Текст книги "Thunderhead"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston,Lincoln Child
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

7

IF NORA HAD EVER WALKED INTO A HOTTER, stuffier place than Peter Holroyd’s apartment, she couldn’t remember it. The air was not just dying here, she decided; it was dead and decomposing.

“Got any ice?” she asked.

Holroyd, who had walked down the four flights of stairs to retrieve his mail and open the door for her, shook his shaggy head. “Sorry. Freezer’s busted.”

Nora watched him sort through his mail. Below the mop of sandy hair, the very white skin of his face was stretched over two prominent cheekbones. As he moved, his limbs never seemed to be in the right place, and his legs seemed a little short for his narrow torso and bony arms. And yet the overall impression of melancholy was countered by a pair of intelligent green eyes that looked hopefully out on the world. His taste in clothes was questionable: striped brown polyester pants, topped by a V-neck short-sleeved checkered shirt.

Grimy yellow curtains flapped apathetically in the travesty of a breeze. Nora walked to the window, glancing south toward the dusky boulevards of East L.A. Then she looked down toward the nearby intersection and the front window of Al’s Pizza. She’d spent the last two nights at a friend’s house in Thousand Oaks. This was an ugly little corner of L.A., and she felt a sudden sympathy for Peter and his longing for adventure.

She took a step back. The apartment was so barren she was unable to determine what kind of housekeeper Holroyd was. A small bookcase, made up of plywood strips balanced on cinderblocks. Two elderly Adirondack chairs, festooned with back issues of Old Bike Journal.An ancient motorcycle helmet on the floor, scarred and scuffed. “Is that your bike I saw chained to the lamppost?” Nora asked.

“Yup. An old ’46 Indian Chief. Mostly.” He grinned. “Inherited a basket case from my great-uncle, and scrounged the rest of the parts here and there. You ride?”

“My dad had an old dirt bike I used to ride around the ranch. Rode my brother’s Hog once or twice before he laid it down on Route 66.” Nora looked back toward the window. There was a row of very strange-looking plants: black, crimson, a riot of drooping stalks and pendulous flowers. Must be the only things around here that enjoy the heat,she thought.

A small plant with dark purple flowers caught her attention. “Hey, what’s this?” she asked, reaching out curiously.

Holroyd looked over, then dropped the mail. “Don’t touch that!” he cried. Nora jerked her hand away.

“It’s belladonna,” Holroyd said, bending to pick up the scatter. “Deadly nightshade.”

“You’re kidding,” Nora said. “And this?” She pointed to a neighboring plant, a small flower with exotic maroon spikes.

“Monkshood. It contains aconitine, which is a really terrific poison. In the tray there are the three deadliest mushrooms: the Death Cap, Fool’s Mushroom, and A. virosa,the Destroying Angel. And in that pot on the sill—”

“I get the picture.” Nora turned away from the Death Cap, its horrible mantle resembling plague-spotted skin, and gazed once again around the bare apartment. “Enemies bothering you?”

Holroyd tossed the mail into the garbage and barked a laugh, his green eyes suddenly catching the light. “Some people collect stamps. I collect botanical poisons.”

Nora followed him into the kitchen, a small, cramped area almost as free of furniture as the rest of the apartment. A large wooden table had been pushed up against the old refrigerator. Sitting on the table were a keyboard, a three-button mouse, and the largest monitor she had ever seen.

Holroyd smiled at her appreciative glance. “Not a bad chunk of video real estate, is it? Just like the ones at the Lab. A few years ago Watkins bought these for all his top imaging staff. He assumes that no one who works for him has a social life. Pretty good assumption, at least as far as I’m concerned.” He glanced at her.

Nora raised a speculative eyebrow at him. “So you dobring some homework with you, after all.”

The smile vanished as he caught the implication. “Only declassified homework,” he replied, as he reached into a rumpled Jiffy bag and pulled out a rewriteable DVD disk. “What you asked for doesn’t exactly fit that category.”

“Can I ask how you did it?”

“I took the raw data from the shuttle feed this morning and burned an extra copy onto the disk. I’ve always got a handful of disks in my backpack; nobody would know the difference.” He waggled the disk and it flashed in the dim light, sending out a coruscation of color. “If you have the right clearance, stealing data isn’t difficult. It’s just that, if you get caught, the penalties are much stiffer. Muchstiffer.” He grimaced.

“I realize that,” said Nora. “Thank you, Peter.”

