Before I can respond, Jewel pulls open her door, pushes me outside, and shuts it again. The lock turns behind me.
After a stunned couple of seconds, I hear Kirk Boisseau’s excited voice in my head: Bones … There was a car sitting on them.
After a paranoid glance at the sheriff’s department, I start running for my car.
CHAPTER 34
KIRK BOISSEAU DRIVES a scarred Nissan Titan with kayak racks mounted over its bed and roof. His truck is parked in the side lot of Easterling’s Music Company, a family-owned music store that’s surely connected in spirit to Albert Norris’s long-vanished emporium. The owner, a man nearly my father’s age, is a gifted musician and a country philosopher in the mold of Will Rogers. His store sits right beside Carter Street, the busy main thoroughfare of Vidalia, Louisiana, and thus makes a convenient but unobtrusive place to pick up the bones Kirk found in the Jericho Hole.
When I pull my Audi to the far side of the Titan, I find Henry Sexton standing beside the truck’s passenger window, where Kirk’s girlfriend, Nancy something, is sitting. Henry’s Explorer must be parked behind the store. The reporter’s face is bright with excitement, but Nancy’s is lined with concern.
By the time I climb out of my car, Kirk has gotten out and come around to my side of the truck. The ex-marine’s face shines like that of a boy who just dug up a dinosaur bone. An inch taller than I, Kirk has a waist no bigger than a woman’s and the shoulders of a mountain gorilla, the result of good genes and kayaking miles every day on the Mississippi River.
“Where’s the fossil?” I ask.
He grins and reaches through the passenger window, down between Nancy’s legs, then brings up a foot-long object wrapped in wet newspaper. When he unwraps the soaked paper, I see a dark brown cylinder with a rounded head at one end. I’ve visited the burial sites of many murder victims, and in seconds my brain categorizes this artifact as the distal end of a femur.
“Human for sure?”
“It’s no chimpanzee,” Kirk says.
If the bone is in fact a human femur, then I’m looking at what must be the lower three-quarters of it. Below where the hip should be—the trochanter and other protuberances—the bone appears to have been crushed.
“The water mineralized this?” I ask.
“Obviously!” Henry Sexton exults, shivering with excitement. “Do you realize what this means?”
“Is this all you brought up?” I ask, trying to stay focused.
Kirk reaches into the truck and brings up more wet newspaper. “Three more in here. I think the whole skeleton is down in the Jericho Hole, but it’s got a car sitting on it.”
“What make of car?” Henry asks sharply.
Kirk purses his lips. “I’m not sure. I was focusing on the bones. It was a convertible, I know that.”
Henry’s eyes bug halfway out of his head. “Luther Davis drove a 1957 Pontiac Bonneville convertible!”
“Did it look like a Pontiac?” I ask.
Kirk snorts in derision. “It looked like a big hunk of rust lying upside down.”
“Were the bones just loose on the bottom?” asks Henry.
“Hell, no. The river would have scoured any loose bones out long ago. The only reason I found these is because they were in the car. The femur was fastened to the steering column with barbed wire. I had to dig my hand up from under to reach it.”
“Oh, man,” Henry breathes. “Oh, shit. After all this time.”
“Check this out,” says Kirk, his eyes flashing. From the new bundle of paper he brings out another brown piece of bone. This one is long and thin, with a rusted piece of barbed wire still embedded in it.
A rush of adrenaline flushes through me.
“Jesus Lord,” Henry breathes. “Morehouse was telling the truth. That’s Luther Davis.”
“Maybe,” I say with caution born from experience. “Boys, we are in dire need of expert help.”
Henry gazes reverently at the find as though at a perfect new specimen of Australopithecus. “Were there enough bones under that car to be two people?”
“You’ll have to move it to find out. But you guys haven’t seen the showstopper yet.” He removes what looks like a fossilized vertebra from the newspaper. “This was buried under a couple of inches of mud. Looks like part of a backbone to me.”
“What’s special about it?” Henry asks.
Kirk rolls the bone over in his fingers and points to a small, dark protrusion with his other hand. “See this?”
Henry squints at the bone like an orthopedic intern. What is it?”
“A bullet.”
The reporter’s hand flies to his mouth.
“Can you tell what caliber it is?” I ask.
“No, but it’s small.”
“Nine millimeter?”
Kirk scrapes the encrusted projectile with a fingernail. “Closer to seven, I’d say. Hard to tell with the mineralization. But the owner of this vertebra was definitely shot in the spine.”
While Henry looks stricken, Kirk says, “You want me to go back down there and try to bring up some more? With that landowner on the lookout, I’d have to make a night dive.”
“No!” his girlfriend snaps from the passenger window. “You heard Penn. It’s time to bring in the law.”
“I didn’t say that exactly,” I point out. “But we probably don’t have any choice.”
Henry appears torn. “I don’t like the idea of turning this over to Sheriff Walker Dennis.”
“I know, but this parish is his jurisdiction, first and foremost. We ought to give Walker a shot at doing the right thing.”
“Even if Sheriff Dennis is honest, I worry about leaks in his department. He’s got some deputies with family connections I don’t like. I know an expert down at LSU that even the FBI consults in murder cases. They call her the Bone Lady. Nobody in the world could tell us more about these bones than she could, and we wouldn’t have to show the sheriff anything until we were sure.”