Tribal Ways Read Online Free Page B

about their business. They kept studiously clear of the dig itself, marked off and gridded by string stretched between stakes. If she wasn’t supposed to be there, they clearly reasoned, the county boys would never have let her step over the tape. The evidence team had jobs to do and not much daylight left to do them. She guessed nobody wanted to be out there with a generator going and stand lights shining as the temperature dropped and the prairie wind came up.
    She walked around with her arms crossed in front of her. The wind was indeed picking up as the sun fell toward the rumpled horizon in the west.
    The geographic region lay in the Red Beds Plains, which ran all the way from Kansas down across the Red River into Texas. Unlike the true Great Plains farther north, this land was wide but rolling, dotted with small stands of trees. There weren’t any signs of cultivation in view. This particular part of the Red Beds was walled off to the north by the rough granite ramparts, built on a foundation of Cambrian sandstone beds, of the Wichita Mountains. Annja’s maps showed none of them got as high as twenty-five hundred feet, and the general elevation of the landscape was around a thousand. To Annja they were really just rugged hills by the standards of the ranges not far to the west in New Mexico and Colorado. Much less the Andes and the Himalayas, which she also knew firsthand. But the locals seemed adamant about their “mountain” status, so she felt disinclined to argue.
    There really wasn’t much to see but some nasty dark splashes, now pretty dried out, on the short grass and the rocks. Where it was bare the red soil had sucked the blood down without much trace she could see, although the techs were taking samples and the spots where blood spatter had been found were marked with little plastic tabs. As were the places where the bodies had been found.
    The dig team had been housed in a small RV, a trailer and a small camper pickup. If there was any sign the attacker had entered any of them Annja hadn’t been told. She decided to keep clear of them. She wasn’t looking for criminal evidence, and part of being a trained professional at site preservation meant minimizing the risk of messing anything up.
    She searched for tactical evidence. How had the attack happened? How had the killer come so swiftly on the six people, whose attention, the transcript of Ten Bears’ interview with Paul indicated, had been innocently focused on coffee and doughnuts?
    Some blurred tracks in the dirt suggested the killer had gotten close by using the trailer for concealment, before launching a blitz assault. If the tracks had given the investigators any clues as to the true nature of the monster—and whatever or whoever it was, there was no doubt it was a monster—they hadn’t shared them with her. She didn’t expect they would.
    Following a few quiet words from Ten Bears the troopers at the Troop G HQ had also permitted Annja to see photos of the attack scene taken before the bodies were removed. They seemed surprised at how calmly she studied them.
    They had affected her. But she was long past the point of breaking down from seeing butchery, no matter how horrific. Especially not mere images.
    Now she tried to retrace the killer’s steps. He had worked incredibly fast, ripping or slashing open state archaeologist Dr. Watkins’s throat, then those of the two undergrads, Watts and Luttrell. Next it attacked Allison York, eviscerating her at a single blow.
    All this occurred while Paul had his head turned, and apparently without his becoming aware of it. That was according to what he had told the trooper who rode with him in the helicopter when he was airlifted to Norman.
    The killer then struck Paul. The landowner, Eric James, apparently tried to jump the killer when he was attacking Annja’s friend. The killer then knocked the Comanche man away, leaped on him and savaged him before turning back to further maul his other