Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

dramatic discovery of the missing students’ boat. He was a small man, but his reputation grew larger all the time. Anthony stood again in the spot where he had seen Faye rushing away from her colleagues, drawn toward the water where her discovery waited for her. The woman had intuition. This was something he trusted.
    He was not surprised to find her in the same spot, wandering around like someone who almost remembered where she had left her glasses. He would have been a fool not to hide and watch.
    Crouching behind a live oak, he watched her move through the underbrush, stooping now and then to examine something on the ground. Footprints? Maybe.
    When she squatted and started scraping at the pervasive mat of leaves and pine needles, he knew what she’d found, but still he waited to be sure. When she put her hand to her mouth and began digging with precise, rapid strokes, he got his confirmation. He hightailed it to fetch his cameraman, who was standing among all the other journalists waiting to find out where the missing kids were. Anthony Perez, ready to grab his second scoop of the day, knew exactly where they were.

    Faye started at one end of the hastily covered grave, knowing she would find either faces or feet. It was a fifty-fifty shot and she was sort of hoping for feet.
    Fate handed her a face, Sam’s face, a broad, full-lipped face with a day’s growth of beard. There was dirt caked around his eyes and mouth and she wanted to wipe it away, as if it would make him more comfortable, but she couldn’t take the time. The grave was big enough for two.
    She dug to Sam’s right and was rewarded, if that’s the proper word, with another face. Krista was barely recognizable, her freckles obscured by powdery white sand.
    Faye screamed for someone to get Magda, then she kept screaming because it seemed the right thing to do. A rustle alerted her to the cameraman rushing up behind her and she threw her body over her dead friends, refusing to move aside so their fate could be recorded for the evening news.
    She screamed for Magda, over and over, and the tough little archaeologist came running, yelling at the reporters, cursing them, whapping at them with a handy tree branch. Fearing for their equipment, Anthony Perez and his cameraman beat a swift retreat.
    As they left, Faye unbuttoned her shirt, saying, “I’ll be damned if those reporters will climb a tree and use a telephoto lens to get a picture of this.”
    Magda helped Faye spread her shirt over the spot where the students’ faces peered up from the dirt, then, out of solidarity, laid her own shirt atop Faye’s. The two of them stood vigil together, in their brassieres, until the sheriff came.

Chapter 5
    The afternoon heat, the boat’s side-to-side wallow, and the fact that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast had combined to bring Faye to the point of seasickness. It had been an interminable day and it wasn’t over.
    Sheriff Mike McKenzie and his investigation team had worked efficiently through the morning, herding everyone on Seagreen Island onto a patch of sand near the dock before sending a search crew to fan out over the island. From her vantage point, she had watched technicians lifting fingerprints off the storage shed and searching Magda’s crew boat.
    Her nerves had stretched a little thin when they searched her skiff, not so much because she thought the killer might have concealed any evidence there, but because she had things of her own to hide. Would they wonder why she kept topographical maps of all the Last Isles stashed, along with her navigational charts, in coolers to keep them dry? Would they notice the shovels and trowels and sieves and brushes and dental picks stored aboard her skiff, and wonder why she didn’t just use the tools the university provided? What if a tiny antique bottle or rouge pot that she’d dug out of the ground had rolled up behind the coolers and lodged there, waiting for the investigators to find it and wonder why she took her work home with her? It seemed that none of these questions struck the searchers. They poked through her skiff for a few short minutes, then moved on.
    They had rifled through the audiovisual equipment on the TV reporters’ boat with more care, then turned their attention to the sleek speedboat that had carried Senator Kirby and his entourage. Faye figured the searchers were focused on finding the missing laptop and data loggers, but they were empty-handed when they stepped onto the