LC 02 - Questionable Remains (34 page)

"You would have had an easy death, like Denny. We
weren't sadistic. It was your idea to lose yourself in the cave."

He took a hypodermic needle from his coat pocket. This
was it, Lindsay thought. She held tightly to the knife in her
lap. He approached.

"Don't move," he said. "This won't hurt."

Lindsay stood. The desk was between them, but he was
between her and the door. He was in somewhat of a bind
himself, she thought. He couldn't come around or she
would run and flee out the door. And it was hard for him to
reach across the desk. He pulled a small gun from his pocket. Not such a bind after all.

"Just stay still and give me your arm." Lindsay did stay
still, but she didn't hold out her arm to him. "You aren't
going to cooperate, are you?" he said. "Well, I don't suppose I can blame you. Move away from the desk, back
against the wall."

"Look, it's useless to kill me. Your fingerprint developed
into Denny Ferguson's dental x-ray."

He looked alarmed, then smiled. "Good, good. You
almost had me. Clever. I'd lie, too, about now."

"It's true," she said.

"I don't believe you. Now, do as I asked." He gestured
with the gun.

"Will you answer one more question?" she asked.

"Why not?"

Good, he wanted to put off killing her. "Why did you kill
Gil Harris? That has completely stumped me."

"Well, what do you know. Something you couldn't figure
out. Well, I can't blame you there. It was completely out of
the blue. Not that it will matter to you, one way or another,
but I didn't kill him. Ken did. We were following you, Ken
and I, trying to get you to call off your investigation and go
home. Why didn't you just go home? All of this could have
been avoided."

He seemed to be getting frustrated. She had to calm him
down. "It didn't occur to me to go home."

He shook his head as if he found that amusing. "We tried
everything we could think of to make you go home," he
continued. "We even shot your tire, but you knew that, didn't you?"

"Yes. What about Gil Harris?"

"I'm getting to that; be patient. Ken got the idea of disabling your Rover. We figured if you didn't have transportation, you would just give it up after everything else that happened to you. See, we tried every way in the world not to kill
you. We only killed when it was completely necessary. Ken
even laughed at our efforts-started calling us Wiley Coyote
and you the Road Runner. We aren't bad people."

No, thought Lindsay wryly. You just do bad things.

"Gil Harris saw us," he continued. "That wouldn't have
been so bad, but he recognized Ken. Can you believe it?
After all that plastic surgery. I didn't recognize him. Jennifer
didn't. Nobody else did."

"It was dark," said Lindsay. "It muted the differences, probably. And I imagine he heard Ken's voice. We had just
been talking about Ken, and Ken was already on his mind."

"That makes sense." Scott seemed to appreciate the
explanation.

Lindsay had been moving slowly around the desk as they
talked. Now they were both in front of it.

"Back up, I said." He was nervous. It must have been easier with Denny, who hadn't known what was coming.
Lindsay imagined it was harder for Scott when his intended victim knew what was going to happen. He was not a
natural-born killer, but he was still a killer.

"So Ken killed him," she said.

"Yeah. We marched him up to the cliff with a gun on him.
Ken said he had a proposition he wanted Gil just to listen to,
that he didn't want to hurt him. He hit him with a tire iron
when his back was turned. Just stunned the damn fool. He
got up and tried to fight. I tried to calm him down, tell him
it was just an accident, but he knocked me to the ground.
Ken hit him again and killed him." Scott sounded as if he
regretted it. Probably that was the one that made him feel
like a killer. He could rationalize the other, but not Gil.

"That must've been nerve-racking," Lindsay said.

"It was. We waited on the cliff trying to decide what to
do. We hadn't planned on anything like that. It rattled us
both. We went back to the van and left. Then Ken got the
idea we could use it to our advantage. It would be more
dramatic to throw him off the cliff. I didn't want to go back,
but Ken said that what we wanted was for you to go home.
He said if a dead body didn't do it, nothing would. You've
got to be the most relentless person I've ever met."

"You actually went back?" Lindsay was surprised.

