver’s side window, careful to pick a spot furthest away from Rose’s head.
Before I’d pulled my foot free, Veras was on his knees, going at the pellets with his hands knotted inside his sleeves. I joined him. It took mere seconds to clear the window, then Veras reached in and felt around Rose’s neck while I ground my teeth and wondered if I should intervene.
“Pulse is strong. Her neck doesn’t seem to be broken. But there’s some bleeding.” He drew his hand back streaked with bright red.
I leapt at the good news. “How can you tell . . . it’s not broken, I mean.”
“I was a paramedic for a while out of college. We’ll need to get her seat belt off.”
I peered through the busted out window into the cab. “I can get in on the passenger side and unlatch it. Can you support her? Get her down?”
He nodded. “Go.”
I scrambled around the front end of the car, noticing a curl of greasy smoke rising from the engine compartment. The passenger-side window was mostly gone. I pulled my hands up into the sleeves of my jacket and cleared the remaining glass. For once in my life, I was glad to be petite. It made getting through the window relatively easy. It was a squeeze, but I was able to crawl on my hands and knees to where Rose dangled upside down behind the steering wheel.
Cruz Veras was already in position, lying on his side, his head and arms inside the car. As I put my hands to the seat belt latch, he reached up to support Rose.
“Okay,” he said. “Let it go.”
I did, but not before wrapping my right hand through the strap and taking some of Rose’s weight onto the webbing. She moved again, whimpering and turning her head slightly. Blood ran down the side of her face and into her hair. Where was it coming from? Had the airbag deployed late? Had something inside the car come lose and struck her?
I swallowed my fear and said, “It’s okay, Rosie. I’m here. We’re going to get you out.”
I thought I heard her murmur my name a second before Veras said, “Okay, slowly. Bring her down onto my chest.”
We lowered her as carefully as possible so that her upper body was lying in Veras’s arms, then he worked his way back out through the window while I lowered and straightened her legs.
By the time I’d gotten out and around the car, he’d carried her several yards away behind a dense growth of sedge and laid her out full length in the grassy sand. I could hear the plaintive sound of sirens now; they seemed to come from every direction at once.
I stumbled to my knees beside Rose in the sand, confused and frightened by the amount of blood around her neck and head. Given the nature of the accident, it didn’t make sense.
Veras had ripped a sleeve from his shirt. He wadded it and used it to apply pressure to a wound I couldn’t see from my vantage point.
“What is it?” I asked. “How—?”
“It’s a bullet wound,” he told me. “This wasn’t an accident.”
Chapter 10
Undercover Agent
The Hopi word for kachina is katsinam. I know this because of Rose Delgado.
Katsinam are the spirits of all created things. Those little wooden dolls tourists buy are called tinu. The wood from which a tinu is carved is chosen carefully to please the spirit that will inhabit it.
The tinu in my hands—the one I held as if it were a winning lottery ticket—was made of cottonwood. Rose’s granddad carved it for her when she was fourteen for the Powamuya Ceremony—the Bean Dance. That was the year we met and adopted each other, discovering in the process that we each had a bedroom shelf inhabited by lucky charms for every occasion.
I’d had a team of them on me today as I watched Rose’s car veer off the road and flip over into the dunes. The oberegi had failed me. They had failed Rose. So I clung to Rosie’s prayer-covered tinu. I couldn’t see the prayers, but I knew they were there. I piled more on as I sat in the hospital waiting room, watching David Delgado rock their daughte
r Letty, while their son, Luis, slept at the end of a sofa, and the mysterious Cruz Veras paced and murmured soft Spanish syllables into his cell phone.
I knew he was not what he seemed to be, this man, and had as many layers as one of Rose's archaeological digs. This recent knowledge was disturbing because it meant that my highly developed research skills and painfully won sensitivity to liars had failed. If I hadn’t been a quivering mass of adrenaline-hyped nerves, I would have been furious with myself for buying his lies. PIs are supposed to have a sixth sense about these things.
Hospital waiting rooms are wretched places to wait, but they’re great places to internally agonize over what you could have done to avoid ending up here, hopefully watching doors through which only the desperately injured pass.
