The Bone Yard (Body Farm 6)

Suddenly I heard a door banging somewhere nearby, then heard Vickery yelling, “Angie? Are you okay? Angie?”

“Oh, shit,” she said in a low voice. She tucked the gun into the gap between the bed and the wall. “Keep this between us, would you? I don’t want Stu to think I’m cracking up.” She held my eyes for an instant, and I nodded. Then she tucked her feet beneath her and sprang into a standing position on the mattress.

Vickery appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, on high alert, his pistol in his hand. He looked at Angie, standing on the bed, then at me, then at Angie again. “I heard a scream. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry to scare you. It was just a mouse.” He stared at her, his eyes still wide, his nostrils flaring, his breath rasping loudly enough to be heard over the air conditioner. “A mouse? You’re kidding me, right?” He turned to me and rolled his eyes. “Doc, is she pulling my leg?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t see the mouse. But I sure heard the scream.”

Angie stepped off the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. “I was lying down, resting for a minute before dinner. I felt something crawling up the leg of my pants, and I freaked out. Sorry, guys.”

Vickery shook his head. “Jesus, Angie. And everybody thinks you’re tough as nails.” He holstered his gun. “What’s it worth if I keep my mouth shut about this?”

“Stu, are you blackmailing me?”

“I sure am.”

“Uh…” Clearly she was struggling to switch gears. “Well, could I buy your silence with the meat-and-three special at the Waffle Iron?”

“I was thinking more like a lifetime supply of cigars,” he answered. “But I’m a reasonable man. Throw in a piece of apple pie, and the mouse incident stays in the vault.”

“Shake on it,” said Angie, “and let’s go eat. Dr. Brockton, will you be my witness?”

“Sure, I’ll be your witness,” I agreed.

But a witness to what? I wondered all through dinner — the dinner Angie had earlier said she didn’t want. There was a reason I wondered. As we’d left Angie’s room to head to the diner, I’d glanced back at her bed, and my eyes had caught sight of a small box sitting on the lower shelf of the nightstand. I wouldn’t have staked my life on it, but in the instant before she switched off the lamp, I thought I’d glimpsed the image of a shotgun shell printed on the side of the box.

I continued to wonder about Angie after we returned to the Twilight, and then my wondering shifted gears, became more personal and more painful. I wondered about my father, and the moments just before he pulled the trigger and shot himself. If someone — anyone: my mother, a client, even my own three-year-old toddling self — had come into his office and found him with the gun to his head, might he have explained away the scene, put away the gun, and set about cleaning up the financial mess he’d accidentally made?

I would never know, of course. And therefore I would forever wonder. “Remember me, remember me, remember me.” The ghost whispering those words was not Angie’s sister nor Hamlet’s father this time, but my own.

Chapter 19

The next morning Angie, Stu, and I returned to Pettis’s place. We were met there by ten crew-cut-sporting students who’d been bused over from the Pat Thomas Law Enforcement Academy, a training facility located in the nearby town of Quincy.

We were also met by Nat James, from the Computer Forensics Section. “Do you want the last track,” he asked Angie, “or do you want the dog’s last track?”

“Aren’t those the same?”

“Nope,” he said. “There’s a slow, loopy track in the middle of the night. And then there’s a straight, fast track yesterday morning, about an hour after Pettis called Deputy Sutton. That one heads away from the cabin and out the dirt road to the highway, moving about twenty miles an hour. Then, at the highway, it turns north and accelerates to seventy-five miles an hour.”

“It’s the killer,” breathed Angie. “The collar is tracking the killer as he drives away.”

“Where does it go?” demanded Vickery.

“It ends.”

“You mean he stops?”

“No. I mean he gets out of range. The collar’s still moving fast, then the receiver loses the signal.”

“Crap,” said Angie.

“Leave it on,” said Vickery. “Maybe he’ll come back.”

Nat nodded. “I thought of that. I’m rigging a satellite link, so if the receiver picks up the collar’s signal again, it’ll relay the new track to my computer right away.”

Angie carried a handheld GPS into which Nat James had loaded Jasper’s track, so the route we took would be superimposed on the map of Jasper’s. Slung over one shoulder was her crime-scene camera, and tucked into the belt of her cargo pants was a bundle of orange survey flags. In addition, she’d enlisted students to carry two shovels, two trowels, a couple of baggies of gloves, more survey flags, a partial roll of crime-scene tape, and paper evidence bags.

Stu carried his cigar. I carried a half-dozen detailed topo maps, which Nat James had brought us. The computer whiz was right: FDLE, or at least his piece of it, was highly wired. The day that Pettis had agreed to putting the GPS collar on the dog, Nat had come out to put the finishing steps on the tracking technology. He’d connected the receiver — the small display on which a hunter could see his dog’s position — to a flash drive, which captured the location coordinates that the collar transmitted. He’d reset the tracking interval from five seconds to thirty, to stretch the battery’s life. Then he’d concealed the pair of devices high in the nearby fire tower, as Pettis had suggested, for maximum range.

Most of the dog’s coordinates clustered around and inside the cabin. The one notable and intriguing exception was the long, looping ramble that the dog had taken during his final night.

The top page of the printout I carried was an overview of the area, including a bright red “you are here” dot marking the location of the cabin. From it, a squiggly red line meandered to the northeast before looping back. The other five pages each showed enlarged views of segments of the route Jaspe

r had covered before returning with the bone. According to the tracking data, Jasper had covered seven miles during his final outing. As the crow flew, though, he’d remained within a three-mile radius of home.

Vickery had suggested that we retrace the dog’s footsteps exactly, but Angie disagreed. “I doubt that the dog did a lot of wandering with a big bone in his mouth,” she reasoned. “He obviously wasn’t looking for a place to bury it, since he brought it back, right? See how the last part of the track looks fairly straight? It’s like he was hurrying home with his new treasure.”

“I think I see what you’re saying,” I said. “You think we should follow the track in reverse.” She nodded, and Vickery agreed, so we lined up at the edge of the clearing side by side, Angie at the center, flanked by Vickery and me, with five trainees on either side. Angie had us spread out, arms stretched wide, until our fingertips were barely touching. “That’s your spacing,” she said. “Try to maintain it. I’ll set the pace. We’ll stop and re-form the line whenever it gets too ragged, but try to keep it fairly even.” On her signal we began moving forward in unison, more or less, scanning the ground for bones, signs of recent digging, or anything else out of the ordinary.

The first mile or so took us through pine stands that were relatively free of undergrowth, and we made good time. Jasper had also made good time on this stretch, his home stretch: the red thread of the GPS track was marked on the map with a string of small dots, showing his location at thirty-second intervals. Judging by the spacing of the dots and the scale printed on the map, the dog had covered the final mile in just ten minutes. It took us twenty-five minutes, partly because there were occasional stops to examine holes in the ground — the burrows of various animals, according to Vickery, including one that he swore, with a straight face, had to be a python’s hole — and partly because Angie had to call several halts to straighten and tighten the ragtag line.