Artifacts (25 page)

She hadn’t been in the old tabby barn since she’d given Wally the use of it. She’d had no need to go in there, and she respected Wally’s privacy. If her memory served, there was nothing of hers in there that had even as much dubious value as the farm equipment in the barn, but today was a day for pursuing long shots. She unlocked the padlock and went in.

It was dark, with only a single shuttered window. It was also cool, and the thick masonry walls would trap this morning coolness and use it to keep the building comfortable all day long.

Her eyes adjusted to the small amount of light coming in the door behind her. She was suddenly disoriented. The barn was jammed full of far more boxes than she remembered Wally bringing all those years ago. To her knowledge, he’d never come back. And some of the stuff she did remember—the couch, the dinette set, the well-used mattress—was gone.

There were only row after row, stack after stack of sturdy crates. Suddenly relieved of any high-minded desire to respect Wally’s privacy, she tried to lower a crate to the floor so she could see what was inside. It was far too heavy.

Undeterred, she used the stack of crates next to the wall as a ladder and climbed up to open the shutter covering the barn’s lone window, high in the front wall. Balancing atop the stack, she struggled to lift the lid off the top crate. The sun shone in the window, beautifully illuminating a treasure trove of rock and bone, packed none-too-carefully in wadded newspaper.

Just a glance at the top layer of artifacts in the crate yielded two Clovis unifacial tools and three pre-Columbian chert points. Her friend had stashed crates of stuff—some of it run-of-the-mill arrowheads, some of it irreplaceable museum-quality goods, and some of it junk—in her shed. Faye felt a girlish need to cry. Her backstabbing friend Wally was involved in robbing the Clovis site.

Oh, great. Now she was going to have to do the right thing and turn Wally over to the Feds. He would, no doubt, spill his guts about everything he knew about her black market dealings, but if she didn’t do what she could to stop him and his grave-robbing, thieving accomplices then, once and for all, she would know that she was just as scummy as they were.

Wally tried to look assured as he sat down next to the boss, but it was hard, because he was so tired. The man liked to schedule these meetings at the last minute, in out-of-the-way places, and early in the day. If he had known the phone was going to ring before sunup, ordering him to get here by nine, he wouldn’t have bothered going to bed at all.

Wally brought a battered briefcase full of sales records with him, as he usually did. The boss always wanted to know what artifacts Wally had dug up and what price they brought, and that was all that he had ever wanted to know, up to this point. Wally didn’t have an
M.B.A
., but he’d kept the marina going for thirty years now. In the process, he’d acquired accounting skills that were at least marginal. He was prepared for the boss and his questions.

And then the man threw him a curve, asking him whether he knew that the Park Service was looking into possible artifact poaching in the wildlife preserve.

Wally was inordinately proud of the fact that he hit the curve ball out of the park. Digging deep in his briefcase he drew out an envelope full of photos. They were valuable and they would make him valuable.

“See these?” he said, fanning out the photographs of Faye touring the Water Island dig site. “This babe’s an amateur pothunter, herself. If there’s ever any danger of us getting caught poaching artifacts, we can use these to pin the whole thing on her.”

The boss was silent, so Wally pulled out a second envelope. “And see these? I took them day before yesterday with a telephoto lens. They show her digging, and her boyfriend, some Indian-looking guy named Joe, is helping her. Now, she’s digging on her own island, so she ain’t breaking no laws, but you can’t tell it in this picture. I zoomed right in where you can’t see anything but them.”

The boss was silent, looking at the second batch of photos, one by one. He pulled one of them out of the stack, a close-up of the man leaning over an excavation, while the woman—small, short-haired, with boyish hips—crouched with her back to the camera.

Wally was proud of his plan and the uncharacteristic foresight that had gone into it. He didn’t understand why the boss, livid, kept shuffling the photos in his hand.

Chapter 22

The ride to Wally’s was going to be a rough one. Faye had seen this kind of weather before when there was a hurricane in the Gulf. She felt bad for the people on the Texas coast, boarding up their homes and getting out. Her skiff was going nowhere today. It would take the
Gopher
to get her to shore in this mess.

Steering the
Gopher
out of its protective inlet and into open water, she steeled herself for the swells—evenly spaced and more than four feet high—that signaled misfortune for coastal Texans. Her own sky was steel blue and cloudless, so she reckoned she could weather a few swells.

She didn’t, however, reckon she could stand to look at Wally, so she hoped Cyril would come quickly, before Wally woke up. She ran in to the marina—no Wally, praise God—and called Cyril at his Tallahassee office.

His secretary answered the phone, cool and business-like, but Faye simply blurted, “Can I speak to the senator? I need—just tell him that Faye would like very much to speak with him.”

