But what had killed him, months after he survived a beating—perhaps even multiple beatings—that had been forceful enough to deform his hip bones? I hoped the grave would contain the answer.
During Angie’s absence, Rodriguez had done an initial scan with the metal detector before I’d begun excavating, just as we’d done with the six prior graves. Alerted by the detector’s staticky squawk, I’d been watching for metal as I’d troweled down through the shredded plastic and sandy earth, working my way from the edges of the grave inward to the bones. I hadn’t gotten far—only as far as the boy’s right thigh—when I found a piece of metal embedded in the back of the bone. It was a bullet, lodged in the bone in much the same way as the flint arrowhead I’d once found in an Arikara Indian thigh. But the Arikara warrior had been an adult, a warrior, shot in battle; this was a boy, shot from behind, probably as he ran.
From the legs, I’d worked my way up the pelvis, up the spine, until I reached the third lumbar vertebra, the one centered in the small of the back. That vertebra’s spinous process—the knob jutting from the body of the bone, to give muscles a place to attach—was snapped off, and the vertebral foramen—the channel through which the spinal cord ran—was collapsed. Some powerful blow, possibly from the edge of the heavy leather strap, or more likely from something heavier, like a baseball bat or a metal pipe, had shattered the bone and doubtless crushed the spinal cord. The fracture lines here remained sharp, with no signs of healing. This injury, unlike the trauma to the hip bones, had occurred at or around the time of death.
The damage to the spinal cord would almost surely have paralyzed the boy’s legs. But would it have killed him? Not directly, though if he’d spiraled down into shock, he could have died within hours or even minutes. That theory seemed plausible, but then, as I continued to probe the grave, I found a small bone that forced a new and terrible realization on me. It was the hyoid—the fragile, U-shaped bone from the front of the throat—and it was snapped, the way a chicken’s wishbone would snap if you squeezed its ends together instead of pulling them apart.
I could think of only one sequence of events that fit all the pieces of this skeletal puzzle together: long after the boy’s initial beating or beatings—perhaps he still walked with a limp; perhaps, having been damaged already, he was an easy target for continuing abuse—he’d tried to escape. He’d been shot, then beaten again, so brutally that a vertebra shattered, rendering his legs useless. At that point, realizing things had gone much too far, someone had wrapped a strong, pitiless hand around the boy’s throat and strangled him.
After I finished excavating the ravaged skeleton, Angie scanned the grave with the metal detector again, and again the instrument squealed angrily in her hands. The signal was strongest in the area where the top of the chest had lain. I dug deeper with the tip of the trowel, watching closely for the glint of metal. As I flicked aside a pea-sized clump of earth, I heard the faint clink of metal on metal, of trowel on artifact. “Got something,” I called, and Angie came over to crouch beside the grave as I dug deeper. A small hollow took shape beneath a miniature dirt cliff, and tiny avalanches of sandy soil broke free and trickled down. And tumbling down in one of these crumbling little landslides was a disk of blackened metal, two inches across and a half inch thick, its rim rounded and its weight slight enough to hint at hollowness. A seam around its equatorial edge, and a corroded bulge that might once have been a hinge, seemed to corroborate this notion. Might it be a locket, a boy’s memento of his mother?
It was not a locket. What it was, I saw as Angie carefully pried it open, was a compass.
We had just found the remains of Buck, I felt sure.
I felt something else, too, something I’d never felt before during an excavation: I felt tears streaming down my face as the story of the boy’s death emerged from the ground.
The diary had told us that Buck had died the night he tried to escape. The bones now told us that Buck had died the most painful, brutal death of all the boys we’d found here.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Buck checking his compass by the light of the moon, picking a direction, and starting to run. And then I saw him tumble to the ground as a guard’s bullet tore into his leg from behind and the guards closed in on him for the kill.
Leading the pack—a rifle still clutched in his one good hand—I imagined Cockroach.
Chapter 28