Page 8 of Badlands (Nora Kelly #5)

T HIS WAY ,” C ORRIE said, opening the door into the lab for Nora and then leading her over to a broad table covered with plastic evidence bags.

“That’s a lot of evidence,” Nora said, staring at the array.

It looked like Corrie had taken everything in sight—including half the terrain.

“I may have gone a little overboard,” said Corrie, flushing slightly.

“I just didn’t want to miss anything. Let me get the spearpoint out for you.” She rustled around among the bags and pulled one out.

Nora leaned over, faintly curious—but far more interested in something else she’d noted in the photographs.

Corrie unsealed the bag and, using rubber-tipped tweezers, took out a three-inch spearpoint and placed it on an evidence tray.

She moved a magnifying glass over it for Nora to use.

Nora bent down and peered at the point.

It was very finely flaked from white Pedernal chert: fluted but not stemmed, in perfect condition.

“Just as I thought,” she said.

“Folsom. Ten thousand years old.”

“Folsom?” Corrie asked.

“The Folsom people. They hunted prehistoric bison with it.” Nora felt a rising impatience.

“Now, there’s something else I want to see.”

“Hold on,” said Corrie.

“Any thoughts on how it might be connected to the body? It was lying right where we found the bones.”

Nora paused.

“Was she carrying it in her pocket?”

“She had no pockets. She’d taken off all her clothes.”

“What?”

“This is confidential, but she’d hiked out into the desert, taking off her clothes piece by piece, before ultimately dying. I wondered if this point might have had something to do with it. For example, could somebody have stabbed her with it? Or could she have been using it for defense?”

Nora looked more closely.

“Can you give me a pair of gloves?”

Corrie offered her a pair of nitrile gloves.

Nora picked up the point and examined it closely, turning the point and peering at the edges through the magnifying glass.

“It’s been lying out in the open for thousands of years,” said Nora.

“It’s got a lot of desert polish from windblown sand, and the edges are seriously dulled. So, no, I don’t think it would have been used as a weapon, unless, as I said, it was attached to a shaft.” She glanced around.

“And it seems that a shaft was about the only thing you didn’t collect out there.”

“There was no shaft,” said Corrie, defensively.

“So how did it get there?”

Nora shrugged.

It was a beautiful point, but she was itching to move on.

“Coincidence.”

“Really?”

“Ten thousand years ago, those badlands had some bison. It’s not so strange to find something like that out here.” She laid the point down and Corrie—with seeming reluctance—put it back in the bag.

“What I really want to see,” Nora said, “are those rocks.”

“Which rocks?”

“The two greenish pebbles under the bones. They were in a photo. You collected those, I hope?”

Corrie sorted through the bags and finally pulled out two small stones.

“Here they are.”

She placed the rounded pebbles on the examination tray.

Each was about the size of a golf ball and glowed green in the bright light.

As she stared at them, Nora felt her heartbeat accelerate.

They were exactly what she’d been hoping they were—what she’d ended her vacation to examine.

She positioned the tray under a lens and squinted at them.

She could hardly believe her eyes.

“What do you see?” Corrie asked.

“Just a moment.” Still wearing the gloves, Nora picked up the stones, one in each hand, and held them up to the light.

They glowed a strange, almost ethereal greenish yellow.

“Are they anything special?” Corrie asked.

“Special!” Then Nora hesitated.

She needed to make sure.

“Can you do me a favor and turn off all the lights? The darker it is in here, the better.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

Corrie switched off the lights.

The basement lab had no windows, and the room was immediately plunged into pitch darkness.

“Watch closely,” Nora said.

She rubbed the stones together.

A cascade of green light flashed from within the stones, illuminating them for a moment like tiny emerald globes.

“What the hell ?” Corrie asked.

“You can turn the lights on.”

There was the snapping on of lights, and then Nora saw Corrie standing beside the switch plate, frowning.

“What was that?”

“These are lightning stones,” said Nora.

