Diablo Mesa(19)

11



THE GROUND WAS soft and dry, and to Morwood’s unpracticed eye the work appeared to go rapidly. After a while, Tappan left their shady oasis and went over to stand at the edge of the dig, watching the archaeologists work. There was a time when Morwood would have gone with him, but now he stayed put, watching from afar as they painstakingly brushed sand from the corpse, collected the dirt, and ran it through a screen, looking for things of possible interest.

Morwood felt unusually fatigued that day, but out of long practice he kept it well concealed. Only he and his personal physician knew the full extent of his condition. And he intended to keep it that way for another eighteen months, when he’d retire after a full twenty-five on the job.

That was especially important to him: on the job. He would never agree to a medical retirement. Call it truculence or stubbornness—with him, it was a point of honor. From the time he was ten, when he devoured reruns of The F.B.I., he’d wanted to be an agent. These days, of course, when he mentioned the show’s star, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., younger agents just gave him blank looks. But unlike many childish dreams, that ambition had persisted into adulthood, particularly as the asthma that plagued his youth slowly went away. He’d charted a careful path, and by twenty-six he was a full-fledged special agent, with ambitions having matured away from Efrem Zimbalist and more toward Eliot Ness. And he wasn’t planning to put in just the requisite twenty, either: with another year and a half, he would hit twenty-five with the extra years of service and pay grade increases…and still retire before the mandatory age of fifty-seven.

The ERT guys had finished their sweep. Morwood rose from his chair, went over to their van for a brief update, then returned to his spot in the shade.

Those early years with the Bureau had been the most exciting of his life. He had a knack for breaking cases, and a degree of recklessness that put him in the middle of dangerous firefights during raids or arrests. The FBI rewarded hard work with regular promotions, and his starting pay grade was behind him almost before he knew it. Lady Luck, he’d thought, had definitely been smiling down on him.

Until the day she suddenly made a one-eighty.

A dozen years into his career, after his reassignment from Albuquerque to Chicago, he knew nothing about autoimmune disorders. He started getting winded after a hard workout or chasing a suspect, which he attributed to being out of shape. When he hit the gym harder and it became obvious this was not the case, he told himself it was his asthma, acting up again after being dormant so long. Instead of visiting a doctor, he bought nebulizers and over-the-counter inhalers, and steadfastly ignored it for several more years.

Eventually, when he could overlook it no longer, it turned out he’d waited too long. The pulmonologist he consulted told him he should have been on anti-inflammatories. Now the damage to his lungs, the scarring, was permanent. The best things he could do for interstitial lung disease—quit working, eliminate occupational exposure—were unthinkable. So he took other steps, some of them mortifying. He removed himself from the task forces, focusing more on investigative background. And he hid his shortness of breath from his colleagues, keeping the severity of his condition a secret. But finally, after an age-required FBI physical, an internist with the Bureau copped to his condition and told him the “chronic dyspnea” mandated a change of venue. And it was not optional.

He was disturbed from his reverie by a rising murmur of voices over by the dig—apparently, something of interest had been uncovered. Morwood knew it was time to join them. He took a few lungfuls of the desert air in preparation, then stood up.

They’d sent him back to New Mexico precisely because of the “clean desert air.” What a joke—the air might have been clean, but half the time it was so full of dust from the wind that it seemed half the town was hacking from dust pneumonia. The locality pay here sucked. What bothered him more than anything was the altitude: almost a mile above sea level. But he knew speaking up would only make things worse, so he kept quiet and tried to lose himself in mentoring new agents. He’d been able to leverage his exemplary field experience into a supervisory instructor position and was now on track to retire as a GS-14 step 8, or maybe even step 9.

He wasn’t able to hide his condition completely, of course, but he could keep people guessing. Rumors began to circulate about his past: how he’d been exposed to poisonous gas during an arrest or sucked in a lungful of battery acid during a shootout in an auto warehouse. He did nothing to quell such rumors, because they were more colorful than the truth. Now he just toughed it out from one day to the next, controlling the condition as best he could with albuterol scrips.

Reaching the dig site, he found that Nora Kelly had almost completely exposed the body. It lay on its back, one arm thrown over its chest and the other resting by its side. Morwood noticed it was male, even though all the hair seemed to be gone except for a fringe on the back of the head. A few tatters of a shirt clung to the rib cage, with the pants in better condition. One leg was slightly crooked. Given its position, the body appeared to have been unceremoniously rolled or tossed into the grave. As Morwood watched, Nora’s whisk uncovered first one foot, then the other, exposing a pair of oxford wing tips, much shriveled.

“Inappropriate footwear for out here,” said Tappan.

“Quite,” said Nora. She rose and called for a break.

Morwood found her sense of timing excellent. They relaxed in the chairs, drinking sodas and looking at the body, now almost entirely exposed within the trench.