“He’d give them to the museum,” Lina said.
Carlos laughed softly. “Such beautiful innocence, querida. It is one of your greatest lures.”
“I don’t find it alluring to be called naive,” she said evenly. “Are you saying Carlos would sell those artifacts on the black market?”
“No. I’m saying that the only way Carlos would let go of those artifacts is if he had better pieces in his collection.”
“We have nothing to equal them in the museum,” Lina said.
Mercurio’s smile was both gentle and amused. “You must be the only person in Mexico who doesn’t know that Carlos has a personal collection, and I’m not referring to your Houston museum.”
“So he might know about these artifacts?” Hunter asked quickly.
The quick flare of temper in Lina’s eyes had warned him that she was reaching her limit on being patronized by Mercurio ak Chan de la Poole. That was fine with Hunter, but they had more questions to be answered before he let her shred the handsome Mexican.
“Carlos?” Mercurio shrugged. “He is a man who keeps his own counsel. Lina’s abuelita might know. She and Carlos are close.”
“Why?” Hunter asked. “She’s two generations older than he is.”
“He is the only reasonably direct male descendant of the Reyes Balam line,” Mercurio said. “He is the focus of the backward villagers who see him as a conduit to the old gods.”
“He’s CEO of a cement company,” Lina said. “Not real godlike.”
“To you and me, no. He is just one more spoiled son of an old family. The villagers are more foolish. They look for anything to make their dirt-scratching lives more important.”
“Take a good look at those photos,” she said impatiently.
Mercurio’s disdainful attitude toward poor Maya villagers was one of the major reasons she hadn’t let their relationship go beyond a few dates with him. Despite his handsome face, fit body, and love of field archaeology, Lina couldn’t see him as a potential mate.
Too bad Mercurio didn’t feel the same way.
“What do you see?” Lina pressed. “What do you think the function of the artifacts was?”
“Is that cloth really a god bundle?” Mercurio countered.
“I don’t know,” Lina said.
He looked at Hunter.
“Same here,” Hunter said. “That’s why we knocked on your door.”
“If I assume that the artifacts are as represented in the pictures,” Mercurio began.
“This isn’t a peer review,” Lina said. “You’re not being recorded or judged or asked to buy or sell. Spare me all the academic qualifiers.”
“So direct,” Mercurio said. “So American.”
About time you noticed, Hunter thought sardonically.
“I’m not the starry-eyed teenager you knew on the digs,” she said. “I’m way past that.”
“You were beautiful, a bird just learning to fly.” His voice was like a stroke, his eyes hot with memories.
“That was years ago,” she said. “The pictures are now.”
Hunter measured Mercurio like an undertaker sizing up future business.
Lina’s dark eyes watched the other man, hoping he would accept that she had long outgrown her crush on her father’s handsome assistant.
“People are dead because of those artifacts,” Hunter said. “We don’t want any more deaths on our hands.”
But his tone said he wouldn’t mind some of Mercurio’s blood on his knuckles.
Mercurio studied the photographs again, his mouth flat rather than seductive. “Were they found together?”
“At the Texas-Mexico border,” Hunter said. “Where they’d been before that is unknown.”
“I can’t tell you anything Lina can’t.” Mercurio shrugged. “They came from Reyes Balam land.”
She started to protest.
Hunter cut across her. “What is their function?”
“Religious,” Mercurio said. “Specifically, sacrificial. The quality of the knife, the scepter, the mask, the Chacmool, the incense burner—it all speaks of priest-kings communicating with gods. If there ever was a cult of Kawa’il, these goods belonged to its high priest.”
“Why couldn’t they have come from Belize?” Lina asked.
“I have several digs in Belize, most of them close to historic villages, places where traders came from the Yucatan peninsula to conduct business. Two of my digs are deeper in the jungle. Some of the sites have wall paintings. There is even one—just one—with the sigil of Kawa’il.”
Lina’s breath came in and stayed.
“The sigil is on the order of Mexico City graffiti,” Mercurio said, shrugging. “It is a crude statement that someone was there at some time with some paint. I’ve never found artifacts of high quality produced on any post–Terminal Classic site in Belize. Everything I’ve found is crude, made in the shadow of Yucatec memories by untrained people who barely survived the onslaught of the Spanish. The people who lived there were Maya, yes, but they had no greatness left in them. Like the villages today. Their gods are gone, and it shows in the poor rubble of their lives.”
“Yet you have that scrap of paper,” Hunter said. “Paper is the product of a high civilization.”
“Or the remnant of what once was,” Mercurio said. “If the scrap is from Belize, it was carried there.” He looked up from the photos, took Lina’s chin lightly in his hand, and turned her to face him.
Hunter eased forward, ready to deck the touchy-feely archaeologist.
“If I’d found artifacts as good as those in your photos,” Mercurio said, “I’d have quit my post and started my own foundation. Money to sponsor my digs would have flooded in. Madre de Dios, National Geographic would have me on speed dial! Do you understand what I’m saying yet? If real, that mask alone is better than anything the Aztecs made, and they’re considered the pinnacle. Who has those artifacts? ”
“If we knew, we wouldn’t be here,” she said, stepping away from his grasp. “Thank you for your time.” She turned to Hunter. “We’d better go. My family will be impatient to meet you.”
Mercurio finally seemed to get the message. The look he gave Hunter was as hard as a blade.
“Thanks for showing us around, Dr. de la Poole,” Hunter said, hand extended.
Mercurio grasped it angrily. “Of course.”
This time Hunter didn’t hold back his grip.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
OUTSIDE, THE SUN WAS A MEMORY AND DARKNESS REAL. Lina and Hunter walked down the pathway, casting strange shadows from the knee-level lighting. No voices came to their ears. Nothing moved farther back in the landscaping.
“Old boyfriend?” Hunter asked blandly.
“Don’t start.” Lina all but snarled into the night. “Sometimes I wonder what goes through Mercurio’s head.”
“I don’t. He wanted you sweaty and horizontal.”
She grimaced. “In his dreams. By the time he noticed me sexually, I had outgrown my crush on him.”
“Bad timing.”
“In hindsight, it was brilliant.”
Hunter’s arm slid around her shoulders. “Yeah.”
She turned toward him and started to say something.
His mouth came down and suddenly Hunter was all Lina knew, all she could know. There was no darkness, no stone path, no wild jungle breathing fragrance over the land. There was only Hunter’s heat, his taste of coffee and lightning, need coiling in her until she couldn’t breathe.
“I want you naked,” he said against her mouth.
“And horizontal?” she teased. But it sounded more like a suggestion.
“Any way I can get you, including straight up.”