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Lauren scratched her head as she peered down at the corpse. It looked more like a chicken than any known animal, but the feet were cloven, like a goat. The stench that wafted from it made Lauren gag. The sickly-sweet aroma of death and decay lingered — evidence that putrefaction remained incomplete.
“What is that?” The escort from the Peruvian government pushed past the camera, jockeying for a better look. Jean-René peered out over the viewfinder at him. He cast a sidelong look at Lauren.
“That’s what we’re here to find out.” Lauren put on her gloves and edged the escort out of her way before reaching into the small indention. She lifted the tiny body from deep within the cavern. She carried it to a nearby rock to examine it. “I need light.”
The night-vision cameras were off, so the lighting techs moved in with two high-powered spotlights. After five years of working on the show, Lauren was accustomed to being in front of the cameras, but she became impatient when the production teams got in the way of her work. She wasn’t much happier about the inspector, who maintained a stern and sour disposition, barking at her in a language she didn’t understand.
She was a scientist first and foremost, a television personality second. It wasn’t where she’d thought she’d be at this point in her career, but the television crews paid for her research, and it was better than she’d made working for PBS, or the college where she’d had tenure.
“It doesn’t have a head,” Rowan observed. Lauren glanced at him but said nothing. Any idiot could see it didn’t have a head.
“The body is very light for its size. I need my scale.” Lauren pulled her tape measure out of her pocket. She stretched it out, glancing up at Bahati, who was ready to take notes. “Thirty point five centimeters.” She measured the length, then turned the tape. “Seventeen point eight centimeters.” Rowan handed her the digital scale. She laid the body on the metal plate, tapping a few buttons with her gloved pinkie, waiting for the beep. “Six-hundred-eight point three nine grams.” She handed back the scales as she lay the body back on the high, flat stone.
Bahati nodded, documenting the evidence. She handed Lauren the digital camera and everyone waited while Lauren photographed it from every angle, laying out her tape measure for scale. After all these years as a research scientist, she was doing what she knew best.
“Looks like an alien to me,” Jean-René recoiled at the stench as he moved over Lauren’s shoulder to get a better shot.
She turned and cast a stern look at him. “We don’t make conclusions until we’ve analyzed the evidence.” He knew that. They all did. It was hard not to make assumptions, though. The legs had two sets of joints, one that bent opposite the other. Upon closer inspection there were two toes, maybe hooves or toenails.
“Okay. Let’s bag it up,” she said. “Get me an evidence kit.”
“No,” the escort said flatly.
Lauren could feel the cameras on her as she recoiled at his refusal. His jaw was set, with his lips pursed and his hands went to his hips. “What?”
“It is the property of the Peruvian government. You cannot take it.” His accent made the short, clipped words hard to understand. Lauren knew what he was saying. She just didn’t like it.
“We found it,” she snapped.
“It is not yours,” he countered. “Property of Peruvian government. This is not finders-keepers.”
Lauren’s brow narrowed. “We came to study what we found. I can’t do that here. I need my lab.” The heat rose in her cheeks and flickered in her dark eyes.
“What if we agree to bring it back after we’re done studying it?” Rowan stepped in, blocking Lauren. She was a logical woman, but he knew how passionately she hated anything that came between her and her work.
“No.” The escort stabbed a finger in Rowan’s chest, tilting his head back to look him in the eye. Rowan peered down at him, arching a critical eyebrow. The official took a step back. “You Americans are all the same. Take what is not yours, even when you are shown every courtesy. This is our history, and I will not allow you to defile it!”
Lauren took a step closer to the official, who barely came to her shoulders. She stood with her hands on her hips. “Look, Mister.” She held the words between clenched teeth. “While this might be part of your history, if you think you can bully me and tell me I can’t study something that I traveled 4,000 miles to find, then you better think again. If you keep it up, this won’t be the only headless corpse they find in a cavern in Peru.”
The man backed up and swallowed hard.
Rowan caught her arm and drew Lauren back. “Hey,” he used a soft tone to turn away her wrath. “Let’s just back up and take a minute here.”
“Excuse me?” Her brow furrowed. “It’s bad enough that you drag me into the middle of nowhere and send me down into a dark hole...and then I have to put up with that guy?” Her eyes flashed as she turned her anger on her co-host, who also functioned as the team medic.