The secretary connected them so promptly that Faye wondered if he’d added her to his list, the list that all powerful men gave their secretaries. Cyril’s list of people that he was always willing to speak to would be short. If she was on it, that was a sign that she hadn’t imagined the things that had passed between them on that lovely evening when they shared a dinner and a moonrise at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.

Popular wisdom said that sexual attraction was instantaneous but deeper feelings took time. Popular wisdom was usually right, but maybe not this time. Maybe he cared for her, and she needed to be cared for. Wally had betrayed her in a big way, so she could count one less friend. She had more or less accused Douglass of murder, so that cut out another. Joe was ever-faithful and she trusted Magda, but that was about it.

Today would be a day for her friends to stand up and be counted. It was time to find out where Cyril stood. “I’m in trouble. I need help, and I thought of you.” She swallowed. “I want to show you where I live.”

She had dodged his every delicate effort to worm her street address and phone number out of her. He would know the significance of her last statement.

He answered quickly, without bothering to ask what the trouble was. “I’ll meet you at Wally’s Marina in two hours.”

Faye hung up the phone, feeling measurably safer. She dodged the mid-morning influx of recreational fishermen and walked over to the grill. As she plopped onto a counter stool, Liz leaned over the counter and whispered, “I’ve been waiting for you. Your handsome friend Joe called an hour ago, but I couldn’t reach you. Don’t you ever turn your radio on?”

Faye shrugged. “There aren’t many people I want to talk to. What did Joe want?”

“He wants you to get him out of jail. You were his one phone call.”

“Jail? What’s Joe in jail for? Vagrancy? Building a campfire without a permit?”

“Murder. They got him for killing your two friends. And some other people. Three of them.”

“Joe didn’t…” Or did he? Where was he the morning that Sam and Krista were killed? Where had he been the night they had found Abby?

If Joe had done all five Seagreen Island murders, she could keep quiet about Abby. Cedrick was gone, dead or in hiding. If he had killed no one else since Abby, he couldn’t be much of a danger any more. Let him rot, wherever he was.

It was so tempting to leave Abby to her fitful rest and let Joe answer for all the other killings. She would be back where she started, treading financial water and trying to save Joyeuse with nothing more serious on her conscience than poaching an occasional rusty artifact off the land of an American public that didn’t give a damn. But she knew that the connection between Abby and Krista and Sam and the nameless three on Seagreen Island, though tenuous, was real.

Joe wasn’t old enough to have killed Abby. And he wasn’t old enough to have murdered people who’d been dead so long that tree roots had grown through their chest cavities. Her gut said that Cedrick had killed them too, then killed Sam and Krista to cover his crime.

Joe’s plight didn’t change her plans for self-sacrifice. It reinforced the need for it. She would go to Sheriff Mike, as planned. She would tell him about Abby, show him the earring, the religious medal, the yearbook photos. He would understand that the connection between all the killings was plenty real and he would free Joe. He would probably turn around and arrest her, which was why she still needed to take Cyril to Joyeuse for a fundraising drive. Lawyers could be fearfully expensive.

She had just one thing more to do and she could squeeze it into the two hours left before Cyril arrived. She said to Liz, “I’m meeting a friend. If he comes before I get back, tell him to wait here in the grill for me.”

Faye thought she was prepared for the sight of Joe in jail. She was not.

An hour away from the sun had bleached the ruddy color from his face and bowed his broad shoulders. His jailers had taken the leather thong that graced his omnipresent ponytail, leaving his lank hair hanging around his face. Why? Was that tiny strip of leather a threat to Joe or the people around him?

He sat behind a sheet of safety glass and spoke meekly into the microphone. “I don’t understand, Faye. I never said I killed anybody. I never did kill anybody. But they say I did. They say I said I did.” There was a noise behind him and he looked surreptitiously over one shoulder at the sound of angry voices. Joe, who could face down a bereaved mother bear, was afraid of the men jailed with him.

Faye got through her allotted ten-minute visit with as few tears as she could manage. Above anything else, she couldn’t afford to make Joe cry. The sight of his tears would finish her. Her impotent anger would drag her off the uncomfortable stool and make her put her skinny foot right through that pane of safety glass. Then they’d both be in jail and she’d have several dozen stitches down her leg.

“I’ll get you out,” she vowed before she left him, “but it may take me a little while. Be patient. And Joe—” His gaze, which had been wandering, focused on her again. “Please stay safe, Joe.”

She left him and went looking for Sheriff Mike, but he’d gone to the forensics lab in Tallahassee. One of his deputies was tending the store.

“What will it take to get him out of here?” she asked.

The deputy was polite and well-trained. “Nothing short of intercession by the President, the Pope, and the Queen of England would get that man out of jail before he makes his first appearance in front of the judge tomorrow morning.”

“Even if he’s innocent?”

“They all say they’re innocent and some of them are, but everybody has to go through a first appearance. That’s just the way it is.”

