Rodriguez led the excavation of the second grave, which did contain a skull. As if to compensate for possessing a skull, this grave was lacking a femur, and I suspected that the missing bone was Jasper’s final find, the one he’d brought home just hours before he and Pettis were shot. Was the femur still in the possession of Pettis’s murderer, kept as a grim souvenir of the killing? Or, more likely, had it been simply tossed off the bridge into the Miccosukee River, along with the GPS tracking collar?
I knelt by the sheet where Rodriguez was laying out the bones. “I’m thinking white male,” he said, handing me the skull. “Am I right?” He was. This one looked to be somewhere between the ages of the first two victims—twelve or thirteen, I guessed, from the sutures in the roof of the mouth and the development of the long bones. I had just picked up the pelvis, whose narrow width confirmed that the bones were indeed male, when Rodriguez gave a low whistle. I glanced down into the grave. “Take a look,” he said. He handed me a thoracic vertebra—it appeared to be the seventh thoracic vertebra, T7, from the middle of the spine—and I noticed two things. First I noticed that the spinous process, the bony fin projecting from the back of the vertebra, had been shattered. Then I saw why: a bullet had blasted through the back of the bone, passed through the spinal canal, and lodged in the body of the vertebra. The boy had been shot in the back. “Must’ve been running away,” said Rodriguez. “Didn’t really have a sporting chance, did he?”
The third grave, being excavated by Raynelle, contained big, robust bones. The ends of the long bones were almost fully fused to the shafts, which meant that his growth spurt was ending. From the size of the bones, I guesstimated his stature to be nearly six feet. The bones weren’t merely big, they were also heavy, dense—possibly African-American, as Negroid skeletons tend to have higher bone density than Caucasoid skeletons. The skull would give a clearer answer to the question of race, but there was no skull in the grave. Not much of one, anyway; the mandible was there, and the molars—whose biting surfaces were bumpy and complex—were also characteristic of a black boy’s.
As Raynelle neared the bottom of the grave, she called me over. “I’ve got no clue,” she said, stretching and sliding the word into two blurry syllables –“cluh-OOO”—as she handed me a piece of bone. It was chunky, small enough to close my fingers around, but big enough to make my hand bulge. Roughly conical in shape, it was smooth over most of its surface, but the narrow end of the cone was splintered. “What is it?”
”It’s a mastoid process,” I told her, holding the fragment behind my left ear, “and I’d bet your next paycheck that it came from the African-American skull that’s sitting in the evidence room at FDLE right now.”
“Wait,” she said. “You’re betting my next paycheck?” She laughed. “Not much of a gambler, are you?”
“Not much,” I agreed. “But actually, I might even be willing to bet my own paycheck about this.” As a matter fact, I might even have been willing to bet my life. The splintered edges of this mastoid process, I knew, would fit the splintered edges of that skull’s temporal bone as neatly as the thousandth piece of a jigsaw puzzle fits the first 999 pieces.
What I didn’t know was what the puzzle, this puzzle, was about. I wasn’t seeing the picture. Was the whole thing turned upside down—were we seeing only the blank cardboard backing, rather than the pattern that was the point of it? Or was there no particular pattern to the deaths, no discernible meaning to the violence? Maybe there was nothing but the emptiness of gaping eye sockets and the blankness of unbroken clay subsoil.
Except that the clay subsoil here was not unbroken, I reminded myself. The steel blade of the open-bowl scraper was doing its job. With near-surgical precision, it was cutting through decades of darkness and oblivion, bringing the boys of the Bone Yard into the light of day.
Over the course of the day, the scraper cut four swaths, each a hundred feet long, beneath the canopy of live oaks. At the center of the cuts was the cluster of three graves the dog had found for us. Around that cluster of graves, the cuts curved and parted, two and two, like a river parting around an island, like the grain of an oak plank making room for a knot; the lines diverged fluidly and gracefully, then merged again. And as the cuts flowed past the island of graves, more graves surfaced, all within a stone’s throw of one another.
Four additional graves in all; four silent war whoops. Like the Indians of the Great Plains, I was counting coup.