“We found one of the missing girls in December, buried in a Civil War-era graveyard. So I was just curious,” he said as we rounded the pile of lichen-covered boulders.
“Putting together a profile,” I guessed.
“We’re working on it.” His voice lost inflection. Cop voice, giving away nothing.
“But keeping it out of the media,” I suggested.
“Not so much keeping it out as not sure whether we have a serial thing going here. Other than the general hair coloration and age, the missing girls have nothing in common.”
“I was trying to stay away from the evidence. I didn’t get up close to the burial site so I’m not sure if it’s near the old homestead. I looked one time and backed away. But it may be. And if so, we’ll see a family burial plot, gravestones lying on the ground where they were washed by a big storm before I was born.”
We moved the rest of the way in silence, the birds flitting through the trees as we walked, chasing one another in spring courtship, preparing for nesting time, an occasional squirrel making a leap from tree to tree. A hawk circled overhead in lazy spirals, searching for prey.
Not far beyond the fallen tree, its bark ripped away by lightning, we caught the smell of old death carried on the breeze. It had been bad before, but with the rising heat, the putrid scent had grown fetid and pungent. One of the cops swore, and I had to agree.
4
I stayed behind the two old oaks when we arrived; Jim stood at the edge of the grave site only a few feet away, hands on his hips while cops ran crime-scene tape from tree to tree at the sheriff’s direction. Though the scene was far from pristine, Jim obviously wasn’t going to add tracks or evidence to it until the photos were finished. Skye and Steven, another deputy, set up cameras and began to take digital and 35mm shots. Steven was giant, an African American with a shaved head and biceps as big as my thighs. Well, almost as big as my thighs.
“Ramsey?” Skye said almost instantly. “Headstones. I count three, lying flat.”
“Where?” he demanded.
“With this marker as six, we got one at two o’clock, one between ten and eleven, and a broken stone that looks as if it’s been moved recently at five and eight.”
I looked where she pointed, my gut tightening.
“Got it. Keep your eyes open for any other signs of grave markers,” Jim said. “Ash says this is nearly three hundred years old. A plot like this might have some uncarved markers, too, or some carved stone that’s so old it’s not easily recognizable as a grave marker.”
She nodded and began removing equipment from the cases they had toted in.
After the shots, Skye passed out protective clothing, paper shoes and coats that shed no fibers. Then she handed out gloves, evidence bags, small cans of orange paint, a one-hundred-foot tape measure for marking a grid and string to run from one spot to another, indicating straight lines. Together, working like a precision team, she and Steven measured the circumference and diameter of the space between the trees, marking off specific intervals around the vaguely circular area. They mapped it out on a pad, creating a visual grid to prevent the crime-scene guys from tripping, adding measurements and other indicators. Skye took more photographs while Steven recorded the dimensions into a tape recorder and on a separate spiral pad.
I had seen cops mark a grid on television using spray paint, and in class we had been lectured extensively on the proper way to handle a scene, but I had never seen one detailed in person. It was very clean and geometrical. I noticed that Skye and Steven walked carefully, studying the ground before putting down a bootie-clad foot. They avoided the center of the area, where clothing peeked from the makeshift grave. The alleged makeshift grave.
I knew that, until they saw human remains, it would be only a suspected grave. All this effort and we didn’t even know for certain if there was a body or if it was human. The toe could have come from somewhere else. This grave could be a dog, buried in a pile of rags. Not a child. It could be anything. I wanted it to be anything, anything but a little girl.
All the cops seemed to have a job except the sheriff. Gaskins stood back and looked important. Jim was out in the trees, walking a course around the site in a spiral, marking things on the ground with painted circles. A quiet hour passed during which I found I could disassociate myself from the meaning of the scene and watch. Perhaps that was part of my nursing training, being able to put away normal human feelings and simply do a job. The cops moved in slow, studied precision, touching nothing, recording everything on the detailed evidence map that would be one result of today.
Into the silence that followed I said, “Cheeks buried his face in that strip of cloth right there. There’ll be drool and hair on it. And I think my other two dogs—” I paused, breathless as the meaning of my words slammed into me. I licked lips that felt dry and cracked. “I think they actually dug up the body and rolled in it. You’ll want to take samples from each dog, I’m sure.” The cops were looking at me. I thought I might throw up. I pressed my hand to my stomach. “Johnny Ray has Big Dog and Cherry both locked up in the barn.”
The cops went back to work without a word. Gaskins called in my information to one of the investigators driving in from Ford County and told him to take care of the dog samples before coming out to the site. No one said anything much after that.
The preliminaries over, Jim donned fresh gloves and booties and tossed several evidence bags into a larger bag he marked with black ink. With the digital camera slung over his shoulder on its long back cord, he followed a straight line he referred to as CLEAR. Walking slowly from the two oaks into the center of the small clearing, back hunched, eyes on the ground, he marked evidence as he moved but left each item in place, a paper bag beside it. When he reached the scrap of cloth that Cheeks had drooled on, Jim looked up at me with a question on his face and I nodded. “That’s the one.”
He photographed the scrap of cloth where it lay and took another shot in relation to the total scene. “Document contaminant information,” he said to Steven, “with the year, case number and item.”
“Got it,” Steven said.
Jim marked the photo with the same numbers and continued his slow methodical pace to the center of the circle. Taking several shots, he backed out the same way he’d gone in, and handed the photos and camera off to Skye. “You the acting coroner today, too?”
“I have that pleasure,” she said, her tone belying the words. It was common in poor counties for law-enforcement officers to be trained in several different fields. Skye was a trained crime-scene investigator and also worked as part-time county coroner. She moved closer to the edge of the clearing. “What do we have?”
“Protruding from sandy-type soil, I see part of a small skull,” Jim said, “presumptive human, part of what looks like a femur and lower leg bones, and clothing.”
“Ah, hell,” Steven said.
Skye’s expression didn’t change. Stone-faced, she stepped to the denim bag I had noticed earlier on the passenger seat of the county van and removed a folder marked Blank Coroner Forms. “Could it be from the 1700s?” she asked.
“No,” Jim said. “Connective tissue is still in place. In this kind of soil, well draining but under a canopy of trees, I’d guess it’s not more than a year old.”
Something turned over in my belly, a slow, sickening somersault of horror. Silently, I walked away, along the length of the old riverbed, back out of the shadows. When I reached the pile of boulders, a single shaft of noontime sunlight found a way past the foliage, falling on the topmost stone. Without thinking, I climbed up the pile, pushing off with booted feet against the slick rock until I was perched on top, my arms wrapped around my knees.