Kiss of the Bees

With her legs shaking beneath her, she staggered across the room. A few feet away, she stopped beside the easel. There in front of her was a picture—a picture that was undeniably of her.

Mr. Vega saw her stop beside the picture and look. “Well,” he said. “What do you think? Is this the kind of thing you had in mind for your parents’ anniversary present?”

“Tohntomthadag!” she said.

“You were talking Indian, weren’t you,” he observed. “What do those words mean?”

Lani Walker shook her head. She never had told Danny Jenkins that s-koshwa means “stupid.” Not caring what he might do to her, she didn’t tell Mr. Vega that in Tohono O’othham, the single word she had spoken, tohntomthadag, means “pervert.”

In the forty minutes between the time Brian Fellows called Dispatch for assistance and the arrival of the detective, Brian stayed in the Blazer. Working on a metal clipboard, he started constructing the necessary paper trail of the incident. He began with the call summoning him to assist Kath Kelly and had worked his way up to unearthing the bones when he realized how stupid he was. Rattlesnake Skull, the ancient village that had once been near the charco, had been deserted for a long time, but it had probably been inhabited for hundreds of years before that. It made sense, then, that there would be nothing so very surprising about finding a set of human remains in that general area. In fact, it was possible there were dozens more right around there.

Brian Fellows was still considered a novice as far as the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was concerned. He cringed at how that kind of mistake might be viewed by some of the department’s more hard-boiled homicide dicks, none of whom would be thrilled at the idea of being dragged away from a Saturday-afternoon poolside barbecue to investigate a corpse that turned out to be two or three hundred years old.

Brian was putting together his backpedal routine when a dusty gray departmental Ford Taurus pulled up beside him. When the burly shape of a cigar-chomping detective climbed out of the driver’s seat, Brian breathed a sigh of relief. Dan Leggett. Of all the detectives Brian might have drawn, Dan Leggett would have been his first choice. Dan was one of the old-timers, someone who had been around for a long time. Dan had grown up in law enforcement under Brandon Walker’s leadership. He had a reputation for doing a thorough, professional job.

Tossing his clipboard to one side, Brian clambered out of the Blazer and hurried forward to meet the man.

“So what have you got here, Deputy Fellows?” Leggett asked. He handed Brian a plastic water jug and then paused to light a half-smoked cigar while Brian gulped a long drink. “Dispatch tells me they sent you out here to investigate a dead steer,” he continued once the cigar was lit. “They claim you turned that steer into first a beating and now a homicide.”

“I never said it was a homicide,” Brian corrected, hoping to salvage a smidgeon of pride. “And it isn’t even a whole body. I dug up some human bones is all. If it turns out to be some Indian who’s been dead a few hundred years, you’ll probably think I’m a complete idiot.”

“Suppose you show me where these bones are and let me take a look for myself. Afterward, depending on the results, we can take a vote on Deputy Brian Fellows’s powers of observation and general reliability.”

“This way,” Brian said. He led Detective Leggett over to his small collection of previously unearthed skeletal remains. “There’s a skull down there too,” the young deputy said. “Down there, toward the far end of the hole. As soon as I realized what it was, I left it there for fear of destroying evidence.”

Leggett blew out a cloud of smoke, held the cigar so he was upwind of both the cigar and the smoke and downwind of the bones. He stood there for a moment, sniffing the air. Finally, he stuffed the cigar back in his mouth.

“Thank God whoever it is has been dead long enough that he or she doesn’t stink,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a second cigar and offered it to Brian. “Care for a smoke?” he asked.

Brian shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said.

Leggett shrugged and stuffed the cigar back in his pocket. “Just wait,” he said. “If you’re in the dead-body business long enough, you’ll figure out that there are times when nothing beats a good cigar. At least, that’s what I keep telling my wife.”

Clearly amused by his own joke, Leggett was still chuckling as he pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves and then dropped to his hands and knees in the dirt. Chomping down on the lit cigar, he held it firmly in place while he used both hands to paw away loose sand. Brian kept his mouth shut and watched from the sidelines.

It wasn’t long before Dan Leggett picked up a small piece of bone and tossed it casually onto the pile with the others. “Looks like a finger to me,” he mumbled.

Still saying nothing, Brian waited anxiously for Leggett to locate the skull. Eventually he did, pulling it out of the dirt and then holding it upside down while sand and pebbles drained out through the gaping holes that had once been eyes and nose. When the skull was finally empty, Dan Leggett examined it for some time without saying a word. Finally, with surprising delicacy, he set it down on the ground beside the hole, then he stood for another long moment, staring at it thoughtfully while he took several leisurely puffs on his cigar.

Brian Fellows found the long silence difficult to bear, but he didn’t say a word. Lowly deputies—especially ones who intend to survive in the law enforcement game—learn early on the importance of keeping their mouths shut in the presence of tough-guy homicide detectives. Finally, Leggett looked up at Brian and gave him a yellow-toothed grin.

“Well, Deputy Fellows,” Leggett said, “it looks to me like you’re in the clear on this one.” He knocked a chunk of ash off the end of the cigar, but Brian noticed he was careful none of it landed in the hole or on any of the recently disturbed dirt around it.

Brian had been holding his breath. Slowly he let it out. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Because, if this guy had been dead for a couple hundred years, I doubt his head would have five or six silver fillings. I doubt the Indians who lived around here back then were much into modern dentistry.”

“No,” Brian agreed. “I suppose not. Can you tell what killed him?”

Leggett shook his head. “Much too soon to tell,” he said. “Looks like there was quite a blow to his head, but it doesn’t mean that’s what killed him.”

Stuffing the cigar back in his mouth, the detective climbed out of the hole. Brian was surprised to think the