Titus peered down into that hole.
The skull was painfully small, as most are when the skin and muscle has fallen away. A few scraps of hair were still attached to the top of it. The skull was attached to a spine that looked fragile as a twig. The torso was wearing a shirt, brown and tattered with age. The roots of the willow tree were notoriously invasive. Most homeowners are warned not to plant one near their well or their septic tank. These roots were no less aggressive. They had wrapped around the body like an anaconda. One of the roots had found its way into the skull and was coming out the eye socket to reconnect with its brethren.
Titus dropped to his haunches. There was a small plastic rectangle near the top of the skull. He reached out his hand and a pair of latex gloves were placed in his palm. He put them on and picked up the piece of plastic.
It had darkened with age, but Titus recognized it. His high school girlfriend had worn one in her hair. A tortoiseshell claw clip.
“There are more here. Let’s take care of them. Let’s get them out of this ground and get them home,” Titus said. He raised his voice just enough that everyone heard him. They had formed a semicircle around him but were standing as far away from the hole as they could.
He stood. “They been out here long enough.”
* * *
They were still at it two hours later. Work lights were employed to give them light as the darkness chased the sun back to her den. The creatures of the night, the whip-poor-wills and owls, the crickets and mockingbirds, the random coyote, vocally affirmed their presence. A nearly full orange-hued moon shone down upon them, its light lost among the illumination from the work lights. Titus watched as red survey flags on thin, flexible wire posts sprouted from the ground like wildflowers.
“How many?” Titus asked.
Davy wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Seven so far. Boys and girls, just like you said was on the videos.”
Titus took a deep breath. “Call the funeral homes.”
“Which ones?”
Titus exhaled. “All of them. Bigelow’s, Blackmon’s, Spencer and Sons. All these bodies going to have to go to Richmond. I’ll put in a call to the state police. We’re gonna need help with analyzing the remains. They’re all going to need full autopsies,” Titus said, silently wishing Virginia had an actual coroner’s office instead of just four district offices for the medical examiner.
Davy let his chin hit his chest. Words tumbled from his mouth, but under his breath.
“What?” Titus asked.
“I said, why wasn’t nobody looking for them? Some of these bodies been here for years, it looks like.… Why wasn’t somebody trying to find them? They was just kids!”
Titus took off his hat and ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “They were Black children, Davy. People are probably looking for them, but blond hair and blue eyes make the news.”
“Don’t make it about that,” Davy said. Indignation spilled from him like water from a sluice.
Titus readjusted his hat on his head. “You look over there and tell me it ain’t about that,” he said. Davy didn’t respond.
“I’m going back to the office. Gotta get things going with the state boys. I want to run this jointly. I’m not letting them take this over. This is our case. This is our home. Set up a perimeter, then you and Carla go get some sleep. I’m going to get Douglas to post up at the entrance to the property overnight.”
“That’s a long shift,” Davy said.
“We’re all going to be working long shifts from here on out, until this is finished.”
“And when is that gonna be?”
Titus looked past Davy to the graveyard that had rapidly grown around them. The killing field hidden in plain sight for so long. The willow tree swayed gently in time with the cold wind.
“When we catch him,” Titus said.
* * *
Titus got back to the office thirty minutes later. He saw Kathy’s car in the parking lot.
“You’re here early. Cam was supposed to be on till eight,” Titus said when he entered the office.
“Yeah, but he called me and asked if I could come in early, seeing as I was late yesterday. He’s still pretty shook up about what happened yesterday. He told me to tell you Ricky Sours been blowing up the phone,” Kathy said.
“I’ll call him later.”
“Is it true? About Latrell?” Kathy asked. She’d dated Calvin for a hot minute when Dorothy had broken up with Cal. Three months later they had made up and Kathy was with Bobby Packer, Titus’s other old high school teammate. They’d gotten married a year after Calvin and Dorothy. They’d stayed together until Bobby died in an accident in his dump truck in 2012.
After the election Kathy had applied for the dispatcher job, since both dispatchers, two older white women, had quit out of loyalty to Cooter. Titus had hired her almost on the spot. When she was filling out the paperwork, he noticed she had gone back to using her maiden name. He hadn’t asked her about it, but she noticed him noticing it.
“It’s hard to hear it. Packer. Every time I hear it I think of Bobby. It’s … it’s tough,” she’d said. Titus understood that kind of grief. He used to love reading Greek mythology as a kid. He especially loved the Iliad. After his mother died, he couldn’t read it anymore. He couldn’t stand to see the word Helen over and over again on the weathered pages of his book. Eventually he’d burned it in their woodstove. When Kathy had told Titus the story behind reclaiming her maiden name, he’d felt a wave of grief so powerful he’d felt his chest tighten. Sometimes grief is love unexpressed. Other times it’s regret made flesh.
“Yeah. It’s true,” Titus responded.
“Jesus be a fence around us,” Kathy said.
“I don’t think Jesus is getting involved in this one.”
“Titus!”
“There’s more going on than just Latrell shooting Jeff Spearman.”
“Like what?”
“We found a lot of disturbing things on Jeff’s phone. Things are going to get crazy ’round here in the next few days.”
“Oh Lord. Well, you the man for the job,” Kathy said. She smiled at him.
“I’m gonna make some calls, then I’m gonna head home. Pip is working a double. If you need me, you can get me,” Titus said, sidestepping Kathy’s compliment.
“Okay. Oh, Darlene called too. She said she was trying to get your cell phone.”
“I must have been out of signal range. All right, thanks.”
Titus could handle the proprietary tendencies of the state boys if it meant they’d bring the full arsenal of the Virginia State Police’s forensic capabilities to his county.
His county. When he was in Indiana, he’d often sidestep talking about Charon the way he’d sidestepped Kathy’s embarrassing compliment. If he was honest with himself, he had been ashamed of his hometown. Of the backward people and the small-town pettiness that flourished there. Only after Red DeCrain’s family had exploded in front of him did he find comfort in the familiar highways and byways of Charon County. Being home, being with Pops, after losing everything, made him look at Charon County in a different light. It was his home and it was his heart. And he’d be damned if he let men like Ricky Sours think they could claim it as their sole property or men like the Last Wolf get away with making it a killing field.
Titus had no illusions about who or what he was. For many people he was the devil. He accepted that. Only he was a devil that chased down demons.
* * *
When he got home his father wasn’t there. He found a note on the refrigerator that said Albert had gone to give Bernice Gresham’s granddaughter a jump. Bernice was a member of his father’s church, and since his father was chairman of the deacon board his number was on the emergency contact list for church members. Titus thought his father was still trying to make up for his misspent youth. If his father’s early morning gas station buddies were to be believed, Albert Crown was once a hellion. Quick with his fist and fearless as only young men can be. Only when his father’s temper flared up did he get a glimpse of the man whose fists were so strong from years of pulling crab pots they called him the Maul. Because when he hit someone, it was like they’d been attacked with a hammer. Titus thought that both the scrapper and the gardener existing in the same man was a testament to the multifaceted tapestry that lives in us all.
“Like Jeff Spearman being a teacher and a child killer,” Titus said under his breath.