He looked at her. “You knew I’d help, didn’t you? Even before you left the pizza parlor.”

Nora returned the glance. It was true; once he’d described the way he could access the data, she felt certain he’d agree. But she did not want to hurt his pride. “I hoped you would,” she replied. “But I wasn’t really sure until you called the next morning. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

Nora realized Holroyd was blushing. He quickly turned his back and opened the refrigerator door. Inside, Nora could see two cans of alcohol-free beer, some V8 juice, and a large computer CPU. Looking more closely, she noticed the computer was connected to the monitor by cables running through a small insulated hole in the back of the refrigerator.

“Too hot out here,” Holroyd said, sliding the disk into the computer housing and closing the refrigerator door. “Put your topo over there, okay?”

Nora began to unroll the map, then paused. “You realize this won’t be like crunching numbers all day long in an air-conditioned lab,” she said. “On a small dig like this, everybody does double or triple duty. You’d be coming along as an assistant, specializing in image sensing. Only they’re not called ‘assistants’ on archaeological digs. They’re called ‘diggers.’ For a reason.”

Holroyd blinked at her. “What are you trying to do? Talk me out of going?”

“I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into.”

“You’ve seen the books I read. I know it won’t be a picnic. That’s part of the challenge, isn’t it?” He sat down at the wooden table and pulled the keyboard toward him. “I’m risking a possible prison sentence, bringing you this data. You think I’m afraid of a little digging?”

Nora smiled. “Point taken.” She pulled up a plastic chair. “Now how does this thing work, exactly?”

“Radar’s just another kind of light. We shine it down on Earth from the shuttle, and it bounces back changed. The Terrestrial Imager simply takes digital photographs of what bounces back, and then combines them.” Holroyd punched some keys. There was a brief pause, then a small window opened at the bottom of the screen, displaying scrolling messages as a complex program began to boot. Several other small windows flew open in corners of the screen, displaying various software tools. Then a large window appeared at the screen’s center. Holroyd moused the cursor through several menus. Finally, an image began rolling down the large central screen, line by line, painted in artificial reds.

“Is that it?” Nora stared at the screen in disappointment. This was the last thing she’d expected: confusing monochromatic patterns like no landscape she had ever seen.

“It’s just the beginning. The Imager takes infrared emissions and radiometry into account, but that would take too long to explain. It also looks at the earth in three different radar bands and two polarizations. Each color represents a different band of radar, or a different polarization. I’m going to paint each color on to the screen, layering one on top of the other. This’ll take a few minutes.”

“And then we’ll be able to see the road?”

Holroyd gave her an amused look. “If only it were that simple. We’re going to have to beat the shit out of the data before we can see the road.” He pointed. “This red is L-Band radar. It has a wavelength of twenty-five centimeters and can penetrate five meters of dry sand. Next, I’ll add C-Band.”

A blue color scrolled down.

“This C-Band has a six-centimeter wavelength, and it can penetrate at most two meters. So what you see here is a little shallower.” More key taps. “And here goes X-Band. That’s three centimeters. Basically, it gives you the surface itself.”

A neon green color rolled down the screen.

“I don’t see how you can even begin to figure all this out,” said Nora, gazing at the distorted swaths of colors.

“Now I’m going to paint in the polarizations. The outgoing radar beam is polarized either horizontally or vertically. Sometimes you send down a beam horizontally polarized, and it bounces back vertically polarized. That usually happens when the beam encounters a lot of vertical tree trunks.”

Nora watched as another color was added to the screen. It was taking longer for the program to paint the image on the screen; obviously, the computational problem was becoming more complex.

“Looks like a de Kooning,” said Nora.

“A what?”

Nora waved her hand. “Never mind.”

Holroyd turned back to the screen. “What we’ve got is a composite image of the ground, from the surface to about fifteen feet deep. Now it’s a matter of canceling out some of the wavelengths and multiplying others. This is where the real artistry comes in.” Nora could hear a touch of pride in his voice.

He began typing again, more quickly this time. Nora watched as a new window opened on the screen, lines of computer code racing as routines were added and deleted. The remote desert vastness was suddenly covered by a thin web of tracks.

“My God!” Nora cried. “There they are! I had no idea the Anasazi—”

“Hold on a minute,” interrupted Holroyd. “Those are modern trails.”

“But this area isn’t supposed to have any roads.”

