“Lots of new information is turning up every day,” he said. “So much that the universities can’t keep a lock on it. Hell, they can hardly keep a handle on it. Even we Moki poachers—that would be the folks who don’t work on university digs”—he explained sardonically, “have been invited to attend some of the university conferences and talk about what we’ve found. But we have to translate it into professor-ese and document it their way. No oral traditions for university types.”
“If they tolerate you, they must be desperate for your information,” she said blandly.
He gave a crack of laughter. “That they are. We’ve found trade goods in Anasazi sites that could only have come from thousands of miles away.”
“Argillite and abalone shells from the Pacific.”
Cain looked at her in approval. “And copper bells and parrot feathers from the interior of Mexico. Trade routes almost two thousand miles long.”
“Quite an empire. What happened? Where did it all go?”
“No one knows.”
Christy blinked. “Why not?”
“No written language. All we know is that the empire began to collapse in the twelfth century, just about the time the Chaco community was reaching its zenith.” He slowed the truck to a crawl. “That’s where the Sisters come in. And this is where we leave the road.”
“What road?” she said. “I don’t see any.”
“In a few minutes, you’ll remember this little track with great fondness.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Trust me on this one, Red.” He stopped and shifted the truck into low range.
Then he turned right and headed up a sandstone slope.
“Cain!”
He grinned. “Weren’t you the one singing hymns to four-wheel freedom?”
“But—”
“Hang on, honey. It looks a lot worse than it is.”
The slope was broken and weathered, a long rough ramp onto the top of another mesa. He let the Suburban set its own speed. The truck rocked from side to side unpredictably—unpredictably because the angle of the ramp was so steep that the hood hid everything but the sky.
She held on to the door with one hand and Moki’s ruff with the other, bracing both of them until the truck gained the top of the mesa.
“Moki’s going to wonder what he ever did without you,” Cain said.
There was another faint track out through the scrub forest of piñon and cedar. Though rough, the way was better than the sandstone chute had been.
“Those are the Sisters up ahead,” he said.
Her head whipped around. “What?”
“The Sisters. At least that’s what some people call them.”
He pointed to two rock spires that rose a hundred feet above the mesa. Like massive stacks jutting up from a piñon sea, the Sisters were the remnants of a long-vanished, much larger rock formation.
“Is that where we’re going?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“How far away are they?”
“Several miles.”
The columns stood together and had generally similar shapes, but they were distinctly different colors. The smaller was a reddish sandstone that rose in slender elegance above the land. The other was nearly white toward the top, the color of the mesa’s cap rock.
“The Sisters are hard to see from the flats, even when it isn’t cloudy like today,” Cain said. “From most angles, only the white one shows. But once we get over to them, you can see damn near to Arizona and New Mexico.”
The intensity of his eyes as he watched the Sisters was almost tangible. He was like a wolf sighting prey.
“Why are the Sisters so important to you?” Christy asked.
“I have a theory about the Anasazi, why they settled in some of the unlikely places they did. If my theory is right, there will be Anasazi sites clear up here, close to the mountains.”
“And you want to be the first to find them.”
He glanced at her. “You have a problem with that?”
“I’m old-fashioned,” she said after a moment. “I think archaeological sites should be explored by professionals rather than stripped by even the most highly educated pothunter.”
“I’d agree with you, if it was that simple.”
She raised auburn eyebrows but said nothing.
“There are thousands and thousands of sites that the academic archaeologists won’t get to for decades, if then,” he said evenly. “Some of those sites are on public lands. A lot are on private ground, farms and rangeland.”
“Still—”
“What’s the local bean farmer supposed to do when he plows his most productive fields in spring and turns up artifacts?”
“Call in the university,” she said.
“Then what? He could wait a long time before the professionals show up to do their research, particularly since neither the state nor the federal government has the funds to properly explore and document the sites that are already known, much less new ones.”
She began to understand what he’d meant about the sites being an embarrassment of riches. She might have lived in the city since she was nineteen, but she hadn’t forgotten the intractable rhythms of the seasons. Kicking up potsherds in a field and doing the right thing by calling in the authorities could bankrupt a small farmer.
“Planting time doesn’t wait,” she said, sighing.
“Modern farmers and ancient Anasazi have that in common. Short growing season. If the farmer knows his discovery means taking that field out of production for years, he’ll keep his mouth shut, plow the whole damn thing under, and plant beans so he can support his family.”
“So in come the salvage archaeologists.”
“Yeah. Not a perfect solution, but not as bad as plowing everything under. We get to look at something new and the farmer gets on with the job of making a living on marginal cropland.”
Christy thought about the designs Peter Hutton had borrowed from the finds on his own land. Despite the protests of his hired archaeologists, he’d simply gone in and taken what he wanted when it had been found, and to hell with the rest of the process.
Not a perfect solution either.
