“Was anybody rescued from the Lost Camp?”

“One person. A single rescuer got up there and found everyone dead save a man named Peter Chears, who was babbling and died raving mad shortly thereafter. What that rescuer saw at the site was pretty awful. He gave a short description to someone who committed it to memory, but the rescuer never spoke of it again.”

“What do you expect to find?” asked Burleson.

“Human and animal remains, personal effects, abandoned supplies and equipment from the original wagons. Crude shelters. The most important thing is to extract DNA from the human remains, so we can identify them by name. It will help us reconstruct exactly what happened in that camp.”

Nora said nothing about the stash of coins; her own two assistants had been told of it in strict confidence, but she and Clive had agreed that it would only complicate things if Burleson’s party knew a fortune in gold might well be hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the Lost Camp.

Maggie Buck put down her coffee cup. “What about the legends? You know, the Donner Party ghosts? The ones who went mad before they died—or, maybe, after?”

There was a brief silence. Then a sprinkling of uncomfortable laughter went around the room.

12

AS THE LAUGHTER at Red Mountain Ranch was dying away, Agent Corrine Swanson was entering the front hall of a three-bedroom condo in the well-groomed suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona. She flashed her shield at the cop standing at the door, unsmiling and wearing the kind of blue-mirrored sunglasses currently popular with thirtysomething males below a certain income bracket.

“Is Lieutenant Porter on the scene?” she asked.

The cop nodded. “In the kitchen.”

From the front hall she could see the kitchen situated at the far end of a carpeted hallway. She moved toward it, noting the blond wood walls, the recessed lighting. A deep, thumping bass made the air tremble slightly around her. The entrance to the living room was to her left, and she could see even in her peripheral vision that it was expensively furnished. To her right, a yellow strip of crime scene tape had been strung, almost as an afterthought.

Lieutenant Porter was a tall, youngish man in a tan suit, leaning against a kitchen counter and drinking coffee. He shook her hand. “Agent Swanson.”

“Lieutenant Porter. Thank you so much for this opportunity.” This was not mere politeness: Swanson was, in fact, grateful to the lieutenant for providing her access to a scene where the feds had no clear jurisdiction. Just as she was grateful to Morwood for letting her chase this lead of hers, despite his being highly skeptical and giving her only one day to run it to earth.

So far, despite her best efforts, she’d been unable to develop any solid case out of the Glorieta battlefield killing. They’d identified the dead gravedigger as Frank Serban, a small-time thief, drug dealer, and grifter whose red hair had given him the nickname of “Bricktop” and in turn explained the tattoo. And the body in the iron coffin—the bottom half of it, anyway—was indeed Florence P. Regis, unlikely casualty of the Battle of Glorieta Pass. Thanks to the rain that night, they’d been able to determine that two vehicles left the cemetery around the time of Serban’s death. One—Serban’s—had been found abandoned a few miles away. She hadn’t been able to trace the other vehicle. Larsson, to his credit, had recovered two 9mm slugs after a meticulous search. Rifling marks indicated they had been fired from a noise-suppressed gun, most likely an exotic, integrated model like a Maxim. Beyond that, they had collected a lot of incidental forensic material that she feared would yield nothing.

Just as troubling as the lack of crime scene evidence was the question of motive. Other than the fact that she’d been a woman combatant in a historic battle, Florence Regis was unremarkable. Was it possible some crazy collector wanted her remains as a trophy? But then why kill Serban, whose role had been just to do the manual labor? It would have been much easier to take Regis’s body, refill the grave, and leave the site looking undisturbed: nobody would have been the wiser. No, Serban had to die so no witnesses would be left, and that implied the stakes must be high.

I’m eager to hear what your budding forensic expertise makes of it all, Morwood had said. So far, “it all” was damn little to go on.

Until—maybe—today.

The one item of interest Swanson had learned in the course of her widening digital searches had to do with Florence Regis’s maiden name: Parkin. Almost seven months ago, in Paris, a grave in the Cimetière du Montparnasse had been violated and a corpse—part of a corpse, at least—stolen. The missing remains belonged to one Thomas Parkin, an American expatriate painter who had died in 1943 during the Nazi occupation. And then, this February, another Parkin corpse had gone missing—Alexander Parkin, a schoolteacher from the tiny town of Nelson, New Hampshire, who died of old age in 1911 and was buried in the town plot. He had rested in peace for over a century until somebody yanked his long-cured carcass out of the ground and, no doubt, gave the hamlet of Nelson something to talk about for the next century.

Three Parkins, their deaths spanning eighty years, but all dug up within six months of each other. And now, this…

She glanced at her watch: quarter to one. Even though she’d started out at dawn, Phoenix was a good six-hour drive from Albuquerque. She’d be lucky to get home before midnight.

“Sorry I’ve made you keep the crime scene open,” she said.

Porter shook his head. “Team’s just wrapping up. Want to talk to them?”

Even with her inexperience, Swanson understood how the hierarchy worked. “That’s not necessary, thanks. Why don’t you give me the details, if you can spare the time, and then maybe I can take a look?”

“Sure. Given the amount of blood, our coroner tells us whoever it came from would be mighty incapacitated and quite possibly dead.” He cleared his throat, consulted a tablet. “Rosalie M. Parkin, twenty-seven, unmarried, newly minted lawyer from U of A Law School, now an associate at the Pritchie and Wilkins firm over on McDonald Drive. Both parents dead—that Airbus A380 that went down over the Pacific a few years back, some malfunction, no survivors, maybe you remember it?”

Swanson said she did.

“Well, they were on it. Returning from a vacation in Singapore. The father was a banker, left enough for Ms. Parkin and her brother to live comfortably. For a while, anyway.”

“Brother?” Swanson asked.

Porter nodded. “The little punk’s in there,” and he nodded across the kitchen, past a hallway with a guest bathroom, to a closed door. It was this room, she noticed, that was the source of the thumping bass. Another uniformed cop stood outside that door.

Swanson was still adjusting, not only to being an active FBI agent—walking around with a firearm hidden under her blazer—but to the ballet among different law enforcement agencies. She decided to keep her questions brief, neutral, and to the point, and to betray no opinion or judgment of her own. After all, these people, whatever their jurisdiction, had a lot more time on the job than she did.

“Would you mind giving me the background?” she asked.

Porter nodded again, pleased to be given free rein. “Ms. Parkin was due in court yesterday at ten AM. She never showed up. By lunchtime, the firm got worried, had a paralegal call her cell. No answer. So around six, one of the partners came over. When nobody answered, he let himself in.”