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.
The FDLE crime-scene truck lumbered into view, a boxy black vehicle that looked like a cross between an ambulance on steroids and a Winnebago on Weight Watchers. Driving it was Rodriguez, the forensic tech Angie’s boss had promised to send. Compact and muscular, Rodriguez had a shaved head, olive brown and glossy in the dappled light beneath the pines. Along with Rodriguez was a second tech, a young woman with long blond hair—Whitney, though I couldn’t tell if that was her first name or her last—whose arrival was a pleasant surprise to Angie.
Rodriguez set to work on the tire track behind the Suburban. Pouring water into a large Ziploc plastic bag that contained powder, he kneaded the bag until the mixture inside was the consistency of pancake batter—a thick liquid that I recognized as dental casting stone: the same stuff, I realized, that FDLE had used to cast Ted Bundy’s teeth. Watching him from ten feet away, I said, “Those aren’t the Suburban’s tracks, are they?”
Rodriguez didn’t look up. “Not unless the Suburban’s wearing a worn-out set of off-road tires,” he answered. “With a big chunk out of one of the tread lugs.” I smiled; clearly he knew what he was doing, and if he ever ran across that same tread on a vehicle, I felt sure he’d be able to show a jury that it matched. The tire-tread impression might not be quite as chilling—or as damning—as the cast of Ted Bundy’s teeth had been, but it might, just possibly, serve as a small evidentiary nail in the coffin of whoever had killed Pettis and Jasper.
As Rodriguez was lifting the hardened cast from the ground, a silver Lexus SUV arrived, looking badly out of place despite the blue lights flashing through its grille. The driver looked out of place, too—a hawkish, fortysomething guy with a thirty-dollar haircut and a crisp Brooks Brothers shirt, cinched with a yellow silk tie. Heads turned; the crime-scene techs and even several of the agents stared with a mixture of curiosity and disdain at his fanciness, but Vickery smiled slightly. “The shit storm just escalated,” he said. He headed for the Lexus, shook hands with the new arrival, and after conferring briefly, brought him over to me. “Clay Riordan, chief deputy state attorney,” the man said.
“Bill Brockton. Pleased to meet you.”
“Agent Vickery speaks highly of you.”
“That’s kind of him.”
“Let me see if I’ve understood Agent Vickery correctly, Dr. Brockton. He says you don’t think the two skulls that the victim’s dog brought home came from the burial ground at the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.”
“No, I don’t think they did. I know this is Florida, and things grow fast down here, but the vegetation at that cemetery looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in years. I just don’t see any way the dog got those skulls from that burial ground.”
“So where did he get them?”
I shrugged, and Vickery said, “That’s what we were hoping to learn from the GPS collar we put on the dog.” Riordan nodded, then excused himself to take a look inside.
Another unmarked car appeared, but this one didn’t stop at the house; instead, it continued farther down Pettis’s dead-end road. Thirty minutes later the car returned and stopped, and a pale young man with short, dark hair and wire-rim glasses got out. He held out a hand to me. “You must be Dr. Brockton, the anthropologist.” I nodded. “I’m Nathaniel James—Nat—from the Forensic Computing Section. Nice to meet you.”
“You, too, Nat. I’m a little surprised to see you out here. I wouldn’t have pegged Mr. Pettis as particularly wired.”
“No, he wasn’t what I’d call wired,” said Nat. “But we are. I just retrieved the GPS receiver and the flash drive I set up in the fire tower. We don’t have the collar that was on the dog, but I’m pretty sure we do have the data it transmitted.”
If he was right, would that mean we’d find the source of the bones? And would it mean that Pettis and the dog had not died in vain?