Beautiful Sacrifice

the Texas borderlands. It didn’t fit. “Anything connect to cold cases?”
    Jase drank some coffee, rinsed it around, and swallowed. “I don’t know. We handed the death house off to the sheriff’s department with the understanding that ICE wanted info on anything covered in our mission statement. All they told us was that something was taken off the wall, and there were signs that a table had been moved.”
    “Or an altar?”
    “I don’t like to think about that, but yeah, I wondered.”
    “Okay. You busted artifacts and small-time coke. Followed an address to a bloody dead end. Cataloged the artifacts into the ICE warehouse.”
    “With that Maya apocalypse 2012 all over the media, Brubaker was practically lap-dancing about the chance to add the artifacts to the pool of stuff that’s being repatriated to Mexico on the twenty-first. It’s a big-ass deal. Vice president, governor, senators, everybody under the Homeland Security umbrella will be there, shaking hands across the border and giving Mexico back pieces of its history as we walk shoulder to shoulder into the future, blah blah blah.”
    “But the artifacts go poof from ICE storage,” Hunter said. “Then what?”
    “I don’t have to tell you the theft has ‘inside job’ written all over it.”
    “I remember the warehouse. Cameras, locks, finger pads, guards, everything but the ever-popular alien butt probes.”
    Jase smiled faintly. “Brubaker was thirty-two flavors of pissed off. He looked around for an ass to pin the tail on. Must have been my lucky day, huh? He put me on paid leave, told me I had until the twenty-first to find those artifacts, then said if I even breathed the word ‘ICE’ in my investigation, much less showed my badge, I was roadkill. No word of the theft was to get out.”
    Hunter stared at him. “That’s a joke, right?”
    Jase looked back with hard, dark eyes.
    “When did this happen?” Hunter asked.
    “About two weeks ago. I tried to call you, but…”
    “Cell phones don’t work where and when you want them to,” Hunter finished. “I was up to my pits in jungle and limestone scrub.”
    “I hear those beaches on Riviera Maya are primo.”
    “Didn’t get that far. You have pictures, file numbers, descriptions?”
    “Of the artifacts?”
    “What else?”
    Jase reached for the manila folder on the counter. “You never saw these.”
    “Saw what?”
    Hunter opened the envelope and started looking at photos he never should have seen.

C HAPTER T HREE
     
    T HERE ARE STILL MANY AREAS OF M AYA MYTHOLOGY THAT are wide open to interpretation,” Lina Taylor said clearly to her more-or-less attentive students. “This is to be expected, given that people are still fighting over the meaning of texts that have been widely available, translated from culture to culture, and practiced for more than two thousand years.”
    Nobody coughed or stirred. The truly uninterested students were still asleep in various beds. Part of Lina envied them, especially if they were with lovers, but nothing of her simmering emotions showed in her face or voice.
    “The fact that so much of Maya myth and lore was lost in one night, at the hands of Bishop Landa, means that we may never know the actual names of deities such as ‘God K’—suggested as Kawa’il by some—much less the subtle distinctions in their hierarchy and powers, religious and civil lives.”
    An unlikely blonde who was dressing like her teenage daughter dutifully took notes from the front-center seat.
    Does she ever look in the mirror? Lina thought. Does she need glasses?
    “The nuances of the ancient Maya may be lost to us,” Lina continued, “but the broad strokes are reasonably clear. And in many ways, unchanged since the first glyph was chiseled into limestone.”
    She clicked a remote and the room lights dimmed. Another button on the remote brought the overhead projector to life, displaying an image of jungle broken only by the reclaimed ruins of a Maya ziggurat in the distance. The ancient building was pale and jagged under a cloudy sky. In the foreground, several people were gathered at a bonfire, dressed in bright shawls worn over a variety of very colorful garments. Each person carried an offering of flowers, handmade crosses, or small glass bottles of liquor. When the people withdrew, the offerings remained behind at the feet of traditional Maya deities overlaid by a veneer of Christian names.
    “Notice the syncretic nature of the celebration,”