And so she left Joe with the criminals.

It was time to meet Cyril. The two-faced nature of what she was about to do struck her hard. She was going to hit Cyril up for money, then try to convince the sheriff that Cyril’s brother was a murderer. She hated like hell to do it, but Cyril could take care of himself. Joe couldn’t.

When Sheriff Mike moved quickly, it was a sign that he was troubled in his mind. He was fairly well hustling as he entered the office where Deputy Claypool sat.

“Explain to me again why you arrested him,” he said in an oddly gentle tone of voice, given his level of agitation.

“Who?”

“Who do you think? Joe Wolf Mantooth. How many arrests you made this morning?”

Claypool cocked his head and spoke slowly, as if he were explaining the obvious. “I arrested him because he told me he killed those people we found yesterday. Not many people confess to murder unless they did it.”

“Not many, but it happens. You should be checking your facts, right now, instead of sitting there drinking your coffee. Hell, keep your coffee. You can drink a pot of it, as long as you’re doing your job while you drink.”

Claypool dropped his Styrofoam cup, still full of coffee, in the trash. “I’ll be glad to do my job, if you’ll just tell me what it is you think I should be doing.”

“How old is your suspect?”

“He’s a classic vagrant. No driver’s license, no papers of any kind. We had a devil of a time filling out the paperwork to book him. No address or phone. His place of birth is just ‘Oklahoma.’ Couldn’t even remember his birthday.”

“How old do you think he is?”

Claypool pursed his lips. “Thirty-five? Forty?”

Sheriff Mike rolled his eyes. Claypool was no fool. He had five years of experience and he’d performed well, but there was no overcoming the handicap of being twenty-seven years old. Life experience was a complement to law enforcement experience and Claypool would accumulate both in time.

“Son, I’ve seen Mr. Mantooth. He’s lived a hard life, but he moves loose and his eyes are young. I’ll buy you a scotch-and-soda if that man’s as old as you are.”

Surprise was evident on Claypool’s pale babyface. The boy needed a scotch-and-soda. He’d never known life without air conditioning and he’d spent his adolescence at the business end of a video game controller, rather than a fishing rod. Claypool’s grandfather’s face had likely worn a weather-beaten tan by the time he was twenty-seven but, for Claypool, the aging process would be a long, drawn-out affair.

“Say he’s your age,” the sheriff continued. “It took somebody man-sized to fracture that skull we dug up. And it took somebody man-sized to put those bodies in the ground. How old were you when you got big enough to do something like that?”

Claypool had committed thousands of video-game murders by the age of twelve, but his electronic victims had just fallen down and evaporated. “I don’t know. Maybe fifteen or sixteen.”

“So if Mr. Mantooth did it, it’s been in the last ten years. How long you think those bodies have been in the ground?”

“Well, the flesh was all gone, so they weren’t put there yesterday, but you can’t always tell by the rate of decay. Bodies break down at different rates, depending on things like soil chemistry.”

Sheriff Mike was pleased. Claypool never forgot anything he learned from a book. Life experience would sneak up on him and he’d be a real good officer.

“Then there’s the roots,” Claypool went on. “It surely took some time for them to disrupt the bodies that way. I’m not sure if they could do that in ten years or not.”

The sheriff gave him an “Attaboy” nod, and said, “The coroner, the forensics people, and the archaeologists—they all think those bodies were buried before you and Mr. Mantooth were born.”

“So we let him go?”

“You brought a trespassing vagrant with no proper ID in on murder charges, and now you want to let him go before he makes his first appearance before the judge? Hell, no, we don’t let him go. It will not hurt Mr. Mantooth to spend a night in our air-conditioned jail and eat a few hot meals. Besides, I want to talk to him. You can sit in the room with us and listen to what he has to say.”

Sheriff Mike hustled Claypool into a questioning room and had Mr. Mantooth brought in. The prisoner did not look good. Despair had drained the youth out of his eyes and anyone asked to guess his age might easily have made Claypool’s error. He sat in the chair Sheriff Mike offered him and spread his hands out on his thighs. They were the hands of a man who made and fixed things. One of his fingernails was bruised black and all of them were broken. His hands were callused in odd places that had to be specific to a certain task.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Mantooth?” the sheriff asked, hoping to figure out where he got those calluses.

“My last job was working for a flintknapper in Georgia. I ain’t worked steady since then, but I still chip stone, when I got the time and the stone.”

A bit of life glinted in the prisoner’s eyes and the sheriff understood. Humanity had lived in the Stone Age far longer than it had enjoyed the Information Age, and the slick-sharp feel of a stone tool resided in the collective unconscious. He’d found few thrills in life purer than the act of pulling an old arrowhead out of freshly plowed soil. Like anybody who’d walked many miles behind a plow, he’d amassed a sizeable collection. It pleasured him just to look at the ancient things.