Skeleton five was female. The orbits lacked heavy ridges, the cheekbones were smooth and slender, the mastoids small. The lower half of the body was enveloped in remnants of a rotted skirt identical to a dozen above my head. A corroded wedding band circled one fragile phalange.
Though the colors were faded and stained, I could make out a pattern in material adhering to the upper torso. Between the arm bones, atop the collapsed rib cage, lay a bundle with a different design. Cautiously, I separated a corner, eased my fingertips underneath, and teased back the outer layer of fabric.
Once, at my Montreal lab, I was asked to examine the contents of a burlap bag found on the shore of an inland lake. From the bag I withdrew several rocks, and bones so fragile at first I thought they were those of a bird. I was wrong. The sack held the remains of three kittens, weighted down and heaved into the water to drown. My disgust was so powerful I had to flee the lab and walk several miles before resuming work.
Inside the bundle clutched by skeleton five, I found an arch of tiny vertebral disks with a miniature rib cage curving around it. Arm and leg bones the size of matches. A minute jaw.
Señora Ch’i’p’s infant grandchild.
Among the paper-thin cranial fragments, a 556 projectile, the type fired by an assault rifle.
I remembered how I’d felt at the slaughter of kittens, but this time I felt rage. There were no streets to walk here at the gravesite, no way to work off my anger. I stared at the little bones, trying to picture the man who had pulled the trigger. How could he sleep at night? How could he face people in the day?
At six Mateo gave the order to quit. Up top the air smelled of rain, and veins of lightning pulsated inside heavy, black clouds. The locals had gone.
Moving quickly, we covered the well, stored the equipment we would leave behind, and loaded up that which we would carry. As the team worked, rain began plinking in large, cold drops on the temporary roof above our heads. Amado, the DA’s representative, waited with lawn chair folded, face unreadable.
Mateo signed the chain of custody book over to the police guards, then we set off through the corn, winding one behind another like ants on a scent trail. We’d just begun our long, steep climb when the storm broke. Hard, driving rain stung my face and drenched my hair and clothes. Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Trees and cornstalks bent in the wind.
Within minutes, water sluiced down the hillside, turning the path into a slick, brown stream of mud. Again and again I lost my footing, hitting hard on one knee, then the other. I crawled upward, right hand clawing at vegetation, left hand dragging a bag of trowels, feet scrambling for traction. Though rain and darkness obscured my vision, I could hear others above and below me. Their hunched forms whitened each time lightning leapt across the sky. My legs trembled, my chest burned.
An eon later I crested the ridge and dragged myself onto the patch of earth where we’d left the vehicles eleven hours earlier. I was placing shovels in the bed of a pickup when Mateo’s satellite phone sounded, the ring barely audible above the wind and rain.
“Can someone get that?” Mateo shouted.
Slipping and sliding toward the cab, I grabbed his pack, dug out the handset, and clicked on.
“Tempe Brennan,” I shouted.
“Are you still at the site?” English. It was Molly Carraway, my colleague from Minnesota.
“We’re just about to pull out. It’s raining like hell,” I shouted, backhanding water from my eyes.
“It’s dry here.”
“Where are you?”
“Just outside Sololá. We were late leaving. Listen, we think we’re being followed.”
“Followed?”
“A black sedan’s been on our ass since Guatemala City. Carlos tried a couple of maneuvers to lose it, but the guy’s hanging on like a bad cold.”
“Can you tell who’s driving?”
“Not really. The glass is tinted an—”
I heard a loud thump, a scream, then static, as though the phone had been dropped and was rolling around.
“Jesus Christ!” Carlos’s voice was muted by distance.
“Molly?”
I heard agitated words that I couldn’t make out.
“Molly, what is it?”
Shouts. Another thump. Scraping. A car horn. A loud crunch. Male voices.
“What’s happening?” Alarm raised my voice an octave.
No response.
A shouted command.
“Fuck you!” Carlos.
“Molly! Tell me what’s going on!” I was almost screaming. The others had stopped loading to stare at me.
“No!” Molly Carraway spoke from a distant galaxy, her voice small and tinny and filled with panic. “Please. No!”
Two muted pops.
Another scream.
