A Treasure Deep (23 page)

“My Greek is rusty,” Curtis said. Perry
noticed his voice shook. “I . . . I specialize in North American
archaeology, but I studied some Greek in graduate school. It’s the
language of the New Testament, you know . . . oh, I think . . . I
think I already said that. I read the New Testament a lot. I like
to study it in the original language . . . This can’t be.” His
hands began to shake, and he licked his lips several times. “No,
no, this is a joke. You’re having fun at my expense, aren’t you,
Perry? Yeah, that’s it . . . this . . . no . . . this can’t be
right . . . I must be reading this wrong. Have you had this . . .
have you had this translated?”

“You okay, Doc?” Jack asked softly, his brow
furrowed.

Curtis slapped his hand on the table; the
sound of it filled the room. “I asked you a question! Did you or
did you not have this translated?”

Perry quickly laid his hand on that of Dr.
Curtis. He was trembling. Perry said nothing at first; he just
looked in the stunned academic’s eyes. “I should have prepared you,
Dr. Curtis. I’m sorry.”

Curtis took a ragged breath. “Please, Perry.
I must know. Am I reading this right?”

“Do you remember my saying that Joseph can
recall everything he sees or reads? He translated it . . . Well, he
didn’t truly translate the text, but he associated each Greek word
on the drawing with those he found in his father’s books.” Perry
pulled up the second cylinder and opened it as he had the first.
Again he removed a roll of paper and spread it out on the table.
“This is what brought us here.”

It took only seconds for Curtis to absorb the
images before him. The drawing was the same as the first, with one
exception: Greek words had been replaced with English.

“He couldn’t have done this,” Curtis said.
“To do this requires years of disciplined study . . . the
declensions are right, the parsing; he’s even maintained the Greek
syntax.” His voice faded. “This can’t be. Someone is playing a huge
joke, a monumental practical joke. No, I refuse to believe it. This
would turn the world upside down.”

“Brent,” Perry said. Brent was trying to read
what was before him. “Brent,” Perry repeated.

“Huh? Oh, sorry.”

“Did you bring the video camera you used last
night?”

“Yeah, I have it right here, just like you
asked.”

“Set it to play back for Dr. Curtis.”

Brent pulled the small camera up and opened
its digital display panel. “Here you go, Doc. I’ve got it cued to
start when Mr. Sachs pulls the first board out.”

Curtis took the camera in trembling hands.
Jack reached over and pressed the play button. Perry watched Curtis
watch the video. A minute later, Curtis set the camera down, rose
without speaking, and left the room.

“What’s with him?” Brent said.

“Read the translation,” Gleason said to his
protégé.

“I was but . . .”

“Just read it,” Gleason stated.

Brent did. A few moments later he said, “But
that would mean . . . that would mean . . .” Unable to finish his
sentence, he whispered, “Oh, everything is going to change.”

CONCESSIONS HAD BEEN made, and Perry supposed he
should feel grateful, but feelings were spurious things that never
quite seemed synchronized with the facts of life.

A person could be depressed on a beautiful
day as well as on one covered in gray skies. Depression was
knocking on Perry’s emotional door. His mood was darkening faster
than the sky overhead. The sun was well into its daily plunge
toward the horizon. In a few moments it would drop behind the hills
west of him and twilight would be in full swing, lending its eerie
tone to an already dark situation. The powerful work lights beamed
down a wash of illumination, causing anything in their path to cast
long, ebony silhouettes on the ground.

The longest shadows were cast by uniformed
men who combed the land for clues, and by a detective in a white
shirt and dress pants. Perry watched as the last of the crime scene
investigators bundled up their equipment and started down the slope
to the police van now on the site.

Perry was not one to allow depression to
linger. It was an unwanted guest, and while he was as human as the
next person—and therefore vulnerable to such invasions—he never
surrendered to it. Emotions, he knew, were frail, misleading
things, and the best way to deal with them was to choose how he
would feel. He had heard his pastor describe emotions as blind
things. “Never let them drive.” Perry thought the point was well
made.

