“Ah, the forensic coat hanger,” said Angie. She mimicked my gunslinger stance. “Stranger, you’d best be gone by sundown,” she drawled à la John Wayne, “or I’ll fill ya fulla starch.”
Vickery hooted, and even I was forced to smile, despite feeling some embarrassment. “Hey, scoff all you want, but my colleague Art Bohanan swears by it.” Vickery rolled his eyes. “Art says he mapped a bunch of graves in an old family cemetery this way.”
“No slam on Art,” Angie said, “but I’ve read some journal articles about divining for graves. A few years ago, there was an archaeologist in Iowa who did a big literature search and a bunch of interviews and some simple experiments. From his research, at least, he concluded that it’s totally ineffective. He says the wires move when you slow down, or bend over, or your posture shifts because you’ve stepped down into a low spot. Basically, it’s like a Ouija board—it works because you make it work, subconsciously.”
I shrugged. “Well, I know a research scientist who’s also a believer. His theory is that as a body decays, it turns into a big biochemical battery, giving off electrical currents that the wires pick up.” I pointed my divining-rod revolvers at Angie. “Say, little lady, ya wanna go back to grad school and get yourself a PhD? Divining would make a dandy little dissertation.”
She held up both hands. “I surrender. I wish Art were here right now. I’d be happy to put him to the test. We could check his accuracy by bringing in the forensic backhoe.”
“See, now you’re talking some useful technology,” said Vickery, and I smiled. Unlike forensic coat hanger, the term forensic backhoe was actually used in all seriousness, or at least in some seriousness, by police and anthropologists. A forensic backhoe was identical to a basement-digging backhoe or a ditch-digging backhoe; the fancied-up terminology simply acknowledged that a backhoe could be used, by a skilled operator and an experienced scientist, to excavate with surprising precision. I’d used forensic backhoes many times in my career, just as I’d used forensic shovels, forensic trowels, forensic paintbrushes, and even forensic saucepans on forensic kitchen stoves. Stoves I’d ended up replacing, not once but twice, when the bones I was cleaning boiled over, forever contaminating the unreachable nooks and crannies of the forensic burners. “But, fascinating though this discussion of technology is,” he added, “I do feel duty bound to bring us back to the questions at hand. How do we identify who’s buried here? And how do we figure out which of their skulls that damn dog brought home?”
“I’m not sure those two questions are actually related,” I said slowly, the realization coming clear only as I said it. I pointed to the lush ferns surrounding the eleven rusting crosses. “Unless there’s something I’m not seeing, nothing—and nobody—has been dug out of this cemetery in years. Not by that dog or by anybody else.”
Vickery’s face fell, and the wind went right out of his sails. He’d been so proud of his find, and it was a remarkable one. But as we took a critical, appraising look at the markers—I couldn’t help thinking of the old hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”—it became more and more clear that this was not the source of Jasper’s finds.
Before taking Angie and me to the cemetery, Vickery had called to alert his boss, the FDLE special agent in charge of a batch of counties in the Florida panhandle. Now he phoned headquarters again with an update, and though I didn’t hear the details of the call—Vickery headed down the overgrown road on foot as he began to talk—I could hear notes of disappointment in his voice.
Angie, meanwhile, was already documenting the graveyard. She started by taking photographs of the cemetery as a whole, then of each row of crosses, and then of the individual markers. Then she enlisted my assistance, which consisted mainly of holding the end of a fifty-foot tape measure as she sketched the site and noted the locations of the crosses. After she’d finished the sketch, she reeled in the tape, which slithered and twitched its way through the ferns like a yellow ribbon snake.
“Just for kicks,” she said, snapping the crank into the case of the reel, “why don’t we probe one of these, see if these crosses really do seem to be marking graves, or if they’re just decorative accents.”
“We have probes in the Suburban? Why didn’t you say so sooner?”
“What, and miss that great seminar on the forensic coat hanger?”