One Grave Less Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Praise for the Novels of Beverly Connor

  “Calls to mind the forensic mysteries of Aaron Elkins and Patricia Cornwell. However, Connor’s sleuth infuses the mix with her own brand of spice as a pert and brainy scholar in the forensic analysis of bones. . . . Chases, murder attempts, and harrowing rescues add to this fast-paced adventure.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Connor combines smart people, fun people, and dangerous people in a novel hard to put down.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Connor grabs the reader with her first sentence and never lets up until the book’s end. . . . The story satisfies both as a mystery and as an entrée into the fascinating world of bones. . . . Add Connor’s dark humor, and you have a multidimensional mystery that deserves comparison with the best of Patricia Cornwell.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “In Connor’s latest multifaceted tale, the plot is serpentine, the solution ingenious, the academic politics vicious . . . chock-full of engrossing anthropological and archaeological detail.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Connor’s books are a smart blend of Patricia Cornwell, Aaron Elkins, and Elizabeth Peters, with some good Deep South atmosphere to make it authentic.”

  —Oklahoma Family Magazine

  “Crisp dialogue, interesting characters, fascinating tidbits of bone lore, and a murderer that eluded me. When I started reading, I couldn’t stop. What more could you ask for? Enjoy.”

  —Virginia Lanier, author of the Bloodhound series

  “Beverly Connor has taken the dry bones of scientific inquiry and resurrected them into living, breathing characters. I couldn’t put [it] down until I was finished, even though I wanted to savor the story. I predict that Beverly Connor will become a major player in the field of mystery writing.”

  —David Hunter, author of The Dancing Savior

  “Fans of . . . Patricia Cornwell will definitely want to read Beverly Connor . . . an author on the verge of superstardom.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Connor’s breathtaking ability to dish out fascinating forensic details while maintaining a taut aura of suspense is a real gift.”

  —Romantic Times (top pick)

  ALSO BY BEVERLY CONNOR

  The Night Killer

  Dust to Dust

  Scattered Graves

  Dead Hunt

  Dead Past

  Dead Secret

  Dead Guilty

  One Grave Too Many

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, December 2010

  Copyright © Beverly Connor, 2010

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47659-8

  All rights reserved

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This is to Charles Connor for all his love and support

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A very special thanks to my editor, Brent Howard.

  Chapter 1

  Somewhere in the Amazon

  The woman sat on the bare floor of the wooden cage hugging her legs to her chest. Her forehead rested on her knees. Her long chestnut brown hair, dirty and tangled, covered her shoulders like a tattered blanket. She kept her sobs silent and tried to swallow her fear and pain. She lifted her head furtively for quick looks around her, taking in her surroundings. Her cage had hardwood saplings for bars, a thatched roof, and a
rough-hewn floor of similar saplings. It sat on stilts three feet off the ground near the tree line in a village clearing, one of a cluster of clearings dotted with grass-covered huts on stilts. On all sides of the village clearings was the dense, almost impenetrable, endless jungle.

  The captive was alone. She was hurt and in pain, and she couldn’t talk. Her abductors had bruised—almost crushed—her windpipe when they snatched her. She didn’t know where she was. She couldn’t even identify the tribe of the villagers. They looked to be a blend of groups. Dress was a mixture of traditional sarongs and ragged Western clothes. Most were barefoot. There were no clear identifying marks to tell her who they were.

  But they were not her captors. That distinction was held by the ragged band of “soldiers” among them who had attacked her Jeep as she drove on her way to Cuzco.

  She wondered whether there was an ally among the tribespeople. Surely there was someone who didn’t like the guerrillas holed up in their village. She searched their faces. None looked in her direction. She put her head back down on her knees, trying to wish her predicament away, trying to force herself to keep calm, trying to think of some plan of escape. There must be a way.

