The Bone Yard (18 page)

“A minute or two ago, I started seeing the collar again. Looks like it’s on a county road, about four miles south of Pettis’s place. Moving away fast—sixty, seventy miles an hour. It’ll be out of range again in a second.”

“Call Operations,” Vickery ordered. “Tell ’em we need everybody who’s anywhere near that road. Stevenson might be the nearest, but I don’t know where he is.”

“Hang on, hang on, it’s slowing down!” James’s voice was loud, distorted. “It’s stopping! It’s stopped! Wait. Oh, crap, it’s gone. We’ve lost it again.”

“Out of range?” asked Vickery. “How’d it go out of range, if it was stopped?”

“Oh, wow. The place where it stopped? It’s a bridge over a river. . . . Let’s see . . . the Miccosukee River. I betcha the collar’s drifting down to the bottom of the river right now.”

“Shit,” cursed Vickery. “Call Operations. Give ’em the location. See if we can seal off that road. Get ’em to pull in the local cavalry, too. Which county?”

“Uh . . . Bremerton on one side of the river, Miccosukee on the other.”

“Shit. Same jurisdictional mess we’re in out here in the woods. Okay. Tell Operations we need help from both counties. We need to question anybody who’s on that road, anybody who might’ve been.”

A
s Vickery was winding up the conversation with Nat James, the pair of recruits who’d jogged downstream returned with good news. A large tree had fallen across the stream only a few hundred yards away, they reported; the trunk was two feet in diameter, with branches that could be held for balance most of the way across.

Angie tied a strip of crime-scene tape to a tree trunk beside the muddy notch in the bank, to make sure we could pick up the trail again directly across from where we stood. Five minutes later, when the other pair of trainees returned from their search in the opposite direction, we headed downstream to the fallen tree. It was indeed a fine makeshift bridge, I thought.

Stu didn’t think so. He sized up the trunk nervously. “I thought it would be fatter.”

“Jesus, Stu,” said Angie, “it’s as wide as a sidewalk.”

“But not as flat. And a lot higher up.”

“Tell you what,” she offered. “You can watch everyone else go across and see how they do. Then, if you’re still nervous, you don’t have to do it.”

He considered this only briefly. “Nah, that’s okay. It’s like jumping off the high dive the first day of swimming season. The longer you think about it, the scarier it gets. Might as well get it over with.” With that, he plucked the cigar from his mouth and hoisted himself onto the trunk, making the move with surprising agility for a sixty-year-old with a bit of a belly. He walked quickly, on the balls of his feet, extending both arms for balance, making small circles in the air with the cigar to compensate for his occasional wobbles. When he reached the opposite bank, he pivoted on the trunk. “Okay, quit stalling, you yellow-bellied, lily-livered cowards,” he called. “We’re burning daylight here.”

Angie was the last to cross. Before hopping off the trunk, she tied a long streamer of tape as high in a branch as she could reach so we could find our bridge more easily in the dark, if need be. We walked quickly up the Miccosukee bank of the stream until the yellow tape, the paw prints, and the GPS confirmed that we were back on the dog’s trail. “Okay,” Angie told the group, “from here, we’ve got about another half mile or so where he was moving pretty straight and fairly fast. So line up, spread out, and let’s go.”

Our progress was slower on this side of the creek; at some point the land here had been cleared, and what had grown back, in place of pines and live oaks, was a field of briars. Game trails, including the one the dog had followed, formed low, narrow tunnels through the stickers, but without crawling on all fours, we were forced to pick our way through, and our progress was punctuated by a chorus of curses and yelps.

There were supplemental curses from Vickery when he learned that Stevenson, two other agents, and four county deputies had failed to apprehend any vehicles within miles of the bridge across the Miccosukee River, and a network of side roads made it impossible to seal the area. Vickery looked close to flinging his phone into the briars; he settled instead for snapping his cigar in two and then hurling it away.

Thirty sweaty, scratchy minutes after we’d entered the briar patch, the stickers thinned out, giving way once more to live oaks, pines, and waist-high ferns. Angie called a halt and scrutinized the GPS screen. “Okay, we’re getting close to an area where the dog hung out and wandered around awhile,” she said, “so look sharp.”

We’d barely started forward again when she held up a closed fist—the “stop” signal—and pointed. Ten yards ahead, directly in her path, was a low heap of dead ferns and freshly scattered dirt. Angie crept forward, motioning for me to join her. I moved slowly, inspecting the ground carefully before each step. Angie reached the spot before I did; when I joined her, she was staring down into a shallow hollow, roughly a foot in diameter and a foot deep. Paw prints and claw marks edged its rim. Within the hole, I saw shreds of black plastic sheeting. And jutting from the tattered plastic and the clumped dirt, I glimpsed the ends of three ribs.

