“You’re not alone in filling holes in your collection,” Lina said. “Even in the later days of the Maya empire—and I use the term loosely, for it was less an empire than a culture that changed through time—there were artisans who were specifically commissioned to replicate items hearkening back to the kings of old. Perhaps it was a way to invoke the gods of a more powerful time, before the culture began to unravel.”
“Fake is fake,” Hunter said.
“Even fakes tell us about the culture they came from,” Lina said. “Yet I understand your point. Authentic artifacts are always preferable.”
“So who would you go to for something authentic to add to your collection?” Hunter asked the older man. “Something you’ve heard rumors of but have never seen.”
“Well,” Crutchfeldt said, “Celia Reyes Balam, of course.”
“What if she didn’t have it?” Hunter said. “Where would you go next?”
“If she doesn’t have it,” Crutchfeldt said, “no one does.”
“What if it came up the chain from grave robbers?” Hunter asked casually.
Lina made a startled sound. “Then it would be illegal.”
“Yeah,” he said, without looking away from Crutchfeldt. “So who would be likely to have it and how would you get in touch with them?”
“That’s—” Lina began.
“I’m curious,” Hunter said, not looking at her. “If you aren’t, go sit by the pool or something.”
She didn’t hide her irritation. “Mr. Crutchfeldt might not like the implications of your questions.”
“You insulted?” Hunter asked Crutchfeldt.
“I’m a collector,” the other man said easily. “In order to pursue the avenues you are implying, I’d have to want the item very, very badly. I don’t have many such items, but…”
Hunter and Lina followed Crutchfeldt’s glance to a nearby alcove where a teardrop light illuminated half of what appeared to be a stone knife. It was chipped, dull and unremarkable, broken into three pieces. Yet on closer inspection, the sheer craftsmanship glowed through the haze of time and damage. On one of the blade segments there was a small marking. Hunter looked at it curiously, sensing that he’d seen the sign or something much like it on one of the pieces that Jase had lost.
With a soft sound, Lina edged closer. The broken knife had a sigil on it, a marking that made her pulse spike. The mark was a cluster of four triangles all turned point out, with jagged lines joining them on their longest side.
Four corners joined by lightning.
Kawa’il.
“Where did you find this?” Lina asked tightly.
“If memory serves, it probably wasn’t from a sponsored dig,” Crutchfeldt said, his smile more a hint than a real curve. “It’s from a lowland site in the Yucatan. Post-Classic period. It actually postdates the official end of the Maya civilization, though there were many artisans who kept working with motifs and styles—”
“Yes, I know,” Lina interrupted curtly. “Which site.”
It was a demand, not a question.
“South of Padre,” Crutchfeldt said blandly.
She took a careful breath before she looked at Hunter. “You never wanted to date me. You just wanted to use me.”
He stared back, unreadable.
“I’ll be in the Jeep,” Lina said.
Without another word, she left.
“Sensitive young lady,” Crutchfeldt observed. “It’s that Latin temperament.”
Hunter wanted to roll his eyes. “I haven’t noticed that Latins have the only tempers on earth. If you’re talking temper, I come from Vikings via Genghis Khan.”
For the first time, Crutchfeldt looked at Hunter with real interest. “What do you want?”
“I have a client who wants to acquire artifacts from that period.” Hunter nodded toward the alcove before he added a deliberate echo of Crutchfeldt’s words. “Very, very badly.”
“You should have dated the mother, not the daughter.”
“Celia doesn’t have access to the artifacts,” Hunter said.
“And you think I do.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Hunter reached into one of the pockets of his cargo shorts and pulled out the pictures of the missing artifacts. The photos showed the rubs and creases of careless handling, but the artifacts were quite identifiable.
Curious, Crutchfeldt leaned closer. Hunter yanked back the photos and held them like a poker hand, close to his chest. With an impatient sound, Crutchfeldt plucked one of the photos free.
A mask, shining like a smoking mirror, ringed with glyphs of power and death.
