Tears of the Jaguar by A.J. Hartley Page A

Bowerdale for trying to blame her for the whole fiasco.
    “Pictures of the tomb,” he said, frosty. “And video. I want to see exactly how everything was before you people fucked it up.”
    Miller took a breath.
    “Yes,” she said. “We tried to document everything as thoroughly as possible, though the official site photographer hasn’t arrived yet.”
    He considered the lights inside the tomb and the power cords running up to the generator.
    “Get me a video monitor and whatever you stored the data on,” he said.
    “Here?” she said, incredulous. “You can’t just watch them at the lab?”
    “No,” he said simply, moving into the recessed alcove where the skeleton sat and pulling a pocket lens from his shirt. “I need it here.”
    She opened her mouth as if to protest, thought better of it, and nodded.
    “I’ll do what I can,” she said.
    “And I need the rest of these people out of here,” he added.
    “Now look here, Rylands,” Bowerdale began. “You aren’t any more important than the rest of us.”
    “You’ve had plenty of time to look at what was here, Bowerdale,” Rylands countered evenly. Bowerdale was always a pompous ass but he was acting more defensive than usual. “Since most of what these people came to see isn’t here anymore, I see no reason for them to get in the way of my work. I came to look at bones. You have lost everything else, but we still have them.”
    “He’s right,” said Miller. “But I want another detailed video shot of the tomb as it is now before anyone starts working in here.”
    “A good idea,” Rylands acknowledged with a cool smile.
    It took ten minutes to get the cameras back in and to shoot their sad little documentary. They all stood silently out of shot while Bowerdale shot the video and Miller added commentary in a pathetic voice: “This is where the fabric bundle was. This was the location of the gold rod and the red crystals.”
    Idiots.
The only thing they’d saved was the one stone that the Mexican deputy—Aguilar—was analyzing back at the lab. Still, he had his bones, and that was what mattered. And now that he came to think about it, as they stood around like mourners at afuneral—mourners who had been cut out of the will at the last second—it was kind of funny. Actually, it was the perfect image of what had happened in archaeology, people like him moving into the light while the dirt guys, baffled, resentful but knowing they were beaten, gave ground.
    They need you now, Chad,
he thought.
Ain’t that something?
    No trinkets to play with. No jewels. Just bones. Bones only he could read.

Chapter Eighteen

     
    It was Bowerdale who first noticed that Eustachio was missing. The elderly Mayan was invariably on site by sunup and he had never been this late. Bowerdale decided to drive over to the village himself without discussing it with anyone. He had to get away from Rylands and the tomb anyway, just to clear his head. By the time he got back, everyone would have realized the same thing, but in the intervening half hour or so, he’d get the jump on finding the guy. Maybe he knew something.
    He told Miller he was going back to Valladolid, which was a mistake, because Stroud woke up and said she wanted to go back too. She had nothing to do so long as “that bone man” was in there, and she wanted to get out of the heat. She could search the pictures they had already taken for glyphs that might help identify the body in the tomb.
    Once they’d climbed back up the ladder and started for the van, James—the idiot who had let all this happen—said he wanted a ride back as well so he could lie down.
    “You’ll still be stupid when you wake up, you know,” Bowerdale snarled, but the kid came along anyway.
    So what should have been a half-hour trip tripled. He dropped James off at the dorm beside the lab, gave Stroud a cursory tour and set her up with a computer stuffed with images from the new site. When he had spent enough time sauntering