THEY BEGAN BY DEFINING THE MARGINS OF THE grave with probes—thin, four-foot rods of stainless steel, each topped by a one-foot horizontal handle. Pressed into the soft earth of a fresh grave, the slender shafts sank easily; encountering hard, undisturbed soil, though, they balked and bowed, resisting. The probes weren’t actually necessary; the perimeter of the grave was clearly visible, once the leaves and the slight mound of excess fill dirt had been removed. Still, the Bureau prided itself on thoroughness, and McCready was a Bureau man all the way. There would be no shortcuts today, for himself or his team.
Once the grave’s outline was flagged and mapped and photographed, three of the agents—already sweating inside their biohazard suits—began digging. They started with shovels, working at the margins, digging down a foot all the way around before nibbling their way toward the carnage they expected to unearth at the center. After a grim twenty minutes, marked mainly by labored breathing and the rasping and ringing of shovel blades against soil and rocks, one of the agents—Starnes, a young woman whose blond hair spilled from the hood of her moonsuit like a saint’s nimbus—paused and leaned in for a closer look. “Sir? I see fabric. Looks like maybe a shirtsleeve.”
McCready knelt beside her. With the triangular tip of a thin trowel, he flicked away crumbs of clay. “Yeah. It’s an arm. Lose the shovels. Switch to trowels. Let’s pedestal the remains.”
Two sweaty hours later, digging downward and inward from all sides, they’d uncovered a tangle of limbs, torsos, and heads. The pedestaled assemblage resembled a macabre sculpture—a postmortem wrestling match, or a pile of tacklers on a football field. It also reminded McCready, for some odd reason, of an ancient Roman statue he’d seen years before, in the Vatican Museums: a powerful sculpture of a muscular man and his two terrified sons caught in the crushing coils of sea serpents. Maybe the reason wasn’t so odd after all, he realized: like the chilling figures frozen in stone, these three men had died in the coils of something sinister, something that had slithered up behind them as surely and fatally as any mythological monster.
McCready photographed the entwined bodies from every angle, seemingly oblivious to the stench that grew steadily stronger as the day—and the corpses—got hotter. “All right,” he said finally. “Give me three body bags over on this patch of grass. Let’s lift them out one at a time. I’ll want pictures after each one.”
It took another half hour to lay out the corpses, faceup, on the open body bags. By then, several of the techs were looking green around the gills, though no one had vomited. The last of the bodies to be lifted from the grave—the eyes gone to mush, the cheeks puffed out—was recognizable, just barely, as the man whose photograph McCready had passed around in the morning’s briefing. “This one’s Haskell, our undercover guy,” he said grimly.
“So the C.I. was telling us true,” said Kimball. “The drug buy goes bad, turns into a shoot-out.”
“Looks like it,” said McCready. “But just to be sure, let’s ask him.” He turned, looking over one shoulder toward the trees on the far side of the clearing. “Hey,” he called out. “You—Brockton. Step out from behind that tree. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
The team turned as a man emerged. He did not appear to be a seedy specimen from the sewers of the drug-trafficking world. The man looked more bookish than dangerous, and as he raised his hands, a broad smile creased his face.
“YOU—BROCKTON,” I HEARD MCCREADY CALLING. “Step out from behind that tree. And keep your hands where I can see them.”