“Kawa’il,” Crutchfeldt breathed. For an instant the avarice of a collector gleamed in his eyes. Then the businessman took over. “What is the provenance?”
“My client wants the artifact,” Hunter said, “not the pedigree.”
“I don’t have either one.”
Hunter had known that the moment Crutchfeldt looked at the photo with the eyes of a man who wanted, not one who already owned.
“Who would?” Hunter asked.
There was a long silence. Then Crutchfeldt sighed. “I rarely give advice, yet…Dr. Taylor’s exquisite appreciation of my collection was very satisfying.”
Hunter waited.
“There are grave robbers on Reyes Balam lands,” Crutchfeldt said. “They take, but they don’t sell to me or anyone I know. Their leader is more ruthless than your Genghis Khan.”
“Who is he?”
“To speak his name is death.” Crutchfeldt smiled thinly and handed over the photo. “I prefer life.”
“Is he Mexican?”
Crutchfeldt nodded.
“Is he called El Maya?”
Crutchfeldt’s eyelids flinched. “Good day, Mr. Kerrigan. You know the way out.”
Hunter wanted to argue, but he knew a losing hand when he held it. With a smooth motion, he pocketed the photos and walked out, leaving Crutchfeldt and his collection behind. The sun seemed unusually hot and vital after the mansion.
Lina was waiting in the Jeep, frowning and biting her lush lower lip.
Hunter got in and started up the engine without a word.
“Well?” she asked after they were beyond the long drive.
“I’m thinking.”
“Think out loud.”
Hunter almost smiled despite the anger and adrenaline racing through him.
To speak his name is death.
He didn’t want Lina anywhere near that kind of danger.
And he didn’t have any choice. Houston hadn’t provided safety for her. They had been followed to the city limits and would have been followed farther if Hunter hadn’t lost the tail. The fact that it was a lone follower had told Hunter that it wasn’t a law enforcement agency breathing down their neck. Even the dumbest cop knew that if the subject was alert, a single tail didn’t get the job done.
“Hunter?”
He flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “If I thought it would do any good, I’d turn around and hold Crutchfeldt’s face in the toilet until he talked.”
Lina’s eyes widened in shock. “Did he recognize the photos?”
“As in knowing where they were now? No. But he knew they came from Reyes Balam land.”
“How?” she demanded.
“Same way you did, even when you didn’t want to. A good eye.”
“What did he say?”
“That there are grave robbers on Reyes Balam land.”
She made a low sound. “I was afraid of that.”
“Apparently their leader is a real piece of work. Crutchfeldt was afraid to even say his real name. When I asked if it was El Maya, he invited me to leave.”
Lina’s long lashes lowered and she went back to nibbling on her lip. “Celia would have to know about him, wouldn’t she?”
“You own a lot of land. Rough land. Remote. Tough to get around in. I doubt if anyone could keep track of every acre.”
“But if
she’s buying from grave robbers, she’d know.”
Hunter’s hands flexed on the wheel again. He didn’t like any of this, and everything he found out made it worse.
“Crutchfeldt said the grave robbers weren’t selling to anyone he knew.” Hunter’s voice was like his eyes, edgy.
Relief and frustration went through Lina. She was glad to hear that her mother wasn’t trading in black-market artifacts, yet the information didn’t get them any closer to the person who was.
The sounds of the tires and the road and the occasional cry of a seabird filled the Jeep.
“You’re thinking again,” Lina said finally.
Hunter didn’t answer.
“I can’t help if you close me out,” she said.
“I’m trying to decide between taking you to my uncles for protection—”
“No,” Lina cut in. “I don’t want to drag anyone else into this.”
Hunter glanced at her and knew that she was hearing bullets chewing through concrete, seeing Jase’s blood.
“They know how to protect themselves,” Hunter said.
“So did Jase.”
Hunter let out a low curse. “I don’t want you hurt.”
