By the time the air force departed, though, infantry reinforcements arrived: reporters from all three of Tallahassee’s broadcast television affiliates, plus the local Fox station, plus a reporter and a photographer from the Democrat, the Tallahassee daily newspaper. They lined the crime-scene tape at the entrance to the site, their camera lenses straining for a closer look. After shooting everything they could shoot from that vantage point, the cameramen and their accompanying reporters circumnavigated the site to take shots from other angles. Fortunately, after the press conference, Angie had had the foresight to send the recently arrived assistants to tape off the site’s entire perimeter, a task that consumed most of a thousand-foot roll of crime-scene tape.
Vickery called FDLE headquarters for guidance on handling the media; headquarters instructed him to be polite, to keep everyone outside the tape, and to refer all questions to the Public Information Office.
As I worked—inspecting the scraper’s final pass through undisturbed soil; conferring with Dr. Bradford, who served as medical examiner for Miccosukee County as well as Apalachee County; identifying small bones of wrists and ankles—I felt telephoto lenses tracking my movements, zooming in on me, invading the privacy of the graveyard. At one point I looked up and saw the Democrat photographer being escorted firmly back to the other side of the tape. But eventually the contingent of cameramen and reporters drifted away by ones and twos.
As the sun dropped below the tree line and the work lights switched on, the command-post siren whooped again, summoning us all to an end-of-the-day briefing.
“Okay, first,” said Vickery, “Winston Pettis. Autopsy report’s in; so is the report from Firearms. He was shot with a .45, fired from two, three feet away. The bullet pierced the heart, then hit the spine and mushroomed. Even if we had the weapon, which we don’t, Firearms says the bullet’s so deformed it’d be tough to match.”
I raised my hand.
“Doc?”
“What about the dog?”
“What about him?”
“Could the bullet that killed the dog be matched?”
Vickery spread his arms wide in a gesture that took in the group of forensic techs and agents. “See, guys, I told you that people from Tennessee aren’t all dumb.” He got a good laugh from that. “We’re still waiting on the veterinarian’s necropsy. The bullet from the dog won’t carry as much weight as the bullet from Pettis, but sure, if we can match it to a weapon, it’s good evidence. The tire impressions at the scene are from a set of twenty-two-inch BFGoodrich off-road tires. They might be on an SUV, might be on a pickup. The tires have been rode hard and put away wet, so the vehicle probably has, too. And yeah, that description fits about ninety percent of the trucks in L.A.” He must have seen the puzzled look on my face, because he added, “You just thought you were in north Florida here, Doc. You’re actually in L.A. Lower Alabama.” He smiled, then got brisk and businesslike again. “The GPS collar. Not sure it’ll tell us anything, but the dive team is searching the river where we think it got chucked off the bridge. Murky water, bad current, mucky bottom; tough place to search for something small and black. Oh well. If it were easy, they wouldn’t be paying us the big bucks, would they?” More laughs, these with a slight edge to them. “Okay, next: crime scene. Angie, what’s the bottom line on the overall site here?”
“The MapStar’s working like a champ,” she said, handing out copies of a map that showed the main landmarks of the site—the trees, the boundary, and the seven graves. “The laser was definitely the way to go. As you can see, we’ve got a good baseline map. This printout isn’t zoomed in enough to show all the details, but we’re also starting to map the location of bones within the graves, and we’ll keep adding to the map—bones, artifacts, whatever we find—as we continue to excavate.”
“How about we limit vehicle access tomorrow,” Vickery suggested, “put a checkpoint out at the highway turnoff, so we don’t have so many damn cameras and reporters crawling around here tomorrow?”
She nodded. “Great.”
“Okay, next. Human remains. Doc?”
“First off, FDLE’s got terrific forensic techs,” I began. “I’m hoping to steal ’em all and rope ’em into my graduate program.”
“If I spend five years getting a PhD,” cracked Rodriguez, “would I get paid as much as you’re making for this gig?” There was general laughter at this; it must have been common knowledge that I was working for the heck of it.
“Maybe twice that much,” I joked. “So far we’ve got two adolescent males and one preadolescent—the first skull the dog dug up—that’s probably male as well. There’s skeletal trauma in all three. We’ll start excavating the other four graves tomorrow. Be interesting to see what we find once we’ve got all the remains out and processed.”
“Speaking of processing,” Vickery said. “The identification lab in Gainesville hired a new director yesterday. Board-certified forensic anthropologist.”
He named the man. “Oh, I know him,” I said. “He’s good. Almost as good as our Tennessee graduates.” More laughter.
“He called me today,” Vickery continued. “Not surprisingly, he’d like to hit the ground running on this. He suggested you wrap up the excavations here and send the remains to Gainesville for processing.”
“Have they got enough graduate students to handle it all?”
“He says they do.”
“Sounds like a winner to me. Believe it or not, I do actually have a job in Knoxville.”