Perry believed the best way to expel negative
thoughts was to be involved in positive action, but there was the
problem. For the moment he could do nothing but wait. He’d tried
everything he knew, pulled all the strings available to him, and
had only limited success. His father had placed a call to
California’s governor, a man with whom Sachs Engineering was
acquainted—and to whose campaign they’d made sizable contributions.
All that guaranteed was that the governor would pick up the phone.
Perry prided himself on his ethics, and the only man he knew who
took such matters more seriously than he was his father. Henry
Sachs would never ask the governor to interfere with a police
investigation, and neither would Perry. Still, there was the hope
that a little pressure from Sacramento might gain some
latitude.

It had.

Montulli and Sanchez brought in more officers
to search the site and promised they would soon release it back to
Perry. The Sachs Engineering team offered whatever assistance they
desired. So far that had only been the use of the work lights.

After meeting with Jack, Gleason, Curtis, and
Brent in the pizza parlor, Perry had returned to the site with Dr.
Curtis in tow. The scholar had taken some time to himself, trying
to understand all that he had heard and seen on the video. By the
time they made the short drive out of town and onto the Trujillo
property, the archeologist was back to his old self. In fact, he
was manic, asking question upon question, floating suppositions
like a child blowing bubbles into the air. “Greatest find in
American archaeology . . . no, in all archaeology . . . stand the
world on its ear . . . change everything . . . rewrite the history
books.” Complete sentences had given way to bullets of thought as
Curtis’s machine-gun mind went fully automatic.

Now, as Perry sat in a canvas camping chair
watching the police do their business, Curtis was at the plastic
folding table reviewing copies of the survey documents that had
been stolen the night before. He mumbled aloud to himself: “odd,”
“curious,” “of course.” Perry had stopped listening; he continued
to gaze over the yellow crime scene ribbon.

“You look glum.”

Anne Fitzgerald approached, still wearing the
jeans and striped camp shirt he had seen her in earlier that day.
Perry was mildly

surprised that he hadn’t noticed her arrival.
“Not glum, meditative.”

“Is there a difference?”

“I think so.” Perry started to ask how she
got past the sheriff’s deputies but quickly dropped that thought,
noting that this town mayor seemed to go wherever she wanted.

Pulling another camp chair next to Perry, she
sat down. “Sergeant Montulli told me you called in the big guns.
It’s not every day the governor rings our little town.”

“Maybe you can use it against him and run for
governor yourself.”

“Thank you, no,” Anne said with a slight
chuckle. “I’m not cut out for that kind of politics. The small town
stuff is better for me. This is where I can do the most good and
have the greatest impact.”

“Is that what motivates you? Good?”

“You are glum,” Anne said, giving him a
second, appraising look. “You probably won’t believe it, but yes.
This is the second small city that I’ve served. The money is lousy
and the headaches many, but there’s also satisfaction in it.”

Perry gave no response. He continued his
vigil.

“I thought you might like to know something.
A few things, actually.”

“You’re not here to pump me for more
information? I know you didn’t get what you wanted when the police
interviewed me.”

Anne tried not to look surprised. “Not much
gets by you, does it?”

“Or you.”

“I know you think I’ve been a pain, and I
have been. That’s my nature. I’m curious and meddlesome. I admit
it. Actually, I’m proud of it. My husband found it endearing when
he was alive.”

Perry wanted to ask how sure she was of that,
but suppressed the urge. “Well, what can I do for you, Mayor?”

“I came to do something for you,” she
replied. “I thought you’d like to know that the victim wasn’t
killed by your trowel. His neck was broken.”

“How do you know that?”

“Greg Montulli told me. I pester him as much
as I do you. He said the preliminary report by the medical examiner
indicated a broken neck.”

“Not from falling into the pit,” Perry said.
“It was only three feet deep, and it was covered when we came back
in the morning.”

“I imagine that could be far enough,” Anne
said, “but it wasn’t from a fall. The M.E. told Greg that there was
no bruising on the head, but there were some bruises along the
man’s left jaw. He thinks . . .”

