They’d sent him back to New Mexico precisely because of the “clean desert air.” What a joke—the air might have been clean, but half the time it was so full of dust from the wind that it seemed half the town was hacking from dust pneumonia. The locality pay here sucked. What bothered him more than anything was the altitude: almost a mile above sea level. But he knew speaking up would only make things worse, so he kept quiet and tried to lose himself in mentoring new agents. He’d been able to leverage his exemplary field experience into a supervisory instructor position and was now on track to retire as a GS-14 step 8, or maybe even step 9.
He wasn’t able to hide his condition completely, of course, but he could keep people guessing. Rumors began to circulate about his past: how he’d been exposed to poisonous gas during an arrest or sucked in a lungful of battery acid during a shootout in an auto warehouse. He did nothing to quell such rumors, because they were more colorful than the truth. Now he just toughed it out from one day to the next, controlling the condition as best he could with albuterol scrips.
Reaching the dig site, he found that Nora Kelly had almost completely exposed the body. It lay on its back, one arm thrown over its chest and the other resting by its side. Morwood noticed it was male, even though all the hair seemed to be gone except for a fringe on the back of the head. A few tatters of a shirt clung to the rib cage, with the pants in better condition. One leg was slightly crooked. Given its position, the body appeared to have been unceremoniously rolled or tossed into the grave. As Morwood watched, Nora’s whisk uncovered first one foot, then the other, exposing a pair of oxford wing tips, much shriveled.
“Inappropriate footwear for out here,” said Tappan.
“Quite,” said Nora. She rose and called for a break.
Morwood found her sense of timing excellent. They relaxed in the chairs, drinking sodas and looking at the body, now almost entirely exposed within the trench.
“It’s funny,” said Corrie, “that the weird skin texture is confined to the facial area. Everything else looks normal—under the circumstances.”
“I noticed that, too,” said Tappan. “Agent Swanson, your partner said you’re a forensic anthropologist. Do you have any idea what might cause those peculiar scales on the face?”
“Offhand,” said Corrie, “it looks like acid. Or perhaps the features were burned off with a flamethrower.”
“I vote for acid,” said Nora. “I don’t see any evidence of charring.”
“We’ll do some histopathology in the lab,” said Corrie. “What we do is infuse the tissue with paraffin, then slice very thin sections for microscopic examination. And we’ll do toxicology tests as well. I’m pretty sure we can solve the mystery.”
Morwood noticed she glanced at him for approval. He remained impassive. Corrie was one of the best agents he’d mentored, but she had a weakness: she was tentative, and others could sense it. She hadn’t mastered how to project a sense of confidence. It was a tricky thing to do, but a good FBI agent had to learn how to convey self-assurance and control to those around her, even if she didn’t feel it inside.
Break over, Nora and her assistants went back to work in the grid. They began opening additional quadrants. Morwood watched as they removed the surface plants, setting them aside in flats, evidently for later replanting, and then began scraping off thin layers of crusty sand. The work proceeded apace until they reached a depth of three feet—the same depth as the other body. A discoloration now appeared in the soil. Nora and the assistants exchanged trowels for palette knives, loosening the dirt and then sweeping it off.
At this point, Morwood rose and joined them.
The first thing to appear was skin of the same scaly texture. This soon revealed itself to belong to the forehead of another corpse.
There is a second body, Morwood thought. He felt an uncharacteristic excitement, almost as if—subconsciously—he’d been expecting this would happen.
“Same execution-style shot to the head,” he said.
“Yes,” said Corrie.
As Nora brushed, an object suddenly gleamed in the sunlight.
“And there’s another .45 casing,” said Morwood. He glanced at Corrie. “Doesn’t it seem these two bodies could date to the late forties? Those oxfords, those gabardine slacks…？” He glanced over at her, arching his eyebrows.
“It could be,” Corrie said.
“What would you think if, as soon as both bodies are fully uncovered, we transfer them onto tarps and search them for ID?”