Ancient Ones (Emmett Parker and Anna Turnipseed)

Publisher's Summary Though there are signs of foul play, BIA investigator Emmett Quanah Parker and FBI special agent Anna Turnipseed aren't looking for a killer - the remains dug out of a riverbank by an illegal fossil hunter are 14,000 years old. Parker and Turnipseed are sent to Central Oregon as official witnesses to the examination of John Day Man, as he is dubbed, for the bones have quickly provoked a controversy that threatens to erupt into violence: the skeleton is not Native American but distinctly Caucasian, shattering long-held tenets concerning who the first inhabitants of this continent were. Emmett, with his Comanche and white ancestry, and Anna, a reservation-born Modoc with Asian blood, share a sensitivity to both parties' concerns - and a forbidden attraction that's causing them professional and personal problems. They've broken the unwritten law that partners should never get emotionally involved. Having crossed that line, Emmett and Anna are too distracted by each other to see the escalating suspicion and fear around them when a young tribal anthropologist is swallowed by the misty night - and within hours of her disappearance the fossil hunter who discovered the skeleton is found disemboweled. The Warm Springs Indians insist that the unburied bones of the Ancient One have been turned into a skep, a murderous spirit that haunts the darkness. As winter closes in on the steppes of the Colombia Plateau, accusations of ritualized murder fly between the Indian a…