“Neither do I.” She looked out the window. “I’ll go to Quintana Roo. My abuelita will be happy and I’ll be safe. My family members might live in the jungle outside Tulum, but they’re fashionable enough to have motion sensors, guards, and a panic room. All the latest in rich, paranoid chic.”
“What about the grave robbers? And El Maya?”
Lina shrugged. “They’ve obviously been in place for some time and nobody in the family has been harmed. Houston was where I was attacked, not the Yucatan. As for El Maya, it could be an American nickname, not Mexican. Besides…” Her voice died.
“What?”
“I’ve never felt watched in Quintana Roo.”
Hunter looked at his watch. “We have just enough time to make the next flight out of Brownsville.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SEA TURNED TURQUOISE IN THE AFTERNOON LIGHT, slapping lazily against the shore. Tourists were thick on Cozumel’s ground. Expensive hotels gleamed like high-rise wedding cakes, absorbing light and spreading a shimmering kind of brilliance. Backpackers and students swarmed over the other end of the tourist rainbow, sprawling on peripheral beaches or gearing up for jungle hikes. High or low, liquor flowed, oiling the machinery of commerce and culture.
Lina breathed in deep and bloomed like an orchid. Part of her was very much at home with the heat and humidity. A whole childhood of memories poured through her—prowling the jungle, diving and swimming in the cool cenotes that pocked the land, and eating exquisitely spiced food.
“Do we have time to eat?” she asked Hunter as they walked to a cheap rental-car place. “I’d kill for a good pibil.” She laughed. “Even a bad one.”
“I’m supposed to meet Rodrigo at a place called La Ali Azúl on Avenue Escobar. I’m sure they serve a mean pibil. But you’ll be eating alone.”
“Why?”
“My contact isn’t a nice man,” Hunter said. “That’s why he’s useful.”
“Is meet-and-greet with unsavory people another aspect of your job, like being an occasional bodyguard?”
“Information is our most important resource,” Hunter said. “Nothing quite like knowing the weather on the ground to help an operation go smoothly.”
“In other words, yes,” she said.
“Savory people aren’t much help when your business comes down to stopping crooks.”
Hunter rented a Bronco with Quintana Roo plates. Back-road dust had been ground into the floor mats. They drove off the rental lot and followed the Cancun-Chetumal highway south to the meeting place. The countryside was wild with greenery spilling across the limestone plateau and punctuated with even more shrines than Hunter recalled. But then, he hadn’t spent a lot of time in the nicer areas of the Yucatan.
“You remember this many shrines?” he asked.
“Not really,” Lina said, frowning. “Even at this time of year, it seems like an excess of religious fever, more than I’ve ever seen. A lot of Maya crosses.”
“Maya?”
“The cross was a significant symbol to the Maya before the Spanish ever came. Some texts are interpreted as meaning that the native cross represents the plane of the ecliptic, the time when the Long Count calendar ends.”
“Twenty-twelve again.”
She shrugged. “The division of time was a Maya preoccupation. Rather like modern civilization, with our obsession for minutes and hours and nanoseconds. The Maya measured bigger chunks of time, but the intent was the same. What can be measured can be controlled.”
“Culture rules,” Hunter said. “Like us.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been speaking Spanish since we landed.”
She looked startled, then amused. “You’re right. I didn’t even notice the transition. Maybe Abuelita will forgive you for being a gringo after all. You’re very fluent.”
“Your great-grandmother sounds like a pistol.”
“Oh, she is. I swear she’ll outlive us all.”
Hunter smiled at the affection in Lina’s voice.
The vegetation thinned and low buildings sprawled to either side of the divided road. Most of them were made of stucco over cinder blocks and other masonry, fenced off with wrought iron, and walled in by a succession of low billboards and electrical lines like blood vessels nourishing every building.
The mirrors were clear. Nobody had followed them from the airport. Nobody on the highway seemed interested in them.
“You feel watched?” Hunter asked Lina.
“No.”
“Let me know if that changes.”
