Unstoppable (Tracers, #2.5)(3)
Author: Laura Griffin

“Only two centimeters to go on that skull,” she said.

Aaron glanced up at her and lifted an eyebrow. She’d made major progress this afternoon.

“Where’d you get the beefcake?” he asked.

She cocked her head to the side. She hadn’t expected such open hostility.

“Mr. Brewer is a law enforcement colleague visiting from California.” Liar, liar, pants on fire. “He’s interested in our dig, and I told him he was welcome to lend a hand.”

Aaron got to his feet and wiped his hands on his jeans. He glanced over Kelsey’s shoulder, where at the mouth of the cave Gage had been making himself useful hauling dirt. He’d been at it two hours, and by Kelsey’s estimation he equaled about six of her anemic grad students.

Aaron crouched down and began dropping tools into a canvas bag.

“If it’s not too much trouble,” she said, “I thought you might give him a brief tour before you pack up for the day.”

Aaron snorted. “No trouble at all. Although I’m not sure ‘tour guide’ falls within my job description.”

“Fine, I’ll do it. You can type up the notes for Dr. Robles.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. Just don’t expect me to teach him Archaeology 101. He can crack a book like the rest of us.”

Kelsey swallowed a bitchy comment. She didn’t really want to bicker. She’d had enough aggravation convincing Dr. Robles to allow a newcomer on the project at this late date. Maybe he would have been more cooperative if she’d told him the truth about Gage’s purpose here, but Robles was a lifelong pacifist and she didn’t want to risk a negative reaction if he found out Gage was a Navy SEAL. So she’d come up with the law-enforcement-colleague spiel, which vaguely resembled the truth. It was the only way she could think of to explain Gage’s obvious cluelessness about archaeology and the SIG Sauer plastered to his hip.

“Thank you,” Kelsey said. “I’m going to type up my notes. If I don’t see you before you leave—”

“Dr. Quinn!”

Kelsey whirled around to see a pair of students picking their way around the cave’s stalagmites. They stepped into the lamplight and she saw that it was Dylan and Jeannie, a couple who’d hooked up over the course of the summer.

“What is it?” Kelsey asked.

“We found something,” Jeannie gushed. “Something you need to come see. It’s a mandible.”

“Human,” Dylan added. “We found it in the creek bed just south of the mine shaft.”

“What were you doing at the mine shaft?” The old mercury mine was almost a mile south, along the same stretch of roadway where that woman had been shot.

And the sudden flush of Jeannie’s cheeks told her exactly what they’d been doing at the mine shaft.

Kelsey huffed out a breath. “You guys, come on. Did you listen to anything at all I’ve said about safety? That area’s not even part of our dig.”

“It’s not part of anyone’s dig,” Dylan told her. “You’re the expert, but I’d say this bone looks fresh.”

Three

The sun had dipped below the horizon but the stones lining the creek bed still retained the day’s heat. Kelsey lay flat against them, blinking sweat from her eyes as she positioned her Nikon camera. She heard the police cruiser pull up. She heard the heavy crunch of boots. She took one last shot of the mandible, collected the ruler she’d used for scale, and walked over to greet the sheriff she’d met the other day.

“Word is you found us a jawbone,” Sheriff Sattler said.

“Actually, two of my students found it.” She glanced up at the line of onlookers who had gathered on the edge of the dried creek. Gage wasn’t among them, and Kelsey wondered where he’d disappeared to.

She led Sattler to the bone and he knelt down for a closer look.

“You think it’s one of your Indians?” he asked.

“At a glance, I couldn’t tell you the ethnicity. But it’s definitely modern, not ancient.” She crouched beside him and pointed to the molars. “For one thing, there are the fillings. Also, traces of dried soft tissue, in this case ligaments. The scratches suggest animal activity, probably carrion birds, but it looks like they missed a few spots.”