Holroyd shook his head. “Some of these are probably wild horse trails, deer trails, coyote trails, mountain lion trails, maybe even four-wheel-drive tracks. There was some prospecting for uranium in this area in the fifties. Most of these tracks you wouldn’t be able to see on the ground.”

Nora slumped back in her chair. “With all those trails, how can we ever find the Anasazi one?”

Holroyd grinned. “Be patient. The older the road, the deeper it tends to lie. Very old roads also tend to spread through erosion and wind. The pebbles ancient travelers turned up have been smoothed over time, while new roads are covered with sharper pebbles. The sharper pebbles backscatter more strongly than the smooth ones.”

He continued to type. “No one knows why, but sometimes dramatic things happen if you multiply the values of two wavelengths together, or divide them by each other, or cube one and take the square root of another and subtract the cosine of your mother’s age.”

“Doesn’t sound very scientific,” said Nora.

Holroyd grinned. “No, but it’s my favorite part. When data’s buried as deeply as this, it takes real intuition and creativity to tease it out.”

He worked with steady determination. Every few minutes the image changed: sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly. Once Nora asked a question, but Holroyd merely shook his head, brow furrowed. At times, all the roads vanished; Holroyd would curse, type a flurry of commands, and the roads returned.

Time crawled by, and Holroyd grew increasingly frustrated. The sweat stood out on his brow, and his hands flew across the keys, hitting them with greater force. Nora’s back began to ache, and she found herself shifting constantly in the cheap chair, trying to find a comfortable position.

At last, Holroyd sat back with a muttered curse. “I’ve tried all the methods, all the tricks. The data just won’t put out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Either I get a million roads and trails, or I get nothing.” He got up and went to the refrigerator. “Beer?”

“Sure.” Nora glanced at the clock. It was seven, but the apartment was still insufferably hot.

Holroyd sat down again, passing her the beer and propping a leg up on the computer table. A knobby ankle protruded from below the cuff, pale and hairless. “Is there anything unusual about the Anasazi roads? Something that might differentiate them from all these animal trails and modern stuff?”

Nora thought for a moment, then shook her head.

“What were the roads used for?”

“Actually, they weren’t really roads at all.”

Holroyd pulled his leg from the table and sat up. “What do you mean?”

“They’re still a deep archaeological mystery. The Anasazi didn’t know about the wheel and they didn’t have any beasts of burden. They had no use for a road. So why they would take such trouble to build them has always puzzled archaeologists.”

“Go on,” Holroyd urged.

“Whenever archaeologists don’t understand something, they cop out by saying it served a religious purpose. That’s what they say about the roads. They think they might have been spirit pathways, rather than roads for living beings to travel on. Roads to guide the spirits of the dead back to the underworld.”

“What do these roads look like?” Holroyd took a swig of beer.

“Not much of anything,” Nora said. “In fact, they’re almost impossible to see from the ground.”

Holroyd looked at her expectantly. “How were they built?”

“The roads were exactly thirty feet wide, surfaced with adobe. On the Great North Road it appears that pots were deliberately broken on the road surface to consecrate it. The roads were dotted with shrines called herraduras,but we have no idea—”

“Wait a minute,” Holroyd interrupted. “You said they were surfaced with adobe. What exactly is adobe?”

“Mud, basically.”

“Imported?”

“No, usually just the local dirt mixed with water, puddled and plastered.”

“Too bad.” The excitement left Holroyd’s voice as quickly as it came.

“There’s not much else. When the Great North Road was finally abandoned around 1250, it seems to have been ritually closed. The Anasazi piled brush on the road and set it on fire. They also burned all the shrines along the road. And they burned several large structures too, one of which I excavated a few years ago, called Burned Jacal. Seems it was some kind of lighthouse or signaling structure. God knows what they used it for.”

Holroyd sat forward. “They burned brushon the road?”

“The Great North Road, anyway. Nobody has done much research on the other roads.”

“How much brush?”

“A lot,” said Nora. “We found large swaths of charcoal.”

Holroyd slammed down the beer, swivelled in his chair, and began hitting keys once again. “Charcoal—carbon—has a very specific radar signature. Even tiny amounts of it absorb radar. It has an almost nonexistent backscatter.”

The image on the screen began to shift. “So what we’re going to look for,” he murmured, “is just the opposite of what I’ve been searching for all this time. Instead of looking for a particular reflection, we’re going to look for a shadow. A linear hole in the data.” He punched a final key.