“Look,” he snapped. “I’m not any happier about this than you are but threatening a government official isn’t going to help.”
“It wasn’t a threat.” She lowered her voice. “Only one of us is going to come out of this cavern alive.”
Rowan put his hands on his hips and stared at the toe of his hiking boots. He took a deep breath to still his racing thoughts. “Getting angry isn’t going to get us very far with this guy, I can tell.”
“So, what did you want me to do? Kill him with kindness?”
“Just don’t kill him,” Rowan pleaded.
She took a deep breath, finding wisdom in his words. She nodded and let go of her anger. Calmly, she turned to the official. “Can I at least take samples?”
He was silent for a moment. “Small.” He held up two fingers, spread minutely apart.
She held her hand up with her fingers much farther apart. “Just a small one?”
“Small.” He reached up and pinched her fingers down several centimeters.
Lauren stared down at him, her upper lip twitching as she considered her next move. “Small, huh?” She capitulated but rolled her eyes.
“Better than none.” Rowan shrugged.
“Okay. I’m going to need a scalpel and tweezers.”
Unable to take a rotting, unidentified corpse out of the country, they could only take pictures and a few tissue samples for DNA analysis. It wasn’t much, Lauren thought, but it would have to do.
* * *
After all the trouble they’d gone through to get there, more would have been nice, but it was beyond their control. Lauren carefully collected her samples, then labeled and sealed them in a controlled bag, documenting her evidence with the precision of a forensics expert. She had collected samples of all kinds over the years. As a certified phase-contrast microscopist, she’d even done her own analysis in the lab. She preferred being in the field to hovering over a microscope.
She inspected the corpse and planned her cut carefully. The body was like leather, dry and crumbly on the outside. It had no hair, no scales, nothing remotely resembling external reproductive organs. The ribs were visible through torn flesh. As she poked around, she realized the inside felt more like a meaty sponge. She went deep with the scalpel, hoping to collect a bit of the internal viscera. A bit of liver would be beneficial for analysis. Bone would be better, but when dealing with a cryptid, knowing where to aim was the problem. Not every creature kept its liver in the same place.
She lifted the sample with her tweezers and held it up to the light, inspecting it, before dropping it in the bag Bahati held out for her. She glanced up at the official. “Is it too much to ask for a bit of bone?” Lauren flashed him a saccharine-sweet smile.
“Yes,” he said, flatly. He crossed his arms over his chest. “You have enough. No mas.”
* * *
They spent another hour getting footage for the television show before Lauren returned the headless corpse to the depression where they’d found it.
“I wish I could get a sample of that odor.” She sniffed into the sleeve of her jacket before peeling off her gloves. “Man, that’s vile.”
“How long do you think it’s been here?” Bahati asked, holding a trash bag for Lauren to dispose her gloves into. Bahati’s thick accent was melodic and rich but could be hard to understand sometimes. She rolled the bag up and put it in the pack, along with the carefully labeled samples, making sure they were safely tucked in before zipping them closed.
“It’s hard to say,” she said. “The lab will have to determine that.”
“Let’s wrap it up and head home, then,” Rowan said.
* * *
It took another six hours to make their way out of the cavern. Lauren fell asleep in the back of the truck, nested atop their bags and gear, dreaming of tiny alien chicken-men dancing across the star-dappled velvet sky.
“Lauren.” A nudge from Rowan woke her abruptly. “Lauren. Look!”
She was immediately awake. Three objects arranged in a V formation circled directly above them. They maneuvered like a flock of geese. Lauren was momentarily blinded by a glowing blue light as the three objects came together into a unified disc. It hovered above, seeming to lower. It kicked up dirt and rock, sandblasting them with grit.
Lauren was mesmerized by the object that glowed brightly as it moved lower across the ravine. Rowan pounded a hand on the top of the truck, and it screeched to a stop, kicking up a cloud of dust that hovered around them. Rowen regained his balance and turned his attention back to the sky.
Unmoving, the unidentified disc cast a white pallor across the sands, looking like a throbbing moon on the earth. It illuminated the dust cloud that settled around them and their breath that hung in the blue-white air.
“What the hell is that?” Lauren’s heart pounded in her throat. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Get the camera. Get the camera!”
