May 11
THE FOLLOWING DAY dawned clear, and the night had been cloudless, allowing Nora and the rest an excellent view of the comet Skip had reminded her of before she set off. Around noon, however, thunderheads began piling up over the surrounding peaks. Nora’s first task was to open the quad containing the lower half of Samantha Carville’s body. After removing the layer of grassy turf on top and putting it aside, she and Clive began, using paintbrushes and bamboo picks in addition to the ever-present whisks, working with agonizing slowness down through the soil to the level of the bones. As before, the dirt was piled in a tray to be sifted and floated later.
Working even a shallow quad like this was a lesson in patience. Nora was used to it, but Clive was sweating and had a tendency to hurry. While they worked on the Carville quads, Salazar and Adelsky were opening another quad at the edge of the midden heap.
“Easy there, Clive. Those bones aren’t going anywhere.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Curiosity makes me impatient. Does it do that to you?”
“Yes. I had to learn to slow down—just like you need to.”
Clive laughed and turned his blue eyes on her. “We seem to have a lot in common, you and me.”
Nora said nothing, but Skip’s parting words came to her mind unbidden. Opening herself to new people was not being disloyal to Bill. She needed to move past him and get on with her life. She had already dated a couple of losers, but Clive was certainly no loser: smart, a Stanford PhD—but most important for her, someone with real intellectual passions. And he was obviously interested in her.
She found herself coloring at this train of thought and the guilt that it caused in her, and she quickly bent her head to conceal it and continue digging.
“Got something,” Clive said.
Nora looked over. It was clearly the leading edge of a small bone.
“I’ll take over, if you don’t mind.” This had become their informal working arrangement, Clive turning over the delicate labor to Nora.
She moved to the spot and began brushing away the dirt, exposing more of the bone, while Clive watched. She could feel his breath on her hair. “Looks like the left patella.”
“That’s the knee bone, right?”
“Right.”
Working down, Nora exposed the bottom of the femur and the top of the tibia, along with a stray button and a scrap of cotton, which she placed in artifact envelopes with tweezers. As she worked down the leg toward the foot, a ragged row of buttons appeared, along with some withered scraps of leather—the girl’s tiny button-down boot. Leaving it in situ, Nora worked around it, uncovering the entire left leg. When it was fully exposed, she took a series of photos.
Meanwhile, Clive moved over and began working the opposite side of the quad, loosening the surface with the bamboo pick and gently working the dirt off with the whisk. Nora felt a certain unease as he deepened his half of the quad, exposing more and more of the right leg.
“Oh boy. Here’s something else,” Clive said, backing away for Nora to look.
It was the right femur. Nora brushed the soil from around what turned out to be a ragged end of bone. Its termination was a splintered mess and there was nothing below. She placed a magnifying stand over it. Deep chop marks from butchering leapt into view.
There was a silence, interrupted by a sound of distant thunder.
“I’ll be damned,” said Clive. “The legend is true, after all.”
Nora sat back and took a deep breath. “The leg’s been chopped off with something crude, like a hatchet, right at the knee.”
“I can’t believe it. The historical record…” Clive’s voice trailed off.
There was a silence.
“What do you think?” Nora asked. “Should we tell the team? With Maggie riling people up with her ghost stories, maybe we should keep quiet.”
Clive stroked his incipient beard. “They already know we’ve found the girl’s remains. They’re going to ask.”
“But there’s a negative vibe already circulating in the camp,” said Nora.
“True. And that damned FBI agent showing up out of nowhere didn’t help things.”
Nora nodded. “Let’s decide later. We should finish excavating the quad on the off chance we can locate Samantha’s missing—”
She paused as a shadow fell over the excavation. Jack Peel stood at the edge of the quad, dressed in his long duster, staring down at them, his face creased with mingled sorrow and anger. He slowly raised his arm and pointed at the skeleton with a trembling finger.
“Samantha Carville?”
“Yes,” said Nora.
Peel didn’t respond. He simply stood there, immobile.
“Is…is there anything in particular you’d like to know?” Nora asked, spooked by the man’s intensity.
“I’ve already heard everything I need to know.” And with that, Peel turned and walked fast across the meadow toward the trail, duster flapping behind him.
“If we had any plan to keep this on the down low,” said Nora, “it’s walking away with that man right now.”
“What is it with that guy? He prowls around like an extra from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
Nora shrugged. “Let’s cover this up. Adelsky is already waving us over for lunch.”
Clive looked over. “I swear, for a skinny kid, that guy’s got a hell of an appetite. I wouldn’t want to be snowbound in a tent with him.”
* * *
After lunch, Clive and Nora resumed work on the quad. “I hope that FBI agent is safely strapped to her desk in Albuquerque by now,” Clive said.
