“Yeah,” Tully said. “Last known active case, Somalia, 1977. Thirty years and change. So what’s it doing in this picture? And take a look at the blood pooling on the floor there.”
“Looks like a pretty good imitation. It even has flies.”
“Exactly. Not many get that careful, even in these days of universal CGI. And look at the shit all over that altar, and around the bodies. Nobody puts that in, even when they’re going all hyperrealistic.”
Tom felt a crawling at the back of his head and down between his shoulder blades. He’d seen enough dead bodies to know that was one of the things you remembered, and which didn’t get into movies.
“Hell, you’re not saying this sacrifice is real?”
“I’m not saying a goddamned thing, except that he”—Tully stabbed a finger at the high priest holding up knife and heart—“had smallpox, and they”he moved it to the tumbled bodies—“look like the real thing, dead-and-disenhearted-wise.”
Tom laid down the magnifying glass. “Poachers I can believe. Poachers with time travel I don’t.”
“You’re the one who reads that sci-fi stuff,” Tully said. “I’m just pointing out the facts.”
Which would account for the ivory and pelts and the excessively clean condor and—No, stop it, Christiansen! Time travel is scientific nonsense, self-contradictory. And time travelers would have better things to do with their time than smuggle endangered-species products into twenty-first-century California!
“It’s definitely more weird shit, though,” Tom said aloud, thoughtfully. “In a case that’s full of it.”
“Like those investigating. Let’s get on our way. Got an appointment with F, B and I and hopefully we’re going to make arrests this time. Nothing like sweating a suspect to get some real facts.”
INTERLUDE
I wonder why people have taken to calling them the Thirty Families? John Rolfe thought. Only twenty-eight, so far.
The first meeting of the Rolfe Hunt every year had become a central part of the Commonwealth’s social calendar, and all its brand-new ruling class attended, unless caught beyond the Gate by press of business. This autumn very few had missed the occasion here, not while the empires back on FirstSide snarled at each other in the Caribbean and the city-smashing weapons waited on a hair trigger.
At least “The Commonwealth of New Virginia” took, he thought with a wry smile as he took a glass of white wine from a tray and murmured thanks to the girl who carried it. Her father farmed part of this land for the Rolfes, and he made a point of being punctiliously polite to the Settlers affiliated with his family. Apart from being the right thing to do—his father had gotten the importance of manners into him early, with a belt when necessary—in this labor-short economy it was also common sense. Not to mention the political benefits.
The first foxhunt came in late October, after the majority of the grape harvest was in, but before you got much really chilly-wet weather. Rain wouldn’t stop the hunt later in the year, but better weather made the social aspects easier. The tables had been set out on the lawns of Rolfe Hall, where it stood looking southward down the Napa Valley; the hills showed to either side, and Mount Saint Helena loomed green with oak and Douglas fir and redwood behind the big Georgian manor house. It was just getting on to three o’clock and the sky was blue after yesterday’s rain, with a mild pleasant warmth; the hills to either side were turning green, which was a relief after the brown-gold of the Californian summer. Southward past the edge of the ha-ha—a hidden brick-lined dropoff that served to keep livestock off the lawns without a fence to break the view—the leaves in the vineyards were putting on their autumn clothes in fields edged with Lombardy poplar and Italian cypress.
They glowed in every color from pale gold to deep wine red, turning the fields to a dimpled Persian carpet. The Eastern and Rocky Mountain maples he’d planted here back in ’47—several years before the house was started—were tall enough now to add to the symphony of color, scarlet and orange and yellow. Beyond that stretched the yellow of harvested grain fields, and pasture studded with great spreading oaks.
Everyone was here, even ones like Sol Pearlmutter and Andy O’Brien who rode like sacks of potatoes and hated the whole business. The whole pink-coated crowd was circulating as the late posthunt luncheon got under way, socializing and deal making and what Sol called schmoozing; Pearlmutter and his affiliation carefully avoiding von Traupitz and his, and vice versa. Servants were bustling up with trays of appetizers and drinks, and the long table glowed with centerpieces of roses and petunias and rhododendrons. The cheeks of the guests were flushed with country air and exercise, and there was a faint but unmistakable smell of horses among the cut grass and flowers, though all the mounts had been led away to the stables tucked out of sight to the west.
His eldest son Charles came toward him, leading a certain guest. John Rolfe hid his smile of pride behind a grave nod. The fifteen-year-old was nearly his father’s height, already five-foot-nine. He would be taller when he had his full growth, and a bit broader; his hair was darker, a brown touched with russet, and his eyes hazel. Right now his face was a little stiff with the responsibility—Charles was a good lad, intelligent and hardworking, if anything a little too conscious of his duties as a Rolfe and the eldest son.
A bit shy, I think, his father thought. And more serious than I was at his age. Less of a wild streak.
“Thank you for showing Lord Chumley around, Charles,” he said aloud.
“My pleasure, sir,” Charles said.
“And now you’re free to seek company younger and prettier,” Rolfe replied with a smile, letting it grow a little at the boy’s blush.
“My apologies for not showing you around personally,” he said to the older man when young Charles was lost amid the crowd. “The news about the Cuban crisis has been rather disturbing and I’ve been keeping close tabs through our contacts on FirstSide. None of the missiles there could reach California… but there might be a Soviet submarine off the coast. Or even inside the bay.”
“Too right,” the other man said. “Still, we’re safe enough here.”
“Yes. But it’s been difficult, keeping our FirstSide operations going while evacuating everyone from the Families here to the Commonwealth. I trust you’ve not been unduly inconvenienced.”
“It’s been interesting. Damnation, it’s been fascinating, Mr. Rolfe.”
“John, I think?”
Lord Chumley was a little shorter and plumper than his host. His hair—and a mustache worn in the bushy style the RAF had favored during the Battle of Britain—had turned white, where gray had only begun to streak the temples of the Virginian. His eyes were blue and very direct, and more intelligent than his bluff manner might suggest; his upper-class British speech had a hint of something harder and more nasal beneath it. By hereditary right he was Baron Chumley, and could claim a seat in the House of Lords, but his father had come to the equatorial uplands west of Mount Kenya in 1905, and he had been born and reared there. He’d also spent much of the 1950s leading a counter-gang against the Mau Mau in the forests of the Aberdares mountains.
“And Cecil, by all means. But returning to business, John,” Chumley said. “I’m certainly going to accept your offer. My oath, I’d be a bloody fool not to!”