I hadn’t realized I was hungry, but I ate ravenously—two smoked-turkey wraps, three bags of potato chips (which helped replenish all the salt I’d sweated out), and half a dozen peanut-butter cookies, washed down with a quart of milk. I consumed all that food, inhaled all that food, in the space of ten minutes, then went out to put teams of forensic techs to work excavating the first three graves.
Angie, as the ranking forensic analyst at the site, was serving as the crime-scene coordinator, but she had delegated the excavations to me, asking me to supervise the teams that would recover the bones from each grave. I assigned three people to each grave: one person to wield the trowel; one to photograph each bone as it was recovered; and one to list, label, and bag the evidence. Fortunately, three of the forensic techs had received basic osteology training—Rodriguez; Raynelle, a pale young brunette who drawled her words as if she’d grown up in Miss’sippi but who pierced her ears and nostrils as if she’d toured with a heavy-metal band; and Thad, an African-American man who said little but seemed to notice everything. The supplies on the FDLE crime-scene truck included Tyvek sheets for collecting hair and fiber evidence, and I spread one beside each of the graves. “As you recover the bones, lay them out in anatomical order, as best you can,” I said. “I’ll check in periodically and answer whatever questions you’ve got.”
Angie was quick with a tape measure and good with a sketch pad, I’d noticed at the cemetery. But now, confronted by a search scene that was half the size of a football field, she’d gone higher tech. From a nylon bag and a hard-shelled case aboard the crime-scene truck, she unpacked a sturdy aluminum tripod and a black instrument that appeared to be a pint-sized mailbox, with a small LCD screen in one end and what looked like a rifle scope on top. The scope was a laser, and the rig was a laser mapping system, a twenty-first-century version of a surveyor’s transit, capable of measuring and charting distances and positions with pinpoint precision. Angie set the tripod at the center of the site, in the small patch of unscraped ground that lay between the graves Jasper had uncovered, and screwed the mapping system to the top. Once she’d powered up the system, she sent Whitney scurrying across the site with the prism, a collapsible measuring rod fitted with optical reflectors at one end. As Whitney paused briefly at various landmarks—the three graves within spitting distance, the live oaks that marked the site’s borders, the additional grave uncovered by the scraper—Angie pressed buttons on a keypad, saving the coordinates of each point. Later, the system’s software could be used to create a 3-D map of the entire site, including the overall layout, the locations of the graves, even the location and depth of bones or other pieces of evidence as the graves were excavated. The laser system took more time to unpack than a tape measure and a sketch pad, but once it was up and running, the two women worked as a fast, efficient team: Whitney moved efficiently from spot to spot, holding the prism within the laser’s line of sight and radioing details to Angie—“grave two”; “skull”; “pelvis”; “left hand bones”; “thoracic vertebrae”; and so on. Angie deftly swiveled the laser to track the prism, pressed buttons to capture data points, and added labels from a drop-down menu on the computer screen.
The first grave, being excavated by the young African American named Thad, contained the bones of a prepubescent child, probably no more than five feet tall. As I examined the arm and leg bones, I saw that the ends of the bones—the epiphyses, the knobby structures that formed the bearing surfaces at the ankles, knees, hips, wrists, elbows, and shoulders—had not even begun to fuse to the shafts of the bones. That meant that this boy (I now felt it very likely that he was a boy) was nowhere near finished growing when he was killed. There was no skull in the grave, but there was a mandible, one I felt sure would fit the first skull the dog had brought home.