Vigil and Riordan shook Corrie’s hand gravely, one after the other. “Pleased to meet you.”
Nora said, “Let’s get to work.”
Vigil, Riordan, and Nora, loaded down with equipment, left the Quonset hut. As they headed back to the site, Nora explained the situation to Vigil and Riordan while Corrie brought up the rear. The FBI team had finished stringing up caution tape and was starting to sweep the area with metal detectors, pausing every now and then to flag something. Morwood returned with Tappan, followed by several workers who set up a temporary shade, some chairs, and a cooler full of soft drinks.
All we need is a hot dog vendor and the ball game can commence, Corrie thought. She turned to watch as Nora, with Vigil’s and Riordan’s assistance, laid out a piece of canvas and arrayed her tools on it. They donned knee pads, got into the shallow gridded square, knelt, and then began gently whisking sand away from the corpse.
11
THE GROUND WAS soft and dry, and to Morwood’s unpracticed eye the work appeared to go rapidly. After a while, Tappan left their shady oasis and went over to stand at the edge of the dig, watching the archaeologists work. There was a time when Morwood would have gone with him, but now he stayed put, watching from afar as they painstakingly brushed sand from the corpse, collected the dirt, and ran it through a screen, looking for things of possible interest.
Morwood felt unusually fatigued that day, but out of long practice he kept it well concealed. Only he and his personal physician knew the full extent of his condition. And he intended to keep it that way for another eighteen months, when he’d retire after a full twenty-five on the job.
That was especially important to him: on the job. He would never agree to a medical retirement. Call it truculence or stubbornness—with him, it was a point of honor. From the time he was ten, when he devoured reruns of The F.B.I., he’d wanted to be an agent. These days, of course, when he mentioned the show’s star, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., younger agents just gave him blank looks. But unlike many childish dreams, that ambition had persisted into adulthood, particularly as the asthma that plagued his youth slowly went away. He’d charted a careful path, and by twenty-six he was a full-fledged special agent, with ambitions having matured away from Efrem Zimbalist and more toward Eliot Ness. And he wasn’t planning to put in just the requisite twenty, either: with another year and a half, he would hit twenty-five with the extra years of service and pay grade increases…and still retire before the mandatory age of fifty-seven.
The ERT guys had finished their sweep. Morwood rose from his chair, went over to their van for a brief update, then returned to his spot in the shade.
Those early years with the Bureau had been the most exciting of his life. He had a knack for breaking cases, and a degree of recklessness that put him in the middle of dangerous firefights during raids or arrests. The FBI rewarded hard work with regular promotions, and his starting pay grade was behind him almost before he knew it. Lady Luck, he’d thought, had definitely been smiling down on him.
Until the day she suddenly made a one-eighty.
A dozen years into his career, after his reassignment from Albuquerque to Chicago, he knew nothing about autoimmune disorders. He started getting winded after a hard workout or chasing a suspect, which he attributed to being out of shape. When he hit the gym harder and it became obvious this was not the case, he told himself it was his asthma, acting up again after being dormant so long. Instead of visiting a doctor, he bought nebulizers and over-the-counter inhalers, and steadfastly ignored it for several more years.
Eventually, when he could overlook it no longer, it turned out he’d waited too long. The pulmonologist he consulted told him he should have been on anti-inflammatories. Now the damage to his lungs, the scarring, was permanent. The best things he could do for interstitial lung disease—quit working, eliminate occupational exposure—were unthinkable. So he took other steps, some of them mortifying. He removed himself from the task forces, focusing more on investigative background. And he hid his shortness of breath from his colleagues, keeping the severity of his condition a secret. But finally, after an age-required FBI physical, an internist with the Bureau copped to his condition and told him the “chronic dyspnea” mandated a change of venue. And it was not optional.
He was disturbed from his reverie by a rising murmur of voices over by the dig—apparently, something of interest had been uncovered. Morwood knew it was time to join them. He took a few lungfuls of the desert air in preparation, then stood up.