“An assassination. Someone came up from
behind, grabbed his head, and yanked with a twist.”

“Is there anything you don’t know?”

“I read a lot. Why the trowel?”

“To implicate you or your crew, I assume. The
equipment they showed at the sheriff’s station was found over in
that clump of trees. The man was probably killed there and then
moved to your pit.”

“So someone was spying on us at a distance,
then is killed and tossed on our work site.”

“Right, and they know the victim’s name:
Edward Dawes. Since he had no identification on him, he had to be
traced by fingerprints. He was a private detective out of
Bakersfield.”

“Private detective?” Perry mulled the news
over. “Someone hired him to spy on us, then killed him? Not only
that, they placed the body where it was certain to be found. The
killer wanted the police to know of the murder.”

“That’s the way Greg and Detective Sanchez
see it. The question is, why?”

“That’s obvious: to stop our work. It doesn’t
take a genius to know that a dead body would turn the site into a
crime scene and that would halt our work . . . which it has.”

“And implicating you and your crew by burying
the trowel in the back of Dawes would really grind things to a
halt.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Perry
asked.

“Because you didn’t kill him and you have a
right to know.”

“But isn’t it to your benefit for this plan
to work? You share the same goal: stopping our work.”

“No, I don’t, and that’s your problem. You
assume that I’m against what you’re doing here. I never said that.
I just wanted to make sure that what you’re doing is on the
up-and-up and that it wouldn’t adversely affect my town. For all I
know, you’re burying hazardous materials out here that will
contaminate the ground water.”

“That’s a stretch.”

“No, it’s not. It’s been done before, and if
a few more city and county leaders had shown the courage of
curiosity, a great many environmental disasters could have been
avoided. Just ask the residents of Love Canal, New York. Their
children were sickened by chemical dumps that affected the soil and
the water.”

“Okay, I get the idea. I can assure you that
we’re not doing anything like that.”

“No, but you are digging up bodies.”

There was no answer to that. Proof of her
words was in a pit just a few yards away.

She didn’t press the point. “I thought you
might also want to know that the crowds are getting bigger. The
motels in town are full, and those in Tehachapi are filling fast.
Before I came up here, I had the misfortune of encountering David
Branson.”

“Your newspaper editor?”

“One and the same,” Anne said. “He is a happy
camper. He’s been on the phone all morning talking to media around
the country. It seems the world will soon be on your doorstep.”

“They’ve already begun arriving,” Perry said.
“I saw a media van with a microwave dish. Fortunately the police
have kept them back.”

“What happens when they release the crime
scene?” Anne asked. “Greg isn’t going to be able to keep a crew up
here twenty-four hours a day.”

“I’ve thought of that. I’ve hired a security
firm to help with crowd control. And I have a man buying every No
Trespassing sign he can find. That’ll give the sheriff’s department
clear reason for arresting anyone who comes on the property without
permission. I may fence the place off, but that would take a little
time.”

“So you’ve thought of everything,” Anne
said.

“No one can think of everything,” Perry
admitted, “but I try.”

Anne shifted her gaze to the site. “I must
admit,” she said, “that you seem less stressed than I thought you’d
be. I mean, things like this don’t happen on every project, do
they?”

“No. I’ve dealt with my share of setbacks
before, but nothing like this. Our firm has been courted by
admirals and generals and lambasted by congressmen and senators. I
thought I had seen and experienced it all.”

“Yet, here you sit, a little somber perhaps,
but as cool as an ice cube. How is that?”

Perry turned to her and studied her for a
moment. She’d been a problem for him, but she had, at least, been
direct. Nothing required that she make the drive to the site and
walk up the tiring slope, yet here she was, and this time she came
bearing information instead of demanding it. She deserved a
straight answer. “Faith.”

“Faith?”

“I’m a man of faith, Mayor. It guides
everything I do.”

“What kind of faith? You mean like faith in
humanity or faith in the religious sense.”