Effigy (48 page)

“Are you with me?” Derek hissed.

Lori nodded and he finally released his hold. “Good girl,” he said as he kissed her on the forehead. His encouraging smile returned. “See? Don’t we make a good team?”

He stole another glance over the wall. The stranger had vanished but the effigy and the black box were still seated atop the statue.

“Looks like it’s show time,” he said, and with that, Derek slipped away into the ruins.

Lori slumped against the wall. She felt numb. Trapped. While Derek was preparing to make his heroic move, she found herself motionless. Her mind was running a hundred miles an hour but getting nowhere fast. She couldn’t let the killer blow up the effigy and yet, she couldn’t let Derek rescue it either.

She was out of moves and running out of time.

AFI Van

Peet twisted awkwardly and, with his hands bound behind his back, felt for the corner of the bench seat. He let his hands slide off the cushion until he thought he could hook the short length of the cuffs under the seat. With his leverage barely secured, he pulled up, willing his hands to slip from their restraints. Instead, the cuffs merely slid back up the cushy seat with little resistance to pull from.

John was watching him in disbelief. “I don’t see why you insist on escaping,” he grumbled. “We’ve seen the outcome of your rescue efforts. What makes you think an escape will result any differently?”

Peet wriggled his hands back to the underside of the seat. His eyes stung with sweat as his fingers searched the metal carriage and springs beneath. The air in the van was hot and stuffy; sweat had even beaded along John’s brow. To make matters worse, finding something sturdy enough to hook the handcuffs to might require the skills of a contortionist.

“Sit up, Anthony,” John chided. “You look ridiculous bent over backwards like that.”

“I’m not worried about how I look right now,” Peet said as the cuffs slid off their meager hold again.

“And what are your plans once we miraculously escape this van?” John asked smartly.

“I have the keys to an SUV parked outside.” He continued with the struggle behind his back, though it seemed useless. If his hands weren’t budging from the cuffs it was because the cuffs kept slipping off the corner of the seat.

“I see. So we’re just going to race out of
Mexico
with half the country’s police force on our tails. And what about Eva? Are we just going to leave her out there?”

Peet frowned, still concentrating on the cuffs. “Not exactly. I haven’t had a chance to think that far ahead.”

“Ah-ha!” John blurted with a measure of sarcastic certainty. “Now that is the cornerstone of your foolishness. You act before you think a situation through, and in the meantime, someone else invariably pays the consequences.”

Peet stopped and studied John’s impassive face. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I’m talking about everything.”

Peet waited.

“I’m talking about this, you knucklehead. I’m talking about removing the effigy from the museum.” John’s exasperated words were coming faster, his voice growing louder. “I’m talking about your carelessness with your students.”

“Dad, I—”

”I’m talking about Cathy!”

John hesitated as if uncertain where to proceed now that he’d breached the long-avoided subject. He glanced away, unable, or maybe just unwilling, to meet Peet’s stare.

“I’ll never understand why you didn’t come home that day,” he added mournfully.

“I already told you,” Peet tried to explain. “I’d just found a new Chacoan road.”

“It was your anniversary!”

“I know—”

“You should have come home!”

Peet hesitated. This was where he’d always hesitated. It was like standing on the banks of a midwinter river. To step any further would be chancing the unknown thickness of the ice. He might cross with no more harm than a couple of slippery missteps. More likely, the ice wouldn’t hold. He’d fall through and be swept away by the current underneath, with no hope of ever coming up for air.

This time, however, he decided to risk it. What did he really have to lose?

“Cathy loved research as much as we do,” he began cautiously. “She understood why I couldn’t leave
Chaco
. That’s why she chose to come out there with me.”

“Well I don’t understand it,” John huffed. “In all my working years I never missed an anniversary with my wife. If it weren’t for your carelessness, you’d still be celebrating anniversaries with yours.” His eyes were rimmed with tears. “And I wouldn’t be missing my daughter.”

Peet swallowed hard. He’d never known John to succumb to emotion before. He’d always been a man of rational measures, solid and unflappable in the name of science and research. But perhaps in all of John’s tenure, science had never struck such a personal chord before. The endless quest for knowledge had never caused him to hurt before.

Science had been in Cathy’s blood like nothing Peet had ever seen. She loved it all—biology, chemistry, physics, even archaeology. She was a wizard with numbers and statistics, and even though she chose to concentrate on astronomy like her father, she didn’t mind dipping her fingers into other fields every now and then. Cathy liked variety. Perhaps that’s why she found archaeoastronomy so appealing. What better way to combine two fields of study into one?

“Cathy was my world,” John said in a choked tone.

