Mesa Verde Victim. Scott Graham

      He glanced at Chuck. “Okay with you?”

      Chuck placed his hands on Rosie’s shoulders. “She’s a pretty tough cookie.”

      Samuel crouched next to the opening and crooked his finger for Chuck and Rosie to do the same. They squatted beside him and he aimed a powerful flashlight into the opening.

      “Holy shit,” Rosie exclaimed.

      6

      I mean,” Rosie revised, “holy shoot.”

      Chuck looked into the opening along with her. He sucked a sharp breath.

      Samuel’s flashlight illuminated a human corpse visible from the shoulders down. The corpse lay on its back on the dusty floor of a crypt-like space at the bottom of the depression. Cracked leather suspenders extended from the waistline of thick cotton pants that covered the lower half of the body. Beneath the suspenders, a coarse shirt covered the top half of the body. A thin layer of dust coated the corpse. The head of the body was cut off from view by the ragged edge of the opening.

      Chuck attempted to make sense of the scene before him. The suspenders and clothing clearly dated the corpse to the late 1800s, but the body lay in a vault that, just as clearly, dated from the time of the Ancestral Puebloans who’d populated Mesa Verde hundreds of years prior to the nineteenth century.

      Samuel angled the flashlight, aiming its beam at the corpse’s head. “This is where it gets creepy.”

      Chuck squatted lower, peering into the opening. Rosie crouched closer to the bottom of the depression beside him.

      “Geez,” she said, putting a hand to her mouth.

      Chuck stared at the corpse’s head, lit by the beam of Samuel’s flashlight. The skull was cleaved down the middle, nearly in two. Remnants of closely shorn brown hair clung to the split cranium of what appeared to be a male. His skin was still attached to his skull, his ears shriveled on either side of his head. His teeth showed between lips that were dried and cracked and drawn back along the jawbone.

      Bile rose hot and burning in the back of Chuck’s throat. For the second time today, he was looking at the body of a murder victim.

      “What is this?” he demanded of Samuel. “Who? How is this even possible?”

      Samuel aimed his flashlight at the Finnish woman, Ilona, standing above them at the edge of the depression. “You’ll have to ask her.”

      Ilona raised a hand, shielding the light from her eyes.

      Chuck looked up at her. “You’re here because of Gustaf Nordenskiöld, aren’t you?”

      She lowered her hand. Her Nordic-blue eyes glittered in the beam of light. “That is a fast understanding you have just made.”

      Chuck rose from his crouch. “A man was killed today in Durango. A friend of mine.” Rosie stood up beside him. He squeezed her arm. “Our friend.”

      “I am sorry about your friend,” she said. “I have just arrived in your country. I am here as a scientist, to perform a study.”

      Samuel lowered his flashlight. With the beam of light removed, the afternoon sun silhouetted Ilona from behind, her face now a pale moon in deep shadow.

      Samuel directed his flashlight back into the opening. “She’s here on account of this.”

      “Another murder victim,” said Chuck.

      “Not the corpse. I’m talking about the hidden chamber. The crypt. It’s why Ilona invited me here, and why Kyla is here, too.”

      “And me, apparently.”

      “No. I asked you to come on account of the body.”

      “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

      Samuel directed the beam of his flashlight toward the dirt wall of the depression. “Shall we?”

      He climbed out of the cavity and, reaching down, helped Rosie and Chuck clamber out after him.

      Chuck stood with Rosie, facing Samuel, across the depression from the two women. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said to Samuel.

      “I don’t know why Barney was killed today.” Samuel paused for a beat. “But I suspect his death might well have something to do with the corpse here in the chamber.”

      Chuck turned to Ilona on the far side of the cavity. “Which means Barney’s death might be related somehow to the timing of your arrival here.”

      Ilona lifted her chin. “I have no knowledge of this dead man you are speaking of.”

      “And I don’t have any knowledge of you. So how about we start with who you are and why you’re here.”

      “Yeah,” said Rosie, at Chuck’s side. “Let’s start with that.”

      Ilona looked out at the canyon from the mouth of the alcove. The ponderosa pine trees grew tall from the floor of the gorge, their branches lit by the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Her eyes came back to Chuck and Rosie and she addressed them both.

      “I am the head curator for the national museum of my country,” she said. Her command of English was strong. “Six months ago, I received a phone call from here in America. The call was from a woman named Elizabeth Mantry. She told me that her family name—her last name, as you call it—was Cannon when she was a girl, before she married. She lives in the town called Mancos, in the valley outside the national park. She told me she had information about an ancestor of her family, someone who had gone away from his home in the Mancos Valley more than a hundred years ago and never returned. Elizabeth told me she had studied the genealogy of her relatives and found a branch on her family tree that came to a sudden end. The branch was for a young man, a teenager, named Joseph Cannon.”

      Ilona glanced down at the dark opening at the bottom of the depression.

      “Joseph Cannon was Elizabeth’s great-great-uncle, as I think you call it,” she continued. “He was the brother of Carl, Elizabeth’s great-grandfather. Elizabeth learned all this from Joseph’s journals. Joseph and Carl lived on a farm beside the Mancos River, where they grew food to sell to the gold miners working in the high mountains. One day, Joseph, the oldest of the Cannon children, went away with a man who came to the farm looking for workers.”

      The museum curator from Finland lowered her head in acknowledgment to Chuck.

      “As you correctly understood, the man who came to the farm was Gustaf Nordenskiöld. You could say that Gustaf is the reason I am a curator. The Nordenskiöld family has a history that goes back and forth between the different countries of Scandinavia. Many families have such a history. Like the