That’s what I was doing: clutching Rose’s tinu and agonizing. At some point I realized that Cruz Veras had pocketed his cell phone and had sat down opposite me.
When I looked up, he said, “The sniper was after Rose, Miss Miyoko. There’s nothing you could have done to change that.”
Suddenly, I was angry—because this almost total stranger had divined my thoughts; because I’d just come to the same conclusion and it didn’t ease the pain; because anger felt somehow less impotent than grief.
“I could’ve been in the car with her instead of following at a safe distance,” I said, and Cruz Veras broke eye contact and looked down at his clasped hands.
“Dammit, Tink! That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard you say.” This abuse of my truncated nickname came from Dave, who was glaring at me over the top of his daughter’s head. “How do you think Rose would feel if you’d been hurt too?”
I got up and moved to a corner where I could agonize in peace. I knew I should straighten up and act like a professional, but I felt less like a PI whose stint as a bodyguard had just come to a disastrous end and more like a woman who was possibly about to lose her best friend. I was torn between reexamining the past several weeks for clues or sense or meaning, and caressing remembrances of my friendship with Rose. I rejected the latter as impossibly morbid and forced the PI to rear her icy head. What I couldn’t do was sit here and tick off the final hours of Rose Delgado’s life, the end of my life as I knew it, the shattering of a family for Dave and Luis and Letty. What I could do was find out why this had happened and who had done it.
Dave’s mom and dad arrived to take the kids down to the cafeteria. Dave and Veras and I remained in the waiting room. Dave was praying, Veras was pacing, and I was sitting numbly in my corner when Rose’s surgeon appeared through that terrifying set of doors. I was on my feet before I realized I was moving, drawn to him like a chip of iron to a magnet. Dave and I—and Cruz Veras—converged on him at the same time.
He spoke; we listened, waiting for something to jump out at us and inspire hope.
“Soft tissue damage?” I repeated, trying to keep my eyes focused on the doctor. “No spinal cord damage?”
“None. Ms. Delgado was incredibly lucky. The bullet passed through her neck cleanly and left a small exit wound. There was some damage to her throat. That should heal in time. Apart from that, she sustained a hairline fracture of the collarbone and some head trauma. And that is what we need to keep our eye on. She’s in a natural coma right now, but,” he added when Dave uttered a sick moan, “her vital signs are strong. She’s in serious condition, but I’m hopeful we can coax her body to begin repairs. She’ll spend some time in the ICU and I’ve put her on anti-inflammatory medication.”
“Prednisone?” asked Veras.
“Dexamethasone,” the doctor said, and gave him a sharp glance. “Are you a doctor?”
Veras’s mouth turned up at one corner. “A doctor of archaeology. I have a bit of medical training. I know prednisone has . . . issues.”
The surgeon nodded. “There are some pretty nasty side effects with continued use, yes. Which is one of the reasons I chose dexamethasone.”
“But how long will this last, this coma?” asked Dave.
“That depends on Rose. But it’s a perfectly natural way for the brain to react to trauma. A self-preservation mechanism. She may wake suddenly or emerge into normal sleep in a matter of hours or days. The bullet missed her major arteries. Just. She’s lost very little blood, really.”
My mouth popped open to object to that characterization, but the doctor seemed to know where I was headed before I got there.
“I know it looked like a lot,” he said, “but it wasn’t, in the grand scheme of things. She’s not weak. That’s the good news. The bad news is the inflammation of the brain, and we’re doing everything we can to control that.”
Dave nodded. “Can I . . . when can I see her?”
“You can come up now and sit with her for a bit, if you’d like.”
“The kids?” He gestured down the hall.
“They’ll have to wait until she’s out of ICU, I’m afraid.”
Dave nodded and started to follow the doctor into the intensive care unit, prompting me to make a noise somewhere between the bleat of a lamb and the mew of a bereft kitten.
The doctor shook his head, his smile kind and professional at once. “I’m sorry, Ms. Miyoko. You’ll have to wait too. Family only, right now.”
I watched Dave walk side by side with the doctor toward the doors to the inner sanctum. Thus far and no further. I felt cold. Empty. Impotent. I realized I was still clenching the tinu in my fist at the same moment I felt Cruz Veras’s eyes boring into the back of my head.