Two more pops.
Dead air.
WE FOUND CARLOS AND MOLLY ABOUT EIGHT KILOMETERS OUTSIDE
It had rained steadily as our convoy lurched and heaved across the narrow dirt and rock trail that connected the rim of the valley with the paved road. First one vehicle then another became mired, requiring team effort to free the wheels. After shouldering and straining in an ocean of mud we’d resume our seats and push on, looking like New Guinea tribesmen daubed for mourning.
It was normally twenty minutes to the blacktop. That night the trip took more than an hour. I clung to the truck’s armrest, body pitching from side to side, stomach knotted with anxiety. Though we didn’t voice them, Mateo and I contemplated the same questions. What had happened to Molly and Carlos? What would we find? Why had they been so late? What had delayed them? Had they actually been followed? By whom? Where were their pursuers now?
At the juncture of the valley road with the highway, Señor Amado alighted from the Jeep, hurried to his car, and drove off into the night. It was evident that the DA’s representative had no desire to linger in our company a moment longer than necessary.
The rain had followed us out of the valley, and even the blacktop was hazardous. Within fifteen minutes we spotted the FAFG pickup in a ditch on the opposite side of the road, headlights burning at a cockeyed angle, driver’s door ajar. Mateo made a razor U-turn and skidded onto the shoulder. I flew from the cab before he had fully braked, fear tightening the knot in my gut to a hard, cold fist.
Despite rain and darkness, I could see dark splatter covering the exterior panel on the driver’s side. The scene on the interior turned my blood to ice.
Carlos lay doubled over behind the wheel, feet and head toward the open door, as though shoved in from the outside. The back of his hair and shirt were the color of cheap wine. Blood oozed across the top and down the front of the seat, adding to that pooled around the gas and brake pedals, and to the hideous stains on his jeans and boots.
Molly was on the passenger side, one hand on the door handle, the other palm up in her lap. She was slumped like a rag doll, with legs splayed and head at an odd angle against the seatback. Two mushrooms darkened the front of her nylon jacket.
Racing across the shoulder, I pressed trembling fingers to Carlos’s throat. Nothing. I moved my hand, testing for signs of life. Nothing. I tried his wrist. Nothing.
Please, God! My heart pounded wildly below my sternum.
Mateo ran up beside me, indicated I should check Molly. I scrambled to her, reached through the open window, and felt for a pulse. Nothing. Again and again I positioned my fingers against the pale flesh of her throat. Opposite me Mateo shouted into his phone as he mimicked my desperate moves.
On my fourth try I felt a beat, low and weak and uncertain. It was barely a tremor, but it was there.
“She’s alive,” I shouted.
Elena was beside me, eyes wide and glistening. As she opened the door, I bent in and took Molly in my arms. Holding her upright, rain stinging my neck, I unzipped her jacket, raised her sweatshirt, and located the two sources of bleeding. Spreading my feet for balance, I placed pressure on the wounds, and prayed that help would arrive in time.
My own blood hammered in my ears. A hundred beats. A thousand.
I spoke softly into Molly’s ear, reassuring her, cajoling her to stay with me. My arms grew numb. My legs cramped. My back screamed under the strain of standing off balance.
The others huddled for mutual support, exchanging an occasional word or embrace. Cars flashed by with faces pointed in our direction, curious but unwilling to be drawn into whatever drama was unfolding on the road to Sololá.
Molly’s face looked ghostly. Her lips were blue around the edges. I noticed that she wore a gold chain, a tiny cross, a wristwatch. The hands said eight twenty-one. I looked for the cell phone, but didn’t see it.
As suddenly as it started, the rain stopped. A dog howled and another answered. A night bird gave a tentative peep, repeated itself.
At long last I spotted a red light far up the highway.
“They’re here,” I crooned into Molly’s ear. “Stay tough, girl. You’re going to be fine.” Blood and sweat felt slick between my fingers and her skin.
The red light drew nearer and separated into two. Minutes later an ambulance and police cruiser screamed onto the shoulder, blasting us with gravel and hot air. Red pulsed off glistening blacktop, rain-glazed vehicles, pale faces.
