Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

A few weeks before Matty’s death, he’d said Survivor 2012 had made him feel like he was a part of something. At the time, she’d mocked the Zipacna shtick and offered to make her brother a tinfoil hat. After his murder, she’d focused on the group of nutbags he’d joined, needing to blame someone else. Now she wished she could take back the mockery, wished she could go back in time and really listen to her brother. Wished she’d pushed him more, helped him more.

If she had, he wouldn’t have needed to turn to a group like this for a sense of family support . . . and he might not’ve been in the wrong place at the wrong time during the equinox.

‘‘A penny for your thoughts,’’ a man said from directly behind Leah.

She stiffened, then relaxed as she identified the voice. Turning and dredging up a smile, she said, ‘‘Hey, Vince. Just getting my bearings.’’

The programmer was wearing a tux as uninspired as his penny-for-your-thoughts line, and his medium-brown hair was brushed neatly—and uninspiringly—flat in defiance of its usual haphazard nonstyle. His eyes were a bland hazel, his smile unassuming as he said, ‘‘I’m glad you came. I wasn’t sure you would after the other day.’’

They’d gotten into it on the phone a few days earlier, when she’d told him her suspicions were moving away from Survivor2012. Vince had been so fervent in his insistance that Zipacna was the Calendar Killer that Leah had started to wonder if he had another agenda altogether, one that she’d gotten caught up in because she’d needed someone other than herself to blame over Matty’s loss.

‘‘I’m here,’’ she said noncommittally. ‘‘You said you wanted to show me something.’’

She was already regretting having come. Should’ve broken it off the other day, she thought. Her grief had moved past the point where she needed to lean on Vince as a connection to her brother. But as she’d started to ease away he’d gotten clingy, suggesting he wasn’t there yet. So she’d decided to stick it out a few more weeks or months, figuring she owed him a little longer in the lean-on-me department.

Besides, his background check had come back whistle-clean and he didn’t register on her cop creep-o-meter. He was just a guy who’d lost a friend, and was looking for someone to blame. Unlike her, though, he didn’t seem to be moving past his conviction that Zipacna was the serial killer responsible for Matty’s death. Not yet, anyway.

‘‘Matt told me about a special room where they perform their rituals.’’ Vince’s throat worked. ‘‘I want to check it out.’’

‘‘It was included in the last warrant,’’ Leah argued. ‘‘They didn’t find anything.’’

Actually, that wasn’t precisely true. The crime scene folk had said the room was a mosaic of semen stains, vaginal contributions, and blood—but the former weren’t illegal, and the latter hadn’t been substantial enough to suggest exsanguination, but instead had been consistent with the smaller ritual bloodlettings the members of Survivor 2012 readily admitted engaging in.

‘‘Humor me?’’ Vince’s expression went sheepish. ‘‘Look, I know you’re losing steam on this, and I understand. I really do. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I’m not ready to let go yet. I need something . . . more.’’

Because she could relate, and because she figured it’d give their nonrelationship enough closure that she could walk away without feeling too much like a bitch, she nodded. ‘‘Okay. Let’s go.’’

Keeping an eye out for security—half-naked or otherwise—they worked their way across the main room to an offshoot hallway, passing a glossy sign that told them they were headed into the Temple of Wisdom. Said temple proved to be a series of small classrooms furnished with tables and chairs, and flat-screen TVs running documentaries. There were a few partygoers in each room, and Leah slowed down enough to catch snippets of the narration as she and Vince passed.

‘‘The Maya used the tall pyramids as landmarks,’’ said the voice-over in the first room, which held five people deep in conversation. The TV showed an aerial image of three piles of rubble—presumably former pyramids— poking up from a sea of green leaves. ‘‘They could see them over the rain forest canopy, and navigate from one to the next.’’

Which was pretty clever, Leah thought as they moved on.

The screen in the next room, which had a few more people in it, most of whom seemed to be paying attention, showed a CGI rendering of the earth, sun and moon, and the narrator intoned, ‘‘. . . the Mayan Long Count calendar is based on astronomy and the end date of December 21, 2012, when the next Great Conjunction will occur. Other cultures, completely separate from the Maya, have also fixated on this date as a time of great change.’’

‘‘Guess we found the propaganda,’’ Vince said. ‘‘Come on.’’

They moved past two more classrooms—another pyramid lecture and more astronomy, or else the same films running on different schedules—and stopped when the corridor teed into another. A table blocking the hallway to the left was hung with a discreet sign that read, NO GUESTS BEYOND THIS POINT, PLEASE.

‘‘Not exactly high-level security,’’ Leah said as they squeezed past the table and moved into the corridor beyond.

‘‘The cops didn’t find anything,’’ Vince said, in what sounded a little like a dig. ‘‘Zipacna’s probably not worried anymore.’’

Or he didn’t have anything to worry about in the first place, Leah thought but didn’t say, because she just wanted to get this over with and go home. The weird vibes coming off Vince only strengthened her resolve to end their nonrelationship ASAP. The only thing keeping her going now was the memory of how fondly Matty had spoken of his friend. Vince had been there for him when Cheryl had taken off. Leah, not so much.

For that, she figured she owed the guy.

‘‘Here.’’ Vince stopped in front of a floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted case holding a bunch of worn stone statues, all stylized variations of the crocodile god Zipacna. ‘‘It’s behind here.’’

‘‘If you’re going to break something, I’m leaving.’’ Hell, she should leave now. But she stayed put as he pressed his palm against the wall and said something under his breath.

The display case swung inward on concealed hinges. The moment the door opened, torches flared to life, one at each corner of the room that was revealed in the firelight, and a trickle of water became audible. The walls were lined with stones—fake or real, she wasn’t sure—carved with row after row of glyphs. Unlike the ones out in the main room, these carvings looked more like formal writing, as though the walls could tell a story if she knew how to read the hieroglyphs. Above the writing, about chest-high, a wavy line of brilliant blue was painted all the way around the room. Above that, human skulls were carved into the stone in relief up near the ceiling. Water cascaded from each of their mouths, tumbling down to a shallow trench running the perimeter of the room and no doubt recirculating in the bizarre fountain.

In the center of the space sat a carved stone altar shaped like a man lying on his back, balancing a stone slab.

‘‘The chac-mool ,’’ Vince said, indicating the recumbent figure. ‘‘Sometimes a throne, sometimes an altar.’’ He paused. ‘‘Sometimes a place of sacrifice.’’

‘‘Shit.’’ Leah stared at it, frozen. This was way freakier than she’d expected, and somehow familiar. She hated that she could picture Matty here, could picture him doing some of the stuff the task force had included in their reports, which ranged from small bloodlettings to full-on orgies, all part of prayers to a pantheon that hadn’t mattered since the fifteen hundreds, in an effort to avert a doomsday nobody sane believed in.