Yet having seen the extraordinary turtle, she doubted that she would have gambled on leaving it behind in its academically proper place, and perhaps losing it to storms or falling stones or true pothunters, the kind who grabbed and ran.
“Life is incurably messy,” she said.
“That’s why the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
He braked the truck at the edge of a five-foot-deep channel in the rocky top of the mesa. “End of the line for wheels. We go on foot from here.”
The two massive pinnacles Cain called the Sisters were still more than a mile away from the truck, but they were close enough to reveal that the red sandstone column was straight-sided and clean. The white spire, though taller and thicker at the top, was shot through with cracks and miniature fault lines. Sections of pale rock had fallen away in several places, leaving the column with an appearance of being humpbacked, twisted, oddly misshapen.
Christy didn’t see a trail anywhere.
Chapter 22
When Christy opened the door, Moki leaped across her seat to freedom. The dog dashed off a dozen yards, sniffed around beneath a spreading cedar tree, left his mark, and came trotting back.
She stood next to the truck. She still didn’t see anything like a trail. There was a wildness in the wind blowing through the stunted junipers and piñon pines. Overhead, the gray clouds seethed and parted. A shaft of golden light flowed across the red pinnacle but soon vanished as the clouds flowed together again.
“You picked a fine morning for a hike,” she said as Cain joined her.
“Talk to your friend Hutton. We could have driven a lot closer than this if he wasn’t so damned touchy about trespassing. We’re close to the edge of his deeded land now. Then it becomes federal land. Of course, he leases that and treats it like he owns
it, but so does every other western rancher.”
With that, Cain scrambled down the near side of the runoff channel that had halted the truck. A few moments later he climbed up the other side and headed off through the broken country.
Moki jumped down onto a rock, leaped across the channel with muscular, four-footed grace, and trotted after his master. Cain disappeared behind a screen of head-high brush without so much as a backward look to see how she was handling the rough land.
“That will teach me to call him a pothunter,” Christy muttered.
Nothing answered but the wind.
She scrambled through the channel with less grace than Moki, but she got the job done. A gust of chill wind combed through her hair as she climbed up the far side. She zipped the windbreaker, pulled the watch cap over her head, and trotted to catch up with Cain.
He strode along easily, his vest unzipped and his hat back on his head. Against the gray clouds, his eyes gleamed like citrine. For all the ease of his stride, there was an intense wariness in him that made her nervous.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
He shot her a surprised look. “Not yet.”
“Are you expecting something to go wrong?”
“No, but I wasn’t expecting anything the last time I was here either.”
“When was that?”
“The day I got shot.”
She felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind. She waited, but he didn’t say anything else.
“Did you get shot right here?” she asked.
“No. Closer to the base of the Sisters.”
“What were you doing?”
“Walking along through a stand of piñon pines, just like we are right now.”
“And someone just shot you? No warning?”
He nodded.
“Why?” she asked.
“If you believe Danner, somebody thought I was a deer.”
She looked at Cain. There was nothing the color of deer hide anywhere on him.
“I suppose it’s possible,” she said slowly. “God knows a lot of range cattle buy it every hunting season.”
“This wasn’t hunting season.”
“Were you out Moki poaching?”
“Red, Moki poaching may be a joke to you, but it’s a felony,” he said in a flat voice. “An ex-con would find himself in jail real quick if he picked up so much as a stinking potsherd without the landowner’s signed, notarized permission.”
Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry.”
A flashing sideways look was his only answer. Then he said something under his breath, yanked off his watch cap, and raked his long fingers through his hair.
“I’m a bit touchy on that score,” he said. “I don’t have permission to dig here. Hutton won’t let anyone on his land, and the Bureau of Land Management won’t let anyone dig, period.”
“Then why are we here?”
“You can hike on BLM land. That’s what we’re doing. Hiking. If you pick up so much as a rock chip, I’ll make you put it back.”
“Why are we hiking here, if it’s such a problem?”
“Because here is where I’ll find evidence to support my theory about the extent of the Anasazi empire.”
“Like what?”
“Ruins, grinding holes, potsherds, anything,” he said.
“Why here?”
“Jesus, you’re a regular fountain of questions.”
“I’m a—”
“Reporter,” he said, interrupting. “Yeah. I’ve noticed.”
They walked quickly for a few minutes.
In silence.
“Well?” she said.
“Well, what?”
“Why do you think the Anasazi will be here when nobody else thinks so?”
“I’ll give you a copy of my dissertation,” he said in a clipped voice.
She sighed and tried another tack.
“Is it likely you were shot by some jealous rival archaeologist, either professional or amateur?” she asked.
He laughed.
“Well,” she retorted, “it makes as much sense as someone thinking you were a deer.”
“Most archaeologists are good at hunting pots and lousy at moving targets.”
“So?”
“Whoever shot me was good enough to bring me down at three hundred yards.”
