Chapter 20
Angie unslung her camera, removed a bundle of survey flags from her belt, and began flagging and photographing the grave. She started with wide-angle shots, showing the grave amid the wooded setting, then she worked her way closer, taking medium shots of the disturbed earth. Gradually she moved in for close-ups of the hole and the exposed bones within it.
Vickery phoned the prosecutor. “Mr. Riordan, we’ve just found a shallow grave. It’s been recently disturbed . . . Yes, sir, unfortunately, we are in Miccosukee County . . . Well, we haven’t excavated it yet, but several bones are exposed, and Dr. Brockton feels pretty confident they’re human . . .” I was surprised to hear him laugh. “Well, I guess we could dig it up and move it across the creek into Apalachee. But then we’d have to kill all these trainees so we don’t leave any witnesses.” He laughed again, which I hoped was a sign that on the other end of the call, the prosecutor was making his peace with the jurisdictional briar patch into which we’d strayed.
As Vickery talked and Angie photographed, I began to explore the surrounding ground. Angie had waved the recruits back, to keep them from trampling the scene, but she’d asked me to take a look around. She didn’t have to ask twice.
We were in another grove of massive live oaks—immense, sprawling trees that must have been hundreds of years old. At their bases, they were wider than my arms could span; ten to fifteen feet above the ground, their trunks branched into six or eight or ten or twelve secondary trunks, each one twice as big around as I was. The limbs that spread from these secondary trunks were blanketed with resurrection ferns—named, Angie had told me, for the way they shriveled up and “died” during dry spells, then came back to life at the return of rain. Over the decades, some of the trees had lost large portions to disease or storms, and some of the trunks were splitting and half rotted. Yet there was remarkable life and beauty in the ancient trees, even the ones that were starting to die. Overhead, their branches laced together into a canopy that was as high, as wide, and as beautiful as the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Beards of Spanish moss, some of them twenty feet long, hung from the limbs and swayed gently in the late-afternoon breeze. The leaves and ferns and moss caught most of the sun; what light sifted through, to the lush carpet of ferns on the ground, was filtered by the foliage to a soft, silvery green.
And in the sifted, silvery-green light, beneath the resurrection ferns, I saw a second grave, also freshly disturbed, about thirty feet beyond the first.
A stone’s throw from the second grave, I saw a third.
This—this—had to be the Bone Yard.
After his conversation with the prosecutor, Vickers phoned FDLE’s operations center to call in the crime-scene cavalry—and to confer on the best way to get them to our location. As it turned out, we were only a mile north of the ruins of the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory, although the school lay in yet another county. “Interesting,” Vickery observed, “that the school itself, and the official cemetery, are in Bremerton County, but these graves are hidden up in this little corner of Miccosukee County. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”
Once Vickery had grasped our proximity to the school, he sent the academy trainees skirting the edge of the grove of oaks. At the far end, one of them found the remnants of an overgrown dirt road—a track that headed in the direction of the school. The dispatcher in the operations center would send reinforcements to the school; meanwhile, Vickery would send two of the recruits to lead them the rest of the way to us.