and showering, there were now several, for coordinating the work of outside agencies, dealing with media requests, community outreach. The coroner’s department had a person there at all times, to make sure the body of the Mystery Man was handled with kid gloves, whenever it might finally be found. To Carter, it was all a massive case of overkill.
Down in the pit, there were maybe a dozen workers now, none of them his usual crew. Rosalie and Claude had been relieved of duty for the foreseeable future, and even Miranda — the poster girl for enterprising UCLA graduates — had been informally banned. The workers now were postdoc paleontologists, and even a retired professor or two, who knew how to do the painstakingly close labor that the extraction of the La Brea Man now required. This was delicate, highly skilled work that was tough to do right under the best of circumstances. But to do it now, with fire-men and cops and coroners looking over your shoulder, and rescue workers trying to figure out how to dredge a nearby quadrant of the site for a recent victim, was nearly impossible.
Carter could tell there was no news as soon as he started down the ladder into the pit. The San Bernardino crew had installed some kind of rope and tackle assembly, and their generator rested precariously on one of the wooden walkways; its operator, dripping with sweat, had stripped down to his navy, SBFD T-shirt and suspendered overalls. It made Carter sick to his stomach to think of what damage all this equipment might be doing to the as- yet-unrecovered finds that lay below.
The operator glanced up at Carter, and it appeared he knew who he was. Carter was having to get used to that, people knowing who he was without his ever having met them. “Nothing so far,” the guy called out over the thrumming of the motor.
Carter nodded.
Several neighboring sections of the grid had men and women with piles of tools and paraphernalia all around them. Most were on their knees, using chisels and hand picks and stiff brushes to isolate the fossils that had been partially revealed. Others were carefully applying the burlap strips, soaked in plaster of paris, to the areas already exposed; once the cast had hardened, the fossil would be removed, hopefully intact, to the labs, where the finer work would be done.
A couple of the workers looked up as Carter approached, but under their hats and headbands, and with their goggles over their eyes, it was tough to tell who was who. His friend Del, however, he could always pick out. A middle-aged guy with a mane of prematurely white hair (tied up today, quite sensibly, with a thick rubber band), he leaned back on his haunches and pushed his goggles up onto his head.
“Hey, Bones,” he said, using the nickname Carter had acquired years before. “Where you been? We’ve hit the mother lode.”
Carter had to smile. He and Del went way back, to grad school; Del had already been an assistant professor at the time, and he had helped to get Carter on a couple of prize assignments. Now he was a full professor up near Tacoma, and when he’d heard about the situation in L.A., he’d been among the first to heed the call.
“Hell,” he’d said upon arrival, “I was on sabbatical anyway, and I
“Oh yeah? What have you found?”
“We’ve pulled up a six-pack of Tab — you know how hard that is to find these days? — and a Partridge Family lunch box.”
Carter laughed and said, “Don’t forget to catalogue them.” Crouching down, he said, “It looks like you’re making progress.” A thick white layer of plaster was coating a section a few feet square.
“Yeah, we’re getting there. But this plaster’s a bitch to work with in this heat.”
“Foam would have been worse.” A more modern method, which Carter had rejected, was to apply polyurethane foam to an aluminum sheath.
“Would have made a lighter cast,” Del replied.
“But the fumes would have killed us all down here.”
“True,” Del said. “But it’s a small price to pay…”
Carter took off his shirt, draped it over a rung of the rear ladder — the very one that Geronimo had descended — and borrowed a pair of safety goggles from one of the workers too hot to continue. He picked up a chisel and began to work away at an area just beyond the plaster, where what might have been a scapular was still concealed. He felt better the second he started. He felt like himself again — a scientist, doing fieldwork — and not a bureaucrat dodging interview requests. With his head down, and the chisel in his hand, he could forget about all the other distractions and concentrate instead on what he loved… and what he did best.
For the next hour, Carter simply worked, occasionally trading a word or two with one of the other diggers, swigging regularly from the Gatorade bottles that made the rounds, glopping tar into the heavy black buckets. As if by some unspoken consent, the other workers had left the prize area of the La Brea Man’s skull and upper torso to Carter, while they worked in the region of the man’s extremities. Overall, the bones appeared to be remarkably connected still, especially considering the wild frenzy that the man’s entrapment had apparently inspired. Bears, wolves, lions, every predator for miles around must have heard his cries, or seen him flailing to get out, and come running. Ordinarily, they’d have torn a limb loose, and dragged the meaty bone off to consume in safety elsewhere, but in this case the conditions must have been disastrous for all. The tar must have been heated and thick, the temptation of human prey too irresistible, and the fight for a piece of him too violent. All across the pit, the signs of an epic struggle were more than evident.
So why, Carter wondered, were the man’s bones laid almost horizontally? It was quite possible, of course, that they had just been pushed and pulled into that configuration over thousands of years in the tar — bones were scraped and scattered and broken and abraded all the time — but there was something about these that still struck Carter as strange. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed again the plastered dome where the skull now resided. He tried not to look right at it — skulls still had a peculiar resonance that made them hard to ignore, even for Carter — but looking now, he had the impression that the face had indeed been turned up toward the sky at the time of his death. That he had lain flat, surrendering to the tar… and offered himself to the animals that had come to kill him.
Had he just run out of strength and been pinned down by the hot tar? Had he simply given up and resigned himself to his fate? Or had he, out of some primitive atavistic sense, sacrificed his body and his spirit to what he might have perceived as the great chain of being?
“Now this might be interesting,” Del said, prolonging that last word.
Del, sort of the unofficial second-in-command now, had been working a few feet to his left, in the area of the hand.
Carter pushed his goggles back on his head to get a better look.
To a layman’s eye, it would appear to be no more than a lump of tar-covered rock, but to Del, or Carter, it was more than that. It had a special shape, a man-made shape, and it appeared to be cradled in the palm of his hand.
“Looks like something that mattered to him,” Del said, and Carter couldn’t have agreed more. He scooted closer. It might have been a weapon, used in his final struggle. Or simply the last thing, as the breath left his body, that his dead fingers had closed upon.
Or was it something the man might have cherished?
Carter had no more time to consider the possibilities before there was a shout from the other side of the pit. “Yo! We’ve got something.”
Carter turned and heard a high-pitched whine from the generator on the walkway as the pulley chains drew taut.
The other workers all stopped, too, took off their goggles, and waited.
The drag chain, with a steel claw on the end, had been submerged to a depth of twenty-five feet or more. The operator, his damp T-shirt clinging to his body, waved up to another fireman standing at ground level.
The generator rumbled, the chain tightened again and then, slowly, began to pull.
“We’ve got something, that’s for sure,” the operator said, staring down at the now turbulent tar. Methane bubbles pocked the inky black surface.
Stepping around the other workers, Carter crossed to the section of the grid where Geronimo had gone down. The chain was still pulling something up, and Carter found himself thinking, to his own shame, that he was worried it might be a priceless fossil, now damaged beyond repair. Lucky, he thought, that the media could never guess
