The Bone Yard (Body Farm 6)

“Mr. Pettis?” Vickery put his face to the glass, cupping his hands around his eyes to cut the glare. He shifted his face to the other pane of glass for a better angle. “Oh Christ,” he muttered, then, “Get down, both of you.” He unholstered his gun and clicked off the safety.

“Stu,” said Angie in a low voice, “what is it?”

“Get down,” he repeated. “You, too, Doc. Get down and stay down.” Angie dropped to a crouch, and I followed suit. “I think something bad has happened here.” He stepped slightly to the side of the door. With his left hand, he took a handkerchief from his hip pocket and draped it carefully over the doorknob, then gave a slight turn and pushed the door open with the barrel of the pistol. “Mr. Pettis?” By now, huddled at the far end of the porch with Angie, I felt fairly certain Pettis wasn’t going to answer.

Vickery leaned forward just long enough for a quick look through the open door, then leaned swiftly back again. After a moment he risked a second look, this one not so brief, and then eased through the door, leading with the weapon. “Christ,” he said again, loudly. “Damn it. Fuckin’ hell.”

“Stu?”

“Pettis is dead. God dammit. The dog, too.”

“Oh, shit,” said Angie. “Can you tell what happened?”

“Hang on. Let me clear the place.” Inside, I could hear the agent’s breathing, deep and fast, with occasional shufflings of his feet as he moved through the small dwelling, which had only one main room — a combination living room, bedroom, and galley kitchen — and a tiny bathroom, as I remembered it. Finally he reappeared in the doorway, drenched in sweat, his chest still heaving. He holstered his gun, mopped his head with the handkerchief he’d used to open the door, and shook his head grimly. “Shot. Must’ve been right after he called the sheriff’s office. Blood’s coagulated, starting to dry. Bunch of flies have already found their way in.”

“Shot? Both of them?” Angie got to her feet. “Who on earth would shoot those two? And why?”

“Don’t know who,” said Vickery. “Got an idea why, though.”

“Why?”

“The collar’s gone.”

My head began to buzz, and I sat down on the porch. “The GPS collar? You think he and the dog were killed because of the tracking collar?”

“That’s my theory, until something better comes along,” he answered. “I’d say we can rule out a drive-by shooting, since we’re out in the middle of damn nowhere.”

“Probably robbery, too,” added Angie, “if all that’s missing is the collar. That collar wasn’t cheap, but it’s sure not worth shooting somebody over.”

“Not,” Vickery added, “unless you’re afraid of where the track might lead.”

Dead, the simple man and the friendly dog. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I’d worked on a lot of forensic cases over the past couple of decades. I was good at them, and I liked my role. I came in long after the crime, helped recover bones, sometimes identified a murder victim or figured out the manner of death or the time since death. Then, sitting in my quiet sanctuary beneath Neyland Stadium, I wrote my report. My hands — safe inside my latex gloves and my sheltered office — stayed nice and clean. Always. Always before, anyhow.

Now Winston Pettis and his dog were dead, and they’d apparently been killed because of the GPS tracking collar. The collar I’d suggested putting on the dog.

Sitting at the far end of the screened-in porch, I bent my head into the corner and threw up.

* * *

Angie shepherded me outside to keep me from compromising the crime scene any further than I already had. Before leading me across the sandy yard to the Suburban, she stooped and checked the ground closely, looking for footprints that were not ours; looking for footprints we hadn’t unknowingly obliterated on our way in. This world is one big crime scene. As we made our way slowly across the scrubby grass and weeds, she shook her head in frustration. Then, as we reached the vehicle, she brightened. She pointed to a faint track in a bare patch of dirt behind the Suburban. “Looks like we might have a tire impression,” she said. She crouched beside it. “Not the clearest one I ever saw, but maybe better than nothing.”

Vickery’s first call was to the Apalachee County Sheriff’s Office. The dispatcher patched him through to the sheriff, whom Vickery briefed on what we’d found. “Do you want your folks to handle this? Your deputy, Sutton, is on his way over here already… Right, to get the latest bone the Pettis dog brought back… No, sir, we haven’t found that bone. And the tracking collar we’d put on the dog is gone, too… Yeah, that is a shame… Do you want us to just secure the scene till Sutton gets here?” He nibbled on his cigar as he listened. “Actually, Sheriff, we’ve got a good crime-scene analyst here; a bone expert, too — the forensic anthropologist that looked at those two skulls.” He seemed to take satisfaction in something the sheriff said. “Okay, do y’all want to call the M.E.? And the funeral home? It usually takes a while for the hearse to show up… Okay, will do… You know we aren’t trying to step on your toes here, but we’ll be glad to go ahead and start working it. You sure that’s what you want?” He motioned “go” to Angie, who nodded and seemed to shift gears almost instantly, into crime-scene mode — the same intense mode I’d seen when she and I had reconstructed the sofa on which her sister had died, and then again when we’d examined Kate’s body. “All right, Sheriff, we’ll get started. See you soon.”

