Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries by W. Michael Gear, Kathleen O’Neal Gear

three-by-five index cards in clear sandwich bags that identified individual artifacts for curation.
    Through the open door to her left, she could see a small bathroom with sink, toilet, and shower. To her right, more shelves lined the wall, bursting with reference books, field reports, and the other exotica of report production.
    “Dale?” Dusty called. “You here?”
    Maureen leaned over to examine the mouse dung on the file cabinets and boxes. “Nobody here but us mice.”
    “Yeah, I need to bait the traps again.”
    Dusty stepped to the closest table and rolled up the maps there. Scrounging a rubber band, he secured them and used a whisk broom to bat a cloud of dust from the tabletop. “That should be enough room for the Pueblo Animas stuff, right there.” He pointed.
    Maureen spent the next half hour packing in boxes of human bone, pottery sherds, soil samples, and other cultural material from their dig at Pueblo Animas. This, as in her specialty in physical anthropology, was where the real work started. Contrary to popular opinion and the image created by National Geographic, most archaeology was done in the lab, perched on uncomfortable chairs, peering down at bits of human trash that opened dim windows into long-vanished worlds.
    As he set down the last of the boxes, Dusty said, “Okay, there it is. That’s the last of the field records.” He thumped the cardboard box full of forms. “Sylvia took the photos into the processor, so that’s taken care of.”
    “Right. Let’s go see if Dale’s home,” Maureen said, and headed for the front door. “He and I are going to
have a little talk about this employee complex he’s developed.”
    “You’re going to beard Dale in his own house?”
    “Yep.”
    “This I gotta see.”
    Casa Rinconada, Chaco Canyon
    Magpie propped her hands on her hips. She stood just above the gaping circumference of the Casa Rinconada great kiva. A cold wind tugged at her green Park Service jacket, and teased the ends of her shoulder-length hair where it escaped her silver clasp. Looking to the east, she could see her vehicle parked beside Dale’s gleaming red truck. It was supposed to be her lunch hour. She checked her watch. In fifteen minutes she had to be back at the Visitors Center, on guard at the main desk to accommodate the few tourists who passed through this late in the season.
    Maggie couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible had happened to Dale.
    She sighed and looked around. Maybe it was just the stress she’d been under lately. Her elderly aunt Sage was dying of cancer. She lived alone just off the road north of Grants. Despite Magpie taking every chance to drive down to see her, the old woman refused to leave her old trailer house. She wanted to die in her house, not among strangers at a hospice in Albuquerque or at the hospital in Gallup.
    Her eyes fixed on his red truck, as though it could send her a message, some subtle clue as to where Dale might be.
    “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rupert Brown, the park superintendent, had told her when she’d reported the vehicle. “This is Dale we’re talking about. I’ve known him since before you were born. He does things like this. I think I’ll write him a citation personally, just to
see the expression on his face when he roars in here to protest.”
    But Maggie’s encounter with the vanishing owl, the faint hazy vision of Dale walking right up this path toward Casa Rinconada, had been eating at her all day. She’d had to return for a second look.
    Turning, she looked off to the west, up the low gray ridge that humped out from the side of Rincon Canyon’s buff-colored sandstone. The grasses and brush, stroked by the wings of the wind, might have been beckoning her. Why? She knew that ridgetop. Nothing was up there except an unexcavated ruin.
    The flash of white caught her eye. Maggie frowned, shading her vision as she studied it. It looked like a piece of paper. Trash. People were such pigs.