Lina hadn’t been looking forward to that question. The jaguar altar could have come from a relatively large number of sites. But the mask…
“It depends on your interpretation of the symbols around the mask,” she said.
“It’s stone,” Hunter said. “Couldn’t tell what kind. Too dark. It could even have been cement. Bigger than life by about twice.”
“If the artifact is only a tenth as well done as the sketch, I doubt that it’s made of cement,” Lina said.
“Was that a compliment?” Jase asked, looking at Hunter with a sly smile.
“Truth,” Lina said to Hunter. “You should be an artist.”
He looked bemused. “Pay sucks.”
“If you could take the Yucatan jungle, you’d be real useful on a dig,” she said.
Jase laughed. “Ma’am, Hunter spends half his time in Mexico, on back roads or worse.”
She looked at Hunter as though seeing him for the first time. “Really.”
He tapped the second drawing. “Let’s stay on topic.”
Visibly, Lina thought over whether to accept the change of subject. When she did, Hunter suspected he’d be hearing more about art later. That was okay. He’d be glad to get naked and talk about whatever she wanted.
At length.
Depth, too.
“This looks like an elaborate stone mask,” she said. “The crown or whatever is unusual, more like stylized sun rays or something shining from or through the mask. It reminds me of…”
“What?” Hunter asked.
“Come with me. I have a piece of wood I want you to look at.”
Jase made a choking sound and looked sideways at Hunter’s lap.
Hunter flipped him off.
But he was grateful for the walk through the museum’s maze, because his pants fit better at the end of the stroll than at the beginning.
Quickly Lina walked toward a room that held special, temporary cases—locked, controlled for temperature and humidity. Every step of the way she told herself that she was imagining the waves of sexual heat coming off Hunter. Her outfit was a simple dark pantsuit, nothing clingy, nothing feminine, no peekaboo tease, nothing to make her feel like Hunter’s glance was caressing her hips.
She remembered, she just didn’t care. Maybe her previously unsuspected bad-girl self was coming out to play.
Automatically Lina punched in her code, held the door for the men to enter the room, and made sure the door locked again.
The door opened into a room flooded with cool, blue-white light. The illumination was indirect, bounced from hidden lights, with no obvious source. Inside a transparent, humidity-controlled case, a sheet of very dark red wood rested on a stark white sheet. The wood was perhaps twenty inches long, two-thirds as wide, and appeared to be the top of a sacred box that had once held a god bundle.
Each time Lina saw the artifact, it took her breath and set her mind on fire. There was something richly organic and alive about the wood, as if it might flow right out of the case into a Maya priest’s smoke dreams. A crack ran across the lower third of the artifact, a new break that told of a missing wedge of wood.
Hunter looked from the dark wood to Lina’s face. The distance between this room and the bloody evil of the basement was so great he had a hard time holding it in his mind. Belatedly he realized Lina was talking.
“Then we’ll verify the age by several kinds of analysis,” Lina said. She looked at him. “Hunter?”
“Sorry. The contrast between this museum room and that barrio basement…” He shook his head
She put her hand on his arm. “The job you and Jase do must be nearly impossible.”
“One of the reasons I’m no longer with ICE,” Hunter agreed, putting his hand over hers.
Jase looked from one to the other and felt invisible. He had always accepted Hunter’s differences—especially his intense awareness of things most other people didn’t notice—but every so often Jase was reminded all over again. Like now. He had a sense of what Lina and Hunter were talking about, yet he didn’t quite understand it.
But they certainly did. Even Jase could feel the sexual energy between them. It made him think about going home and nibbling on his wife. All over.
Lina cleared her throat and turned to the artifact case and the oddly radiant wood, taking refuge in professionalism. It was either that or start undressing Hunter with more than her mind.
“After I saw your photos,” she said, “I reviewed every bit of private and published research on the Kawa’il cult. When I found nothing to explain most of your artifacts, I looked for reasons why someone might create counterfeits. Only a few people in the world care enough to go to those lengths. My father does, but he couldn’t. It’s not a matter of professional standards so much as creating those artifacts would take an act of imagination that he simply isn’t capable of.”
She looked at Hunter, trying to see if he understood.
He nodded. “What about Mercurio?”
“Possible, of course. But impossible to keep secret. Take the mask in your photo,” she said. “Even today, creating that from a piece of obsidian would take artisans of enormous sophistication a very long time to complete. No matter where you find those people, they will have friends, associates, competitors, whatever. Over time, that number of people can’t keep a secret. If the piece is machined, rather than handmade, the ‘secret’ is out as soon as someone who knows what they’re doing examines it under a microscope.”
“In other words, why bother?” Hunter said.
“Exactly. To me, that mask looks even more sophisticated than Aztec mask work, which is considered by many to be the zenith of the art.”
“Anything else?” Hunter asked.
“Your mask glowed and reflected like a smoking mirror, which is one interpretation of glyphs associated with priests of Kawa’il.”
Hunter whistled tunelessly. “And Kawa’il is a god of death. Then and now.”
“It makes a whacked sort of sense,” Jase said. “Cartels are always looking for an edge in the fear department. Living human sacrifices made to a god of death are scarier than the narco’s Santa Muerte cult with its ghosts and groans.”
“That’s a travesty of the original intention of sacrifice, literally to be made holy,” she said. “In the past, the ritual was an act of awe and reverence, a way to communicate with the gods, with the very structure of the Maya universe. Look at this piece of wood. Look with your mind and emotions as well as your eyes and experience.”
Jase and Hunter leaned closer, but it was Hunter’s warmth she felt.
“This”—Lina traced the glyphs in the wood, not quite touching the case itself—“is the radiance of the gods and their wisdom shared, brought to the Maya by a priest-king-god who climbed up from the earth wearing a mask like a smoking mirror, his very breath the exhalation of gods.”
Hunter’s eyes narrowed. He followed her words, her finger, her voice describing a sacrament rather than the barbarism of the basement in a crumbling stucco house.
“The carving is of dream serpents,” Lina said. “See the delicate tracery of individual feathers on the mouths of the beasts? The carver didn’t see these creatures as monsters in the modern sense of the word. They were guardians, keepers of knowledge that was sometimes bestowed upon the wise, the brave, the worthy.”
Jase grunted. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Hunter didn’t look up from the case. Lina’s voice curled around him, sank into him like smoke, like dreams.
“The central image,” Lina said softly, almost reverently, “shows a human figure emerging from the fanged
