Diablo Mesa(36)

“That’s all right, sir.”

“I need to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. Can you please tell me when you last saw Agent Morwood?”

Corrie’s half-asleep daze made this question harder to answer than it should have been. “This afternoon, sir. Yesterday afternoon, that is. He came by the forensics lab.”

She heard a shuffling of paper. “You were working on some facial reconstructions.” Garcia might not sound like his usual self, but he seemed remarkably awake and alert, given the hour.

“I was preparing to, yes.”

“Do you happen to recall what time this was?”

Corrie thought a moment. She was fully awake now, too, and increasingly alarmed by the direction these questions were taking. “It would have been about five o’clock, sir.”

“And did he give you any indication of what he had planned for the rest of the day?”

“He said…ah, he said he was going to see an old acquaintance, ask him about the device found at the Roswell site.”

More shuffling of paper. “That would be the scientist he mentioned—what was his name?”

“Eastchester.”

“Very well,” Garcia said. “Any idea why he’d be in the forensic lab a few hours ago?”

“A few hours ago?” Corrie paused. There was a low babble of voices in the background. Where was he calling from? “He might have been returning the device he checked out to show Eastchester.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Sir, would you please tell me what these questions are about?”

It was several moments before Garcia continued. “There was a fire in the lab tonight. A serious fire.”

“What—?” Corrie began. Her mind raced. In the lab?

“I’m very sorry to inform you that Agent Morwood perished in that fire.”

“What?” Corrie blurted again, not even trying to restrain the sudden spike in her voice.

“The investigation has just started. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

Corrie, stunned into silence, did not reply. The babble of voices on the other end of the call grew louder.

“I need to hang up now. I’m very sorry, Corrie. I know how much you respected him. This is a shock to you—to all of us. We’ll talk again in the morning.”

“Wait!” Corrie shouted abruptly, but Garcia had already terminated the call and she found herself crying into a dead phone.





23



SKIP WAS A little put out about a Saturday workday: he was tired of cataloging Bitan’s books, or shoveling and screening dirt and finding nothing, and was looking forward to sleeping late and lounging in the RV. But Nora and the crew had wanted to keep working, as they were close to uncovering what Nora believed would be the terminus of the trench. At eleven o’clock that morning, the group assembled for the prelunch meeting around a table set up in a tent shade next to the dig.

This meeting, Skip sensed as he looked around the group, was going to be different from the usual. Emilio Vigil took a seat next to Nora, his normally black beard covered with dust. The other postdoc, Scott Riordan, sat on the other side, even more dusty.

Noam had joined them unexpectedly, and so had Greg Banks and the other two engineers. Tappan occupied the far end of the table. It seemed the perfunctory midmorning meeting had turned into a big deal.

Skip took a swig of coffee and waited.

“Well,” said Nora, opening the meeting, “Emilio, could you tell everyone about the morning’s progress?”

“Sure thing.” He looked around. “As you all know, we’ve been excavating the outline of the groove left by the object in the ground. Dr. Bitan spent quite a lot of time taking measurements of the furrow.”

Bitan had asked multiple times for them to halt work while he got down in their trenches and took precise measurements with a laser theodolite. Skip wasn’t sure what he was doing, and Bitan had been vague when Nora asked.

“Perhaps Dr. Bitan would share with us the scope and purpose of his work?” asked Nora rather crisply. Skip could tell she was a little irritated—and he was equally sure Noam had his reasons for not revealing exactly what he was up to.

“Not yet, not yet! Soon. I’m working on a little theory of mine; that’s all.”

Little theory, Skip thought. He was sure not to make eye contact with the man.

“Very well,” said Nora. “Go on, Emilio.”

“Thanks. We had a major surprise this morning. We reached the end of the furrow, as far as we can tell…and found nothing. Whatever created that furrow seems to have vanished.”

“Vanished?” Tappan asked, suddenly interested. “How so?”

“It’s a bit mysterious, actually,” said Nora. “The object came in at a shallow angle. The trench, of course, was backfilled in 1947, but we could still follow its outline. I, we, expected to find a terminus where the object came to rest. But instead, the trench just seemed to spread out and vanish, leaving nothing behind but a welter of sand and fused glass. Skip has been saving quantities of the glassy sand for further analysis by Dr. Banks.”

Banks nodded.

“Our plan going forward,” Nora went on, “is to excavate beyond where the furrow disappears to see what else we might find. We also plan to cut several transverse test trenches to see if the object might have scattered pieces to either side. Any questions or thoughts?”