  There was a crunch of the vegetation, the sound of someone walking toward her. She lifted her head again. It was a man she hadn’t seen before, an older man, perhaps in his forties. His appearance suggested he was one of the criminals who held her. His worn khakis and green camouflage looked vaguely military. He grinned as he approached and swiped his dark black hair from his eyes. He gave his beard a cursory scratch. With him was a woman in jeans and a T-shirt. Her face was familiar. Her name was Patia—one of the workers at the Incan dig site. She was involved in this?

  The two adults were followed by a small barefoot child in a tattered dress, holding a bowl.

  The man squatted in front of the cage.

  “Doc-tor Fallon,” he said in English washed in a heavy Spanish accent, “I hope you feel comfort. You are going to do me a lot of money, so I want you well.”

  Doctor Fallon? So that was it. It was some kind of horrible case of mistaken identity. He had the wrong woman. She weighed the advisability of somehow conveying to her kidnapper that he had made a mistake—that he had the wrong person. He would not believe her. Even if he did, he was unlikely to say “oops” and simply let her go. It was more likely he would kill her right then to cut his losses. Perhaps she should keep it to herself for now.

  “You say nothing?” he said with no irritation.

  She stretched her neck and pulled back the collar of her shirt, revealing dark bruising. She attempted a whisper, but nothing came out.

  “Oh.” He put a hand over his heart. “It hurts me to see violence on woman. Some of my men, they are brutes. I speak to them.”

  Patia, the black-haired woman standing behind him, grinned as if she thought the injuries were funny.

  “Please accept my sorrow and take soup.” He gestured to the child and said something in Spanish to her.

  The little girl approached and stuck out her hands, holding the soup bowl. Her face had no expression, but she made eye contact. The woman was surprised at how that one gesture lifted her spirits. She reached for the bowl. The man put a hand on the little girl’s arm, holding her back.

  “You must be good.” He stared at his prisoner with a hard black gaze. “Make trouble for me, I make trouble for you. Understand?”

  She nodded. He released the child and she took the bowl of soup from the little girl’s hands.

  “Good.” He grinned broadly. “See, we friends.”

  He lifted a satellite phone from a hook on his belt and made a call. It took a while to go through. The prisoner sipped the soup from the bowl. It was surprisingly good. The man moved away and spoke into the phone—Spanish, at first—something about May 3. The prisoner’s Spanish was almost nonexistent. He changed to English. She strained to listen with her head down, as if interested only in her soup.

  “Sí, I have her. I am looking at her now. Sí, forensic anthro-pol-ogist from Georgia, U.S.A.,” he said. “She ask many questions about the bird feathers. She wanted to know everything about them.”

  Patia nodded, as if verifying what he was telling the person at the other end. Patia’s eyes gleamed brightly as she looked at the captive, who, for her part, was feeling a great deal of confusion.

  When he finished his conversation, he said, “Everything is okay. You be good.”

  He rose and walked away with Patia. The child tagged along. Of the three, only Patia looked back. Her face wore a sly grin of triumph.

  At nightfall the prisoner was curled into a ball in the center of her cage, trying to hide her exposed skin from mosquitoes. She opened her eyes at the sound of someone approaching from the jungle side of her cage. Whoever was advancing was quiet. She barely heard the sound. But it was there. She froze, holding herself rigid, mentally preparing for a fight, an attempt at escape.

  “Miss.” It was a delicate whisper.

  In the deep jungle shadow illuminated only by slivers of moonlight was the child who had given her the soup.

  “Be still, please. They should not see us,” she said.

  Her English was surprisingly good.

  The prisoner nodded.

  “I will help you to get free if you will take me to my mother,” the girl said.

  “Who are you?” the captive whispered.

  “My name is Ariel Fallon. Diane Fallon is my mother. Do you know her?”

  The impossibly steep steps of Chichén Itzá’s Kukulkan pyramid rose in front of Diane Fallon.

  Remarkable, she thought. It looks so real.

  The brown-gray-white-green fake stone had the same mottled appearance as the original.

  Visitors will love it.

