“And I said we’ll do our best.”
The sheriff spun on his heel and stalked away. He conferred briefly with his deputy, then slammed the door of his truck, and with impressive force, I thought, for a man his age. As he fishtailed away, his wheels—which boasted the glossy sidewalls and deep tread of new tires—flung shreds of ferns and dirt into one of the open graves.
Angie knelt and studied the ferns beside the spot where Judson had been standing, then—using a glove she fished from her pocket—she carefully plucked and bagged the end of a fern. The leaves were damp and slimy with what I realized was a mixture of tobacco juice and spit. Angie had just collected a DNA sample from Sheriff Darryl Judson.
“That went well,” said Riordan. He motioned Angie over, without seeming to grasp what she’d just done, then looked around our small huddle. “Okay, how do we make that happen?”
Stu and Angie looked at each other, then at him. Stu said, “Make what happen?”
“Clear this scene in twenty-four hours.”
“You’re kidding,” said Angie. “Right?”
“Wrong. We need to recover these three sets of remains and do whatever additional searching we need to do by the end of the day tomorrow. Unless we find something else by then—and by ‘something else’ I mean more graves—we need to pack up and roll out of here at sundown.”
“Sir, no offense,” Angie persisted, “but how the hell are we supposed to search an area this big in that amount of time?”
“Swiftly and efficiently, I suppose.” He gave her a tight smile. “You’ve got technology for this, right? Didn’t FDLE spend a lot of taxpayer dollars on a ground-penetrating radar system? Isn’t this exactly what that technology’s designed for?” Angie opened her mouth, and I expected to hear the words root finder, but Riordan held up a cautionary hand, so she kept quiet and he went on. “Like the sheriff said, do whatever the hell you have to do, but get it done tomorrow. Good night. And good luck.” With that, he, too, left, though his departure was not as showy as the sheriff’s. It reminded me of an old saying, an insult I’d first heard as a kid: don’t go away mad; just go away. He just went away.
Stu looked from me to Angie. “So. What next?” Angie shook her head glumly; Stu frowned and chewed his cigar.
“I have an idea,” I said.
A flurry of phone calls, explanations, and pleadings ensued over the next three hours. What we needed was hard to find, and when we needed it was almost instantly. The whirlwind of calls and arrangements occurred against a backdrop of logistical and vehicular chaos, because the ten trainees who’d helped with the search needed transportation back to the law enforcement academy in Quincy, and Stu’s vehicle needed to be ferried to the new scene from Pettis’s cabin. Eventually all the logistical and vehicular loose ends were tied up beneath the buggy glare of the work lights, but by the time we left the scene, it was going on eleven o’clock. Two junior FDLE agents remained behind, camped out in the cab of the crime-scene truck, sharing night-shift guard duty with Sheriff Judson’s unsociable deputy.
Following a dozen sets of tire tracks, Stu’s Jeep and Angie’s Suburban lurched and scraped down the unfamiliar dirt road. A half mile down, we found ourselves passing the makeshift cemetery of pipe crosses. It made macabre sense, I supposed, that the clandestine graves would be located in the same general area as the marked graves, but hidden farther—geographically farther and morally farther—from what had passed for civilization at the school. As our headlights illuminated them, the crosses cast long shadows that reeled and skittered as we jounced and angled past.
From the cemetery we easily made our way back to the burned-out ruins of the reform school, and then the blacktop road and the county highway. On our way back to the Twilight, we dashed into a lonely-looking Circle K to snag a late “dinner”—the Waffle Iron was long since closed, and even the convenience store was about to shut down when we showed up. In the gritty passenger seat of the Suburban, I dined on a bruised banana, a pack of stale peanut-butter crackers, and a pint of chocolate milk as we headed for the proverbial barn—the pestilential barn—that was the Twilight Motor Court. It was midnight by the time we turned off the blacktop and into the sandy parking lot. Ten minutes after midnight, I got out from under the dribbling shower, folded down the biohazard-laden bedspread, and crawled between the dingy sheets of the lumpy bed.
Tired as I was, I expected to close my eyes and find myself spiraling swiftly into sleep.
Instead, I found myself spiraling deep into memory, spinning thirty years back in time and fifteen hundred miles away. I found myself in South Dakota, seeking the long-lost graves of dead Indians.