“No. You told me to—and I quote—'get them out of here.’” She lifted her chin and stared at him defiantly. “I did that. For now.”
He set his jaw. “Great. So we’ve established that you can follow directions. Good to know. Follow this one. You get out of here. Now.”
She shrugged. “No can do. No transportation.”
His gaze snapped to the empty road where the SUVs had been parked. Then back to her. First her face, then her left shoulder, which was weighed down by a heavy metal case, and on down to her right hand, where it rested on the telescoping handle of a small black weekend bag.
Oh, hell. He raised his gaze to meet hers.
Her eyes widened, and like before, he was grimly pleased that he could so easily intimidate her. He knew the effect of his glare. He’d seen it in the faces of suspects, subordinates and, occasionally, friends.
“Then you better start walking,” he muttered, turning and propping his boot up on the fallen tree trunk again.
“Not a chance, cowboy. I’m staying with my site. I need to get some more pictures.” Her hand moved from the bag’s handle to the camera around her neck.
“It’s not your site. It’s my crime scene.”
She didn’t answer. Wyatt felt a cautious triumph. Maybe he’d won. Of course, he knew he was going to have to take her back to town, so she scored props for that. But there was no way she was going to turn his crime scene into a field trip for a bunch of students.
No way. He set his jaw and got ready to tell her to get into his Jeep.
“The ME said he thought there were two bodies.” She spoke softly, but her tone got his attention.
Reluctantly, he slid his gaze her way. “He thought? Does that mean you don’t?”
She stepped over the crime-scene tape and dropped to her haunches at the edge of the hole. He started to stop her, but she’d piqued his curiosity, so he followed her and crouched beside her, sitting back on his heels.
She slid her narrow, powerful flashlight beam over the clods of dirt and debris left by the road crew. After a couple of seconds he picked up on the pattern she was tracing.
Across, up, down and back. Then she moved the beam back to where she’d started and traced the pattern again. “What? What are you showing me?” he asked.
“Look closer.”
“If I look any closer, I’ll fall in.”
She laughed, a sexy chuckle that impacted him like a bullet straight to his groin. Surprised at his reaction, he shifted uncomfortably and swallowed hard to keep from groaning aloud.
“See this?” She shone the beam on her starting point and slid the light back and forth, over what looked like a ridge in the dirt. “That’s a human thigh bone.”
Adrenaline shot through him again. “That?” He pulled his own flashlight out of his pocket. “How can you tell?”
“I’m a forensic anthropologist. Bones are my business.”
“What else can you tell about it? Is it male? Female?
Child? Adult?”
She shook her head as she fished a brush out of her pocket. She telescoped the handle of the brush and leaned over to run the bristles across the surface of the bone. The dirt covering the bone was a mixture of dust and mud, so brushing at it didn’t accomplish much.
“It’s not a child. But making all those determinations is never quite as easy as the TV shows make it seem. Now look at this.” She swept the beam of light across and up, then back across.
“Another thigh bone?”
“Go to the head of the class, cowboy.” The beam moved again.
“And a third,” he said, tamping down on his excitement—and his dread. One of those bones could be Marcie’s. “Three thigh bones? Everybody has two, so was the ME right? There are two bodies in here?”
“Not so fast. These closest two may be similar in size, but the three femurs are all different,” she said, with the same lilt in her voice that he was trying to keep out of his.
“Three? You’re saying they’re from three different people?” He looked at her, dread mixing with excitement under his breastbone. Three sets of bones. Three people gone missing in the past five years. Was it going to be that easy? “That’s three different thigh bones, laid out like that?”
She met his gaze, her dark eyes snapping. “Yeah. Exactly. Look at that placement. They’re crisscrossed in a star pattern. I suppose it could be chance that they ended up like that.” He shook his head, but she wasn’t looking at him. She had turned back to the bones and was brushing at them again. She gasped.
“What is it?”
“I think this largest bone has a piece of pelvis attached. That could definitively tell us if it’s a male or female.” She leaned a fraction of an inch farther forward and brushed at the far end of the bone. “Damn it,” she muttered.
“What now?”
“The ground’s too wet. I’m going to have to wait to unearth the bones.”
“I guess you can’t just pick them up.”
She laughed shortly. “No. There might be something attached to them—clothes, another bone, a piece of jewelry. No. I have to be very careful to avoid destroying evidence.”
“But you’re absolutely sure the three bones are different.”
She sat back on her haunches and tilted her head to meet his gaze. “Absolutely.”
“Are you thinking …” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He needed to know if one of those bones belonged to Marcie James.
Dear Lord, he hoped not.
Nina’s face closed down immediately, and he saw a shudder ripple along her small frame. She needed to know, too. He understood that. But she had a very different reason.
She shook her head. “I can’t say yet.” Her voice had taken on a hard edge—the outward manifestation of an obvious inner struggle between her love for her friend and her professional detachment.
She hissed in frustration as she collapsed the brush handle, wiped the bristles against her jeans-clad thigh and then put the brush in her forensics kit.
“I need to build a platform so I can get to the bones without disturbing the site any more than it already has been.” She informed him. “I can’t rule out the possibility that this is a Native American burial site.”
“Burial site? Are the bones that old?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’ll need to clean them and test them to be sure. But the layout of the land around here is consistent with the places the Comanche chose for their sacred burial grounds. I didn’t see the site before excavation started, but the level of rise and the general shape suggest the possibility.”
Wyatt grunted. He’d thought the same thing as soon as he’d gotten his first glimpse of the scene. The thought had gone out of his head once he’d seen the kids milling around.
“As soon as I can study the bones, I can give you the sex and race. However, to estimate the time of death requires more testing and equipment. Fresh bones will glow when exposed to ultraviolet light. The fluorescence fades from the outside in over time. Still, my opinion right now is that these bones are recent. As soon as I get them cleaned up, I can look at them under my portable UV lamp. Then I’ll take samples for DNA analysis.”
Wyatt’s chest felt tight. There were only a few reasons that DNA would do her any good.