The Bone Yard (Body Farm 6)

I conceded. “If the housing of the mowing attachment hit the head just right, it could have knocked the mastoid process loose. But what about the first skull, the one with the hairline fracture in the temporal bone?”

Vickery shrugged. “He said he was sorry he couldn’t be more helpful, but most of the deaths happened before he took over.”

I wasn’t ready to let go. “What about the beatings? Did you ask about those?”

“I did. I showed him a copy of the newspaper story. He got mad, turned red in the face; I actually thought he might stroke out on me. Said that story was a pack of lies — inaccurate, irresponsible, and cowardly — and he’d sure like to see how some goddamned bleeding-heart reporter would keep order among a bunch of juvenile delinquents without swinging a paddle every now and then. Then he started wheezing and said he was really tired and he didn’t know anything else that might help us, and could he please take his nap now?”

Angie blew out an exasperated breath. “That’s it? ‘I don’t care if some boys were murdered — it’s nap time’? Christ almighty.”

“Look, I’ll go back and talk to him again once I have more questions, but he was clearly done. I didn’t see anything to be gained by interrogating him to death.” I couldn’t help but laugh. “On the way out, I did ask him who else might know about the cemetery or the deaths. He shook his head. ‘Young man, I have no idea,’ he said. ‘That was a lifetime ago. Those boys were already lost by the time they got to us. Why on earth would anybody know or care after all this time?’ I hate to say it, but I’m afraid he might be right.”

“I care,” said Angie.

Vickery nodded slightly in agreement, or at least acknowledgment. He looked at me. “So, Doc, can we figure out who’s buried here? Does each of these crosses mark a grave? And do these crosses mark all the graves? Or might there be more?”

“All good questions.”

“I suppose,” Angie said grudgingly, “we could dust off the old reliable root finder.”

I smiled at the name, though I had no clue what it meant. “Root finder?”

“That’s what the crime-scene folks fondly call their ground-penetrating radar,” Vickery explained. “What is it you told me GPR really stands for, Angie? Great Pictures of Roots?”

“Ah,” I said, the light dawning. I’d seen ground-penetrating radar in action before, and I had to admit, I’d been whelmed: far from overwhelmed, but not totally underwhelmed, either. In theory, GPR made perfect forensic sense: radio-frequency pulses, directed into the ground, would be bounced back with different intensities by materials of different density. Dense materials — undisturbed soil, for instance, or metal pipelines, or rocks, or roots — would send back stronger signals than looser materials, such as a human body, or the disturbed dirt of a recently dug grave. In my admittedly limited experience, interpreting the on-screen images required a fifty-fifty mixture of high-tech aptitude and psychic power. One of my graduate students had done a research project in which she used an advanced prototype GPR system to image bodies buried under slabs of concrete — a realistic simulation of a murder in which, let’s say, a man kills his wife, buries her in the backyard, and then pours a new patio to conceal her grave. My student’s project had shown me two things: first, that someone skilled at reading the cloudlike images on the GPR’s display might have a pretty good shot at determining whether or not a particular patio was hiding a body (or at least a body-sized area of disturbed soil); and second, that I was not that skilled someone, since to me, most of the subterranean images looked like the rainstorms on the Weather Channel’s radar.

“Well, if you don’t want to use the root finder, we could try divining,” I suggested.

Vickery looked puzzled. “Divining? What, like praying?”

“No. Divining, like dowsing. Like water-witching.”

He snorted. “The business with the forked stick?”

“As my assistant Miranda would say, the forked stick is so last century,” I said. “The state of the art these days is coat hanger, man. You take apart one of those coat hangers from the dry cleaners. You know, the kind that has the round cardboard tube for your pants to drape over?” He stared at me, so I hurried on with my explanation. “You cut the cardboard tube in half, then cut two pieces of the wire and bend them into L’s. Stick one end of each L in each piece of the cardboard tube, and use the tubes for handles, to let the wires swivel freely.” I struck a stance like a Wild West gunslinger, my hands mimicking a pair of revolvers. “Then you walk the search area with the exposed wires level, parallel to the ground.” I headed slowly toward one of the crosses. “When you come to a body, or a grave, the wires cross.” I pivoted my fingers toward one another. “Or sometimes swivel sideways.” I wiggled my fingers back and forth.

Vickery removed his cigar and studied me closely, apparently trying to decide whether I was pulling his leg or had gone truly mad.

