David had explained the law as he understood it, cautioning that he had not looked up Oklahoma law yet. If Calligan had “treasure rights,” that meant that valuable artifacts that seemed to have been cached there, under Oklahoma law, belonged to Calligan, unless someone could come along with proof of ownership or proof that the objects had been stolen, or both. And if that was the case, it also accounted for the fact that he’d just buried them there rather than making it look like a legitimate burial site; under Oklahoma law, remains had to be reburied in an appropriate place if they were dug up in the course of construction. But something that was obviously a cache site came under the heading of “treasure,” even if there were bones cached with it. The bones alone would be reinterred; what was with them became simple property.

Since sacred pipes and fetish-bundles didn’t exactly come with I.D. numbers or registration cards, there was no way on earth or heaven that Jennie could prove the artifacts Calligan had came from the looted graves.

So assume that this was what he had done; Calligan would have the right to sell them. Probably for a lot of money; if there had been a Wah-hopeh bundle, for instance … well, there weren’t many of those in white hands, and none in the hands of private collectors. Selling them on the black market would get him a lot of money, but being able to claim them with the force of the law on his side would allow him to put objects up for bid openly, which would mean a lot more money than if he’d had to sell them privately.

So, he gets his loot and makes obvious caches on his land; now how does that fit in with the bomb? And just as importantly, how does that fit in with the stuff that was bulldozed?

That was the part that puzzled her.

Wait a minute. The more public his “discovery,” the less likely it will be for someone to think he looted the stuff. So say he makes one cache of relatively worthless pieces of broken pottery and bones, and has his men dig it up. Then he fights the work stoppage so it looks as if he didn’t know the stuff was there. When the archeologists say it was a cache rather than a burial site, he orders work shut down, does his own excavations, and “uncovers” more caches, these a lot more valuable than the stuff his crew ruined. He sells it all in legitimate circles, and makes back ten times what he spent on the canceled mall.

It was a beautiful scheme, and the only thing that had ruined it was the bomb. Which still didn’t fit in. It was a bright red piece in the middle of the green puzzle, and it stuck out in all directions.