“Very rare. Made from a mineral called prasiolite. I can tell what they are because each stone has hundreds of tiny scratches and divots on their facing sides from being rubbed together—as I just did now.”

“What does it mean?”

“Archaeologists believe the ancestral Pueblo Indians used them in shamanistic ceremonies in their kivas. Virtually all lightning stones are white quartz. But green was a sacred color to the prehistoric people of the Americas. It symbolized life, and greenstone items were treasured. You heard me call these rare? Well, they’re more than that. The fact is, I know of only one other pair with this coloration in existence.”

“How does it work?”

“It’s called triboluminescence, and it’s still imperfectly understood. These stones were once crystals that, over millions of years, were tumbled and worn into pebble-like shapes. Inside, they’re as clear as water. But they have a peculiar electrical quality, generating bright flashes of internal light when you rub them together.”

“Any idea what stones so rare were doing there?” Corrie asked.

“Another coincidence?”

Nora frowned.

“No. Lightning stones were so sacred they were found only inside a kiva—the religious center of ancestral Pueblo Indian life—and never taken out. You never find them anywhere else.”

“You think the victim carried them here?”

“It seems pretty likely. I’d like to take these back to the Institute for study.”

Corrie shook her head.

“I’m sorry, we can’t let evidence leave the lab.”

Nora had expected this, but nevertheless felt disappointed.

“May I take some pictures?”

“Of course.”

Nora took out her phone and photographed the stones from various angles.

They were extraordinary.

The other two prasiolite stones, she recalled vaguely, were in a private collection somewhere.

It would be interesting to track them down and learn where they were found, by whom, and in what archaeological context.

Maybe these stones came from the same place.

She laid the stones down on the tray.

“So the woman stripped off her clothes in the desert and died?” Now that she’d seen the stones, the horror of this was beginning to truly sink in.

“Have you figured out who she was?”

“No,” said Corrie, “but I know what she looked like.”

Corrie led the way to a small alcove, then drew back a curtain, revealing a workspace with a small circular table.

On it was a forensic sculptural reconstruction of a woman’s head, in full color.

“Wow!” Nora said, staring.

“She’s stunning!”

The bust showed a woman of about forty years old, with a long mane of blonde hair tied back in a French braid, blue eyes, creamy skin, a thin straight nose, a well-shaped chin, and dimples.

Nora turned to Corrie, who was clearly pleased by this compliment but trying not to show it.

“This is incredible. How did you do this?”

“Well, it’s part engineering, part art. You start with a cast of the skull. Then you cover it with little indicators that show the depth of flesh at dozens of locations on the face. And then you basically lay down each muscle, one at a time; add the thin layer of fat and skin; smooth it; and paint it—and voilà.”

“But the blue eyes?”

“We recovered samples of her hair, so we know she was blonde. Not dyed. Statistically, a person with natural blonde hair of that shade has a seventy percent chance of being blue-eyed.”

“And the dimples?”

Corrie smiled.

“Artistic license.”

“Can you be sure this is accurate?”

“You can’t be a hundred percent sure—but this isn’t far off. We know she wasn’t morbidly obese from the healthy state of her joints. A microscopic examination of the muscle attachments to the bones in her arms and legs indicated she was unusually fit. And her teeth show a lot of attention to appearance and hygiene. Putting all that together adds up to a person of healthy weight, with good skin and hair, and most likely a comfortable economic status.”

Nora shook her head, the stones momentarily forgotten.

“It’s crazy to think someone like this could just drop off the map without people raising hell.”

“That’s just what I think. A woman this… this regal wouldn’t disappear quietly.”

Nora peered again into the face.

It was so realistic it gave her the creeps—especially the skin, which seemed quasi-translucent, like real skin.

“How did you get the skin so realistic?”

“Encaustic. Painting with hot wax. It looks much more lifelike than flat acrylic paint. It was…” She hesitated, and then continued proudly, “My own innovation.”

“Well done, Corrie.” She had always known Corrie was smart, but this reconstruction showed a truly rare talent.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that the key to this mystery is going to come down to this face—and those lightning stones.”