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Ancient Ones: A Novel of Suspense - Softcover

Mitchell, Kirk

 
9780553579208: Ancient Ones: A Novel of Suspense
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553579207 ISBN 13: 9780553579208
Verlag: Bantam, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

From Kirk Mitchell comes a riveting suspense thriller in the tradition of Tony Hillerman and Joseph Wambaugh, featuring Bureau of Indian Affairs Criminal Investigator Emmett Quanah Parker and FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed, two Native American cops searching for justice between their heritage and the law.

Though there are signs of foul play, Emmett Quanah Parker and Anna Turnipseed aren’t looking for a killer — the remains dug out of a riverbank by an illegal fossil hunter are 14,000 years old. Parker and Turnipseed have been sent to central Oregon as official witnesses to the examination of the relics.

But the bones quickly provoke a controversy that threatens to erupt into violence: the skeleton is not Native American but distinctly Caucasian, shattering long-held tenets of who first inhabited this continent.

Emmett, with his Comanche and white ancestry, and Anna, a reservation-born Modoc with Asian blood, share a sensitivity to both parties’ concerns — and a forbidden attraction that’s causing them professional and personal problems.

As people connected to the case begin to lose their lives, Emmett and Anna are paralyzed by their own demons. And if they stop watching each other’s back, even for a moment, the killer may target them too.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kirk Mitchell is a veteran of law enforcement in Indian country. An Edgar Award nominee for a previous novel, he lives in the Sierra Nevada of California.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

For years, Gorka Bilbao drove sheep back and forth across the hills of north central Oregon. Each day began anew the search for fresh grass and tender green herbs. He baked his bread in a Dutch oven over a sagebrush fire. He slept alone in a coffinlike travel trailer. That is how his father and his grandfather had earned their living, and Bilbao never dreamed of doing anything else. But when he was forty-two, the federal government cut back the number of sheep it allowed to graze on public lands. The conservationists said sheep were overgrazing the range. Most of the herds went to the slaughterhouses, and Bilbao’s old way of life passed away.

What to do?

For a while, he washed dishes at his cousin’s restaurant in Portland. But cities were his downfall. They tempted him to do bad things. A woman would get inside his head and not let go of him until he had her. He was completely helpless against this desire. And it eventually cost him his freedom. Released from prison, he returned to the badlands east of the Cascade Mountains. He could find no way to earn his bread there, so he drank up his welfare money and waited to get sick and die. All things without purpose on the desert get sick and die.

Yet the badlands wouldn’t let him slide off into oblivion.

Each winter, the rains washed a new crop of fossils and old bones out of the volcanic ash that jacketed the barren hills. For as long as he could remember, Bilbao had stumbled across weathered bones and flat rocks with the imprints of leaves and strange creatures in them. He never gave these oddities much of a thought. But then, while waiting for his next welfare check, he came upon a man in a floppy straw hat and short pants who was scratching at the banks of the John Day River with a pick. A college man, it turned out. On that day, Bilbao heard the word fossil for the first time. The college man showed him a fossilized three-toe hoof, explaining that it came from a dog-sized horse that had once roamed this country. Bilbao asked if it had been an Indian pony. Smirking, the college man said no, this was long before there were any men in Oregon, long before there was such a place called Oregon. All this was of mild interest to Bilbao.

But what the college man said next made the unemployed shepherd’s ears perk up.

The professor would pay good money for fossils. Others, although not he, would pay even more for human bones that weren’t quite fossils. As much as their weight in gold. That astonished Bilbao. It also made him grimace as he recalled all the skeletal remains he’d passed by through the years. The college man said that fossils and bones, once exposed to the elements, quickly crumbled and lost their value.

No more would Gorka Bilbao pass them by, and on that afternoon he became a fossil hunter.

