Murder.
The only question would be who had done it.
For now, the work in that back corner of the ark continued. Everyone else had gone to hunker down until morning, bury themselves in as many layers as possible, but there were pressing questions now. Questions that wouldn’t wait for the sun to rise or the storm to pass.
Father Cornelius worked over the now-empty coffin, bright lights still shining into its interior. Kim stood next to him, taking notes longhand in a journal the priest had provided. Her position as UN observer didn’t include assisting Father Cornelius in this way, but a trust gap had existed between Walker’s team and the KHAP staff from the moment of their arrival and it had grown into a vast gulf.
Polly Bennett and a couple of other members of the archaeology team stood watching. The distrust in the faces of the young archaeologists spoke volumes, but Walker knew it had been earned. Kim and the priest had both exhibited strange behaviors around the coffin and its occupant. Walker had contributed nothing in the past few hours, but he had stuck around for the same reason these archaeology students had—to make sure nobody went off the rails and decided to damage the coffin or, worse, themselves or someone else.
A short distance away, at the bottom of the ladder that went to level two, the cadaver had been treated and tightly wrapped, then placed inside a body bag and further sealed inside some kind of zippered canvas enclosure that would be simpler to transport. Ready to go, the moment the storm abated.
Walker tore his gaze away from the zippered canvas, forced himself to stop thinking about the ugly, twisted corpse inside and the wicked-looking horns on its skull.
“Well, that’s not very nice,” Kim said, frowning as she took a step back from Father Cornelius.
Walker felt a tremor inside him. No, no, he thought. No more of this bullshit.
But then Kim glanced over to let him in on the joke.
“He just said he wished Professor Olivieri was here,” she said, nudging the priest playfully. “Honestly, I am offended.”
The priest fumbled sheepishly for words. “It’s only that, well, Olivieri would be able to understand the difficulties in translating—”
“He’s disagreed with every word you’ve spoken since you arrived,” Walker said. “He’s unstable and, sorry Father, he was a prick even before he showed us he was unstable.”
“No argument,” the priest replied. “But he’s a knowledgeable prick.”
The archaeology students stared at him. Kim raised an eyebrow and pretended she hadn’t heard, but Walker only laughed. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in Father Cornelius’s presence when the older man had said something off-color. If anything, it told him the priest was feeling more himself, more in control.
Polly Bennett joined Kim and the priest beside the coffin. In Helen Marshall’s absence, Polly had become the senior member of the archaeological crew, their de facto boss.
“How different is this from what was on the lid?” Polly asked the priest.
Father Cornelius glanced back at Walker, so Polly turned as well, watching the silent exchange. The message was clear. This might be the Karga-Holzer Ark Project, but when it came to what Father Cornelius found here, the priest answered to someone else.
Walker nodded his authorization. All three of the grad students stared at him a moment—they didn’t like the idea that they might be on the outside of new information.
“Same methods,” Father Cornelius said, pointing into the coffin. “Whatever methodology was used by whoever wrote on the lid and engraved the symbols in the bitumen casing, the same mix of languages was employed here. I’ve found some things that are echoed. The Sumerian element is key. I feel as if I’m just not looking at it correctly, that if I can just make sense of why certain languages were used for certain phrases, I’ll get it.”
Polly glanced back at Walker again, although she did not work for him. “Languages are my specialty. I could help.”
Walker expected the priest to scoff. There were times when he certainly would have. Instead, Father Cornelius cocked his head and studied the young woman with her half-shaved, green hair.
“I welcome it,” he replied, but there was something in the way he said it—a kind of tremor in his voice, a darting of the eyes—that made Walker wonder if it was help he wanted, or just the solidity of Polly’s nearness. The company of someone who seemed steady and strong when so many among them were frayed at the edges.
Kim shuffled to the side a bit to make room for Polly. Walker thought she might make a joke out of it, something about knowing when she was wanted, but instead she scribbled something in the journal and then stared at nothing for a few seconds. She seemed to waver on her feet. Concerned, Walker started toward her.
“Wait a second,” Polly said, staring into the coffin. “The markings there—”
“The stains,” Father Cornelius replied. “Yes?”
“You thought they were from bodily fluids.”
“I still do.”
The other students moved nearer. Shaken from her reverie, Kim craned her neck for a better look into the coffin. Walker stepped up behind Polly and the priest, peering between them at the etched symbols and the dark, striated stains where the body had lain. The pattern reminded him of the chalk outlines police made around dead people at crime scenes.
“I’d have to take samples to confirm,” Polly said. “But to me, the outline is too clean to have been made only by stains.”
Kim had her pen at the ready like some eager cub reporter. “What are you suggesting?”
Walker felt all of his doubts begin to unravel. All along he had come up with other explanations, not only for the behavior of the staff but for the one, huge, looming bit of impossibility that hung over it all—the location of the ark. There were ways to explain it, but they all stretched credulity. There had been several times in his career when believing in the supernatural would have made his work and life simpler, but he did not, and in each of those cases, he had found a tangible, biological explanation. Extraordinary, sometimes horrible, but not supernatural. He sought something more—that had become clear to him, hard as it was to admit to himself. But the occult, true evil, had no more bearing on his life than a bunch of fairy tales.
Now he stared into the coffin and he saw what Polly had seen. The darker part of the bottom of the coffin, where much of the writing had been hidden beneath the cadaver… the outline of that corpse hadn’t only been darkened from being soaked in the fluids that escaped the body during putrefaction.
“The wood is burned,” he said.
Polly had begun to explain, but now she looked at him and nodded. “I think so, yes.”
“How is that possible?” one of the other students asked.
“There are ways to explain it,” Polly replied.
And there were. Whoever had put the cadaver into the box might have burned the pattern into the wood beforehand, as part of the message. But Father Cornelius crossed himself, pulled the crucifix from inside his collar and kissed it before slipping it back within the cloth.
“I don’t…” Kim began, lowering her head as she took a couple of deep breaths.
Walker moved over to her. “Kim?”
She straightened, closing the pen inside the journal. “I’m very tired. Would it be all right if I went to lie down? I think I’d like to sleep.”
“Of course,” Walker said. He glanced at Father Cornelius. “Unless you need her?”
“We’ll muddle along,” the priest said, studying Kim with only fleeting concern before he turned his attention back to Polly. “It may help me put all of this together if I talk through the various language elements I’ve already found.”