  But Diane found it frightening. It brought horrible images up from her memory. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and put a hand on her chest, as if that would slow down her pounding heart.

  She’d seen the display many times as it was being built, approving the plans along the way, feeling no apprehension, believing that the step-by-step process was desensitizing her to its effect on her emotions as the rising structure gradually took shape. But here, alone before the finished monument, the large presence filled her with dread and sorrow.

  The pyramid was a facade. It was the entrance to the new Mayan special exhibit scheduled to open in just two weeks at the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History where Diane was director. The entry into the exhibit hall was via a passageway through the lower steps of the pyramid. The artifacts on display in the exhibit were on loan from Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology.

  As she looked into the dimly lit passageway under the pyramid, the quickening of her pulse and her sense of dread accelerated. The Mayan ruins looked too much like the ruins where Diane had hopelessly searched for her daughter after the massacre in South America.

  Diane had worked for the human rights organization World Accord International, collecting evidence of crimes against humanity. She and her team excavated mass graves, interviewed frightened witnesses, and exposed secret torture rooms, accumulating a mountain of evidence of the atrocities committed by dictator Ivan Santos. During his rule he’d massacred thousands of the native population, along with anyone who either disagreed with him or got in his way. He was deposed eventually, but he and his illegal army continued a reign of killings and intimidation against his enemies. Even out of official power he was still a dangerous man, and he was out there somewhere.

  During her work in the area, Diane and her crew often stayed at a mission just across the border in Brazil. Her team shared food, blankets, and medicine with the sisters running the mission in exchange for their hospitality and a safe haven. Over the years the mission had taken in countless refugees running from cruel regimes.

  One day, outside the mission compound, a tiny girl who couldn’t have been three years old emerged at the edge of the forest. She appeared, as if just birthed by the jungle. She wa
s defenseless and alone. It was a miracle she had survived to find her way to them.

  She was dirty and crying, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence—there were many orphans. But this little girl was different. Diane remembered that as soon as the little girl looked at her, she smiled through her tears. Diane picked her up and carried her into the mission and took care of her for the next two and a half years. The sisters who ran the mission tried to find the little girl’s parents or relatives, but no one came forward. Diane spent all her free time with her and, as time passed and still no relatives were found, decided to adopt her. She gave her the name Ariel Fallon. Then the massacre occurred.

  Tears welled up in Diane’s eyes and spilled onto her cheeks as she remembered Ariel’s raven hair and velvet dark brown eyes. She couldn’t count the number of times she cursed herself for not just taking Ariel out of there to a safe place, even if it meant smuggling her into the United States or . . . or just someplace that was safe. Diane had the connections to do it. But she wanted to do everything legally. That was what she and her team always did—they followed the rule of law. If she had been a good mother, she told herself over and over, she’d have taken her daughter to safety.

  Diane sat down on the bench near the wall and put her head in her hands, regretting all the death that had come from revealing the dictator’s atrocities. She shivered as the memories swept through her mind—Ariel’s bloody little shoes, her CD player that Santos left in the compound playing the child’s favorite songs. So much blood everywhere . . . but few bodies. He had carried most of the bodies away, probably to one of many hidden mass graves.

  She hoped that somehow Ariel had managed to slip away and hide in the Incan ruins or in the jungle. Diane had run through the bush yelling for Ariel, searching deep within the ruins, heedless of the dangers, until her friends had dragged her away.

  Diane lifted her face from her hands, wiping the tears off her cheeks. She looked back up at the facade. This is absurd, she thought. I’ve replayed the horror in my mind a thousand times. I’ve been over it and over it. Why again now? What the hell’s wrong with me? But she knew. It was her engagement to Frank. She was feeling guilty about her upcoming marriage . . . about her happiness. Deep inside her a little demon said she didn’t deserve to be happy, because Ariel was not there to share it with her. Diane stood and took a breath. I have to keep moving forward with my life, she said to herself.