Nora watched as the image on the screen disappeared. And then—as a new image scrolled down the screen with maddening slowness—she saw a long, faint, sinuous black line etch itself across the landscape: broken in countless spots, yet unmistakable.

“There it is,” said Holroyd quietly, sitting back and looking at her, his face shining with triumph.

“That’s my road to Quivira?” Nora asked, her voice trembling.

“No. That’s ourroad to Quivira.”

8

NORA WORKED HER WAY THROUGH THE early evening traffic, struggling to keep the highway ahead from blurring into parallel images. She was tired, more tired than she could remember being since her marathon study sessions of graduate school. Though Holroyd had offered to put her up in his apartment the night before, she had instead opted to drive straight back to Santa Fe and the Institute. She had arrived a little after ten in the morning. The day had dragged as Nora, exhausted and distracted, tried to wrap up the end-of-term business. Again and again, her mind had turned back to Quivira and what her next step should be. She sensed it was pointless to approach Blakewood again, even with this startling discovery; there was little chance of him changing his mind. She had passed him in a hallway shortly after noon, and his greeting was decidedly cool.

She slowed, downshifting to second as she turned into Verde Estates, her townhouse development. The afternoon had ended on an unexpected note: a call from Ernest Goddard’s office, requesting a meeting the following morning. Nora had never even spoken to the Institute’s chairman of the board, and she could think of no reason—no good reason, anyway—why he would want to see her. She’d been absent from the Institute without notice for two days, and had made no headway on the Rio Puerco ceramics. Perhaps Blakewood had put a bug in his ear about the troublesome junior professor.

Nora switched on her headlights as she navigated through the curving lanes. Verde Estates might be a development, but it was older and it lacked the ludicrous Santa Fe–style pretensions of the newer condo complexes. There had been time for a good growth of fruit and fir trees, softening the edges of the buildings. A calm warmth began to flow into her tired limbs as she maneuvered into her parking space. She’d take half an hour to relax, then fix a light meal, take a shower, and fall into bed. Her favorite way to unwind had always been to work on her oboe reeds. Most people found reed-making a tiresome, endless nuisance, but she had always enjoyed the challenge.

Twisting the key out of the ignition, she grabbed her portfolio and bags and started across the blacktop toward her door. Already, she was mentally laying out the tools she’d need: jeweler’s loup; a piece of good French cane; silk thread; sheets of fish skin to plug leaks. Mr. Roehm, her high-school oboe teacher, had said that making double reeds was like fly-tying: an art and a science in which a thousand things could go wrong, and in which the tinkering was never done.

She unlocked the front door and stepped inside. Dropping her things, she leaned back against the door and closed her eyes wearily, too exhausted for the moment to turn on the lights. She heard the low growl of the refrigerator, a dog barking hysterically in the distance. The place had a smell she didn’t remember. Odd,she thought, how things can grow unfamiliar in just two days.

Something was missing: the familiar click-clack of nails on the linoleum, the friendly nuzzling of her ankles. Taking a deep breath, she pushed herself away from the door and snapped on the lights. Thurber, her ten-year-old basset hound, was nowhere in sight.

“Thurber?” she called. She thought of going outside to call for him, but changed her mind immediately: Thurber was the most domesticated animal on the planet, for whom the great outdoors was something to be avoided at all costs.

“Thurber?” she called again. Dropping her purse on the front table, her eyes fell on a note: Nora, please call. Skip.Reading this, Nora smirked. Must need money,she thought; Skip normally never used “please” in a sentence. And that explained Thurber’s absence. She’d asked Skip to feed Thurber while she was in California, and no doubt he’d taken the pooch back to his apartment to save himself time.

Turning away, she started to take off her shoes, then changed her mind when she noticed a scattering of dust on the floor. Gotta clean this damn place,she thought as she headed for the stairs.

In the bathroom she shrugged off her blouse, washed her face and hands, dampened her hair, and then pulled on her favorite reed-making sweatshirt, a ragged thing from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Walking into her bedroom, she stopped to look around a moment. She’d been so quick to judge Holroyd’s apartment, almost eccentric in its barrenness, its lack of personality. And yet, in its way, her own place was not that different. Somehow, she’d never had time to give much thought to decorating. If furnishings were a window into the soul, what did this jumble of rooms say about her? A woman who was too busy crawling around ruins to fix up her own place. Almost everything she had belonged to her parents; Skip had refused to take anything except her dad’s book collection and old pistol.