The team, disoriented, roused from sleep by the bizarre glow, raced to get their equipment. In a matter of moments, they had multiple cameras aimed at the sky, and the object that seemingly defied explanation.
“Is it moving?” Jean-René asked, his French accent more pronounced in his heightened state of awe. “I can’t tell.” He went on to mutter a string of French curses as he took out his camera and pointed it into the night sky, trying to hold the camera steady.
Lauren turned and looked at the camera Chance operated. It wasn’t easy, but she did her best to rein in her excitement. Exhaustion tempered her racing heart. “It’s four in the morning and we were on our way back from the cavern. We’re at least two hours outside of Cusco. Our caravan is still in the middle of nowhere and we have come to find that something unreal ... is very real in Peru.”
Lauren set out across the expanse between the truck and the disc, hoping Chance would keep the camera on her as she moved silently. He didn’t. He was as engrossed with the throbbing object as the rest of the team.
She was a good ten meters across the flat expanse before anyone realized she wasn’t beside them. She had her digital camera in her hand. Her finger rested on the button, snapping a string of photographs in rapid succession. She continued to move closer, zooming in on the radiant glow, transfixed on the image as if in a trance. It hovered closer until she stood directly beneath it. Gazing up, she could see subtle details where smaller lights flickered like disco lights at a rave. Her hair lifted off her neck as the vibrations emitting from the object pulsed through her body.
Lauren took a step forward, her head tilted back, transfixed on the disc. She raised her hand to shield her eyes as she moved to try and get a better look. Suddenly, the lights went from blue to red and the pulse rate increased into a rapid tempo. A deafening whine rose around her. She covered her ears and stumbled backwards.
“Lauren!” Bahati leapt from the truck to run after her before she stepped off into the ravine. “Lauren,” she gasped, pulling her back. The red light abated, and the whining ceased. Lauren leaned over and peered down into the deep crevice before Bahati hurried her back into the darkness.
“Mind that first step!” Jean-René shouted, grinning wickedly from the back of the truck, watching her through the viewfinder of his video camera “It’s a doozie!”
She paused a moment. Her heart pounded in her chest and she was breathless. She cocked a hip to one side and raised a hand with a one-finger salute. She didn’t need his smart-ass remarks at the moment.
He returned the camera to the sky, chortling as he filmed. As she moved back to the safety of the group, she returned her attention to her own camera, panning in on the object, switching to infrared. She was amazed to find very little heat signature. It flickered cool shades in a swirling kaleidoscope of energy.
For nearly twenty minutes, they watched and filmed until the disc gradually faded, but never moved away. It finally dissipated into a disintegrating mass of twinkling dust and was suddenly...gone.
“Just tell me you got that.” Lauren turned back to Jean-René as he lowered the camera, his jaw slack in disbelief.
“I think so,” he said, reviewing the video in the tiny monitor. It cast the same blue-white glow on his face from the screen. “Yeah. I got it.”
“Let me see,” Lauren said, climbing back into the truck, taking the camera from him, as the team gathered around, all trying to get a look. “Oh my God,” she breathed heavily, her hands trembling as she replayed it over and over.
* * *
The sky was a pale shade of gray when the convoy came to a stop on the outskirts of the town of Cusco. The dawn brought little relief from the cold. The suburban streets were quiet, but the perfume of baking bread and the rumble of garbage trucks nearby suggested the city’s inhabitants were rising from their beds, preparing to face the day.
The crew roused from their nests in the back of the truck, piling out and unloading their equipment. Lauren lifted out her pack. As she dropped it to the ground, she almost plowed into the government escort who stood with his hands on his hips, his lips pursed, and his eyes narrowed. Two policia twice his size stood behind him, materializing from one of the dusty red archways.
“Excuse me, Señor Prieta.” Lauren had been nothing but courteous since the incident back in the cavern.
The taller of the two police officers said something curtly in Spanish.
Jean-René spoke better Spanish than anyone on the team. “He says you’re under arrest for assault and making threats against a government official.”
“Arrest?”
“Assault?” Rowan turned. “No one was assaulted.”
“You wanna see assault?” Lauren’s upper lip curled, and her fists balled.