He suddenly looked pitiful there, hunched in his seat, hands bound behind his back, his face long with sorrow.

“She was
my
world too,” Peet said, treading cautiously. He could almost feel the ice cracking beneath his feet.

“She was my daughter!” John blurted, his expression suddenly snapping with anger. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose your only child!”

“That may be,” Peet said. “But you weren’t there to watch her die.”

Peet felt his defenses rising, but they weren’t building against John. As he saw the hurt in the old man’s eyes, he suddenly realized that it wasn’t John, or Derek, or even Snead he’d been fighting all this time. His enemy lay much closer, much deeper within. For so long, he’d been cornered by regret, a guilt that didn’t know release.

“You don’t know how long I struggled with the grief of watching her die, knowing there was nothing I could do to save her.”

John sat silent, stone-faced.

“You weren’t there to hold her while she begged for help,” Peet continued, “knowing all the while there was absolutely nothing you could do but watch her die. A piece of me is still out there on that desert, John. I’m still out there praying for a miracle. You never outlive remorse like that.”

John was silent. This time he didn’t turn away—couldn’t turn away. This time the anger was gone from his watery eyes. Instead, there was something else. Something softer. Something closer to understanding.

Peet felt his nerves calming. A new air had come between them. For the first time in a long time, he felt like there was room to step out of his corner and when he spoke again, he found his voice surprisingly composed.

“Cathy was my world too,” he said, “but I’ve had to accept the fact that that world is gone and there’s nothing I can do to get it back. I have to keep moving forward and make the most of this new world without her. That’s what Cathy would have wanted me to do.”

John was mellow with contemplation. He too had calmed and now sat quiet, settled. It was the kind of eerie stillness that Peet thought might follow the rumble of an earthquake, and that’s when he realized that up until now, John had been trembling.

“She would have wanted both of us to move on,” John heavily agreed. There was a dim light to his eyes. A reluctant surrender. “You’ll have to forgive an old man for wallowing in the past.”

Peet shrugged in half-hearted acceptance. “That’s what anthropologists do best. But I think history’s easier to deal with when it’s not our own.”

John offered a distorted grin, a wry sealing of the new unspoken alliance between them.

An awkward silence threatened to recover. Peet sensed the old man struggling for an apology, but he cut the maladroit moment short by plunging his hands beneath the corner of his seat again.

Obviously appreciative of the distraction, John said, “Take my glasses, Anthony.”

Peet stopped. “What?”

“My glasses. Turn around and I’ll drop them in your hands. You can slide the plastic off the earpiece and use that to pick our cuffs open.”

Genius!

“Why didn’t I think of that,” Peet said, turning around in his seat.

John shifted behind him. “Yes, but the question remains, what is our next move?”

Peet felt the glasses fall into his hands. “That’s easy,” he said. “We go get Eva.”

Demons Of Darkness

When the stranger stepped away from the chacmool and disappeared back toward the ballcourt, Derek knew he had to make his move. If there really was a bomb in that box sitting beside the effigy, it only made sense that the man who put them there would find shelter in the recessed pit of the ballcourt before detonating the explosives. Derek had to move fast and he had to move now.

He eyed the chacmool and the offerings that had been abandoned on its chest. With the stranger out of sight, it wouldn’t be too difficult to sprint up there and snatch the effigy before the bomb went off. It would be touch and go, though. Who knew how much time he had before the explosion and the last thing he wanted was to be standing right there when the trigger was pulled.

Derek inched out from behind the safety of the wall. The chacmool was only a few yards away. The muscles in his legs tensed, preparing him for the sprint of his life. Still no sign of the stranger. Now was the time to run.

With the spring reminiscent of his high school track days, Derek launched himself from the protection of the ruin walls. His ears drummed with the pounding of his own feet as he quickly drew closer to the chacmool. He spotted the black box altered with a receiver and some other mechanical gadget. Judging by the battery electrical-taped to a jaguar engraving on the lid, he guessed it had something to do with open and closed circuits. And there were wires seemingly protruding everywhere, connecting to a stick of dynamite plugged into a hole in the chacmool’s shoulder. There was no doubt now. He was racing against a bomb.

Derek noticed every detail as his feet skidded up to the chacmool, his hands landing upon the cool mosaic effigy. It was heavier than he remembered, its surface smoother, but none of that mattered now. His feet skidded into the chacmool and with a twist of his body he catapulted back the other way, the effigy secured beneath his arm like a football.

To his surprise there was no explosion. There were no sounds of the stranger pursuing him. With each step he felt himself drawing closer to safety. He was alive. His feet were moving, his blood was pounding and, he had the effigy!