Nora worked with her brush. “If she’d identified the Parkin skeleton, she might have shut down the dig—or taken the bones.”
“With that jigsaw of a midden heap? Good luck.” Clive shook his head. “The look on her face when you had the tarp pulled away was epic.”
“Actually, luck is only a part of the equation.”
Clive glanced at her. “What do you mean?”
“Meaning parts of the jigsaw puzzle might be easier to put together than you might think.”
“How so?”
“You know how we’ve been plugging all our data into the HQ computer? The Institute purchased the latest, most powerful archaeological software available—I showed you the rudiments on the iPad—and once you get up to speed on its intricacies, it’s pretty amazing.”
“It must be—you three hunching over your tablets every chance you get.”
Nora put down the brush. “I’ll show you how it works in a minute.”
They walked past the tent to the midden heap, which was still partially covered with tarps. A worktable adjacent to the excavation, in the shade of a tarp, held a variety of equipment as well as a few bones in a tray, removed for specific analysis.
“Help me get this tarp off.”
They unpegged a tarp covering the area of the midden heap that Agent Swanson had looked over the day before. Nora donned a fresh pair of gloves and reached into the padded neoprene case where they kept the expedition’s twelve-inch iPads.
“As I started to explain the other night, we enter every pertinent detail of the dig into our iPads—survey coordinates, grid points, depth markers, artifact locations, photographs, and so forth. The software crunches all the data, creating an extremely accurate 3-D rendering of every object, placed in a detailed topographic map of the location.”
“So you told me.”
“But that’s only the beginning. We can’t access the internet, of course, but using this local VPN, we can communicate with each other and the host laptop via Wi-Fi. Obviously, to conserve power, we use the computer only at specific times, such as when we make our uploads and downloads at the end of each day.”
“I was going to ask about that.”
“We’ve got that small generator and solar boosters to charge up all this electronic stuff.” With the iPad in hand, she stood at the edge of the midden heap. “As confused as this looks, the AI suite makes sense of it all. The cataloging and mapping software can show us this midden in any number of ways: by depth, by types of artifacts, locations of particular bones, even who excavated what and when—all overlaid on X, Y, and Z axes. You can also slice the midden heap any which way to look at a cross-section.”
Nora showed Clive a wireframe image of the midden. As he looked on, she swiveled it in various directions. In turn, the screen displayed sections illuminated in different colors.
“Looks like an Atari arcade game,” Clive said.
Nora laughed. “It means a lot of work up front, inputting the data, but once that’s done we’re able to do stuff that would have been impossible even a few years ago.” Using the iPad’s stylus, she made some markings, tapped a few icons. On the screen, one wireframe section of the midden was suddenly highlighted in green: irregularly shaped, filled with darker green shapes. The rest of the midden receded to gray.
“This is the section Jason worked on two days ago,” she said. “The dark areas are individual artifacts. Extensive metadata exists for each one.” She tapped one dot at random with her stylus, and immediately the screen zoomed in on it in 3-D, showing what looked like an old wooden button, with a panel of text scrolling up one edge of the display.
“So you actually know who dug up what, and when?”
“Yes. And more than that—the AI is powerful enough to help us reassemble artifacts. At a Paleolithic dig site, it could reverse-engineer a scattering of flint flakes into the original point they were struck from. Here—as an example, I’m going to ask the software to locate all the metatarsal bones and likely fragments it can. Watch.”
She tapped with the stylus and the screen changed once more, zooming out to show the surface of the midden, several bones highlighted in green and blue.
Clive whistled. “I’m beginning to see what you meant about the jigsaw puzzle.”
“Now,” said Nora, “I’m going to ask it to locate all the clavicles we’ve unearthed.”
Nora tapped the screen again. This time, instead of a particular cross-section, a small scattering of bone shapes and fragments were highlighted.
“You’ll see there are a total of eleven pieces, none intact. Note how in at least two instances they tend to be clumped together—these three pieces, here, and those four over there. And now, let’s look at them in reality.”
Walking over to the midden, and using the tablet as a guide, she carefully removed three bone fragments from the matrix with a gloved hand. Then she set them on a black velvet cloth in a specimen tray atop the worktable. Putting the iPad aside, she examined the pieces closely, moving them this way and that with her gloves. After a moment, she managed to fit them together.
“See?” she said.
“That’s incredible,” said Clive. “You’ve reassembled somebody’s collarbone—just like that!”
“Not ‘just like that.’” Nora smiled. “This is the result of meticulous excavation, good data entry and documentation, months of software training, years of classwork—and, of course, good financing.” She pointed at the broken collarbone. “No signs of recent fracture here.” Picking them up, she returned to the midden, knelt, and carefully replaced them where they had originally been.
