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.