Christy’s hand wrapped around Cain’s arm, stopping him.
“How do you know he was that far away?” she asked.
“I felt the bullet hit me and throw me back. I was on the ground, trying to figure out what had happened, when I heard the report.”
A small sound escaped her lips. Without realizing it, her hand moved slowly, almost caressingly, on his arm.
“I’d estimate the time between the shock and the sound at not quite two seconds,” he said evenly. “That means a range of three hundred yards. It also means that whoever shot me had a telescopic sight.”
Cain started walking.
Christy stared, then hurried to catch up and walk beside him, thinking hard. She snatched a twig off a cedar tree as she walked past it. The scent of the flat green needles was rich and astringent, like Jo-Jo’s closet. With a shudder of memory, Christy threw away the twig.
“Can you see much detail through a telescopic sight at three hundred yards?” she asked.
“You sure as shit can see the difference between a deer and a man, especially when the man is standing out in the open.”
“Can you see enough to identify someone?”
Cain didn’t say anything.
She waited.
“Maybe,” he said finally, “but only if you knew him on sight already.”
“Do you hear what you’re saying?” she asked in an unhappy voice.
“Yeah. Whoever shot me knew exactly who I was. Not an accident, Red. Murder, plain and simple.”
Chapter 23
Christy stopped and stared at Cain as the reality of what had happened broke over her. Until now she really hadn’t believed the shooting had been a deliberate act. She’d assumed that he was simply making an accident more understandable, more meaningful, by saying that the shot had been deliberate rather than a random bit of rotten luck.
But it hadn’t been random and it hadn’t been luck.
Murder, plain and simple.
Even now, she had a hard time accepting it. No one murdered without a motive, yet Cain didn’t know of one, and if anyone should know, it was the man who’d nearly died.
No motive.
No reason.
And no doubt that the shooting had occurred. Cain had the scar to prove it.
I’ve been in the city too long, she thought bleakly. I find it easier to accept random violence than the idea of premeditated murder.
“Hello-o-o,” Cain said, waving his hand in front of her face.
She gave him a startled look.
“You keep staring at me as though I’ve just grown a set of antlers,” he said, smiling.
“It’s not every day a man calmly tells me that somebody tried to kill him.”
“It’s hardly the first time I’ve said it.”
“But it’s the first time I’ve—”
“Believed it?” he finished.
She nodded.
He turned away.
“Damn it, Cain,” she said fiercely, “how would you feel if a stranger walked up to you with a story that someone was trying to kill him but everyone else thought it was just an accident?”
After a moment of hesitation, he ran a big hand through his hair, yanked the watch cap back into place, and looked over his shoulder at Christy.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got some rough country to cover before those clouds decide if they’re going to get together and rain.”
Moki came dashing in from some piñons with a predatory gleam in his eyes and his long pink tongue hanging out. There was no doubt the dog loved the wild land and the even wilder wind. He nudged Cain’s hand and danced over to Christy, vibra
ting with life.
“What does he want?” she asked.
“Not much. Just a little company when he’s lonely or has something to share.”
Before she could answer, he walked off with long, lithe strides. Moki yapped excitedly and took off running again.
Christy shut her mouth and followed.
The sun was warm in protected places. Everywhere else the wind stripped heat from land and flesh alike. Yet she found herself enjoying the clean chill of the air and the slow-motion boiling of the clouds high overhead. The mountains that rose behind the mesa were already on fire with aspens turned gold by the frost. Deer and elk at the higher elevations would begin to gather and drift toward the valleys, following summer as it retreated down the mountain slopes.
Vast change. Vast sameness.
She thought she’d left all that behind, the untamed land, the exhilarating freedom, the wind from a distance that was just as wild. Yet it had always been there, always waiting for her just a handful of hours from Manhattan.
And it always would be here.
Once that would have dismayed her. Now it comforted her in a way she didn’t understand, just as she didn’t understand the depth of her attraction to Aaron Cain.
But like the land, the attraction was real.
When they approached a thick stand of piñon, Moki caught a hot scent and bounded into the thick of the trees. The grove exploded with noise and flashes of dark blue as birds flew up in all directions. The birds were bigger than robins and four times as loud. The blue of their feathers had a shiny, misty sheen, like the bloom on a plum.
Smiling, Cain and Christy watched the birds’ wild flight, enjoying the bright blue specks of life racing before the wind. The birds jeered and called back and forth while they reformed into a new flock. A few hundred feet away, they settled into another stand of piñons and attacked the ripe cones, stuffing the bounty of rich, oily seeds down their throats.
“Piñon jays,” Cain said.
He bent over and picked up a deep blue feather that one of the birds had dropped. The feather seemed much darker now than any of the birds had been. Absently he held the feather next to Christy’s red hair. His eyes said the contrasting colors pleased him.