Sattler stood up now and surveyed the surrounding area. The lawman was tall and bulky, and his thick silver hair contrasted sharply with his leathery brown skin. If not for the badge pinned to his chest, Kelsey would have guessed him for a cattle rancher.

“Just a jawbone, huh? Anything else?”

Kelsey stood, too. “Nothing readily apparent, but of course you’ll have to conduct a thorough search. A cadaver dog would be a huge help. Does the county have a canine unit?”

“Just the drug-sniffing kind.”

“Well, that won’t work for this.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes and glanced around, hoping to see some evidence she’d missed earlier. It was that strange time of day, lightwise. Everything looked flat and gray and a bone would be easy to overlook among all these rocks.

Sattler pulled a toothpick from his breast pocket and popped it in his mouth. He didn’t say anything, so Kelsey continued.

“Given the animal activity, I’d say there’s a good chance the skeleton could be scattered over a wide area.” She paused and waited for a reaction. Nothing.

“Another possibility is that the remains were buried and an animal dug them up. You might find the rest of the skeleton, except for the skull, obviously, in a shallow grave nearby. You could rope off this area and use ground-penetrating radar—”

“Who could?” Sattler asked around the toothpick.

“You. Your deputies. And your medical examiner will want to—”

“Seco County doesn’t have a medical examiner. Not big enough. Our justice of the peace serves as coroner around here.”

“Your JP, then.”

He nodded. “Fella by the name of Sam Niederhauser, ’bout seventy years old. Not much on death investigating.”

Kelsey stared at him, pretty sure she knew where this was going.

“Fact, that shooting we had last week pretty much wore him out.” Sattler plucked the toothpick out and looked her in the eye. “I hear when you’re not digging up old skeletons, you work at that crime lab in San Marcos. The Delphi Center.”

“That’s right. I’m scheduled to go back there in less than a week, in fact.”

“You’re a forensic anthropologist. An expert on bones.” He nodded in the direction of the campsite. “You’re already out here with all your equipment, why don’t you take a crack at it? See what you come up with.”

“I’ve got a field school to run. And I don’t have jurisdiction.”

“I’m giving you jurisdiction. Thing like this, we have to get outside help anyway. You’re here already, I’d just as soon get it from you.”

She gritted her teeth, irritated at being steamrolled yet again today. And the look on Sattler’s face told her he knew he’d won.

Actually, he’d won even before he pitched her. Kelsey had never turned down a request for help, and she wasn’t about to start now, in front of her students. Some of them could be headed for jobs like hers, and the reality was when a call came you went. Police work didn’t always adhere to a convenient schedule. In Kelsey’s experience, it never did.

“We sure appreciate it.” Sattler nodded. “Tomorrow I’ll send out one of my deputies to give you a hand with the search.”

“I’d rather have a cadaver dog.”

He smiled slightly. “I’ll see what I can do.”

IT WAS AFTER dusk when Gage returned from town, and he wasn’t happy to see the sheriff had already left. Speedy investigation. Gage pulled up to the campsite just as Kelsey stepped out of her door, keys in hand.

He parked his truck and climbed out. “Where you headed?”

“Nowhere.”

He walked over to the steps of the camper, and they stood there, staring at each other.

She’d cleaned up while he’d been gone. Her damp hair hung loose around her shoulders, and she wore a snug-fitting black T-shirt and brown cargo pants that hit her mid-calf. Something black and bulky stuck out of her pocket.

“You got a minute?” he asked. “I need to show you something.”

She darted a glance over his shoulder, clearly worried about Robles seeing him go into her place. Evidently satisfied that the guy had turned in for the night, she opened the door behind her.

“I’m making dinner,” she said without enthusiasm. “You’re welcome to have some.”

“I’m good, thanks.” Gage ducked his head and walked through the door, then instantly regretted his words as the spicy aroma of whatever she had cooking hit him full force. He hadn’t eaten all day, and the dinner he had waiting for him tonight was a cold MRE.

“It’s a mess,” she said, squeezing around him.

