Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

asked. And what would they be doing differently if they were aware that they would be dead by six?
    With that thought rankling in her psyche, she got up and fetched the morning newspaper off Magda’s porch. The front page was blanketed with facts, near-facts, and rumors about the Seagreen Island murders. Her name and her picture leapt off the page. So she was to be denied the mindless daily escape of perusing the paper. She found a deck of cards in a kitchen drawer and played solitaire until the sound of riffling cards brought Magda from the room where she, too, wasn’t sleeping. They played gin until it was time to go to work.
    Faye and Magda walked into Wally’s, where they found the rest of their crew sitting in the grill, each of them finishing up a plate of Liz’s widely renowned eggs and grits. Faye was surprised to see Wally awake and sober. He was even working. He looked up from the SCUBA tank he was filling for an impatient-looking customer and sent a friendly half-wave in Faye’s direction.
    “I know that guy,” Magda said under her breath.
    “Wally?” Faye asked. “I know Wally. Everybody knows him.”
    “No,” Magda said, “not Wally. His friend.” She studied the patched linoleum floor, as if she hoped the impatient SCUBA diver wouldn’t notice that she’d seen him.
    “Who is he?” Faye said, trying not to stare. It was the grimly silent black-eyed man she’d seen brooding in the checkout line the day before. The day Sam and Krista died.
    “I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him twice before, both times when I was working on a field survey way out in the sticks. It seemed odd to see the same guy hanging around the big towns of Vernon and Cross Creek. Especially since those two sites had something else in common.”
    “What?”
    “Significant artifact losses. We never tracked down the culprit, but it was an inside job. One of my workers stole from both digs.”
    Faye frankly stared at the innocent-looking faces around them. “One of these kids—” she began.
    “No, it happened years ago. But whoever the thief or thieves were, I’m sure they didn’t have the connections to get rid of the loot. They needed a middleman, a fence. I’ve got no evidence, but we’re looking at the only common denominator I ever came up with.”
    Faye gave the diver another corner-of-the-eye squint.
    “Sam and Krista wouldn’t steal,” Faye said nonsensically.
    “Maybe that’s why they’re dead,” Magda said as she stepped into Wally’s office without permission and flipped open her cell phone.

    Magda was mightily tired of doing her civic duty. She’d kept her crew hanging around Wally’s until an investigator arrived to talk to the suspect she’d turned up for him. Then she’d loaded her students onto the workboat and hauled them to Seagreen Island, all the while in touch with the Micco County Sheriff’s Office by cell phone.
    “His name is Nguyen Hanh and he’s got an alibi,” her new buddy, the sheriff’s receptionist, told her. “He had breakfast yesterday at a diner way on the other side of Tallahassee. He’s got witnesses, even a credit card receipt.”
    Magda, who was not easily convinced of anything, couldn’t get her brain around the fact that they had let her suspect go. If the sheriff’s people couldn’t be persuaded to do her bidding, then why was she out here on Seagreen Island doing theirs? How could they possibly ask her to shut down her field survey?
    She and her crew had spent the morning packing up the equipment that the undersheriff had deemed unnecessary to the investigation, trying not to think about what was going on behind the crime scene tape. At least the bodies were gone, taken ashore for autopsy. They were trying not to think about that, too.
    Her workers, headed home to seek jobs at the mall or to do nothing, looked as gloomy as she felt. And Faye, who likely needed this menial, low-paying job more than any of them, still wore her usual serene expression, but her shoulders drooped.
    Magda hurled a box of sample bags into the workboat. She had been packing up fragile, expensive equipment all morning and half the afternoon. Tomorrow—Friday, a perfectly good workday—would be wasted, and so would all the other perfectly good workdays between now and the beginning of the fall semester. Dr. Raleigh, who would be happy to see her production of journal articles dwindle to his own piddly rate, would make her time in the office insufferable. It felt