Last to arrive was a pickup towing a generator and light tower, the sort of high-intensity work lights used by highway crews at night. As the number of people, vehicles, and pieces of equipment multiplied, the nature of the scene changed. We’d arrived to a scene of lush natural sights, sounds, and smells: shades of leafy green, mossy gray, and crumbling brown; a chorus of woodpeckers, insects, and chirping frogs; the scent of honeysuckle, magnolia blossoms, pine needles, and decaying leaves. Now all those were being trumped by the fluorescent colors of crime-scene paraphernalia;, the rumble of vehicles and generators; and the acrid fumes of gasoline, diesel, and sweat.
The prosecutor huddled with Sheriff Judson and Stu. I heard raised voices—actually, only one raised voice, which was the sheriff’s. He paused in his tirade long enough for Stu to give some low answer that I couldn’t make out; occasionally I caught a few sentences in Stu’s voice and, eventually, a long, conciliatory-sounding summation by the prosecutor. Finally I heard my own name; I strained to hear what was being said about me, but a silence followed the words Dr. Brockton. After a moment, my name was repeated—louder this time—and I realized with a guilty start that Stu wasn’t talking about me; he was talking to me.
“Sorry, I was daydreaming,” I answered.
“Could you come confer with us for a minute?”
“Sure.” I jogged over, and Stu introduced me to the sheriff.
Riordan nodded a hello. “We appreciate your helping us out,” he said. “I gather this is more than you’d bargained for when you offered to take a quick look at that first skull for FDLE.”
“A little more,” I admitted. “But it’s an interesting case, and I’m glad I can help.”
The prosecutor cleared his throat. “Sheriff Judson was wondering how long it might take us to excavate these graves. He has limited manpower, and he’ll need to assign a deputy to the scene while we’re here. Agent Vickery here says you’re the expert.” He nodded at Stu, as if I might be unsure who Agent Vickery was. Stu returned the nod, as if confirming that he had indeed said that. “The sheriff’s hoping maybe we can be through by midnight. What do you think?”
“Unfortunately,” I said, “I think it’s a bad idea to excavate graves and search an area this big in the dark. The lights on that tower are bright, but they won’t begin to illuminate this whole area. Besides, even with bright lights, we’re bound to miss things we’d see in the daylight.” I added, “With all due respect, the people in these graves are already dead. They can’t get any deader by morning.”
Vickery smiled. The sheriff worked his jaw muscles, and the veins in his neck bulged, but before he could explode, the prosecutor asked smoothly, “And if we start the search in the morning, how long would you estimate it might take to recover the bones from the graves?”
I’d already been giving this matter some thought, since the clock was ticking on my two-week window of availability. “Well, that all depends,” I hedged.
The sheriff spat another string of brown juice into the ferns. “Depends on what?”
“Depends on how many more graves there are.”
The sheriff’s rheumy eyes bored into me. “The hell you say.”
I held his look. “We know there are three. At least three. Who’s to say we won’t find four, or fourteen, or even forty?”
“Bull shit.”
I shrugged. So far, two line searches of the grove by the recruits had failed to disclose any more open graves, but I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of additional, undisturbed ones.
“There might be more, there might not. But we won’t know until we look.”
“Look where-all? You plan to turn my whole damn county into a crime scene?” When he said it, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the whole county might be a crime scene, and I remembered Vickery’s words—“this whole world’s one big crime scene”—but I kept those thoughts to myself.
The prosecutor spoke up. “Sheriff, I don’t think anybody’s suggesting we go overboard. But Dr. Brockton has a point. If we know of three graves in this specific area, we need to make sure there are only three. And to do that, we have to take a closer look.”
The sheriff spat again. “You go digging around on some damn fishing expedition here, there’s gonna be newspaper and TV reporters crawling all over the place.”
“If we don’t go digging around,” said Riordan, “there’ll be even more reporters crawling around, doing stories about cover-ups in Miccosukee County.” He said it calmly, as if he were stating an obvious, neutral fact, but I thought I detected a hint of a threat in the prosecutor’s words. I wasn’t the only one who detected it; Vickery and Angie both carefully avoided making eye contact with anyone, and the tendons in the sheriff’s neck tightened, stretching his wattle into webs of splotchy flesh.
“Tomorrow,” growled the sheriff.
“Great. We’ll start tomorrow,” agreed Riordan.
“You’ll finish tomorrow.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean do whatever the hell you have to do, but get it done tomorrow. I want your fancy asses out of my county twenty-four hours from now.”
“We’ll do our best,” said Riordan. I was impressed with how coolly and levelly he managed to say it.
“I said tomorrow,” repeated the sheriff.