“You mean, you’ve got stuff with you?” Bushyhead looked ready to kiss her, and a little light-headed with relief. “I don’t mind telling you, with the full moon coming up, I’ve been kind of nervous about sleeping.”

A cleansing was one of the easiest ceremonies to perform. There was just one precaution she was going to have to take. She took a quick glance into the hallway, made certain that the nurse was still deep in her paperwork, and closed the door. Then she climbed up on a chair, and stuffed facial tissue into all the openings of the smoke detector.

Ten minutes later, the ventilator in the bathroom was clearing out the last of the tobacco-redbud-and-cedar smoke, and the nurse was none the wiser. Larry Bushyhead looked much happier, and Jennifer was back in her chair, her implements neatly stowed back in her purse. Just as if she hadn’t been chanting and wafting smoke around with a redtail feather a few minutes ago.

“If it makes any difference, I didn’t feel as if They had tagged you,” she told him. “But if I were in your shoes, I’d have wanted someone to do the same. I—I don’t suppose you got any kind of a look at what was dug up, did you? Enough to really, honestly, recognize whose ancestors you were messing with?”

He hesitated, frowning. “I’m not an expert,” he said, after a long moment. “And you know how much swapping around there was between the nations, even a long time before the white guys took over.”

“A guess,” she urged.

“Well—it wasn’t Cherokee, or Seminole, and it wasn’t Cado. If I was guessing—I’d guess it was our people. Osage. That’s what I thought at the time.” He licked his lips, as if they’d gone dry. “But that’s just a guess. Could’a’ been Sac and Fox. Could’a’been Creek, or Potawatami.”

“Do you have any idea what happened to those relics?” she asked. “Because no one has mentioned them—and you’d think with cops crawling all over the site, somebody would have.”

“I got two guesses,” he told her. “The stuff we first dug up was either blown to bits or buried again. And the stuff that didn’t get blown to bits, Calligan probably snuck in and got rid of. If he hasn’t yet, I’m betting he will. All he needs to do is bring in a bunch of white guys who don’t give a shit, as soon as the cops clear out.”

She nodded, thoughtfully, and looked at her watch. “Oh hell, visiting hours for us nonfamily types are up—” And right on cue, the nurse showed up at the door, to remind her of that fact.

She stood up, swinging her purse over her shoulder, and gave him her best smile. “Thanks, Larry—you were a really big help.”