Cradle Of Solitude. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ The three bars that designated the rank of captain had been sewn onto the coat’s collar. A kepi hat was still perched atop the skull where it rested against the back wall.

      The dirt and dust that had settled on the remains of the clothing made it difficult to determine the exact color of the uniform, but there was no mistaking the brass emblem of a wreath pinned to the front of the hat. The arms of the wreath rose on either side, surrounding the three letters nestled between them.

      CSA.

      As she stared at the emblem in surprise, Annja finally understood what Laroche had meant. They weren’t questioning that the remains belonged to an American. Not at all. They were questioning his status because the America he’d belonged to no longer existed.

      The Confederate States of America.

      5

      Annja walked over to the skeleton and settled into a crouch before it, her gaze moving slowly and carefully, taking in the details. Behind her, she heard Bernard step into the room.

      “Fascinating, isn’t it?” he said, his voice hushed, as if in reverence for the dead man before them. “To think he’s been down here for a hundred and fifty years, just waiting for someone to come along and find him.”

      Annja nodded. She was amazed that anyone had done so, frankly. The chances of the construction team finding the adjacent tunnel, never mind following the right series of chambers to wind up here, several hundred yards from the entrance, were astronomical.

      “Any idea who he was?” she asked, looking back at her colleague.

      Bernard shook his head. “Not a clue. But that’s why we’re here, my dear, to solve the mystery.”

      And a mystery it was. Annja couldn’t think of a simple reason why a Confederate soldier, a captain no less, would have been wandering around down here in the catacombs miles from any known entrance. Had he simply gotten lost? Stumbled around in the dark, unable to find his way back out, until eventually he’d succumbed to a lack of food or, more likely, water?

      If that was the case, what was he doing with a cutlass and pistol in hand? Just who, or what, had he been defending himself against?

      An interesting puzzle, to say the least.

      And just the kind of thing that Annja lived for.

      She reached into the bag at her side and pulled out her digital camera. She rarely went anywhere without it and it was times like this when she was thankful she’d adopted the habit. Eventually, she knew, they were going to have to remove the skeleton from the catacombs and take it back to Bernard’s laboratory for proper examination, but there were a lot of things they needed to do before that and documenting the site as they’d found it was the first priority. The position of items in relation to others and the context in which they were found were just as important to an archaeologist as the items themselves. The photographs would help them establish a record of where each item was in relation to all the others, allowing them to reconstruct the site down to the finest detail if necessary as their investigation progressed.

      She started by taking several wide-angle shots, panning her way around the room until she had covered it all. They would be able to make a panorama-style shot from the photographs showing the entire room and even use them to create a three-dimensional computer model.

      When she was finished with that task, she focused on the skeleton itself. She took several shots to establish its position against the wall, then moved in for close-ups. She’d taken about a dozen pictures and was about to call it quits when the light from the flash bounced off the uniform the skeleton wore and highlighted something she hadn’t previously noticed.

      Bernard must have seen her sudden tension.

      “What have you got, Annja?” he asked as she leaned in closer to get a better look.

      “Not sure yet,” she murmured, her gaze on the skeleton in front of her.

      As the flesh beneath it had decayed, the uniform coat had folded down upon itself, hiding small stretches of fabric between the folds. The light from the flash had thrown back an oddly shaped shadow from one of them, suggesting that there was something else there. Annja withdrew a pen from her pocket and gently lifted the edge of the folded material, revealing what lay beneath.

      The blackened edges of a bullet hole stared back at her.

      Gently, Annja used her pen to lift the coat’s edge away from the shirt beneath. The dark stain that covered the yellowed linen shirt beneath answered one question that had been nagging at her.

      The soldier, whoever he was, hadn’t wandered down here, gotten lost and eventually died of thirst, as she’d first hypothesized.

      He’d been shot in the chest.

      And from the looks of it, he’d died pretty quickly thereafter.

      This hadn’t been an accident; it was murder.

      Bernard crouched beside her and she showed him what she found.

      “See the rounded edges of the bullet hole?” she asked, pointing with the end of the pen. “And the way the fabric is still intact all around it, rather than stretched or torn?”

      Bernard nodded. “The musket ball was moving so fast that it didn’t have time to do much damage to the material as it passed through. Must have been close range, then.”

      “Just what I was thinking, as well.”

      She sat back on her haunches and stared at the dead man in front of her. “He wasn’t here by accident. We’re too far away from any easily accessible entrance for that to be the case. He came here deliberately, perhaps to meet someone…”

      “And whoever it was gunned him down where he stood,” Bernard finished for her.

      “It’s no longer an interesting archaeological puzzle,” Annja said as she climbed to her feet. “Now it’s a homicide investigation.”

      The police, however, wanted nothing to do with such an old murder. After a few quick calls back to headquarters, Laroche approached and informed Annja and Bernard that they were still in charge of the investigation, that their skills were going to be more valuable in terms of identifying the victim and perhaps even his murderer than anything the police could bring to bear on the problem.

      Homicide or not, it was their problem to solve.

      Several technicians from the museum arrived, summoned earlier by Bernard when he’d realized what it was they were dealing with. The technicians had a portable specimen case with them, essentially a long, flat box that looked like the case for an electric keyboard, and carried several toolkits of different shapes and sizes. Annja stepped out of the way to give them room to work in the narrow confines of the antechamber.

      One of the technicians withdrew a video camera from the case he carried and, switching on the high-powered light attached to it, began to pan his way around the entire room in unwitting mimicry of what she had done earlier with the still camera.

      When he was finished, he nodded at one of the other team members, who opened another case and began assembling an odd-looking device from the parts inside.

      Annja СКАЧАТЬ