The police officer said something else and reached over to catch Lauren by the arm. She recoiled, trying to escape his grasp, but found herself pinned against the truck with her arms wrenched behind her. The officer cuffed her. To her right, she found Rowan in the same predicament. “Wait!” she protested. “Why are you arresting him? He didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t either,” Rowan said. “Just take a deep breath. We’ll figure this out.”
* * *
Jean-René was led into the room where Lauren sat. Her feet were chained to the chair, and her hands cuffed behind her back. Her head hung heavily. He walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him, one eye swollen shut, her lip split. Her cheek was bruised.
“Tabernaque!” he winced. “What happened?
“I sure as hell didn’t fall down.”
“Boss...” he sat across from her. “I called the Embassy. They’re sending an assistant to negotiate your release.”
“The Embassy? An assistant? Really?”
“I’m also going to see if I can get you some medical attention,” he said. “At least they could let you see the medic from our team.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need to see the medic.” She didn’t want Rowan seeing her like this. Apparently, his arrest had been just for a show of power; he’d been released shortly afterward.
Jean-René considered her a moment. “Just hang tight. Let me see what I can do.”
* * *
The next time the door opened, it was one of the two policia involved in her arrest. She sat up, but the room spun, and it was everything she could do to hold herself upright. The officer carried one of her equipment bags and rummaged through it without saying a word. He inspected each piece of equipment and set the cameras on the table, tossing everything else carelessly back into the bag, including the specimens collected from the cavern. He pushed the bag off the table, and it landed with a thud. Taking the camera, he turned it on as he sat down then scrolled through the pictures; the camera beeping each time he hit the button to advance. Lauren glowered at the man. She wasn’t sure what he was up to, but if he intended to look at every picture on that camera then the joke was on him. She’d taken several thousand pictures since replacing the video card at the beginning of their expedition. At the moment, she was grateful she’d uploaded pictures from the cavern to the Cloud before they loaded into the truck.
“¿Qué es esto?” He turned the camera towards her. The image of the corpse appeared.
Lauren sat stone-faced, remaining silent.
“¿Qué es esto?” he repeated, more forcefully.
Jean-René had taught her a few useful phrases in Spanish. “Vete al inffierno.” She was pretty sure she’d just told him to go to hell.
The man looked up at her soberly. He repeated, “Una última vez. ¿Qué es esto?”
“Tu madre,” she said. Your momma.
He kicked back the chair and rose. He walked around behind her and she tensed, preparing for a blow that never came. Instead, the crashing sound of breaking glass and crushing plastic exploded behind her. She could hear his boot come down on the remains of her camera and he twisted his foot to obliterate what was left. Panic washed through her as the evidence of her work was destroyed. All of her pictures...lost forever.
“In my country, that’s called destruction of personal property. Maybe even destruction of evidence.” The video of her exchange with the official – the video that might convict or acquit her – was most likely on Jean-René’s or Chance’s camera. It offered her a small glimmer of hope. She needed the ambassador’s assistant to see that video. She never laid a hand on Señor Prieta. On the other hand, he had jabbed Rowan in the middle of the chest with his short, stumpy finger. That’s what her counsel needed to see.
* * *
Rowan walked out of the police station into the blinding sun and biting wind. Jean-René stood waiting with a tall woman with long dark hair. “Mr. Pierce?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Consuela Gonzales.” She stuck her hand out. “I’m with the American Embassy.”
Rowan grimaced at Jean-René. “You called the Embassy?”
“We needed help.” He shrugged. “At least I didn’t call the Network.”
“I contacted your network for you,” Gonzales said. “I was able to secure your release, but the local law-enforcement refuses to release your ...”
“My boss,” Rowan answered the unasked question. “She’s the field producer and lead investigator for our show.”
“I need to know exactly what happened.”
“If we had our equipment, we could show you,” Jean-René said. “They confiscated all our cameras.”
Rowan blanched, swaying with exhaustion. “What about the digital recorders?”
“Those won’t help our case any.” Jean-René ran a hand over his closely cropped hair. “She did verbally threaten Señor Prieta.”
“She didn’t mean it.”
“She threatened the government official?” Gonzales’ brow furrowed. “Wait a minute. I need you to tell me everything.”
“Let’s go back to the hotel and get out of the cold,” Jean-René said. “It’s just down the street.”