Vickery’s next call was to his boss, the special agent in charge of FDLE’s Tallahassee region, to bring him up to speed on the murder and the sheriff’s request for forensic assistance. At the same time Angie phoned her boss, the supervisor of the crime lab. As she talked, she took a roll of crime-scene tape from the back of the Suburban and stretched it between two pines at the end of the turnoff from the dirt road into the yard. “I haven’t been inside yet,” she was saying as she came back. “Vickery went in looking for the guy, found him and the dog.” She crouched beside the tire track she’d shown me. “Looks like we have at least one tire impression. I didn’t see any shoe impressions, but I’ll take a closer look… Is there somebody who could assist?… Great, send Rodriguez. Thanks.”

Angie started by photographing the cabin itself, then took pictures of the faint tire track from various angles and distances. Next she added a position marker—“1”—and a ruler for scale and took another series of photos of the impression. Then, drawing from bins in the back of the Suburban, she filled the pockets on her cargo pants with more evidence markers, gloves, and paper-bootie shoe covers before heading inside to begin photographing the death scene. During the next ten minutes, I glimpsed occasional flashes of light through the porch screen and the kitchen door, as if a small thunderstorm were occurring inside the cabin. “Okay, Stu,” she called, “I’ve got the basic photos, and I’ve done a quick search. I’m not seeing shell casings so far, and there’s not a lot of blood spatter to speak of.”

“Got a guess about the bullet caliber?”

“Medium,” she said. “Maybe .38.”

“Could be,” he mused. “Or maybe a .45.”

“Looks to me like he was standing by the bed when he was shot, or maybe sitting on it, and he fell backward. Lots of blood pooled in the mattress under him, and more on the floor by the dog. But I’m not sure there’s a lot to work with in terms of spatter or trajectory.”

“Yeah, that’s sorta what I thought,” he said. “Ready for me to come in?”

“Sure, come on. Just don’t touch the kitchen doorknob. Maybe we’ll get lucky there. You haven’t touched the inside knob, have you?”

“Nope. Okay, I’ll come poke around, see if it looks like somebody else has gone through his stuff; see if we can find his next of kin.”

While Angie and Stu worked the interior, I tried to console a disbelieving and distraught Deputy Sutton, who arrived moments after they went inside. “I just talked to him a few hours ago.” Sutton shook his head. “He was joking and laughing. So proud of that dog. Couldn’t wait to show us what Jas

per’d gone and found this time.” The young officer appeared close to tears. “I had to work an accident. If I’d come right when he called me, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“I know how you feel,” I said. “I’m the one that suggested we put the tracking collar on the dog.” A question popped into my head. “If somebody killed him to get the tracking collar,” I asked, “how do you reckon they knew about it?”

“Hell, this is Apalachee County,” he said without hesitation. “Everybody knows everybody’s business here.” Angie had said basically the same thing about Cheatham County, Georgia, I remembered — and for that matter, the same was true of rural Tennessee. Suddenly he looked even more stricken than before, if such a thing were possible. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “I was talking about it with one of the other deputies the day y’all put it on.”

“Talking where? At the courthouse? At a coffee shop?”

He flushed. “Talking on the radio. Anybody with a police scanner could’ve heard it.” He now looked more in need of consolation than ever, but I could think of nothing consoling to say about the irresponsibility of broadcasting, quite literally, information about how Pettis was cooperating with an FDLE investigation.

Over the next hour, the dirt lane leading to the cabin became clogged with law enforcement vehicles, which parked in a line outside the crime-scene tape Angie had stretched between the pines on either side of the turnoff from the dirt road into the cabin’s yard. The first to arrive was another Apalachee County sheriff’s cruiser, driven by the sheriff himself, a wiry sixtysomething-year-old with a face of leather and a white handlebar mustache. On his heels came the county’s medical examiner, a general surgeon named Bradford, who seemed content to defer to FDLE as soon as he’d pronounced Pettis dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. Then came an unmarked Ford sedan driven by Stevenson, the FDLE agent who’d brought us photos of the reform school the day we’d first visited the site. Vickery sent Stevenson to seek information from Pettis’s “neighbors”—the nearest of whom was two or three miles away — and the few hardscrabble businesses along the county road.