Word of an escaped murder suspect would be more than enough to grab their interest.
Luke studied the men. None showed any sign of heightened awareness.
Five women on the far corner of the grass promenade were stretched out on blankets, lost in the ritual of their yoga exercises.
The net hadn’t extended this far yet, but the police would arrive soon.
To the east, two police helicopters buzzed the hillside behind his property like angry insects. Above them, four TV news copters maintained fixed positions. He was probably on every TV set in southern California.
Luke stripped off his T-shirt and rolled the bottom of his scrub pants into a cuff. He continued this until the pants had become knee-length shorts. It would look ridiculous to anyone who gave him more than a passing glance, but he had to do something; the green scrubs marked him like a bull’s-eye.
The pay phones were twenty feet away, next to a closed food concession. Luke jumped out from his hiding spot and casually jogged to the bank of phones. While dialing the number, he shook his arms loosely and twisted his torso from side to side — as though stretching after a long run — while he waited for an electronic operator to process the collect call.
If the man he needed wasn’t there, or wouldn’t take his call, Luke had no backup plan. He had one shot, and even that was a dim hope.
One of the groundskeepers turned in his direction, gave an indifferent glance, and went back to raking the ground.
When Sammy Wilkes answered the phone, Luke emptied a lungful of air he didn’t remember taking in. “Sammy, I need a favor.”
A minute later they were still talking when a convoy of police cars exploded over the crest of the hill at a full gallop and splayed across The Observatory’s promenade.
Luke plunged over the concrete wall, grabbing furiously at branches and sprigs to slow his fall down the steep hillside.
Megan climbed over uprooted trees and slogged through mounds of leafy rubble, following the flood’s path. Paco led the way, forging a trail along what was left of the river’s embankment. Father Joe brought up the rear, fingering a rosary as he went. The priest’s brooding mood seemed to pull the rain out of every storm cloud that passed overhead.
The priest had merely shaken his head, glassy-eyed, when she asked if he had any idea what had caused this.
Her mind was a jumble of conflicting thoughts. The last thing she wanted to do was follow a swath of destruction along an unfamiliar river into unknown territory. But then, neither did she want to stay behind in Xical, just her and a village full of strangers speaking Q’eqchi. Those had seemed to be her choices because Father Joe started upriver the moment the floodwaters subsided, as if pushed toward the source of the destruction by some unseen force.
The memory of her waking nightmare in Ticar Norte, knowing that her assailants were still out there, had tilted the scales in favor of Father Joe’s company. And their trio was traveling southeast, Megan reminded herself, not northeast toward Ticar Norte.
She pictured people lying injured from the flood, clinging to life in some remote corner of this wilderness. Knowing that she might be able to help them aroused in her a sense of purpose.
But her moments of resolve were fleeting. The young man’s corpse that had washed onto the riverbank near Xical was a harbinger of death. She could feel it.
Father Joe’s countenance told her that he felt it too.
Megan slowed her pace until the priest was alongside her. “Father, you need to rest.”
The priest pulled the inhaler from his breast pocket and took a puff. “There’ll be time for that later,” he said with a tight throat.
Five minutes passed before they came across the second body. It was an older man, and his body lay cockeyed at the water’s edge. His wide-open eyes held the gray fog of death. There was a crescent-moon-shaped tattoo on his chest.
Paco remained at a distance as Megan and the priest approached the body. Father Joe knelt by the corpse and looked skyward in prayer. His face suddenly relaxed, his expression trance-like as he whispered an indecipherable prayer.
When he was done, the priest gently folded the dead man’s arms across his chest and said, “I knew this man. He’s from a village about three miles upriver.”
She glanced at the tattoo again. “Mayakital?”
The priest nodded without looking away from the corpse.
“When was the last time you visited Mayakital?”
“Ten, maybe eleven months ago. They’re an independent sort of people. And they’re not Catholics, so I wait for them to invite me. That happens maybe once a year.”
“The tattoo. What does it mean?”
The priest turned to her, the question slowly congealing in his eyes. “It’s part of a fertility rite. It’s unique to their tribe.” The priest started to raise himself. “The people of Mayakital tattoo their infants on the night of the first full moon after their birth. Boys get a crescent moon on their chest. Girls are marked with three small circles, down here on their stomachs.” He pointed at his lower abdomen.
“I’ve seen that tattoo before, on a boy that came to our hospital. He traveled all the way to the U.S., only to die in our emergency room.”
He looked back at the corpse and nodded through a distracted gaze. “The Mayans have a hard life. And their children — well, they die in greater numbers than you’re probably used to in your work. I’ve heard that infant mortality is as high as twenty percent in some of these villages, and from what I’ve seen, that figure sounds about right. It’s a fact of life for these people.” He waved Paco forward. “These people don’t ask a lot from life, and they don’t get much.”
The priest opened his palm and let his rosary unfurl as they walked through a thin cloud of mosquitoes.
She slapped at a prick on her neck. “What do you do when the prayers don’t work?”
He glanced at her. “I’ll let you know if that happens.”
It wasn’t long before they came to another body. It was a small girl with a broken bone sticking out of her left lower leg. Her body was wasted and shriveled. Something had been at work, stealing her life, long before she drowned in the flood.
With each grisly discovery — the next hour brought three more — Father Joe picked up his pace. His legs churned through the mud like pistons.
When they finally stopped to rest, he was coughing with almost every breath.
While gulping air, he said, “Megan, do you pray?”
“Not…no, not really.”
“This might be a time to reconsider.” He kneaded his fingers, as if trying to rub an image out of his mind. “Mayakital is just over the next rise.”
She followed his gaze up the slope.
The priest exchanged a few words with Paco in Q’eqchi, then said, “Paco’s going to stay here. He’d rather not…he’d rather stay here.”
The Indian lowered himself onto a rock and started to remove his pack. Megan glanced back a few times as she and the priest started up the slope.
Paco followed them with stolid eyes.
She spent the next five minutes trying not to think about a growing blister that was searing the heel of her left foot. What she saw when she came over the top of the rise swept away any thought of her pain.
A wet moonscape stared back at her. She stood at the lip of a half-mile-wide lake of reddish-brown mud that looked as if it had probably been an upland valley.
Twenty feet from where she stood, a crude wood-plank table floated on the surface. No one had to tell her: There was a dead village lying on the basin floor, buried under hundreds of acres of mud.
Towering mountains shadowed the soggy graveyard on three sides. At the far end of the valley, a bulbous rock formation protruded like a kangaroo’s pouch from a cluster of peaks. It was enormous, rising several hundred feet above the valley’s floor. Running down the middle of it was a broad, ragged fissure at least thirty feet across.