"Yeah," answered Scott. "Ken loves to live on the edge. I
think he enjoyed the risk of it "

Lindsay moved suddenly, picking up the telephone
receiver, hitting his gun hand and stabbing him in the neck
with the knife in one motion. She had decided on the plan when she first saw the gun and had mentally practiced it
while he talked. She knew she could do it. If she could climb
the wall of that shaft in the cave and hang over a bottomless
pit, she could do this.

She bolted, unlocked the door, and nearly flew up to the
main office. Dr. Kerwin, the acting head was there, so was
his secretary, Edwina. They stood and blinked at her when
she tried to tell them to call the campus police. Finally, she
reached for the phone and called them herself.

AGENT MCKINLEY CALLED. Lindsay was in her office
working on an article. "Just wanted to catch you up on the
latest. We have a tight case against the lot of them. Even if
confessions weren't pouring out of Kelley Banks and
Timothy Scott, we would have enough evidence. That was
his thumbprint on the x-ray. He was very surprised. By the
way, Scott's wound in the neck was superficial, and he's
recovered nicely. So if you're the kind who worries about
that kind of thing, don't. When we find Ken and Jennifer
Darnell, we've got them, too. Seems little Miss Meticulous
Jennifer missed a couple of things. First, we got a partial fingerprint of hers off the burned-out bulb from the flashlight."

"You're kidding. You mean mine didn't smudge it?"

"You didn't have any fingerprints to speak of. By that
time you had worn yours off in the cave, and your skin was
very dry from being dehydrated. Luckily, you didn't happen to rub hers off when you removed the bulb. Luckily,
too, you kept the bulb."

"Harley told me to never leave anything in a cave except
footprints." Her mind flashed to her panties and she smiled.

"Harley?"

"An old boyfriend."

"Good advice. Apparently Jennifer didn't know that the West Builders cap in the back of their van belonged to you.
She just thought it was left over from construction workers.
It had a couple of your hairs in it, along with some root tissue. So, if you'll give us a sample of your DNA, we'll match
it up and place you in the van."

"That's really good news. I can't tell you how relieved I
am," she said. "I meant to ask Scott, while I had him here
holding a gun on me, why they put a magnifying glass in
the backpack. Everything else was regular caving supplies."

Agent McKinley laughed. "I know the answer to that one.
Jennifer thought you would have one, because you were
supposed to be going to the cave to do detective work."

"Oh." Lindsay shook her head and smiled.

She hung up, feeling better. She was having fewer nightmares now, fewer incidents of waking up in a panic. Oddly
enough, she found she slept better without a night-light. It
was the light that seemed to trigger her attacks-fear that
she had left her flashlight on, that its batteries would run
down and she would be in the darkness forever. She looked
up from her thoughts to see Grace and her family standing
in the doorway.

"Hi," said Marilee, smiling and waving her tiny hand at her.

"Hi, yourself," said Lindsay. "Come in."

"I came to apologize," said Grace. "I know I wasn't very
gracious when you came out to the place to bring Joshua his
knife. I know-I knew then-that none of this is your fault.
Ken did terrible, terrible things. It's just that it hurt, and
right or wrong just doesn't seem to make any difference in
the hurt."

"I know," said Lindsay. "He's still your brother."

"Yes. He always will be. And I am glad he's alive. But it
just doesn't seem like the same person I knew and grew up
with did all those things. I'd like to blame it all on Jennifer,
but I know that's not fair."

"I'm very sorry about Kelley," said Lindsay. "I know she
wasn't involved in any of the really bad things." Lindsay selected her words carefully in front of Marilee and Joshua,
though she had imagined they had heard the worst.

"No. She may be disbarred, but they don't think she'll
have to go to jail."

"We really want to say we're sorry for what Ken tried to
do to you," said Miles. "That must have been just a terrible
ordeal."

"It was. I can't deny that, but I'm better. How did you like
the knife, Joshua?" she asked.

"Neat. Did it belong to the guy you found in our field?"

"Maybe. Can't say for sure. I can say he is definitely
European."

"How did he die?" asked Joshua.

