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sounds of their boots and shoes were loud in the numbing silence inside this rock tomb. Their breaths sounded labored and louder inside the mountain, each exhale echoing back at them.
    To distract himself Palmer shined his cell phone flashlight at the rock walls as he walked past them.
    The walls were definitely closing in, the path getting narrower with each step they took—he was sure of that.
    Palmer looked for traces of blood on the walls as they walked past them, but he didn’t see any at all. He shined the light beam from his phone down at the hard-packed dirt floor expecting to see smears of blood and drag marks from the bodies. But there was nothing—only a fine powdery dust and small rocks kicked to the base of the rock walls after countless trips back and forth through this passageway by the archaeologists. He saw that the construction lamps had been set on the floor every hundred feet or so, connected together by the electrical cords. He wished those lights were on right now.
    A thought occurred to Palmer and once it popped into his mind he couldn’t get rid of it: What if the spotlight Klein was using went out? What if Begay’s flashlight went out, too? What if the batteries died? All of the other electrical equipment around here seemed to have malfunctioned before … what if their flashlights went out?
    What was wrong with him? He’d never been this nervous before. It was a straight shot out of the cave; there was no way they could lose their way. Besides, there was the string of lanterns and electrical cords to follow like a trail of breadcrumbs.
    He knew once the forensics team got here they would get another generator running and get these lights working again.
    “How far inside the cave are these bodies?” Palmer asked, his words bouncing off the smooth rock walls right back to him. He hoped he didn’t sound nervous.
    “This passageway opens up to a big cavern,” Begay said from the darkness behind him. His voice was so low and deep the echoes made his words a little difficult to understand.
    “Why would the killer have brought these bodies all the way back here?” Klein asked more to himself than to Begay or Palmer. “To hide them?”
    Neither Begay nor Palmer responded to Klein’s question, but to Palmer it seemed like hiding the bodies way back here in the cave was a lot of trouble to go through. He had to agree with Klein that there had to be more than one killer working here. It was hard to believe one man could’ve pulled all of this off. Now he was beginning to rethink his earlier theory, coming up with a new scenario now. What if it wasn’t one of the scientists who’d done this?
    Then who? Robbers?
    Maybe some of the artifacts the archaeologists had dug out of this cave were worth a lot of money. Palmer didn’t know for sure. He felt certain they had to be worth something. Maybe a band of robbers had staked out the dig site and waited for the right time to attack and steal the artifacts.
    But if that scenario were true, then why were there so many artifacts left behind inside the trailer? Maybe the robbers had been looking for gold. Would some of the artifacts have been made out of precious metals? Palmer couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t an expert on archaeology, but it was something to consider.
    Another thought came to him: What if some kind of activists killed these archaeologists, some kind of eco-terrorists who felt that these archaeologists were destroying the environment or harming Mother Earth?
    It wasn’t so far-fetched. Maybe they weren’t everyday big news, but eco-terrorists were real. Maybe they weren’t such a big deal back east, but they could be a force to contend with in the west. Eco-terrorists had amassed more property damage than all other terrorists combined in the United States. But they didn’t usually kill people—especially not purposely.
    Then another thought occurred to him. What if some of the local Native Americans, the Navajo, were displeased with