“Are you planning on standing there until she wakes up?” he asked me.
“I’m not planning anything,” I said.
“Not even making what she’s going through count?”
“What did you have in mind? I’m fresh out of ideas at the moment.”
“You were a witness.”
“Oh, right. I can tell the police exactly nothing. Except that I saw her car plunge suddenly off the road.”
“I think you can tell them more than that. I think you may be able to give them a description of the shooter.”
Now I turned to face him. “What?”
“Come on, Gina. Turn your brain back on. You can’t help Rose if you’re all doped up on your own sense of impotence.”
It was not lost on me that he’d decided we were on first name terms. I squeezed the tinu within an inch of its life. “What the hell would you know about my sense of impotence?”
“Right now, all of your anger is going into crushing that poor, defenseless kachina. I think there are more productive places to put it.”
“It’s a tinu, Doctor Archaeologist, and—” And it suddenly hit me. “And you think this was the same guy that tracked her to the headlands.”
“I think it’s possible. Don’t you? I didn’t get as good a look at him as you did, but he was clearly targeting her.”
I released my death grip on the tinu and carefully smoothed its feathered headdress. “You ready to tell me what you were doing there?”
He nodded, his eyes still on my face. “Okay. But not here. I don’t think there’s much we can do here at the moment. It’s got to be hours since you ate. How about we find a private place to refuel and talk?”
“The police—”
“We can do that first if you want. But I think they’ll seek you out for further discussion when they’re ready. I already gave them my version of what happened at the headlands, including that I thought it was an NPS sting.”
“You did?”
He raised both hands in surrender. “I’m out in the open now, Gina. And I’m not about to hide anything from the authorities, in any event.”
“Oh, just from me and Rose.”
“I felt it was necessary. I’m offering to come clean now.” He turned and made a “walk this way” gesture toward the hallway beyond the semiprivate waiting room in which we stood.
“All right. But I want to go someplace public.”
His lips twitched. “Fine. Public and private. We can
do that.”
The booth in the café he chose was private by virtue of the ambient noise level. We didn’t have to shout to hear each other, but even if we had, the conversation would have been swallowed up by the sounds of dishes clattering, espresso makers frothing, and other voices swirling about on the caffeine-laden air.
We ordered our food and drinks, then I sat back against the high padding of the booth, pulled my jacket more tightly around me, and said, “All right, Zorro. Who are you, really, and why have you been following Rose Delgado?”
“I’ve already told you who I am. Cruz Sacramento Veras. I am an operative with the INAH. Like your friend Rose, I’m a trained archaeologist with a somewhat personal interest in the history of native peoples.”
“Who’s been an investigative reporter.”
“Yes.”
“And a contributor to Arqueología magazine.”
“Yes.”
“And a paramedic.”
He inclined his head.
“Man of a thousand faces.”
“Perhaps not quite a thousand.” He said it with a straight face.
“What face were you wearing when you started tailing Rosie?”
He pointed at his chin. “This face. The face of an undercover agent. I am charged with tracing artifacts pillaged from Mexican sites for illegal sale in the United States. Artifacts such as the one you encountered during your recent sting operation in Phoenix.”
I sat up straight. “What do you know about that?”
“That it occurred. That you found a Mayan piece among the Hohokam potteries. That the dealer died violently upon his release from jail.”
“And you found all this out from . . . ?”
“I’ve been in touch with Ellen Robb.” He met my gaze levelly and every defense mechanism I had went to DEFCON One.
“I’ll verify that.”
He smiled at me the way people smile at bristly little kittens all puffed out in Big Bad Lion Mode. “Of course you will, and you should. This is not a business that engenders trust . . . more’s the pity. And that is why I was surveilling Rose Delgado. My organization knew there were artifacts from important archaeological sites being smuggled into the U.S. for sale, and I suspected Ted Bridges of being part of that process. He was a small time player and he was sloppy, but the artifacts he was fencing were authentic. I just had no idea where or how he was acquiring them. I knew the NPS had been trying to corner Bridges for some time, and I knew of Rose’s role in authenticating trafficked goods. I thought she might know more than we did about what happened to the artifacts once they crossed the border.”
The Antiquities Hunter Page 11
