Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

the rifle falling out of the tree, she found that she had underestimated her own speed. She was out of the ditch and running before the gun hit the ground.

    Wally fell back under the power of a fist to his jaw, but he didn’t quit. He was unaccustomed to playing the role of hero, but he had a vague idea of how it was done.
    “Put down the gun,” he barked. “Do you want to kill her?”
    Nguyen’s fist fell again. “Frankly, yes. I do. I like the money I’m making here and I don’t think I would like prison. You’ve let her get away. Now she’ll talk and this place’ll be crawling with people who will want to lock our asses up.”
    Wally grabbed the other man by the shoulders and used his body weight to pin him against the trunk supporting the rickety tree stand. “And nobody will want to lock our asses up for murder?”
    “ If they found this babe’s body, and if they traced it here, they would think the pothunter did it. The one who’s going to jail instead of us for digging up this site. Hey, maybe they’ll decide the pothunter killed those two students, too.”
    “You idiot. This babe is our pothunter. If you kill her, we lose our cover.”
    Wally released his partner and watched him yank a .38 out of his shoulder holster and brace his shooting arm against the railing of the tree stand. “Let her go. Even if we have to leave this site, it’s nothing compared to the wreck. Besides, she won’t turn us in. She has too much to lose. Either way, keeping her alive leaves us with a scapegoat if this thing goes sour.”
    Faye was still running for the dunes. Wally reached in his pants pocket and held up a small yellow box—a throwaway camera. “I’d shot nearly a full roll documenting Faye’s tour of our island before you started throwing bullets at her. If we ever need a cover, a few of these handed over anonymously to the Park Service will make her their prime suspect.”
    Nguyen lowered his handgun and watched Faye sprint over the dunes, silhouetted against the sky. Wally breathed a sigh of relief.
    Wally genuinely liked Faye, but he would let her take the fall for his crimes without a qualm, because that’s the kind of guy he was. In the end, Wally looked out for Wally and no one else, but that didn’t mean he wanted Faye dead.
    His cut lip throbbed and his ears rang. Taking a beating from Nguyen just to save Faye’s hide was the noblest hour in a life devoid of morality. He felt both proud and stupid.

    Magda knew that the brave new cyber-world had finished dawning when archaeologists went on-line. A more hidebound, old-fashioned, technology-hating band of reactionaries than her colleagues was never born, but they had finally discovered the wonders of the Web. Some of them had been forced to give up their quill pens and learn to type.
    Every day, Magda found that the chore of winnowing through her e-mail grew more difficult. No topic was so esoteric that it had no proponents to put on a conference and invite Magda to submit a paper. No academic rivalry could be allowed to fester on its own without both sides convening in private chat rooms to trash the reputations of their opponents.
    But then, some of the information was useful, and so current that telephone and traditional mail were truly too slow to disseminate the message. Today, Magda’s virtual mailbox was full, and much of its content was actually urgent.
    Her colleagues were abuzz over a strange mixture of Native American artifacts, some ancient and maybe Clovis, and some far more recent, that had suddenly gone up for auction on eBay. The newer pieces were probably from west Florida, suggesting a similar origin for the Clovis artifacts, but none of her colleagues on the Internet could pinpoint a likely location.
    The consensus was that someone had looted Paleo-Indian artifacts found in a datable context, maybe even in an actual occupation site. Humans lived lightly on the land twelve thousand years ago. No wonder the Internet was alight with archaeological gossip.
    Magda signed off and brooded for a while. For years, she had overlooked her suspicions of Faye. Frankly, she couldn’t believe that the woman she knew would loot a site of such importance. And the unsophisticated mixing of artifacts of such varied age didn’t sound like Faye’s work. Still, when solving a problem, she had to follow every possibility, no matter how unlikely, to its logical end. It was the scientific method in action. For years, she’d had clues to