Tears of the Jaguar by A.J. Hartley

attractive made life easy. Not, Krista thought, in academia. She had realized some time ago that compliments on her appearance and youth were slightly backhanded, that they implied that she wasn’t serious or smart enough. Perhaps, she sometimes thought, if she was meaner, harder, quicker to rub her achievements in people’s faces, life would be easier. But then she would be a different person, one she didn’t wish to become.
    “It’s not unusual to find stingray spines at a royal burial site even a long way from the sea,” she said. “The Maya imported the spines from the coastal regions and they had great ritual significance because they were used in bloodletting rites.”
    She grimaced playfully, guessing that they would know how the spines were used. They were passed through parts of the body, the blood being caught on fabric or paper or in some kind of vessel, and offered to the gods. Sometimes thorns were used, fastened to string or rope and threaded through the tongue of the self-sacrificer, but stingray spines were particularly special.
    “The barbs mean that you can’t go back once you start,” she said. “They have to go all the way through. Men usually put them through their penises. I imagine it must have been very painful.”
    Martin Bowerdale raised his eyebrows at what he clearly took to be an understatement, but Rylands just gave her a withering stare.
    “You done with the lecture?” he snapped. “We know what they were used for. We also know that they are usually found in the groin area of the body because they were carried in some kind of pouch there. And there is one like that on the body, see?”
    He trained the beam of his flashlight inside the coffin with one hand and used the pencil in his other hand to indicate a slender spine down there among the bones and dust.
    “But the one I found over there,” he said, nodding toward the door, “is different.”
    He gently raised the second spine for their inspection. It was much more polished, and the difference between the two was instantly visible.
    Krista, who had flushed at his rebuke, went quiet and stared at the spine, her eyes prickling.
    “But the site has been tainted,” said Deborah Miller. It clearly pained her to say it, so Krista managed an encouraging smile to the project leader. “Maybe whoever stole the other artifacts dropped it.”
    “Fished it out of the groin of the skeleton,” said Rylands, “but didn’t bother to get the other one that is still there or disturb the bone bundle that was on top of them, and then dropped it on the way out? No.”
    “Was it on the video we shot when we first opened the tomb?”
    “Not on the floor, no,” said Rylands. “But it was...
here
.”
    He pointed at the video monitor to a bundle, the one that had disappeared. It had contained, they said, a handful of strange red stones, a carved and polished length of wood, a ring, and a gold rod with a dove on the end, though in the video the bundle was still rolled up, about eighteen inches long and tied with bright thread. The fabric had moldered, though not as badly as Krista would have expected given the tomb’s age, and you could see a dozen or so small ivory-colored objects showing through the bundle: bones. Lying with them, poking out through the decayed fabric was a black, needlelike spine.
    “So the thief took the bundle and the spine fell out,” said Bowerdale. “The fabric was shot and it fell apart when he picked it up. So?”
    Rylands had fast-forwarded to footage of Bowerdale unwrapping the bundle. One of the red stones fell out and the light fluctuated as they searched for it.
    “Have you found any of those small bones as well?” said Deborah Miller.
    Krista watched Deborah Miller wince at the video, the appearance of amateurism as Bowerdale fumbled for the dropped gemstone. She understood why Miller had made the decisionto lock the site down till the lab was ready to bring everything in. The thought that it had, in