Mess was an understatement. The camper was small and chock-full of clutter. Beside him was an eating alcove with a Formica table that had a notebook computer on top and books stacked beneath. Gage put his plastic shopping bag on the table as his gaze skimmed over the minuscule kitchen and a door that probably led to a bathroom. Beyond the kitchen, he caught sight of what looked like a fold-out bed with a sleeping bag on top. Something red and lacy was strewn across it.

Holy God.

“What’s in the bag?”

His attention snapped back to Kelsey. “Huh?”

“The bag?”

“It’s for you,” he said. “Your com setup here sucks.”

She peeked inside. Then she gazed up at him with those big brown eyes, and he had a flash of her in that red bra. “My com?”

“Communications. You’ve got one sat phone for the entire group.”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” she said defensively. “The cell service is extremely patchy. That’s why we have the sat phone.”

“You need something for you. On your person. I need to be able to reach you at all times.” He took out one of the radios and turned it on to demonstrate. “See? Just press this button here when you want to talk. It’s got a long-life battery and a range of about five miles, which should be plenty.” He paused and waited for her to look up at him. “Were you going to wait for me to go with you?”

“Go where?” She was doe-eyed now, innocent as hell.

“Wherever you were going when I pulled up.”

She hesitated. “I need to check something at the recovery site.”

He stepped closer until he was invading her personal space. “Lemme explain how this works, Kelsey. You set foot off this dig site, I’m coming with you. That’s a dangerous highway and I don’t want you driving around alone, especially at night.”

She crossed her arms. “What happened to ‘hand me a shovel and pretend I’m not here’?”

“That was before I knew you were camped out within spitting distance of a homicide scene.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re jumping to conclusions. I’ve hardly had a chance to examine the bone, much less determine the manner of death.”

“Oh, yeah? What do you think your uncle would say if I called him and told him about your little find today? I bet you a thousand dollars he’d say ‘tell her to pack up camp and hightail it home.’”

“That’s ridiculous. I have a job to do here.”

“Yeah, and although this might come as a surprise to you, I get that. Which is why we aren’t packing. But I don’t plan to go back to my CO and tell him I let his niece get carjacked or killed or so much as breathed on wrong under my watch. So until your work’s done here I’m your shadow. Get used to it. Now, where are we going?”

She gazed up at him, and he could see the frustration simmering in her eyes. He could understand it, too. She had a job to do, and she wasn’t used to people standing in her way. But Gage had a job to do also, and this was one job he didn’t plan to f**k up.

“All right, fine,” she said. “Let’s get going. You can help.”

She took the black thing out of her pocket and handed it to him. It was lightweight and slender and looked like some sort of high-tech Maglite.

He glanced up at her. “Help with what?”

“The search,” she said. “I want the rest of those bones.”

KELSEY WAVED HER UV lamp over a pile of rocks. She took a few more paces and did another scan. Another few paces until she was at the very edge of the area she’d mapped out for tonight.

She shoved her orange-tinted glasses up on top of her head and glanced around at the blackness. “You finding anything?”

“No,” came Gage’s faraway response.

Kelsey sighed and switched off the blue light. They’d been out here nearly two hours and had netted nothing more than a few pieces of trash, a broken eggshell, and some miscellaneous long bones, all easily identifiable as belonging to small mammals. Each time she’d spotted the faint bluish glow, she’d felt a surge of excitement, only to be disappointed by an up-close inspection.

“This what you do back in San Marcos? Tromp around crime scenes looking for skeletons in the dark?”

“No,” she admitted. “We work by day, usually, and usually with cadaver dogs. But you never know what you might see with an alternative light source. Teeth. Clothing. Lots of dyes contain chemicals that fluoresce. I was hoping we’d find something out here that could lead us to the rest of him.”

She let her gaze scan the area again, without any luck. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was nearly midnight.

Kelsey tipped her head back to look at the stars. It was amazing how many you could see out here. It was something she forgot during the rest of the year, then reminded herself of every summer.