With a smile and a shake of her head, she reached automatically for the brush on top of her dresser.

And found it gone.

She paused, hand outstretched, motionless with perplexity. Her brush was always in the same place: the archaeologist in her insisted on keeping her possessions in situ.Her damp hair felt cool on the back of her neck as she mentally went through the motions of three mornings before. She’d washed her hair as usual, dressed as usual, combed her hair as usual. And replaced the brush as usual.

But now it was missing. Nora stared at the strange, inexplicable gap between the comb and the box of tissue. Goddamn Skip,she thought suddenly, irritation mingling with relief. His own bathroom was a solid mass of mildew, and he liked to sneak showers at her place when she was away. He’d probably dumped it someplace, and . . .

Then she paused and took a breath. Something in her gut told her that this had nothing to do with Skip. The strange smell, the dust in the hall, the feeling that things were not right . . . She whirled around, searching for anything else that might be missing. But everything seemed to be in place.

Then she heard a faint scratching sound coming from outside. She looked over, but the black windows only reflected the interior. She turned off the lights with a quick brush of her hand. It was a clear, moonless night, the desert stars spread out like diamonds across the velvet blackness beyond her window. The scratching came again, louder this time.

With a surge of relief, she realized it must be Thurber, waiting at the back door. On top of everything else, Skip had managed to leave the dog outside. Shaking her head, Nora walked downstairs and through the kitchen. She twisted the deadbolt on the door and yanked it open, kneeling as she did so for the anticipated nuzzle.

Thurber was nowhere to be seen. A skein of dust swirled on the concrete step, flaring into sharp relief as the headlights of a car approached along the back alley. The headlights swept across the grass, past a stand of pines, and silhouetted a large presence, furred and dark, springing back into the protective darkness. As she stared, Nora realized she had seen that movement before—a few nights before, when the same object had raced alongside her truck with horrifying unnatural speed.

She stumbled backward into the kitchen in a rush of terror, face hot, gulping air. Then the moment of paralysis passed. Filled with sudden anger, she grabbed a heavy flashlight from the counter and dashed for the door. She stopped at the threshold, the flashlight revealing nothing but the peaceful desert night.

“Leave me the hell alone!” she cried into the blackness. There was no dark figure, no prints in the damp earth beyond the door; only the lost sigh of the wind, the crazed barking of a distant dog, and the rattle of the flashlight in her shaking hand.

9

NORA STOPPED OUTSIDE A CLOSED OAKEN door labeled CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD, SANTA FE ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE. Clutching more tightly to the portfolio that now never left her side, she looked carefully down the hall in both directions. She was uncertain whether the nervousness she felt had to do with the events of the night before or with the impending meeting. Had word of her shenanigans at JPL somehow gotten out? No, that was impossible. But maybe this was going to be a dismissal anyway. Why else would Ernest Goddard want to see her? Her head ached from lack of sleep.

All she knew about the chairman was what she had read, along with the rare newspaper photo and even rarer glimpse of his striking figure around campus. Although Dr. Blakewood might have been prime mover and chief architect of the Institute’s vision, Nora knew that Goddard was the real power and money behind Blakewood’s throne. And unlike Blakewood, Goddard had an almost supernatural ability to cultivate the press, managing to get the occasional tasteful and laudatory article placed in just the right venue. She had heard several explanations for the man’s tremendous wealth, from inheriting a motor oil fortune to discovering a submarine full of Nazi gold—none of which seemed credible.

She took a deep breath and grasped the doorknob firmly. Maybe a dismissal would be a good thing at this point. It would free her to pursue Quivira unhindered. The Institute, in the person of Dr. Blakewood, had already passed judgment on her proposed expedition. Holroyd had given her the ammunition she needed to take the idea somewhere else. If the Institute wasn’t interested, she knew she would find a place that was.

A small, nervous secretary ushered her through the reception area to the inner office. The space was as cool and spare as a church, with whitewashed adobe walls and a Mexican tiled floor. Instead of the imposing power desk Nora had expected, there was a huge wooden worktable, badly scuffed and dented. She looked around in surprise; it was the exact opposite of Dr. Blakewood’s office. Except for a row of pots on the worktable, lined up as if at attention, the room was devoid of ornamentation.

Behind the worktable stood Ernest Goddard, longish white hair haloing his gaunt face, a salt-and-pepper beard below lively blue eyes. One hand held a pencil. A rumpled cotton handkerchief drooped from his jacket pocket. His body was thin and frail, and his gray suit hung loosely on his bony frame. Nora would have thought he was ill, except that his eyes were clear, bright, and full of fire.