“We can’t leave her here.” Rowan protested.
“What choice do we have?”
* * *
Rowan didn’t have the strength to argue. Back at the hotel, he sank into a chair in the lobby, yearning for a good night’s rest, yet still jittery. A Peruvian jail was no place to sleep, and after a night in the back of a moving truck with a camera case for a pillow, his back ached.
He let Jean-René fill the embassy rep in on their expedition, and what had transpired between Lauren and the government escort. “And that is when she said something like, if you keep it up, it won’t just be a headless chicken-man they find in a cavern in Peru.”
“But she didn’t mean it,” Rowan interjected. “She gets really cranky when people get between her and her work.”
The diplomat’s assistant looked dubious. “It sure sounds like a threat.”
“Look,” Rowan said. “She’s a scientist in a field that doesn’t get a lot of respect. She is trying to be taken seriously, but she never seems to get a break. She was right. We needed the specimen to analyze, but Señor Prieta wouldn’t let her have it, so we negotiated for a small sample.”
“Oh?”
“She made nice. She did everything she could do to be polite after that.”
“And did he accept her apology?”
“Well.” Jean-René shrugged. “She didn’t exactly apologize.”
Consuela set one hand on her knee and leaned forward on the colorful loveseat. “Maybe that’s what we need her to do.”
* * *
Lauren lay with her head on the table, praying for some relief for the pain in her shoulders. Hours had passed since the police officer had shattered every camera in her bag. Her face was throbbing, and it was a toss-up what hurt worse, her face or her shoulders. She refused to cry. Tears would make her eyes swell even more and it wouldn’t change her situation, so she held them at bay. While distraught over her own plight, she was just as terrified for Rowan, not to mention what the Network was going to say about this fiasco. A muscle in her back spasmed.
There was nothing to save them from simply disappearing from the face of the earth. She blinked rapidly then pressed her eyes closed tight. Maybe that was exactly the idea.
When the door opened again, a woman in a blue jacket and jeans entered. Lauren lifted her head. The woman sat down on the metal chair across from her, the only other seat in the room. “Miss Grayson?”
“It’s Doctor Grayson.” Lauren swallowed hard.
“Dr. Grayson, I’m Consuela Gonzales, with the US Embassy.” Her eyes narrowed at Lauren’s injured face. “I spoke to your network...”
“What?” Lauren snapped, adding under her breath, “Now we really are going to get cancelled.”
“Look, Dr. Grayson. My assignment here is to negotiate your release, but it’s very difficult. You threatened a government official.”
Lauren heaved a sigh. “I did. But I wouldn’t have hurt him ... couldn’t have.”
“Oh?”
“Biggest knife I have in my kit is a scalpel. I could never cut off a man’s head with a scalpel, even if I wanted to.”
“You are a trained doctor,” Consuela said with a hint of a smile.
“A biological anthropologist, not a surgeon; completely different skill set.”
“Well, I’m not sure there’s anything that would convince them otherwise, but I’ve brokered a pretty decent deal that could get you out of here. And with what they’ve done to you, we may have another bargaining chip.”
Lauren sat up straighter. “Tell me.”
“Initially, they offered to have the charges against you reduced to a misdemeanor if you pay a fine and leave the country immediately. You also have to apologize to Mr. Prieta.”
Lauren looked at her blankly. “I will pay the fine. I will leave the country. But I will not apologize to that man.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
* * *
Consuela paced in the police chief’s office that smelled of cigarette smoke and bad coffee, as did the police chief himself. She choked back her disdain as she made her argument in Spanish. “You assaulted an American citizen. You destroyed equipment, including video that could be evidence. Based on this, we will not agree to your offer.”
“No one assaulted her,” one of the officers offered tonelessly. “She fell.”
Consuela did a double take at the comment but calmed herself. “I have been instructed to notify my superiors that if anything happens to this team, Ambassador Francisco will notify the State Department and begin the process of preparing our argument to take to the UN.”
The police chief’s face turned a beet shade. “You have some nerve.”
“I also understand there was video of the confrontation between you and Dr. Pierce,” she said. “Video that one of your goons may or may not have destroyed. I need to watch the video from the rest of the cameras, assuming you haven’t destroyed those too.”
The two men exchanged dubious glances. “May we have a moment to confer, Señora Gonzales?”
