“Margo,” he said, giving her a handshake that turned into a slightly awkward embrace. “Great to see you.”

“Likewise.”

“You’re looking wonderful. I’m really glad you could make it on short notice.”

They sat down. D’Agosta had called her out of the blue just the day before, asking if they could meet somewhere in the Museum. She’d suggested Chaco.

D’Agosta looked around. “The place sure has changed since you and I first met. How many years ago was that, anyway?”

“The time of the Museum killings?” Margo thought a moment. “Eleven years. No, twelve.”

“Unbelievable.”

A waiter brought them menus, the covers emblazoned with a silhouette of Kokopelli. D’Agosta ordered an iced tea, and she did likewise. “So. What have you been up to all this time?”

“I’m now working at a nonprofit medical foundation on the East Side. The Pearson Institute.”

“Oh yeah? Doing what?”

“I’m their ethnopharmacologist. I evaluate indigenous botanical remedies, looking for potential drugs.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

“It is.”

“Still teaching?”

“I got burned out on that. There’s a potential here to help thousands, instead of one classroom.”

D’Agosta picked up the menu again, perused it. “Found any wonder drugs?”

“The biggest thing I’ve worked on so far is a compound in the bark of the ceiba tree that might help with epilepsy and Parkinson’s. The Maya use it for treating dementia in old people. Problem is, it takes forever to develop a new drug.”

The waiter returned, and they gave their orders. D’Agosta looked back at her. “On the phone, you mentioned you visit the Museum regularly.”

“Two or three times a month, at least.”

“Why is that?”

“The sad fact is that the natural habitats of these botanicals I study are being logged, burned, or plowed under at a terrifying rate. God knows how many potential cures for cancer have already gone extinct. The Museum has the finest ethnobotanical collection in the world. Of course, they didn’t have me in mind when they assembled it — they were simply gathering up local medicines and magical remedies from tribes around the world. But it’s perfectly geared to my research. There are plants in the Museum’s collections that simply can’t be found in nature anymore.” She stopped, reminding herself that not everyone shared her passion for the work.

D’Agosta folded his hands together. “Well, as it happens, your being a regular here works out perfectly for me.”

“How so?”

He leaned forward slightly. “You heard about the recent homicide here, right?”

“You mean Vic Marsala? I used to work with him when I was a graduate student in the Anthro Department. I was one of the few people he actually got along with.” Margo shook her head. “I can’t believe anyone would kill him.”

“Well, I’m in charge of the investigation. And I need your help.”

Margo didn’t reply.

“It seems Marsala was working with a visiting scientist not long before his death. Marsala helped this scientist locate and examine a specimen in the anthropology collections — the skeleton of a Hottentot male. Agent Pendergast’s been helping me with the case, and he seemed to be interested in the skeleton.”

“Go on,” Margo said.

D’Agosta hesitated. “It’s just that… well… Pendergast vanished. Left town night before last, leaving no word where he can be reached. You know how he is. On top of that, we discovered just yesterday that the credentials of the visiting scientist working with Marsala were fake.”

“Fake?”

“Yeah. False accreditation. Claimed to be Dr. Jonathan Waldron, a physical anthropologist with a university outside Philly, but the real Waldron knows nothing about it. I interviewed him myself. He’s never even been to the Museum.”

“How do you know he isn’t the killer, and is just claiming to know nothing about it?”

“I showed his photograph to the Anthropology staff. Totally different person. He’s a foot shorter and twenty years older.”

“Bizarre.”

“Yeah. Why would somebody pretend to be somebody else just to look at a skeleton?”

“You think this phony scientist killed Marsala?”

“I don’t think anything yet. But it’s a damned good lead, first one I’ve got. So…” He hesitated. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to have a look at the skeleton yourself.”

“Me?” Margo asked. “Why?”

“You’re an anthropologist.”

“Yes, but my specialty is ethnopharmacology. I haven’t done any physical anthropology since graduate school.”

“I’ll bet you can still run circles around most of the anthropologists here. Besides, I can trust you. You’re here, you know the Museum — but you’re not on staff.”

“My research keeps me pretty busy.”

“Just a look. On the side. I’d really appreciate your opinion.”

“I really can’t see what an old Hottentot skeleton would have to do with a murder.”

“I don’t know, either. But it’s my only lead so far. Look, Margo, do this for me. You knew Marsala. Please help me solve his murder.”

Margo sighed. “If you put it that way, how can I say no?”

“Thank you.” D’Agosta smiled. “Oh, and lunch is on me.”

Clad in faded jeans, a denim shirt with studded buttons, and old cowboy boots, Agent A. X. L. Pendergast surveyed the Salton Sea from the thick cover of ripgut grass at the fringes of the Sonny Bono National Wildlife Refuge. Brown pelicans could be seen hovering over the dark waters, wheeling and crying. It was half past ten in the morning, and the temperature stood at a comfortable 109 degrees.

The Salton Sea was not a sea at all, but rather an inland lake. It had been created by accident at the turn of the twentieth century, when an ill-conceived network of irrigation canals was destroyed by heavy rains, sending the water of the Colorado River flooding into the Salton Sink, submerging the town of Salton and eventually creating a lake covering almost four hundred square miles. For a time the region was fertile, and a series of resorts and vacation towns sprang up along the shores. But as the waters receded and grew increasingly salty, the towns were left high and dry, the vacationers stopped coming, and the resorts went bankrupt. Now the area — with its barren desert hills and salt-encrusted shores, fringed by wrecked trailer parks and abandoned 1950s resorts — looked like the world after nuclear armageddon. It was a land that had been depopulated, skeletonized, burned to white, a brutal landscape where nothing lived — save thousands upon thousands of birds.

Pendergast found it most appealing.

He put up his powerful binoculars and walked back out to his car — a 1998 pearl-colored Cadillac DeVille. He drove back to Route 86 and began making his way up the Imperial Valley, following the western edge of the sea. Along the way, he stopped at roadside stands and sad-looking “antiques” shops, where he spent time examining the merchandise, asking about collectibles and dead pawn Indian jewelry, passing out his card, and occasionally buying something.

Around noon, he pointed the Caddy down an unmarked back road, drove a couple of miles, and parked at the foot of the Scarrit Hills, a series of naked ridges and peaks stripped to the bone by erosion and devoid of life. Plucking the binoculars from the passenger seat, he exited the car and trekked up the nearest rise, slowing as he approached the summit. Ducking behind a large rock, he fitted the binoculars to his eyes and slowly peered over the crest.

To the east, the foothills ran down to the desert floor and, perhaps a mile away, the bleak shores of the Salton Sea itself. Wind devils crawled across the salt flats, whipping up cyclones of dust.

Below him, halfway between the hills and the shore, a bizarre structure rose from the desert floor, weather-beaten and dilapidated. It was a vast, sprawling mélange of concrete and wood, once painted in garish colors but now bleached almost white, studded with gables, minarets, and pagodas, like some fantastical cross between a Chinese temple and an Asbury Park amusement parlor. This was the former Salton Fontainebleau. Sixty years before, it had been the most lavish resort on the Salton Sea, known as “Las Vegas South,” frequented by movie stars and mobsters. An Elvis film had been shot on its beaches and capacious verandas. The Rat Pack had sung in its lounges, and people like Frank Costello and Moe Dalitz had cut deals in its back rooms. But then the waters of the sea had receded from the resort’s elegant piers, the increasing salinity had killed the fish, which washed up in stinking, rotting piles, and the resort had been abandoned to the sun, winds, and migrating birds.