“Yah, you betcha,” he said, with a relieved snort.
They moved over to the van, where the specialists had completed their work; the yellow tape was up, and uniformed police were keeping the crowds back. Tully took out a piece of the beef jerky he always kept in a pocket and tried to interest the condor in it; the big bird just cowered lower in his cage, which was quite an accomplishment, since he essentially filled it.
The evidentiary spoils set out on the van’s floor were pathetically meager; the fire must have blown up like a volcano going off in the SWAT team’s faces, leaving them only seconds to grab what they could. There were a few sheets of paper that might have been accounts, a few letters, a charred and battered computer unit that might have salvageable data on its hard drive. And one large glossy photograph, curled and discolored along one edge. Tom reached toward it, picking it up by the corners of the plastic bag it was sealed in.
“What the hell is this?” Perkins said, looking around him—she’d have had to stand on a chair to look over his shoulder.
“I think those are supposed to be Aztec priests,” he said dubiously. “Some sort of re-creation, or a movie. But it doesn’t look quite right.”
The setting reminded him of things he’d seen in National Geographic articles; the top of a huge stepped pyramid, the edges of the stones carved in violently colored serpents and shapes even more arcane; the alien symbolism made it difficult to pick up the details. The men grouped around the altar were a little easier, despite the huge feathered headdresses, grotesque devil masks set with turquoise and silver, multicolored cloaks, elaborate loincloths. And blood, a great deal of it, flooding down from the gutters on the altar. Bodies lay around, their chests gaping open; another was stretched out across the altar block with a priest holding each limb and another holding up the severed heart and a broad dagger of polished obsidian with a dragonlike hilt.
“The idol he’s offering the heart to, that’s Huitzilopochtli,” Tom said.
He’d dated a Mexican-American girl interested in ancient Mesoamerican art, back when he was in the Rangers and stationed in Texas. Personally he thought it was all sort of grotesque; this statue was indescribable, a tall multicolored stone nightmare of hearts, stylized spurting blood, knives, teeth, snakes, clutching hands and God knew what.
“Hooti Lipopki?” Tully said. “They’re worshiping some Polack country-western star gone bad?”
Tom chuckled, and even the rather grim FBI agent was startled into a smile.
“It’s in Nahuatl, the old Aztec language—he was their god of war—the name translates as ‘Left-Handed Hummingbird’ and ‘The Shadow Behind the Shoulder,’” Tom said.
Perkins made a moue of distaste. “Maybe these scumbags were dealing in snuff films too?” she asked. “Or this might be a still from a horror movie.”
“I don’t know—the sets look awfully realistic and detailed; that costs.” You couldn’t live in California for years and not know something about “the Industry.”
“I think a horror flick that elaborate would have gotten some publicity.”
“Realistic except for one thing,” Tully said with a guffaw, peering a little more closely and pointing out a detail that only became clear if you put your face close to the picture.
“Yeah,” Tom said, with an answering chuckle. It was nice to have some comic relief in a day like this.
Above their loincloths, the “priests” were all wearing T-shirts, black ones, showing a dancing skeleton with a chaplet of red roses and more blossoms falling around it.
“Isn’t that an album cover from one of those sixties rocker groups that kept on performing until they were shuffling around the stage in walkers with oxygen tubes up their noses?” Tom said.
Perkins got it first. “Grateful Dead. I didn’t know they were touring Mexico that long ago.”
They all laughed at that; it was odd how a picture of carnage that would make you faintly sick if it were real looked ludicrous when you knew it was fake, no matter how good the illusion.
“Well, that seems to be that for now,” the FBI agent said. “Let’s get our part of this ratfuck cleared up, at least.”
She shook hands with the SOU wardens, and Tom Christiansen turned to go; he had to arrange to get the condor into the proper hands at the San Diego Zoo’s captive-breeding program, and then they had to catch these smugglers and put them away for a long, long time. In a way this ratfuck would help—they could add arson and reckless negligence, possibly attempted homicide, to the count of crimes—but it meant that the bad guys were still one step ahead of them.
As he turned, he caught sight of something that stood out from the crowd, enough to stop him for an instant. Two men as tall as or taller than he was, one of them as big, which was rare; they were also white men, not common on the street in this part of South Central, and dressed in conservative narrow-stripe business suits. They were just turning away. Between them was a young woman who must be tall herself; he caught a glimpse of bright hair and then the trio were lost in the crowd.
Well, that’s California, he thought. Always surprises.
Tully put a hand on his arm as he turned back, with a slight facial twitch that said Hang around and Shhhhh! Tom waited until the FBI agent had left before he raised a brow.
“Strikes me that there’s one place we haven’t looked, Kemosabe,” Tully said. “The condor’s cage.”
Tom nodded, sighing a little. “It’s a dirty job—” he began.
“No worse than shoveling out the chicken house back on the farm,” Tully said, pulling out two pairs of disposable gloves.
“We were wheat farmers,” Tom said, drawing the tight plastic over his fingers and keeping a wary eye on the bird. On the one hand, condors weren’t very aggressive. On the other, they were very big, and so were their claws and beaks. “We got our chicken at the A and P, like everyone else.”
“Not like us Arkies down in dogpatch,” Tully said. “Why, mah daddy tanned the leather fer our shoes! After he wrassled him the bar, ’n’ rendered it down fer candles ’n’ tanned the hide.”
“Your father was a lawyer,” Tom pointed out. “In Little Rock.”
“Now that’s a filthy job,” Tully said, peeling back layers of sodden, droppings-laden paper. The acrid stench was heavy. “Hel-lo, what have we here?”
“Well, well, well!” Tom said. “The Oakland Herald. Looks like our bird wasn’t LA-LA born. Closer to our neck of the woods, yah, you betcha. And what’s this?”
One of the pungent linings at the bottom of the cage wasn’t newspaper. It was some sort of corporate letterhead.
“‘Bosco Holdings,’” Tom read out; a white splotch of condor feces obliterated most of the rest, but there was a San Francisco address. “Bay Area. So far we’ve been about as useful as an udder on a billy goat. Here’s our chance.”
Adrienne Rolfe stood with her hands on her hips and frowned as the fire engines went past her. The warehouse was a bellowing pillar of fire now; the first firemen on the scene were just trying to keep it from spreading rather than trying to put it out. With any luck it would keep burning until nothing was left but ash. Ashes could tell a surprising amount with modern forensic techniques, but they didn’t have the public-relations impact of intact pieces of dead animals—or, worse, living ones that shouldn’t be here. There were limits to what even the Commission could hush up, but the fire had kept a number of headlines unprinted.
The crowd was growing now, mostly black with a scattering of Hispanics, watching the blinking lights of the police cars. The heat was dense, between the afternoon sun baking back from asphalt and walls and the thick crush, and the smell added to the normal throat-catching vileness of FirstSide city air to put her nerves on edge. That wasn’t all bad; it kept you alert. She still didn’t enjoy being jostled by strangers, or feeling this conspicuous.