“Of course.” She stood and walked out to the lobby where Rowan and Jean-René waited. Both of them popped up from the couch like clock springs.
“Did you see her?” Jean-René asked.
“You didn’t tell me she’d been beaten.”
“What?” Rowan paled, sinking back onto the chair.
Consuela crossed her arms. “We negotiated a deal, but I told them I wouldn’t agree to anything until I spoke to Dr. Grayson. After I saw her, and she told me they destroyed some of her video equipment, I went back in with a few more bargaining chips.”
“Was it just Lauren’s cameras?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I asked to see your video, if it still exists.”
“If they haven’t ruined our equipment, we’re going to need it back.”
“I’ll do what I can,” she said. A wave of dusty smoke billowed out as the police officer stepped into the lobby and motioned her to return to the office.
* * *
Almost two hours later, Consuela returned. She avoided looking at Rowan and Jean-René. Rowan was running on no sleep, no coffee and no sign of Lauren’s release; he felt completely empty.
“I got the charges against her dropped and they’ve agreed to return all your equipment on one condition.”
“Which is?” Rowan asked.
Now Consuela turned and met his eyes. “She has to apologize.”
“That’s it?” Jean-René asked. “Well, what are we waiting for? Tell her to do it! We’ll catch the first flight out of here.”
“There’s a problem,” Consuela said.
A disgusted titter escaped the back of Rowan’s throat. “She won’t do it.”
“You know her pretty well.”
“Can I see her?” Rowan asked, feeling the heat of an embarrassing flush rising. “Maybe I can talk some sense into her.”
Consuela shrugged. “Let me see what I can do.”
* * *
The pieces of his shattered heart fell into his boots. Lauren sat with her head on the table, her hair coming loose from its plait. She lifted her head as he approached and sat down across from her. “You okay?”
“Do I look okay?”
Rowan shook his head. “Two words. That’s all you have to say.”
“You’re asking me to lie.”
Rowan shook his head. “No one said you have to mean it.”
“I will not apologize to that hapless little fraction of a man.” She enunciated each word, dripping with venom.
“A written apology would do. You wouldn’t even have to see him.”
“Then there’d be a record of my perjury?” Her voice escalated.
“We can be home in sixteen hours.” He held up his hands to placate her. “You can sleep in your own bed tomorrow night. Or mine.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Shhh. They’re probably listening.”
“So what? Just tell him you’re sorry and we can go home.”
She set her jaw, glaring at him. “I’m only going to say this one more time. I will not apologize, and you are more than welcome to go back to San Diego without me.”
“Fine.” He stood abruptly. His pulse pounded in his temples. He wanted to rub the headache with his fingertips, but he kept his arms pinned firmly to his sides. “Just fine.”
* * *
Three days later, Lauren stood in front of the police chief’s heavy oak desk as the escort himself unlocked the cuffs from her wrists. Lightning bolts shot through her joints, and her fingers tingled. Three days of miserable conditions, no food, barely any water, and constant harassment had finally broken her. She hung her head and stared at the tiles as she forced her dry tongue to make the words.
“I’m sorry.”
It left her with a sharp feeling, like a needle through her insides. If anything, she was sorry she hadn’t hit him. And now, seeing his lips curve in a superior smile, she wanted to even more.
The officer behind the desk returned her backpack and what was left of her equipment. She grabbed it and hugged it to her chest for a second. Fragmented camera pieces rattled in the bottom, but when she unzipped the flap she heaved a sigh of relief; the samples were still there. She only hoped the lab would be able to do something with them.
Then Rowan walked through the door and came over and wrapped her in his arms. She stood there with her head on his shoulder, backpack in one hand, unable to put her arms around him. She wanted to cry now more than ever. But she refused to let any of the policia see her fold. She hated for Rowan to see her like this, but she really needed him.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Other than needing some food, a shower and a handful of Motrin, I’m just freaking great.”
“Come on,” he took her backpack. “Let’s go home.”
He put an arm around her and led her out into the dark. She didn’t even protest, evidence of how exhausted and beaten she felt. He paused to peel out of his jacket, laying it over her shoulders. He leaned down to kiss her cheek, but she leaned back and pressed her lips to his.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“That was a thank-you ... for not leaving without me.”