Ten years later now, he was back along the John Day River. His shoulders were hunched and burly from a decade of hacking at the ground with a pick, and his tangled beard was flecked with seeds from the thickets that lined the river. It was the last week of September. Mist hid the canyon walls, although a pale sun kept trying to break through. The unseasonable chill had made Bilbao take out his moth-eaten army overcoat and mittens with the fingertips cut off so he could still pick up fine bones. Soon it would be winter. This was a cold desert. Blizzards howled down the canyons. Ice fogs stole in during the night and left diamonds on the brush when the heatless sun came out at dawn. It’d be nice to hole up in his cabin in the Ochoco Mountains during the bad months, to do nothing but drink, but he always seemed to need the cash from more fossils and bones.

Bilbao suddenly halted. “Here we go,” he whispered to himself. “Here we go now . . .”

At the foot of the bank lay a fossil fragment shaped like an oyster cracker. He recognized it right off: a scale from the shell of a giant turtle that had swum the vast, inland lake that had once covered this now parched country.

Bilbao looked over his shoulder for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management ranger who patrolled the area. The cop knew him, knew what he did for a living, and tried to keep an eye on Bilbao. But the desert was a big place.

Seeing no one, Bilbao pocketed the piece of turtle shell. The turtle was an animal with a backbone, and the fossils of animals with backbones were off-limits. Much of what Bilbao collected was against the law to possess, and nothing more so than the remains of human beings. But oh so valuable. Yet, they had to be ancient. Very, very ancient. Once, on a moonless night, Bilbao had dug up a skeleton from the graveyard outside the old Bureau of Indian Affairs hospital in Warm Springs, then soaked the bones in potassium bichromate, hoping to pass them off as being thirteen thousand years old. That was the magic number to the college men; they didn’t figure Indians had been in this country much longer than that. He tried to sell the remains to a professor, but the man knew at once they were fakes and refused to do further business with Bilbao. After that, the fossil hunter became more careful.

College men knew bones like shepherds knew sheep.

Still, there were ways to find the genuine article.

Last autumn, the Army Corps of Engineers had finished the Clarno Reservoir Bilbao could see the sweeping concrete face of the dam from where he stood. And three weeks ago, the spillway gates had been opened, disgorging a man-made flood. This was to help the Chinook salmon make their way up the canyon and over the dam’s fish ladder to their spawning places. The torrent had chewed at the banks of the John Day, hopefully scouring out old bones like nuggets of gold. Last night, the gates had been shut, and the river had dropped again. These fluctuations were posted by the Army Corps of Engineers in the local newspaper, and Bilbao was usually first to search any canyon after a water release.

A loud splash turned him around a slab of bank had just peeled off into a muddy pool.

Bilbao scurried over to this hump of dissolving earth and ran his practiced eye over the debris of centuries. There were flakes of stone left by Indian arrowhead makers. Charcoal from a brush fire that may have swept this way a thousand years ago. Black pellets of sheep dung from a herd he himself might have run when he was younger.

By noon, Bilbao had found the vertebra of an oreodont, a stubby-legged, plant-eating creature.

But nothing else.

He waded across the shallow river. The water slopped into his boots and soaked his socks. He must get used to the cold again. He couldn’t let the weather stop his searching, just as he’d never let it make him neglect his herd.

At dusk, a chip of darkly soiled bone caught Bilbao’s attention along the east side of the John Day. It was resting on top of another slab of earth that had sloughed off the bank. Anyone but Bilbao, who saw bone fragments in his dreams, would have missed it.

“Slow down, slow down.” Bilbao reminded himself. Haste had no purpose here.

Just to the left of the chip was a knee joint. Carefully, he pried the thigh bone out of the silt and examined it. Human. It was definitely human. But how old? Bilbao sucked on his lower lip, studying the bone. By nature, he was suspicious of good fortune, for he’d had almost none in his life, but his heart was beating fast. This was good, so very good.

He peered down.

Strewn around his boots were a jumble of rib, finger and toe bones.

“Jesus!” he cried out loud.

Most of a skeleton, maybe. Rare, so very rare, for with time the Earth scattered her dead children far and wide. But this specimen still might be in one place.

All of a sudden, the hair on the back of his neck...

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Verlag
Bantam
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553579207
ISBN 13 
9780553579208
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
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Verantwortliche Person
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