Page 99

“So, so sorry,” I whispered.

I sighed and walked to the scorpion sculpture, pushing away the desert creature image again and focusing on the bones.

I kept my eyes away from the spot I wanted to inspect most of all. I wanted to take in the whole skeleton again, just in case there was something else I wanted to see. Immediately, my heart ached at the age. Clearly this was a younger person than Silas.

“Do you have an age yet?”

“We X-rayed. The growth plates were almost closed. He was probably about seventeen, give or take a little,” Brady said.

A kid, just like I’d thought.

I had to shake off the melancholy and focus. The bones were stained throughout with stripes of red that must have come from the dirt they had been buried in, I wondered if it had been dug up in Sedona, which was a lot farther north than Tucson and Black Vulture. The shape was unmistakable. Whoever put it together had been patient and meticulous. Respectful. Thorough. The barbeque fork, looking exactly like the one I’d retrieved from the box, sat on the table behind the bones.

“The fork wasn’t secured well?”

“I don’t know,” Brady said. “It came in as a separate piece.”

“Sedona dirt?” I asked.

“No. Definitely down where you are, out by the …” he grabbed a clipboard from a table, “Tumacácori Mountains. That’s down by you, right?”

“Yep.” I was surprised to hear the location, but I shouldn’t have been.

“I don’t see anything more specific, though. We’d like to find the burial site, but no one’s gone out looking yet.”

“Why not?”

“Apparently, the Tumacácori Mountains cover a lot of ground. We need to narrow it down some or have more to go on, before the investigators will go out.”

I nodded. All the bones had been supported by wire and wood pieces. “Anything on the nonorganic pieces?”

“Not a thing. That wire, that wood, you can get stuff like that everywhere. There are no prints anywhere.”

“What else do you have?”

Brady nodded. “Not great nutritionally but functional. Blunt force trauma to the head seems like the obvious cause of death, but I wonder about a nick on a rib, so maybe a stab wound. We’ll figure it out. There is no presence of poisons, no obvious disease. Bones are pretty strong, despite nutritional challenges. No sign of infection.”

My eyes finally went to the skull. The hole with ragged edges along the forehead. The skull was cracked but not with a pattern that I could recognize.

“That doesn’t look like something hit it too hard. Maybe a fall?” I speculated.

Brady nodded. “I think that’s possible, but the edge of what it hit was—”

“Sharp,” I supplied for him. “Like maybe from a fall on a rock with a sharp edge?”

“Or the edge of a table, but I think your idea is a reasonable possibility. I don’t think we’ve taken a closer look inside the gash. Do you want to?”

“Sure. In fact, I want to take a closer look at the skull. May I use a magnifying glass?”

“Of course.” He reached into a drawer and grabbed one.

I stepped close to the skeleton and brought up the glass. This was it, the thing I’d come here to see.

First, though, I took a look in the gash, hoping to find something that might be debris from a rock or something else. I didn’t spot anything, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something there.

“You’ll have to test it,” I said.

“We will.”