Molly and Carlos were administered emergency care by the paramedics, transferred to the ambulance, and raced toward the hospital in Sololá. Elena and Luis followed to oversee their admittance. After giving brief statements, the rest of us were permitted to return to Panajachel, where we were staying, while Mateo made the trip to police headquarters in Sololá.
The team was quartered at the Hospedaje Santa Rosa, a budget hotel hidden in an alleyway off Avenida el Frutal. Upon entering my room I stripped, heaped my filthy clothes in a corner, and showered, thankful that the FAFG had paid the extra quetzals for hot water. Though I’d eaten nothing since a cheese sandwich and apple at noon, fear and exhaustion squelched all desire for food. I fell into bed, despondent over the victims in the well at Chupan Ya, terrified for Molly and Carlos.
I slept badly that night, troubled by ugly dreams. Shards of infant skull. Sightless sockets. Arm bones sheathed in a rotting
güipil.
A tissue-spattered truck.
It seemed there was no escape from violent death, day or night, past or present.
I awoke to screeching parrots and soft, gray dawn seeping through my shutters. Something was terribly wrong. What?
Memories of the previous night hit me like a cold, numbing wave. I drew knees to chest and lay several minutes, dreading the news but needing to know.
Flinging back the quilt, I went through my abbreviated morning ritual, then threw on jeans, T-shirt, sweatshirt, jacket, and cap.
Mateo and Elena were sipping coffee at a courtyard table, their figures backlit by salmon-pink walls. I joined them, and Señora Samines placed coffee in front of me, and served plates of
huevos rancheros,
black beans, potatoes, and cheese to the others.
“¿Desayuno?”
she asked. Breakfast?
“Sí, gracias.”
I added cream, looked at Mateo.
He spoke in English.
“Carlos took a bullet in the head, another in the neck. He’s dead.”
The coffee turned to acid in my mouth.
“Molly was hit twice in the chest. She survived the surgery, but she’s in a coma.”
I glanced at Elena. Her eyes were rimmed by lavender circles, the whites watery red.
“How?” I asked, turning back to Mateo.
“They think Carlos resisted. He was shot at close range outside the truck.”
“Will an autopsy be performed?”
Mateo’s eyes met mine, but he said nothing.
“Motive?”
“Robbery.”
“Robbery?”
“Bandits are a problem along that stretch.”
“Molly told me they’d been followed from Guatemala City.”
“I pointed that out.”
“And?”
“Molly has light brown hair, fair skin. She’s clearly gringo. The cops think they were probably targeted as a tourist couple in G City, then tailed until the truck hit a suitable ambush site.”
“In plain view along a major highway?”
Mateo said nothing.
“Molly was still wearing jewelry and a wristwatch,” I said.
“The police couldn’t find their passports or wallets.”
“Let me get this straight. Thieves followed them for over two hours, then took their wallets and left their jewelry?”
“Sí.”
He lapsed into Spanish.
“Is that typical for highway robbery?”
He hesitated before responding.
“They might have been scared off.”
Señora Samines arrived with my eggs. I poked at them, speared a potato. Carlos and Molly had been shot for money?
I had come to Guatemala fearing government bureaucracy, intestinal bacteria, dishonest taxi drivers, pickpockets. Why was I shocked at the thought of armed robbery?
America is the leading producer of gunshot homicides. Our streets and workplaces are killing fields. Teens are shot for their Air Jordans, wives for serving the pot roast late, students for eating lunch in the high school cafeteria.
Annually, over thirty thousand Americans are killed by bullets. Seventy percent of all murders are committed with firearms. Each year the NRA spoons up propaganda, and America swallows it. Guns proliferate, and the slaughter goes on. Law enforcement no longer has an advantage in carrying arms. It only brings the officers up to even.
But Guatemala?
The potato tasted like pressed wood. I laid down my fork and reached for my coffee.
“They think Carlos got out?” I asked.
Mateo nodded.
“Why take the trouble to shove him back into the truck?”
“A disabled vehicle would draw less interest than a body on the ground.”
“Does a robbery scenario sound reasonable to you?”
Mateo’s jaw muscles bulged, relaxed, bulged again.
“It happens.”
Elena made a sound in her throat, but said nothing.