Page 32 of Badlands

“Yes. She’d spent a few summers with him in the field. According to the mother, her work had been first-class. But then she abruptly dropped her doctorate studies, saw a therapist for a while, drifted around, and finally got a teaching certificate.”

“Dr. Lemmon speculated the sudden dropping of her studies coincided with Oskarbi leaving the university.”

“‘Abandoning them’ was the way he put it.”

“I’d take that with a grain of salt,” Nora said. “I got a pretty strong whiff of professional jealousy from Dr. Lemmon.”

Corrie nodded. “It’s true, Molly’s mother had only good things to say about Oskarbi. But then, she was also adamant her daughter didn’t commit suicide… despite living through what I have to believe was a pretty rough decade or more.”

“Oskarbi’s other ‘groupies’ seemed to rebound well enough. Look at Bellagamba: she was one of them herself, but I don’t see any signs of resentment about how her advisor left. If anything, she was overly defensive of him.”

“Exactly.”

They had cleared the grounds of the university and were now headed for the interstate. “But Bellagamba also said that she knew Molly quite well,” Nora added. “She called her an old handwith the desert. If that’s true, she wouldn’t be the kind of person likely to end up stranded without water and dying of heatstroke, unless it was deliberate.”

After a moment, Corrie shrugged. “I can’t deny that obnoxious professor got my goat. But still, I can’t help but wonder if the two disappearances are related.”

“You mean, Oskarbi and Molly Vine?” To Nora this seemed like a long shot, even for Corrie: not only were the two events separated by almost a decade, but there was no mystery surrounding the professor’s return to Mexico.

Just then, Corrie’s work phone rang. She picked it up. “Agent Swanson.”

As Nora watched, Corrie’s knuckles whitened around the cell phone. “Yes. Yes. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. Thanks.”

She ended the call and looked over at Nora. “They just found another body.”

“What?”

Corrie nodded. “One of our search helicopters spotted it. The sector’s totally different—the chopper was actually on its way back to the airfield when the body was spotted. Pilot said the surroundings were too gnarly for a landing, but telephoto images show a lot of similarities: absolute middle of nowhere, mostly nude, young… at least, apparently young.”

“You mean, there’s a body—not just bones?”

“So it seems.”

“Did they say where the body was spotted?”

“Near something called Pierre’s Ruins—in case that rings a bell.”

“Oh, Christ.” It certainly did. “The pilot was right—that area’s so remote and broken up you couldn’t get in there with a Bradley.”

“So how do we get to the body?”

“On horseback. Unless you want to walk.”

Corrie drove in silence a moment, taking this new development in. “Horseback sounds better to me. And I think I know just who to tap for a guide.”

18

THE3500 HEAVYDuty pickup moved northeast along IS Route 7023, Sheriff Homer Watts driving slowly to make sure the bad road jounced the attached horse trailer as little as possible.

He looked over at Corrie. “You’ve been in New Mexico now—what? Eighteen months? You’ve seen more of the state than most natives.”

“I never knew it was so big—or varied,” replied Corrie as she looked out the window at what could only be called another trackless landscape. It couldn’t be called beautiful, but it had a sort of Zen-like purity to it that Corrie found evocative, albeit intimidating.

Corrie had worked with Homer Watts on several cases. The elected sheriff of Socorro County, he had successfully kept himself above the kind of politics rife in law enforcement. Despite his silver-belly Resistol hat and six-gun cowboy rig, Watts was not a typical good-old-boy sheriff. Not only was he absurdly young, but he was quick-witted, modest, and far more experienced than his fresh-faced good looks would imply. Corrie had felt attracted to him from the first, and the attraction was mutual—but they had both heldfeelings in check until the end of the Dead Mountain case, when she’d almost gotten killed. She realized then that life was not something to be put off. Their romance was still new—they’d spent two weekends together camping in the mountains but saw each other infrequently, trying to keep their relationship separate from work. She hadn’t yet seen the inside of his cabin.

“Well, you picked a doozy this time,” he told her, chuckling.

“Why’s that?”

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