“Ah, the forensic coat hanger,” said Angie. She mimicked my gunslinger stance. “Stranger, you’d best be gone by sundown,” she drawled à la John Wayne, “or I’ll fill ya fulla starch.”

Vickery hooted, and even I was forced to smile, despite feeling some embarrassment. “Hey, scoff all you want, but my colleague Art Bohanan swears by it.” Vickery rolled his eyes. “Art says he mapped a bunch of graves in an old family cemetery this way.”

“No slam on Art,” Angie said, “but I’ve read some journal articles about divining for graves. A few years ago, there was an archaeologist in Iowa who did a big literature search and a bunch of interviews and some simple experiments. From his research, at least, he concluded that it’s totally ineffective. He says the wires move when you slow down, or bend over, or your posture shifts because you’ve stepped down into a low spot. Basically, it’s like a Ouija board — it works because you make it work, subconsciously.”

I shrugged. “Well, I know a research scientist who’s also a believer. His theory is that as a body decays, it turns into a big biochemical battery, giving off electrical currents that the wires pick up.” I pointed my divining-rod revolvers at Angie. “Say, little lady, ya wanna go back to grad school and get yourself a PhD? Divining would make a dandy little dissertation.”

She held up both hands. “I surrender. I wish Art were here right now. I’d be happy to put him to the test. We could check his accuracy by bringing in the forensic backhoe.”

“See, now you’re talking some useful technology,” said Vickery, and I smiled. Unlike forensic coat hanger, the term forensic backhoe was actually used in all seriousness, or at least in some seriousness, by police and anthropologists. A forensic backhoe was identical to a basement-digging backhoe or a ditch-digging backhoe; the fancied-up terminology simply acknowledged that a backhoe could be used, by a skilled operator and an experienced scientist, to excavate with surprising precision. I’d used forensic backhoes many times in my career, just as I’d used forensic shovels, forensic trowels, forensic paintbrushes, and even forensic saucepans on forensic kitchen stoves. Stoves I’d ended up replacing, not once but twice, when the bones I was cleaning boiled over, forever contaminating the unreachable nooks and crannies of the forensic burners. “But, fascinating though this discussion of technology is,” he added, “I do feel duty bound to bring us back to the questions at hand. How do we identify who’s buried here? And how do we figure out which of their skulls that damn dog brought home?”

“I’m not sure those two questions are actually related,” I said slowly, the realization coming clear only as I said it. I pointed to the lush ferns surrounding the eleven rusting crosses. “Unless there’s something I’m not seeing, nothing — and nobody — has been dug out of this cemetery in years. Not by that dog or by anybody else.”

Vickery’s face fell, and the wind went right out of his sails. He’d been so proud of his find, and it was a remarkable one. But as we took a critical, appraising look at the markers — I couldn’t help thinking of the old hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”—it became more and more cle

ar that this was not the source of Jasper’s finds.

Before taking Angie and me to the cemetery, Vickery had called to alert his boss, the FDLE special agent in charge of a batch of counties in the Florida panhandle. Now he phoned headquarters again with an update, and though I didn’t hear the details of the call — Vickery headed down the overgrown road on foot as he began to talk — I could hear notes of disappointment in his voice.

Angie, meanwhile, was already documenting the graveyard. She started by taking photographs of the cemetery as a whole, then of each row of crosses, and then of the individual markers. Then she enlisted my assistance, which consisted mainly of holding the end of a fifty-foot tape measure as she sketched the site and noted the locations of the crosses. After she’d finished the sketch, she reeled in the tape, which slithered and twitched its way through the ferns like a yellow ribbon snake.

“Just for kicks,” she said, snapping the crank into the case of the reel, “why don’t we probe one of these, see if these crosses really do seem to be marking graves, or if they’re just decorative accents.”

“We have probes in the Suburban? Why didn’t you say so sooner?”

“What, and miss that great seminar on the forensic coat hanger?”

She retrieved two probes and a fistful of survey flags from the back of the vehicle and handed one of the probes to me. It was a stainless-steel rod, four feet long and about the thickness of my index finger, with a one-foot handle across the top that formed a tall, skinny T. “Pick a grave, any grave,” she said. I pointed to the cross closest to us, which was at one corner of the cluster of markers. “Which side of the cross do you suppose the grave would be on?” I shrugged; without a plaque or marker — and with such dense ferns underfoot — it was impossible to tell.

“How about we probe both directions? That way, no matter which way the grave is dug, we’ll find it. If it’s there to find.”