Sleeping bones, p.1
Sleeping Bones, page 1
Copyright © 1999 by Katherine V. Forrest
Spinsters Ink
P.O. Box 242
Midway, FL 32343
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Originally Published by Berkley Publishing Group 1999
First Spinsters Ink Edition 2013
eBook released 2013
Cover Designer: Sandy Knowles
ISBN 13: 978-1-935226-66-6
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
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Other Books by Katherine V. Forrest
Curious Wine
An Emergence of Green
Daughters of a Coral Dawn
Kate Delafield Mystery Series
Amateur City
Murder at the Nightwood Bar
Liberty Square
Apparition Alley
The Beverly Malibu
Murder by Tradition
Acknowledgments
To former Sergeant Mitchell Grobeson for his advice on procedural matters, and for his friendship and continuing involvement in the Kate Delafield mystery series. Most of all, for the pioneering activism that has changed the face of law enforcement throughout this country.
To Montserrat Fontes, novelist extraordinaire, the most “senior” adviser on all my work; to my writer-brother Michael Nava for splendid advice and his own splendid work. Very special thanks to Cath Walker for her candor and for saving my bacon in the poker game. To Sherry Thomas for always astute criticism. To Doreen Di Biagio for the excellent counsel on banking procedures. Many thanks to the staff and volunteers at the George C. Page Museum, Rancho La Brea, Los Angeles.
To my editor, Natalee Rosenstein, with much appreciation for input that always strengthens my work.
To Charlotte Sheedy, with love and thanks.
To my partner, Jo Hercus, for bringing it together and keeping it together…
My appreciation is owed to major research sources that form the historical backdrop for this novel: Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Search for Humankind’s Beginnings by Virginia Morell, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY; The Wisdom of the Bones by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, NY; The Story of Peking Man by Jia Lanpo and Huang Weiven, translated by Yin Zhiqi, Beijing Foreign Languages Press and Hong Kong Oxford University Press, New York, NY; Inside the CIA by Ronald Kessler, Pocket Books, New York, NY; and the Los Angeles Times archives.
Some locales are factual, as are the historical events surrounding the Peking Man fossils and their attending historical figures. The present-day story, and all of the characters, are a product of the author’s imagination.
For Jo—
and in memory
of Cassie
Prologue
The pool of water, no deeper than a boulder and dark as a tomb, reflects the fading moon and stars but not the surrounding tule reeds. Its surface, coated with leaves and twigs and bark, with feathers and tiny bones, is ruffled with rings.
A dark, thick bubble unhurriedly emerges from the pool’s depths, and in a slow, steady distention expands beyond its limit and then vanishes in a whock of extinction, marked only by another spreading ring on the water’s surface.
As dawn grays the edges of the horizon, the rounded shoulders of distant hills define a vast bowl of valley, its floor cotton-balled here and there with fog; occupied by a resolute army of manzanita, elderberry, sagebrush, ragweed, juniper, dogwood, poison oak, and thistle; and by studdings of pine and scrub oak. The night-cooled earth is fecund with decomposed flora and fauna, dank with dew, rank with odors of death and decay.
A huge dark form eases its way through the tule reeds toward the water and in the dusky light acquires shape and identity: a bison, massive, seven feet tall at the apex of her thickly muscled shoulders. She moves in guardianship of her young, a four-month-old calf gamboling in her wake, awkward and innocent, but already wary, pulling at tender bits of grass amid the low chaparral.
Other life stirs awake. The tentative first chirp of a bird echoes with sharp clarity across the valley floor. A cautious rustling of rats, squirrels, and rabbits as they discreetly reconnoiter their surroundings. In a patch of brushy undergrowth, a sabertooth cat remains concealed and asleep.
Another sound: the calf lapping at the water, slurping and meandering its way along the pool border. Its parent follows, edging her bulky body farther into the shallows where she more firmly plants her hooves. Alert, she stands motionless in the ebony water, watching her calf and listening, head raised, curved horns bristling. No dangers seem to be lurking here. Settling herself, she drinks to satiation.
Soon the calf makes its way back up the sloping bank, seeking more of the grass succulent with the night dews. Sensing that its parent has not followed, hearing a flurry of splashing, the calf halts, wheeling around on its spindly limbs.
The bison has not moved because she cannot. Her hooves are held fast. She attempts again, and yet again, to force her way out of the innocuous-appearing pool of shallow water. Concentrating all her muscle power as her calf scrabbles about in apprehension, she succeeds in extracting one tarred hoof. But she lacks the leverage to free the others. Concealed under the water, the substance in which she is mired, shallow though it may be, permits incremental but fruitless movements. The bison is powerless to calm her panicked calf, its bleating and erratic hoofbeats clear signals to predators.
In the undergrowth, the sabertooth cat springs awake, ears pricked to the sounds of distress, and crawls from its concealment. Lithely, soundlessly, it lopes through the grass toward the perturbation.
The bison’s struggles become frenzied as the tawny, dappled cat creeps through the dewy reeds into visibility, its yellow eyes fixed on her calf, its enormous curved eyeteeth gleaming in the growing light of dawn.
