Diablo Mesa(64)

“No, no,” Corrie quickly backtracked. “It seems clear it was an accident. But it’s a question we always ask, you know—routine.” She hoped that would satisfy him.

“I can’t think of any reason. A good FBI agent must have a lot of enemies—no? The people he’s put away, their families and associates, that sort of thing. But I personally don’t know of anyone who might have done him harm.” He paused. “The problem with Arvesen’s case was an almost complete lack of evidence. They recovered the bullet and its casing. And that was about it. The area showed no signs of unauthorized entry; Arvesen was very well liked, with no obvious enemies. The fact was, he appeared to be an unusually forthright, ethical, and straightforward individual. Every single person who had access to the high-security room that night—and there weren’t that many—had an alibi. A good alibi. Morwood and Starr came up against a brick wall almost right away and banged their heads against it for, oh, it must have been years—without success.” The old scientist shook his head sadly.



As Corrie left the secure area and drove down the winding road from Los Alamos, her mind drifted back to the burned lab at her own office. The sight and smell of the soggy, acrid place—in the ghostly glow of her flashlight—would be etched into her mind forever. Her forensic drawings, dental X-rays, diagrams, and data were safely inside the computer network, where no fire could touch them. But they were incomplete. The dental records were also in the cloud, of course. But so far nothing had come from them. The homicide victims themselves were reduced almost to ash, and her reconstructions had been completely destroyed. Without intact skulls, she could not redo them. How was she going to identify the victims now?

Still, there was the dial-a-yield device. Now that she knew what it was, those numbers stamped on it might be serial numbers that could lead somewhere.

Exactly where, she had no idea.





41



NORA FELT A surge of excitement as she looked over the site. As soon as the road was finished, she had hopped in a jeep with Emilio and Skip, and they’d arrived at the Los Gigantes buttes a little past noon.

It was a far more evocative place than where they’d been excavating before, and as an added benefit, there was less wind here in the valley. The sandstone buttes stood here and there on the plain, glowing red in the noonday sun. As she looked over the area, Nora couldn’t see any signs of the old 1947 disturbance. It was a tribute to the power of lidar that the site could be seen so plainly from the air.

She wondered again: Was it actually possible that an alien spaceship crashed here? She had to admit that the evidence continued to pile up. She had a feeling the excavation she was about to embark upon would decide the matter once and for all. The thought filled her with both excitement and anxiety.

“So what’s the plan?” asked Skip, looking around, hands on hips.

“A ground survey,” said Nora. “Then we’ll grid out the area and start digging.” She was pretty sure that before the end of the day, Tappan would show up. By the time he got there, she wanted him to see that she’d made good progress. “Let’s get going.”

The three of them walked the site slowly from one side to the other and back again, examining the ground for any surface artifacts. It took an hour, and they turned up almost nothing beyond a single rusted tin of chewing tobacco.

It was time to grid the site. Nora and Skip hauled out supplies from the jeep, including wooden stakes and Day-Glo twine. Vigil set up the theodolite while Skip held the stadia rod for him and Nora gave directions, and in another hour the area had been gridded in precise, GPS-delineated squares. At that moment, Nora saw a corkscrew of dust on the horizon. A few minutes later, Tappan arrived. He stepped out of the jeep with a big smile and looked over the gridded site.

“This is what I call progress,” he said.

Despite herself, Nora felt a glow of pleasure. “You’re just in time to watch us break ground.”

“That was my hope.”

Starting with the first square meter, Nora and Vigil gently dug out bunches of grass and set them aside, then began the serious work of removing the sandy soil, layer by layer. Tappan watched from a shade they had set up next to the excavation, from time to time speaking into the base camp radio.

It was quick, easy going—as Nora expected it would be in ground that had already been dug and backfilled before, even if many decades ago. She and Vigil worked the grids as Skip tossed the excavated sand through two sets of screens, for large and small items, respectively. As the hours went by, they encountered nothing but undifferentiated sand, nor did anything turn up in the screening. The site appeared to be clean—suspiciously clean. There weren’t even the usual random stones.

As the afternoon lengthened, Tappan suddenly called out. “Nora, may I see you a moment?”

She climbed out of the hole and came over.

“I just spoke to Cecilia,” Tappan said. “She and Kuznetsov have been going over the lidar point cloud using image enhancement, and they found something else. A disturbance that looks a lot more recent. I asked Cecilia to bring out the charts for us to look at.”

Sure enough, twenty minutes later another cloud of dust appeared on the horizon. Soon, Toth pulled up in a jeep and retrieved a document tube from the passenger seat. She brought it over, red hair stirring in the light wind. They all retreated to chairs under the shade.