Riordan tilted his head slightly. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean hell no. This is my county. I am the law here. Nobody can fire me but the governor, and I have the authority to limit the scope of this crime-scene search. You can bring in all the shovels and fancy-ass PhDs, you want. For the next twelve hours. But get that damn machine out of here.”
Riordan didn’t speak for a while; finally he shook his head and, just as the sheriff had done, said, “No.” He gave another, smaller shake—wistfully, I thought, regretting the clash of wills—then went on. “Sheriff, I’ve opened an investigation into these deaths—I have some authority, too—and I’ve got a warrant authorizing us to locate and excavate any graves on that piece of land, using whatever tools and equipment we deem necessary. I can’t fire you, but I can arrest you, and if that road isn’t open in sixty seconds, you and your deputy will both be charged with obstruction of justice.” He studied the cruiser that was blocking the way. “I think it’ll be interesting to see what a road grader does to that car when it pushes it into the trees. Not what the machine was designed for, but I suspect it’ll do the job.”
Two minutes later, Riordan was ordering the scraper’s operator to unload his machine and clear the road. I wasn’t sure the nervous-looking equipment operator would actually follow that order, if the prosecutor’s push came to the sheriff’s shove. Luckily—and surprisingly—the sheriff backed down. The Miccosukee County deputy killed his strobes and crept down the dirt road toward the Bone Yard. Our motley convoy followed: the Avalanche of the pissed-off sheriff, the Lexus of the prosecutor, our Suburban, and, bringing up the rear, the goosenecked lowboy trailer hauling the mammoth machine that I hoped would reveal how many graves—how many dead boys—were hidden in the Bone Yard.
If we’d had more time, the sheriff’s mistaken idea—that we’d brought the equipment to cut a road to the site—would have been worth carrying out. The tractor trailer had no trouble negotiating the mile of cracked and weedy blacktop that led to the ruins of the burned school. But progress slowed to a snail’s pace after that, when the blacktop gave way to dirt and the dirt to ruts through the woods. The low trailer bottomed out more than once on the uneven surface, and as it crept around bends in the road, scores of saplings bent, tore, and snapped. The mile to the school had taken less than five minutes; the first half mile toward the Bone Yard seemed to take forever. It took nearly an hour to reach the halfway mark—the clearing with the eleven graves marked by metal crosses—and when he learned that the roughest stretch was yet to come, the driver parked the trailer and unloaded the scraper, and the machine lumbered the last half mile under its own steam.
By the time the machine was in position it was nearly 9 A.M., and the rumble of the idling diesel sounded more and more like the ticking of a clock. I’d stuck survey flags in the ground to mark the initial path I wanted it to follow, and Angie had sent the remaining techs scurrying ahead with metal detectors. Their search yielded a small midden of objects, but as evidence, the only crime they seemed to point to was redneck littering: beer cans, bottle caps, Vienna sausage tins. As soon as Angie gave me the all-clear signal, I walked toward the scraper and beckoned it forward. With a roar and a billowing cloud of diesel smoke, my Florida earthmoving experiment began.
The machine I’d used in South Dakota had been called a Tournapull, a clever word that managed to combine the name of the inventor, R. G. LeTourneau, with the suggestion that the scraper—a two-wheeled blade-and-hopper assembly towed by a tractor—was highly maneuverable. Its latter-day Florida counterpart, manufactured by Caterpillar, was not a Tournapull; the operator had indignantly informed me that it was an “open-bowl scraper.” To me, that didn’t sound like a macho earthmoving machine; to me, “open-bowl scraper” sounded like the rubber spatula my mother had used when she was frosting chocolate cakes. But I didn’t give a fig what the machine was called, so long as it worked.