Intent on its prey, the cat assesses in cold, swift calculation that the calf is a stray; this first meal of the day will be a quick and easy kill. Crouching on its haunches, it gathers itself. The bison bawls her agony and rage.
Aborting its spring, the sabertooth cat leaps back, snarling, bracing itself for what is sure to be a charging attack from the parent of its intended victim.
The raging bellows continue, but the bison does not emerge from the pool; and the cat, low on its haunches, tail swishing, cautiously edges its way forward, eyes fixed on the bison. Why does it not defend its young—or itself? The bison is much larger and more enticing prey, well within the cat’s hunting capabilities, and a sumptuous feast now and for many meals to come.
The cat snarls in challenge. The bison, struggling with all its might to extricate itself, can only bellow defiance and fury.
Other predators appear. In the grass behind the sabertooth cat, five dire wolves, drawn by the snarls and rage of the hunter and hunted, quickly circle the terrified calf, exposing huge pointed teeth in their powerful jaws.
Again the bison bawls its agony. At the edge of the pool, the sabertooth cat rises to its full height, taunting its paralyzed quarry. With a roar of triumph, it breaks into a lope along the border of the pool away from the bison as if to spare it, then suddenly wheels back to swiftly crouch and launch itself. Landing on the back of the bison, it simultaneously seizes her in its claws and strikes its two saberlike teeth into her thick neck, retracts, stabs again, yet again. Leaping nimbly into the pool it completes its conquest by dragging the massive body down by the head.
Her life ebbing in a flow of crimson into the black water, the bison does not see the strings of bright red blood flying from the snarling, thrashing pack of wolves who yank her calf into the rapidly reddening pool as they voraciously feed.
Some minutes later, the glutting sounds lessen. The cat, sated, one paw on its savagely ripped and mangled prey, rears its blood-smeared head and roars its supremacy. Prepared to stalk grandly from the pool and drag the remains of its prey to its lair, it finds its other three legs mired. Tugging ineffectually, it growls in outrage and plants all four paws in the pool to gain greater leverage, only to become fixed in place, even less able to move than its prey had been. Of the five dire wolves, four are also in distress, mired like the cat, only one of their number able to retreat to safety in the reeds.
As the thrashing, howling, and roaring in the pool continues unabated, coyotes and weasels appear, drawn by the uproar and the metallic scents of blood and butchery, as are more wolves, a lynx, a puma. Eyeing formidable enemies that have become helpless prey, they attack, rending and tearing. A horde of vultures circles ever lower over the carnage; but, deterred by the snapping and snarling of the trapped animals and the eager, opportunistic savagery of the newest arrivals, they flap back out of danger and wait patiently, unaware of the tarry, congealing substance being flung onto their feathers by the thrashings of the victims and victimizers.
When their turn comes, and they finally set themselves to feed on both the living and the dead, they hop into the pool to gain better vantage as they rip and pull at flesh: and they, too, are trapped, unable to escape.
And so they all perish, those who have entered this killing field to slaughter t he powerless. Bubbling from the depths of the earth, a deadly, viscous asphalt formation only three or four inches in thickness has seized victims and killers alike.
The dark pool gradually, inexorably closes over all of them, entombing them in its asphalt preservative, conserving their bones and the history of this carnage—for the nearly four hundred centuries to come.
Chapter One
Approximately Forty Thousand Years Later
“It’s the pits.” Dropping the receiver into its cradle, Detective Joe Cameron grinned across the homicide table at Detective Kate Delafield. “The world-famous La Brea Tar Pits.”
He tucked the follow-up report he was working on into a shelf of his four-tier file and climbed to his feet, stretching his lanky frame to slide his jacket from a hanger on the clothes tree. “DB behind a park bench. Being the stiff’s less than ten thousand years old, Sergeant Hansen thinks we should take a look.”
“He would,” Kate said, slapping the Gonzales murder book closed and sliding the blue binder into a desk drawer. She reached for her shoulder bag, grateful that she and Cameron were number one on the rotation, even if it was odds on the dead body would turn out to be a result of natural causes. Anything was preferable to beating herself bloody over the Aloysius Gonzales fiasco.
The homicide table was devoid of other occupants, and the entire detectives squad room was relatively quiet; except for a group clustered in low-toned conversation beside the burglary table, the men and women at the various tables were immersed in paperwork, obeying LAPD’s ever-present imperative of keep up or drown.
In the parking lot behind Wilshire Division, Cameron climbed into the passenger side of the Caprice. “Cremate your balls in here,” he muttered, yanking his tie loose.
There was no insinuation in the remark; after three weeks with this junior partner, Kate had learned that Cameron seemed inclined toward neither sexism nor homophobia. He left his door wide open, waiting for her to start the engine and the air conditioning, choosing dust over heat. The dust was fierce, a fine silt billowing up from the construction project adjacent to the station where a new facility would add more West Bureau functions and create new parking problems.