“You’re just going to put them back?” Clive asked in disbelief. “Now that you’ve established those pieces form a single bone?”
“Of course. The pieces belong in their original locations—for now. That’s the beauty of this method. We are documenting every millimeter of the site so precisely that, if we wanted, we could re-create it in software at any time—long after it’s been backfilled and the bones put in their final resting places.”
“So…can you identify other clavicle bones?”
“You mean, like Parkin’s? Let’s see.”
She consulted the tablet once again, then—using it as a guide—moved to a different section of the midden and, over the course of several minutes, removed four more fragments of bone: the other cluster identified by the software. She laid them out on the cloth, brushed them off gently with a paintbrush, fitted them together, and then looked at them with a loupe.
“Poor old Parkin,” she murmured. “That looks painful.”
“You mean—?” Clive began.
He fell silent as Nora handed him the loupe. He leaned in to look at the bones himself.
“My God,” he murmured. “Is that what I think it is?”
Nora nodded. “A sharp nick in the bone, no doubt made by an arrowhead, with a partial fracture, almost healed.”
Clive straightened. “Incredible. But can we find the rest of him?”
“Let’s see.” Nora applied herself to the tablet again. After a moment, she showed it to Clive. “I’ll ask the computer to assemble—based on bone placement, anatomical analysis, and other relevant factors—the best fit of bones to go with this clavicle.”
She consulted the iPad again. Now the display lit up with additional bones and pieces of bone, outlined in green. She turned back to the midden, gently removed three large pieces of a skull, plus a jawbone, and brought them over, placing them on the velvet cloth next to the clavicle. They consisted of the maxilla and lower face, the relatively intact cranium, and most of the occipital bone and mastoid process. Missing was only an orbit. The cranium displayed a distinctive star-shaped imprint on one temple: a sign of being bashed on the head, either how he died or the initial attempt by survivors to get at his brain.
“So this…” Clive paused. “This is—?”
“Allow me to introduce Mr. Albert Parkin.”
Clive exhaled. “Wow.”
“It’ll take a DNA test to be sure, but I think we can find some confirming evidence in these butcher marks.” She pointed at the pieces of collarbone. “As that FBI agent examined the midden, I noticed her observing the cut marks. And I knew why. You see, when someone is butchering with a single tool, the tool leaves its own telltale marks. Look.” Nora handed Clive the loupe again. “See how the cut marks look the same, here, and here—and then again here?” She pointed first to two pieces of the collarbone, then the cranium. “It’s textbook.” She reached for the section of jawbone, held it up beside the skull. “And notice how the condyle matches up with the mandibular process.”
“You mean, how well the jaw fits in there? I see.”
Nora carefully returned the bones to their respective places in the midden and covered it all with the tarp. When she was done, she turned and gave him a smile. “What were you saying about luck?”
Clive just shook his head in amazement. “But how sure are you?”
“Well, I’m ninety-nine percent sure.”
In the silence that followed, Nora could see Clive’s brows contract.
“What is it?”
“It’s just that…well, what are we going to do now? Swanson asked us to tell her if we identify Parkin. I mean, you could’ve done this identification yesterday for her—right?”
“There was no way to know unless I actually attempted it. But yes—probably. And then what? Have her take the bones and possibly shut down the site, to boot?”
“But…it’s the FBI,” said Clive. “You don’t want to be accused of withholding evidence.”
“Here’s how I see it. Is this truly Parkin?”
“Well, you just said—”
“I said I was ninety-nine percent sure. To truly identify Parkin, we need DNA confirmation in the lab, after the excavation phase is complete.”
“Okay…But—”
“But if I’d given that demonstration to Swanson yesterday, we’d still have no proof this is Parkin, and it would have caused our expedition a lot of trouble.”
“I understand.”
But Nora wasn’t finished. “Here’s the bottom line. Up until five minutes ago, I had no idea who those bones belonged to. Lacking DNA testing, I still don’t.”
“I get it.”
Nora looked at him, a little surprised by the expression on his face. “Don’t tell me you have a problem with this?”
There was another rumble of thunder and a dark cloud blotted out the sun, plunging the valley into shadow. Nora waited as a silence descended. Slowly, the look on Clive’s face changed to a smile. “I believe that what I just witnessed was a hypothetical example of a hypothetical identification,” he said at last. “Nothing worth reporting until we know for sure.”
The sense of guilt Nora had been feeling eased off a little. “Exactly. And we’ll keep Agent Swanson in the loop, as promised. As soon as the excavation phase is complete and we have a DNA identification back in the lab, we’ll let her know.”
The wind picked up, rattling the dead branches of the trees.
“Come on,” she said, taking a quick glance at the sky. “Let’s get this site secured and head for camp. Looks like it’s going to pour any minute.”