Free Tears of the Jaguar by A.J. Hartley Page A

believed they could get Stroud, but Powel had pushed her to inquire. Stroud, it was rumored, had been so obsessed by her research that she had divorced a husband years ago and given him custody of their child without so much as a fight.
    “Yes, they are top people,” said Powel. “But so are you. Orchestrating this dig is not a matter for specialists, Deborah. They lean toward the things they find most interesting. They divert resources toward their pet projects and ideas. Running the dig is about coordinating experts, getting them to work together for the good of the whole, and that—Deborah—is a job for a generalist. If you don’t think you can do it, tell me now, and I’ll replace you, but don’t mistake their expertise with bones and seeds and glyphs for the ability to run a dig.”
    “OK,” she said.
    “You have a photographer on site?” he asked.
    “One was supposed to arrive today,” she said. “A Brit. But he pulled out, and his university is sending someone else. It may take another day or two to get him here. In the meantime, Bowerdale will take charge of the pictures and video.”
    It was all good, she thought. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. There was something
off
about the tomb. The gold, those weirdgems. She suddenly wished she wasn’t there at all, that she was back at the museum where she could simply orchestrate exhibits and manage advertising and personnel—the stuff she was good at. She envied Steve Powel in his office with his family pictures and trophies.
    “How’s your daughter doing?” she asked, thinking of the blonde girl with the sparkling red pendant necklace whose image saturated his office.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “The skating. Any major contests lately? I know how passionate families get about that stuff.”
    “Oh right, yes,” he said. “No, nothing major on the calendar right now. Just the usual.”
    Memories floated up, distracting Deborah for a moment.
Having to sit for hours at the rink before and after school, trying to read while Ma told her instead to help stitch those loose sequins back on. Trying to shut out the blaring music as Rachel worked through routine after routine, while her coach modeled each spin, each impossible jump, until there’d been that one double axel when Rachel had twisted and fallen like a marionette with its strings cut—
    “It must be a lot of work for you,” Deborah said, snapping back into the moment. “All that driving to training and competitions.”
    “It’s what any good father would do,” he said.
    Just then, the van pulled up in front of the lab, and Deborah hurriedly finished the call. Moments later, all three of the people she’d just been discussing so reverently with Powel were coming toward her, dragging luggage and squinting at the sun. She’d suggested they stop at the hotel in Valladolid first, but all three had wanted to come directly to the lab.
    Deborah introduced herself and immediately started talking too fast. She worried that if she stopped, one of them would ask her something she couldn’t answer. Aguilar and Bowerdale emerged from the lab to shake hands. Aguilar knew Rylands, though their greeting was professional, almost brusque. Predictably, Bowerdale knew them all.
    Within a few minutes, everyone except Aguilar had piled into the van and Deborah got on the road to Ek Balam. She didn’t mind driving. It gave her the chance to fully check out each one of them in the rearview mirror.
    Chad Rylands, the wunderkind osteologist—tenured at thirty and a full professor just a few years later—was businesslike to the point of rudeness. He wasn’t interested in Deborah or anyone else for that matter. He just wanted to get to the site to “see how badly you’ve screwed things up.” Deborah bristled and he added, “No offense,” in a voice that said he didn’t care one way or the other.
    He looked out of the van window and said, “Someone always screws things up where bones are concerned. I spend