Diablo Mesa(49)

“Thank you, Corrie. And again, I’m sorry to hear about Morwood.”

“Now I have something to do. Talk to you soon.” She hung up.

The bathroom door opened and Skip appeared in a bathrobe, combing his hair.

“Now you don’t look like a dirty, skinned cat,” Nora said. “Sit down and let me at those injuries.”

He sat down and she examined his nose again. He was going to have a black eye. The cuts and scrapes on his hands were, as he’d said, superficial. She smeared on antibiotic ointment and bandaged everything up.

“Good as new.”

“Thanks, sis.” He paused. “Guess I kind of messed up, didn’t I?”

“What do you think?”

“Tappan is pissed.”

“Probably.”

“He might fire me.”

“Maybe.”

“I shouldn’t have gone along with Bitan and his secrecy. He was so sure of himself. Christ, I always manage to fuck things up.” He dropped his head into his hands.

Nora suddenly felt sorry for him. Poor Skip: he was so impressionable, so easily led astray. “It sounds like Bitan suckered you in. Maybe Tappan will see that.” If necessary, she could talk Tappan out of any really dire punishment. At this thought, her mind flashed back to the brief but wild interlude in his RV. She didn’t ever want to use that as leverage.

“Tappan’s going to fire me for sure,” he said, too preoccupied to notice the flush that came over her face.

“Look, Skip, they’re going to find Bitan, he’ll apologize, and everything will go back to normal. What you said he figured out, that this is just a skip site—it actually makes perfect sense. I wish I’d thought of it. I’ll bet Tappan will forgive him for going a little rogue. We’ll have to find the real crash site now and start digging there.”

“I can’t stop thinking about those lights I saw. I think they were in the area we’d been searching.”

“Maybe it was just a rancher looking for some lost horses. Maybe they were spies. Maybe Bitan was a spy, and he’d arranged to be picked up. In fact, I think that’s probably the most likely.”

Skip raised his head. “Bitan, a spy?”

“It’s possible.”

“Spying for who?”

“I don’t know.” She hesitated. “Between you and me, Tappan suspects there’s a spy on the team. Maybe it was Bitan.”

“I don’t think so…” Skip hesitated, then continued. “Bitan told me a story. About something that happened during his national service in the Israeli Defense Forces. I promised not to tell anyone.”

Nora waited. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it, whatever it was. God knows, it might get Skip in deeper trouble. But after a moment he went on anyway.

“Bitan was abducted by aliens.”

“You’re joking.”

“No. I’m not. On Mount Hermon in Israel. The aliens communicated with him, gave him a mission, a destiny.”

“What kind of mission?”

“To prove intelligent extraterrestrials are watching us and waiting, that they have our best interests at heart, and that they have a plan for us—a good plan.”

Nora stared at Skip. He was totally sincere.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “You really think…what he said actually happened? Or is he maybe a little screwy?” She was sure it was the latter but wanted to know what Skip believed.

“I know he believes it. That’s beyond doubt. Look, he’s one of the most distinguished astronomers in the world. The Weizmann Institute, Caltech, SETI. I mean, this guy is as solid as they come. He’s no fantasist. If he says it really happened to him…” He let this observation hang in the air between them.

Nora pondered this. Of course, the idea was absurd. If aliens wanted to announce their existence and reveal some plan for humanity, abducting a young man in Israel to deliver the news made no sense. But Skip was so serious, so earnest, she realized it was pointless to argue with him. She wondered if she should report this to Tappan. It didn’t seem pertinent to Bitan’s disappearance and might create problems later—especially if Bitan reappeared and found out Skip had divulged his secret.

“I think,” she said slowly, “it would be best if you kept that story to yourself.”





31



CORRIE SAT AT her desk, going over files she’d looked at half a dozen times already. Even though her meeting wasn’t scheduled until eleven, she’d come in at eight, determined that—if she wasn’t going to take time off—she would put in full days, whether there were fires for her to put out or not.

Fires. She winced, mentally kicking herself. Here she was, feeling annoyed that her progress was interrupted because the forensic lab was inaccessible…ignoring the fact this was because of a fire that killed her boss.

After speaking to Garcia the day before, she’d done a reasonably good job of not dwelling on either Morwood’s death or Lathrop’s accusation. The early call she’d gotten this morning from Nora Kelly had helped in its own way: it gave her an excuse to phone Homer Watts, sheriff of Socorro County, to get his advice on the possible missing person. Excuse wasn’t quite the right word, though: despite being attracted to Watts, with his brown eyes, black hair, movie-star looks, and Western rig—right down to the matching Peacemakers—she’d hardly given the sheriff a thought over the last few months. He’d certainly been happy to get her call, though, and his dismay over Morwood’s death was obviously sincere. When she explained why she was calling, he groaned: the sheriff of Chaves County was a good old boy named Buford—the name said it all, he’d told her—more adept at striding around in a uniform with jingling cuffs on his belt than he was at solving cases. Nevertheless, Watts had promised to call his fellow sheriff and give him the details if Corrie agreed to meet him for breakfast tomorrow to catch up—professionally, of course. Though she hadn’t seen any need to catch up on anything, she’d agreed, secretly pleased by the invitation.