Ninety minutes after Angie had spotted the first grave—and thirty minutes before we were likely to run out of daylight—we heard the low whine of an all-wheel-drive SUV laboring through the woods, its progress punctuated by the screechings of underbrush and tree branches scraping the belly and the sides of the vehicle.
The vehicle was not, it turned out, the vanguard of the FDLE cavalry. A big off-road pickup—a Chevy Avalanche, wearing markings of the Miccosukee County Sheriff’s Office—muscled along the overgrown road. It stopped at the crime-scene tape that had been stretched across the mouth of the road to keep vehicles out, and then the engine revved. The Avalanche rumbled forward, pulled the tape taut, and snapped it. The vehicle jounced toward us and slammed to a halt, narrowly missing one of the graves. A grizzled, bowlegged man got out of the cab; his legs and arms were thin with age—I’d have pegged him as a seventy-year-old, at least—but he had a stringy strength about him, like beef jerky. Despite the thinness of his limbs, he had a substantial beer belly hanging over his belt, a sizable wad of tobacco in his cheek, and a major-league scowl on his face. His gaze swept the scene, taking in and rapidly dismissing the crew-cut trainees, pausing and sharpening on the flags marking the three graves, and then settling fiercely on Stu, Angie, and me. “Which one of you’s Vickery?”
“That’s me, Sheriff. Stu Vickery.” The agent stepped forward and offered his hand. The sheriff turned aside—but only slightly—and spat tobacco juice. “Sorry for the surprise. We were surprised, too.”
“Surprised? A surprise? Is that what you call it when you bring a search party into my county without so much as a by-your-leave? Is this what FDLE calls a surprise party? Because I’ll tell you, Vickery, I do not take kindly to surprises. Not in my county.”
Vickery flushed. “I understand, Sheriff. It was a tough call. We were on a crime-scene search, and the trail led straight across the creek. Led to these three graves. I wish they were on the other side, in Apalachee County, but they’re not. So here we are.”
“And here is where you can get the hell out of right now.”
“Right now? How?”
“I don’t give a good goddamn, Agent Vickery. Not my problem. You found your way in here easy as pie. You can find your way right back out again. You’re good at following a trail, looks like. Ought to be a lot easier to follow it back out, now that it’s been beaten down by you and your posse.”
“You’ve got three shallow graves here, Sheriff. How do you aim to handle them? What kind of forensic resources have you got in Miccosukee County for excavating multiple graves?”
“A kind that’s none of your damned business, pissant. Now, you can turn around and walk out of here, or I can call in my deputies and we can haul you down to the Miccosukee County Jail. But I don’t think you’d like it there, because I got some prisoners right now that have serious anger-management issues. They don’t like authority figures, and I figure they’d go ape-shit over a bunch of snotty-nosed FDLE folks.”
The standoff was interrupted by the brief whoop of a siren. A silver SUV paused at the broken strip of crime-scene tape, eased forward, and then backed up beyond the margin of broken tape and parked. The door opened and Riordan, the prosecutor, strode through the ferns in his fancy, city-slicker clothes, managing to look both out of place and yet somehow right at home. By the time he reached us, a ragged caravan of vehicles had begun arriving and parking behind the silver Lexus. First came the crime lab’s black Suburban, driven by Whitney, one of the crime-scene techs I’d met at the Pettis place. The Suburban was followed by a Miccosukee County Sheriff’s cruiser, driven by a deputy who chose to remain in the car, the engine running. Eventually FDLE’s crime-scene truck lumbered into view, announced by a new round of scraping and snapping as it bulled a wider, higher swath through the branches than the smaller vehicles had cleared.