"Don't know," said Lindsay. That wasn't true exactly.
From a nick on the front of his cervical vertebrae, she suspected his throat was cut, but she didn't want to say that.
"He's still being analyzed. My students are having a good
time with him. They are putting his skull measurements in
a computer model. We can probably come up with what
section of Europe he came from."

Grace and Miles merely nodded.

"What's his name?" asked Marilee.

"The students call him Pierre. We don't know his real
name. We do know he was between sixteen and twenty
years old. He had no diseases that we could see on his
bones, but he didn't get enough to eat to keep him healthy.
Let's see." She wrinkled her brow trying to remember. "He
was left-handed, and probably a soldier. He limped with his
right leg, because he had a healed wound to his right calf
that had been made with a sword. That makes us believe he
was fighting with other Europeans, since the Indians didn't
have swords."

"Maybe they thought he was an Indian," said Joshua,
"because of the ear whatchamacallits."

"Could be," said Lindsay. "At that time the French and
Spanish were fighting over the New World; your knife was French. It's an interesting puzzle. But we're learning things
about him. As I said, my students are having a great time."

Marilee tugged on her mother and whispered in her ear.
"Go ahead," her mother said.

Marilee took something from her mother's purse and
gave it to Lindsay. "She made that for you," said Miles.

It was a plaster cast of Marilee's hand in a paper plate,
spray-painted silver and decorated around the edge with a
red crayon in a zigzag that looked liked an Indian. Lindsay
fought back tears as she hugged Marilee.

"I really like this," she told her. "Thank you."

They left, and Lindsay sighed and thought about Derrick.
She was reaching for the phone to give him a call when Dr.
Kerwin walked into her office. "We have a prospective student," he said. "At least that's what she says she is."

"You have doubts?" asked Lindsay, raising her eyebrows
at him.

"She may be, well, a spy," he said in a low voice.

"A spy?" asked Lindsay. "To spy on what, for whom?"

"You'd better talk to her." He walked out, leaving
Lindsay bewildered.

She was enlightened when a young Native American
woman walked through the door and sat down in a chair.
"That guy's weird," she said.

Lindsay grinned at her. "He thinks you may be a spy. We
don't get many Native Americans wanting to be archaeologists."

The woman, who looked about nineteen, grinned back,
showing a beautiful even-edged occlusion. "I don't suppose
you do. Some of my relatives think I'm nuts."

"What can I do for you?"

"I want to be an archaeologist."

"Tell me about it," said Lindsay.

"I'm a Lumbee Indian. You know what that means, don't
you? We are the original lost tribe."

Lindsay did know. The Lumbees are the largest Native American population in the southeast and have utterly and
completely lost their original Indian culture. When they
were first reported and written about in the 1800s, they
spoke only English, lived like whites, and bore no trace of
the culture from which they came.

"Many people," said the young woman, "including other
Indian tribes, don't think we are really Indians, but we are.
Look at us. Where else did my black hair and shovel tooth
incisors come from?" The woman's dark eyes shone with
earnestness.

"I agree," said Lindsay.

"I want to find my history and the history of my people,
and I figure this is the career to do it with. With the new
stuff they're doing with DNA and everything, I think there
is a good chance I can."

"You're right," agreed Lindsay.

"I have this idea that maybe some of our culture did survive, it's just hidden."

"Where?" asked Lindsay.

"In family stories handed down generation after generation. I want to collect them and compare them with known
Indian myths and legends, and with historical accounts. I
know there is something there. Things just don't completely disappear."

"That's a very good idea," said Lindsay.

The young woman smiled again. "And I think there is
something I can find out in the family names as well. You
know, don't you, that even though a lot of people don't
think our ancestors were the Indians who absorbed the
Roanoke colonists into our tribe when they mysteriously
disappeared, we have more than two dozen surnames from
people in the Roanoke Colony among our people. I think
that says a lot. I think that maybe that's what happened to
our culture. We absorbed so many Europeans into it, their
culture began to dominate." She raised her chin as if expecting Lindsay to disagree.