Tribal Ways. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ himself. Then again it also took a very athletic man to kill three able-bodied adults—two men and one woman—and fatally wound a third man.

      The sun was falling behind the divide as Annja drove back east. Although she still felt mostly numb about Paul’s death, in between wracking bouts of grief, she’d had a stressful couple of days. Not to denigrate the sheer physical toll long travel and combat took. She pulled off the highway just east of the river and spent the night in the Hotel Albuquerque on Rio Grande Boulevard, just north of Old Town.

      AFTER EATING BREAKFAST the next morning at Little Anita’s near the hotel, she walked a few blocks south to the Old Town Plaza. It was a pleasant morning, still crisply cool, although warmer than out on the Plains near Lawton, with the sun just beginning to sting where it touched exposed skin. She sat on a cast-iron bench across from the old cathedral, beneath elm branches starting to turn green, while she used her computer to check her e-mail and confirm some information for her day’s quest. Then she made a few calls on her cell phone and hiked back to the hotel for her car.

      The second attack had taken place in early March on land owned by San Ildefonso Pueblo between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The pueblo itself had invited a state team in to excavate what was believed to have been a temporary settlement by Pueblo Indians sometime predating the great Pueblo Uprising that threw the Spanish out in 1680. Despite that fact, and the fact that both State of New Mexico archaeologists and pueblo experts had confirmed the absence of human remains, the site had once again drawn protestors. There had been an ugly confrontation when pueblo police removed them for trespassing, although there was no record of injuries, nor charges filed.

      Apparently there was some sentiment, in the Southwest at least, that any kind of archaeological excavation of potential Indian sites was profane.

      Although this massacre was just a few weeks old Annja didn’t learn anything new there, either. As in the other two cases a cautious approach could easily have gotten the killer in range for a final rush without being seen. Especially since nobody would really have been looking.

      She got back to Albuquerque about two o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon as she waited for her next appointment going through local and national news accounts of the murders online at a coffee shop on a fairly rustic-looking section of Rio Grande Boulevard a few miles north of her hotel.

      The common threads among the murders, aside from the obvious gross similarities, were that they took place on dig sites that were protested by obscure groups. These had no apparent connection between themselves, other than professed radical pro-Native American sympathies. It wasn’t even clear how many of the protestors were actually Indians themselves.

      She sat on the outdoor patio beneath a cottonwood beginning to leaf, drinking tea and pondering a few questions. Was the fact that all three attack sites had been protested significant or purely coincidental? If significant, what was the connection? Even the FBI, notoriously eager to discover terrorist conspiracies even where they weren’t, had either actively cleared the protestors of involvement or at least failed to list them as persons of interest.

      Plus, frankly, people who’d go out and picket an archaeological dig struck Annja, who’d encountered a few in her time, as precisely the sort who would not be inclined to carry out impossibly violent blitz attacks ending in multiple murders. Nor, for the most, capable.

      The light took on a late-afternoon yellowness. The sun had gotten tangled in the branches of the massive old cottonwoods across the boulevard. Time to go, she told herself, and folded her computer shut.

      7

      The western sky blazed in orange like burning forests when the silver Prius pulled up to the curb by the park and stopped. A tall woman got out of the driver’s side. A skinny young girl in jeans, T-shirt and a yellow Windbreaker, with her black hair in pigtails, got out of the passenger’s side. A big floppy yellow Lab pup, an adolescent probably, spilled out after her.

      “You must be Dr. Watson,” Annja said, rising from the picnic table a short way down a grassy slope from the street as the woman walked toward her. She was handsome if a bit heavy in face and hip, and the hair hanging unbound around the shoulders of her mauve cable-knit sweater was black with silver threads. She wore a long dark-blue denim skirt over dark purple suede boots with silver medallions on them.

      “Yes,” the woman said. “And you’re Annja Creed?”

      Annja agreed she was. “And I’m Sallie,” the girl announced. “It’s short for Salamander!”

      “No, it isn’t, Alessandra,” her mother said. “Don’t be untruthful.”

      Annja laughed. Something about the girl’s appearance tweaked her subconscious. She couldn’t pin down exactly what.

      The dog sniffed Annja’s legs. She hunkered down to stroke its head. “What’s his name?” she asked Sallie.

      “It’s a she,” Sallie said. “Her name’s Eowyn. She’s kind of silly.”

      “Young Labrador retrievers act that way,” her mother said. “Why don’t you and she go play?”

      The girl was looking intently at Annja. “You’re on TV, aren’t you?” she said.

      Her mother looked stern. Annja said, “Yes.”

      “Oh. I like your show.”

      “Thanks,” Annja said.

      Sallie reached in a pocket of her jacket and produced a pale-green tennis ball, which she launched down the hill. The dog bounded in pursuit. Sallie ran after her, romping through the shadows of big elm trees lengthening across the hills of Roosevelt Park, which was located roughly halfway between the University of New Mexico campus, where Watson worked, and downtown.

      “Thanks for taking the time to meet with me, Dr. Watson,” Annja said.

      “Susan, please. I’m certainly willing to do anything I can to get to the bottom of these terrible crimes. And I thank you for being willing to meet with me under such unusual circumstances. I don’t really have any time free at school this week, and I don’t want to leave Sallie at day care longer than necessary.”

      She leaned forward and fixed Annja with a disconcertingly probing look. Even without the low boot heels she had to stand six feet clear. Annja did not envy any student of Dr. Watson’s who failed to measure up to her expectations.

      “So, is your interest in skinwalkers personal or professional?” Watson asked.

      If she wanted to keep things up front Annja could match that. “Both,” she said. “I lost a close personal friend in the last attack.” She felt a nasty twinge as she said it.

      “Also the authorities in Oklahoma have asked me unofficially to consult on certain anthropological aspects of the case.”

      “You’re an archaeologist by training, aren’t you?”

      “Yes. Of course, my training included extensive education in social and physical anthropology, as well as subjects like geology.”

      “Oh, yes.” Watson herself was a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of New Mexico, specializing in the study of Southwestern native cultures. “So what can I do for you?”

      “My specialty’s the European Renaissance. It’s СКАЧАТЬ