“I’m impressed,” she said.
He checked the mirrors automatically. “By what?”
“You not only don’t laugh at feelings, you actually listen to them.”
He smiled thinly. “Anyone who doesn’t won’t last long in the jungle—or on the wrong side of city streets.”
Hunter parked as close as he could to the address Rodrigo had given him. Not that Rodrigo had been willing, especially when Hunter had awakened him in the middle of the night. But it was smart not to give Rodrigo too much warning.
The population around them was almost one hundred percent native, which meant that Hunter stood out. Too tall. Eyes too light. Skin not dark enough. Lina’s coloring mixed better with the locals, but she was taller than the men.
Rodrigo would have to choose a native backdrop, Hunter thought unhappily. Probably to punish me for insisting on the meet.
The smell of the ocean and cooking grills filled the tropical air. A little early for lunch, but not too early for a cerveza. Outdoor seating was casual—scattered plastic chairs, a bench, or just squatting on your heels. The morning open-air market had already closed. Other places were doing a slow, steady business. Bikinis and backpacks had been replaced by straw hats and loose guayaberas—shirts—in pale shades of tan and cream and blue. If Hunter had had one, he would be wearing it.
Nobody paid particular attention to him—gringos weren’t that rare—but Lina drew some quiet regard. It wasn’t her sweet figure people noticed, but her face. Men who swaggered elsewhere stepped out of her way. Children stared, only to be softly scolded by their mothers.
“They’re treating you like royalty,” Hunter said very quietly in English.
“I have Reyes Balam bone structure,” Lina said, shrugging. “They see it in the ruins every day.”
“Huh. Thought it was your height and beauty.”
“Height, yes. The rest is in the eye of the beholder and all that.”
“So your family is well known,” he said.
“Think of the American Kennedy family, but with five hundred years or more of royalty.”
“You don’t act royal.”
“When I look in the mirror, I see Dr. Lina Taylor, American. That’s who I am. The res
t is, quite literally, history. Something for Abuelita and Celia to care about.”
“But not you,” Hunter murmured.
“Like I said, I’m American by choice.”
Hunter kept watching, but other than the subtle deference Lina took for granted, he saw nothing out of place. Nothing to make his neck tingle.
Maybe we left that behind in the U.S., he thought.
But he wasn’t going to bet Lina’s life on it.
“See the café two buildings down and across the street?” Hunter asked.
“Yes. They have good pibil. At least they did the last time I was here.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed it was your kind of place.”
Lina tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear. She had twisted the heavy mass on top of her head and held it with a worn silver clip from her purse. “I was feeling adventurous, but not enough to actually eat inside. I got my pibil to go.”
“Get a table toward the center. That way I’ll be able to keep an eye on you.”
“Where will you be?”
“Wherever Rodrigo is, usually near the back exit.”
Lina chewed on that while she crossed the street and went into the café. Small, sturdy tables and people to match. She took a scrap of a table toward the center.
Ten steps after her, Hunter walked in. He saw Lina and Rodrigo in the same sweeping glance. As expected, Rodrigo was in a dark corner. Not that darkness was difficult to find—after the tropical sunlight outside, the café looked like a cave.
A shrine overflowing with offerings of liquor and flowers filled one corner of the bar. The shrine looked a lot fresher than anything else in the café.
The interior lights hadn’t been turned on, probably to help the patrons ignore the dirt and flies. A weak glimmer of light marked the video jukebox screen. The music was a mix of urban Mexican pop and songs glorifying narco traffickers.
Rodrigo was slumped over a row of empty shot glasses and a small pile of lime rinds, squeezed and scavenged for every drop of juice. A stubby unlit candle waited on his table amid salt scattered from tequila glasses. An empty bottle of Herradura lay on its side next to the candle.
Without a word, Hunter dragged a vacant chair over and sat next to Rodrigo at the scarred table, where the view of both exits was clear.
Beautiful Sacrifice: A Novel Page 17
