“So, what do you want to see?” Kelly asked, arms crossed. Her voice carried a note of suspicion.

Corrie tried to muster a firm, confident demeanor. “If you could remove the tarps, I’d like to take a closer look at the remains.”

“As you can see, the dig involves several discrete areas. It would be helpful if you could give me some idea of what you’re looking for.”

Corrie found herself growing defensive at the question. “Dr. Kelly, we are generally not authorized to discuss the details of our cases until we refer them for prosecution.”

“If we could narrow down the parameters, it would speed things up. I’d prefer not to uncover the entire site, which would be a waste of your time—and ours.”

Corrie nodded to the set of pegged blue tarps at the far end of the site near the tree line. “What’s out there?”

“The men I mentioned last night. Spitzer and Reinhardt. They were camped away from the rest.”

“And that other, smaller tarp, down by the stream?”

“The remains of Samantha Carville, a young girl who was one of the first to die.”

“Only Samantha Carville? Nobody else?”

“Not that we know of. We’re still excavating those quads.”

Corrie returned her attention to the main part of the dig. “And what about this large area—what does it represent?”

“It’s a midden heap, essentially a trash pile. It’s where the majority of remains have been discovered so far. We haven’t yet uncovered the camp’s hearth and shelter, but we think they’re over at that gridded area, there.”

“Last night you mentioned six skulls. Are the other three in the midden heap?”

“Yes, two males and a female. Along with a great deal of other bones, bits of clothing, boots, and so forth. And remnants of the camp’s dogs and oxen, which were of course consumed long before any human beings.”

“Could one of those three skulls be Albert Parkin’s?”

“It’s certainly possible,” Dr. Kelly said. “We haven’t made any identifications from the midden. Nine people are known to have died up here, so we still have three skulls to find—those of a male and two females. All of the males were adult, so it’ll be difficult to identify Parkin without DNA analysis.”

Corrie felt a faint sense of satisfaction at the realization that here she had a chance to put this know-it-all in her place. “Really? I don’t think Parkin’s identification would be difficult—depending on the location of his body.”

Nora Kelly uncrossed her arms. “And why is that?”

“He was injured by an arrow during a desert crossing. It broke his collarbone.”

“That’s correct,” the historian, Benton, spoke up. “Indians took potshots at the wagon train at several spots along the route.”

“The fracture should still be visible,” said Corrie, “healed or not.”

Nora said nothing.

“Good. I won’t need to look at the outlying sites, just this midden heap. Could you please remove the tarps?”

There was a pause. “As you wish,” Kelly said. “We’ll take it a few quads at a time—I don’t like to leave the bones uncovered and exposed to light for any length of time.” She turned to one of her assistants. “Jason, will you and Bruce uncover B3 and B4, please?”

As the two got to work, Nora Kelly pointed to a worktable, on which sat several boxes. “You’ll need to put on nitrile gloves, booties, a mask, and a hair net. And I would ask you please not to touch anything. We’re trying to prevent any stray human DNA from contaminating other remains.”

“Of course.”

The quads were soon exposed and Corrie, now kitted up, brought out a hand magnifier. When she did so, she detected some sniggering from behind and caught a whispered “Watson, the game is afoot!”

“These square meters,” Nora explained, “expose the center of the midden heap. We think most of the remains are concentrated here.”

Swanson gazed over the area. It was a dense aggregate of bones lying willy-nilly, a mixture of partials, with a couple of complete bones, very few articulated, and no complete skeletons. Most lay in what looked to the untrained eye like a broken tangle.

She carefully stepped to the edge of the closest quad and knelt on a board placed there, the smell of fresh earth rising to her nostrils. With the magnifying glass held close to the bones, she could see butchering marks made by iron knives, areas of burning, and rough breaks where the marrow had been scraped out—all classic signs of cannibalism. She took a suite of photographs with her agency-issued camera. The three skulls all showed signs of having been cooked in a fire and broken to extract the brains. Despite their damaged condition, it was obvious they were adults, two men and a woman, as Dr. Kelly had said.

Leaving aside the woman, she focused on the first male skull. It lay in two adjacent pieces with the associated mandible. The cranium showed burn spalling and flaking on the back, where it had been placed in the fire. The other skull lay not far from it and showed a similar pattern of cooking and spalling. The skulls were surrounded by a jumble of other bones and postcranial scrap. Almost all were broken, and some were processed beyond recognition. A few small flags bearing numbers and letters were inserted here and there in the matrix of the midden.

It was a dumping spot for food scraps, where the remains of one stew after another had been discarded over weeks or even months, and many of the bones were covered by others. There was no obvious way to tell which ribs, vertebrae, or collarbones were associated with any particular skull. She did her best to conceal her chagrin; so much for putting Nora Kelly in her place by identifying Parkin’s broken collarbone right under her nose.

“As I mentioned last night,” Kelly said, “this is an active dig site—with an emphasis on ‘active.’ As you can see, we still have much to do.”

“What about these flags?” Corrie asked, rising and pointing to the small colored markers.

“Those are checksum tags, placed by my team at the start of each new work session. They help in associating the digital information our computer model uses with the physical excavation—matching the data to the dirt, so to speak.”

Corrie nodded. This was obviously a professional, well-organized operation. There was nothing she could do for the moment except await further results. And she had to be back in Albuquerque tomorrow.

“I’d really appreciate knowing a little more about your investigation,” the archaeologist said. “Whatever you can tell me.”

“I really can’t go into any more detail than I already have. If you are able to identify Parkin, could you please let me know right away? And of course if you could ensure these remains are properly curated, that would be much appreciated.”

When Nora frowned, Corrie realized she had probably come off as condescending, and she added hastily: “Naturally, I don’t want to tell you your job. It’s just that, since we’re not yet sure how Parkin’s remains might fit into the investigation, it’s vital that they are kept secure.”

Kelly nodded. “Anything else?”

“Just keep me in the loop. If Parkin is identified, we might ask for the bones to be turned over to us for analysis. But for now, that’s unnecessary.”