Gingerly bouncing her hands on the steering wheel to locate a safe hold, Kate leaned back into the sun-baked seat as if to transmit all the concentrated warmth up her arms. Heat eased the stiffness that seemed to be a permanent souvenir from the bullet she had taken in her left shoulder during a botched arrest a year and a half ago.
As she pulled out of the parking lot onto Venice Boulevard, Cameron extracted a pair of aviator sunglasses from the breast pocket of his jacket and donned them, then studied the Reporting District Map for Wilshire Division. “Seven-two-two,” he said, identifying the area for the La Brea Tar Pits.
“Right,” she said shortly. A transfer from Devonshire, Cameron had just been promoted into Homicide and needed to familiarize himself with Wilshire, to gain a feel for a territory far more diverse than his previous assignment at LAPD’s farthest outlying division in the San Fernando Valley. As part of his training, he would be the lead detective for the first time if this investigation turned out to be a murder; he would be put in nominal charge under her supervision and oversight. But she was in no mood to offer her usual mentoring and running commentary whenever she rode with him.
The usually talkative Cameron cinched up his tie as the car cooled, and he peered out his side window; she was left to scowl into the traffic, her mind still churning through the details of the Gonzales morass.
As she turned onto Wilshire Boulevard, she understood that Cameron was restraining himself because of her mood. It was unfair, she conceded, to take her anger out on him. The Gonzales case was none of his doing.
“Never thought I’d get to see the Tar Pits this way,” she offered.
Hitching his sunglasses up on his nose as he turned to her, he said incredulously, “You’ve never been to the most famous place in the whole division?”
Rankled by his response to her effort to be considerate, she retorted, “As far as I’m concerned, the most famous place in my whole division is CBS. And maybe the Farmer’s Market.”
“Famous only in America,” he returned. “You’ve lived in L.A. how long?”
“Forever.” A white-lettered green sign on the median strip of Wilshire announced Museum Row on the Miracle Mile. The miracle was yet to occur along this undistinguished strip of Wilshire, but the L.A. County Museum of Art was indeed a jewel, she thought, and a real museum. She remembered when the new La Brea Tar Pits museum had opened in the mid-seventies, and that it hadn’t been much of a big deal; there was no reason to think any differently now, even if some stupid movie had recently featured a volcano rumbling up from its depths to obliterate West L.A.
“There’s a lot more to the place than you think. It’s remarkable.” Cameron shook his head. “I bet you’ve driven past it thousands of times.”
“Tens of thousands,” she said without remorse. “And every single time, I see the replicas of those prehistoric animals from the street. Tar pits and fossils just don’t ring my chimes.”
“My dad took me there before they even built the museum. He loved it. So did I.”
Another reason not to go, she thought. Parents and squealing kids.
“Body’s behind the main lake pit,” he said, “so your best bet is Curson.”
“Roger,” she said, amused that he was now directing her around her own division.
She pulled up behind four black-and-whites parked on Curson, their revolving light bars hurling more brilliance into the radiant sunshine, their radios emitting endless staccato squawking.
Cameron’s remarks had piqued her curiosity, and when she got out of the car, she paused to inspect the museum, a structure tucked into the contours of a smoothly mown green hill set well back from the street. Squat and square, it was nonetheless quietly impressive. The roof, separated from the main structure by a complex composition of pillars and crosshatched girders, was a massive, brown-toned stone frieze of carvings depicting prehistoric animal scenes. As she accompanied Cameron under a canopy of shade trees and onto the curving sidewalk that skirted the museum building, a hot, sluggish current of air carrying the pungent, cloying smell of petroleum filled her nostrils. A horde of tourists flowed along a wide, shrubbery-lined brick pathway that angled downward to the museum, toward glass doors over which bold lettering announced:
GEORGE C. PAGE MUSEUM
LA BREA DISCOVERIES
Across from the building was a solid-granite elevated observation platform crowded with young children. Ineffectually herded by a few harried adults, they punched and pulled at one another to gain better position on the platform, shrilling their excitement at what police action they were able to glimpse.
“What’s the matter with grown-ups these days?” she groused to Cameron. “Television’s one thing. A real homicide scene is no place for children.”
“I don’t know that it isn’t,” he said. “Maybe a dead stranger’s a painless way for kids to know the reality of death.”
She did not reply. This was hardly the time to argue. Beyond two rows of park benches lining the pathway she had spotted the first barrier of yellow police tape, several dozen onlookers clustered behind it. But Cameron was a fool if he thought anything could prepare you for the reality of permanent loss, and she ought to know.
Sergeant Fred Hansen waited at the perimeter of the tape; Officer Pete Johnson, standing beside him, logged in his posse box her arrival and Cameron’s. She returned their nods and pulled her notebook and pen from her shoulder bag. Looking past Hansen to see that four other uniformed officers guarded the scene, she cast the briefest of glances at the figure sprawled facedown on the grassy earth.
“Something special here, Fred,” she said. The heated, petroleum-laden air was oppressive.
Hansen shrugged. “Kate, I just think maybe.”