“Dr. Kelly,” he said, laying down the pencil and coming around the worktable to shake her hand. “So good to meet you at last.” His voice was unusual: low, dry, barely higher than a whisper. And yet it carried enormous authority.

“Please call me Nora,” she replied guardedly. This cordial reception was the last thing she expected.

“I believe I will,” Goddard paused to remove the handkerchief and cough into it with a delicate, almost feminine gesture. “Have a seat. Oh, but before you do, take a look at these ceramics, will you?” He poked the handkerchief back into his pocket.

Nora approached the table. She counted a dozen painted bowls, all peerless examples of ancient pottery from the Mimbres valley of New Mexico. Three were pure geometrics with vibrant rhythms, and two contained abstract insect designs: a stinkbug and a cricket. The rest were covered with anthropomorphics—splendidly precise, geometric human figures. Each pot had a neat hole punched in the bottom.

“They’re magnificent,” Nora said.

Goddard seemed about to speak, then turned to cough. A buzzer sounded on the worktable. “Dr. Goddard, Mrs. Henigsbaugh to see you.”

“Send her in,” Goddard said.

Nora threw him a glance. “Shall I—”

“You stay right here,” Goddard said, indicating the chair. “This will only take a minute.”

The door opened and a woman of perhaps seventy swept into the room. Immediately, Nora recognized the type: Santa Fe society matron, rich, thin, tan, almost no makeup, in fabulous shape, wearing an exquisite but understated Navajo squash blossom necklace over a silk blouse, with a long velveteen skirt.

“Ernest, how delightful,” she said.

“Wonderful to see you, Lily,” Goddard replied. He waved a spotted hand at Nora. “This is Dr. Nora Kelly, an assistant professor here at the Institute.”

The woman glanced from Nora to the worktable. “Ah, very good. These are the pots I told you about.”

Goddard nodded.

“My appraiser says they’re worth five hundred thousand if they’re worth a penny. Extremely rare, he said, and in perfect condition. Harry collected them, you know. He wanted the Institute to have them when he died.”

“They’re very nice—”

“I should say they are!” the woman interrupted, patting her impeccable hair. “Now about their display. I realize, of course, that the Institute doesn’t have a formal museum or anything of that sort. But in light of the value of these pots, obviously you’ll want to create something special. In the administration building, I imagine. I’ve spoken to Simmons, my architect, and he’s drawn up plans for something we’re calling the Henigsbaugh Alcove—”

“Lily.” Goddard’s whispery voice assumed a very subtle edge of command. “As I was about to say, we’re deeply appreciative of your late husband’s bequest. But I’m afraid we can’t accept it.”

There was a silence.

“I beg your pardon?” Mrs. Henigsbaugh asked, her voice suddenly cold.

Goddard waved his handkerchief at the worktable. “These bowls came from graves. We can’t take them.”

“What do you mean, from graves? Harry bought the pots from reputable dealers. Didn’t you get the papers I sent along? There’s nothing about gravesin them.”

“The papers are irrelevant. Our policy is not to accept grave goods. Besides,” Goddard added more gently, “these are very beautiful, it’s true, and we’re honored by the gesture. But we have better examples in the collection.”

Better examples?thought Nora. She had never seen finer Mimbres bowls, not even in the Smithsonian.

But Mrs. Henigsbaugh was still digesting the grosser insult. “Grave goods! How dare you insinuate they were looted—”

Goddard picked up a bowl and poked one finger through the hole in its bottom. “This pot has been killed.”

“Killed?”

“Yes. When the Mimbres buried a pot with their dead, they punched a hole in the bottom to release the spirit of the pot, so it could join the deceased in the underworld. Archaeologists call it killing the pot.” He replaced the bowl on the table. “All these pots have been killed. So you see they must have come from graves, no matter what the provenience says.”

“You mean you’re going to turn down a half-million-dollar gift, just like that?” the woman cried.

“I’m afraid so. I’ll have them carefully crated and returned to you.” He coughed into his handkerchief. “I’m very sorry, Lily.”

“I’m sure you are.” The woman spun around and left the office abruptly, leaving a faint cloud of expensive perfume in her wake.

In the silence that followed, Goddard settled onto the edge of the table, a thoughtful look on his face. “You’re familiar with Mimbres pottery?” he asked.