Chapter 20

A
ngie unslung her camera, removed a bundle of survey flags from her belt, and began flagging and photographing the grave. She started with wide-angle shots, showing the grave amid the wooded setting, then she worked her way closer, taking medium shots of the disturbed earth. Gradually she moved in for close-ups of the hole and the exposed bones within it.

Vickery phoned the prosecutor. “Mr. Riordan, we’ve just found a shallow grave. It’s been recently disturbed . . . Yes, sir, unfortunately, we
are
in Miccosukee County . . . Well, we haven’t excavated it yet, but several bones are exposed, and Dr. Brockton feels pretty confident they’re human . . .” I was surprised to hear him laugh. “Well, I
guess
we could dig it up and move it across the creek into Apalachee. But then we’d have to kill all these trainees so we don’t leave any witnesses.” He laughed again, which I hoped was a sign that on the other end of the call, the prosecutor was making his peace with the jurisdictional briar patch into which we’d strayed.

As Vickery talked and Angie photographed, I began to explore the surrounding ground. Angie had waved the recruits back, to keep them from trampling the scene, but she’d asked me to take a look around. She didn’t have to ask twice.

We were in another grove of massive live oaks—immense, sprawling trees that must have been hundreds of years old. At their bases, they were wider than my arms could span; ten to fifteen feet above the ground, their trunks branched into six or eight or ten or twelve secondary trunks, each one twice as big around as I was. The limbs that spread from these secondary trunks were blanketed with resurrection ferns—named, Angie had told me, for the way they shriveled up and “died” during dry spells, then came back to life at the return of rain. Over the decades, some of the trees had lost large portions to disease or storms, and some of the trunks were splitting and half rotted. Yet there was remarkable life and beauty in the ancient trees, even the ones that were starting to die. Overhead, their branches laced together into a canopy that was as high, as wide, and as beautiful as the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Beards of Spanish moss, some of them twenty feet long, hung from the limbs and swayed gently in the late-afternoon breeze. The leaves and ferns and moss caught most of the sun; what light sifted through, to the lush carpet of ferns on the ground, was filtered by the foliage to a soft, silvery green.

And in the sifted, silvery-green light, beneath the resurrection ferns, I saw a second grave, also freshly disturbed, about thirty feet beyond the first.

A stone’s throw from the second grave, I saw a third.

This—
this
—had to be the Bone Yard.

A
fter his conversation with the prosecutor, Vickers phoned FDLE’s operations center to call in the crime-scene cavalry—and to confer on the best way to get them to our location. As it turned out, we were only a mile north of the ruins of the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory, although the school lay in yet another county. “Interesting,” Vickery observed, “that the school itself, and the official cemetery, are in Bremerton County, but these graves are hidden up in this little corner of Miccosukee County. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

Once Vickery had grasped our proximity to the school, he sent the academy trainees skirting the edge of the grove of oaks. At the far end, one of them found the remnants of an overgrown dirt road—a track that headed in the direction of the school. The dispatcher in the operations center would send reinforcements to the school; meanwhile, Vickery would send two of the recruits to lead them the rest of the way to us.

Ninety minutes after Angie had spotted the first grave—and thirty minutes before we were likely to run out of daylight—we heard the low whine of an all-wheel-drive SUV laboring through the woods, its progress punctuated by the screechings of underbrush and tree branches scraping the belly and the sides of the vehicle.

The vehicle was not, it turned out, the vanguard of the FDLE cavalry. A big off-road pickup—a Chevy Avalanche, wearing markings of the Miccosukee County Sheriff’s Office—muscled along the overgrown road. It stopped at the crime-scene tape that had been stretched across the mouth of the road to keep vehicles out, and then the engine revved. The Avalanche rumbled forward, pulled the tape taut, and snapped it. The vehicle jounced toward us and slammed to a halt, narrowly missing one of the graves. A grizzled, bowlegged man got out of the cab; his legs and arms were thin with age—I’d have pegged him as a seventy-year-old, at least—but he had a stringy strength about him, like beef jerky. Despite the thinness of his limbs, he had a substantial beer belly hanging over his belt, a sizable wad of tobacco in his cheek, and a major-league scowl on his face. His gaze swept the scene, taking in and rapidly dismissing the crew-cut trainees, pausing and sharpening on the flags marking the three graves, and then settling fiercely on Stu, Angie, and me. “Which one of you’s Vickery?”

“That’s me, Sheriff. Stu Vickery.” The agent stepped forward and offered his hand. The sheriff turned aside—but only slightly—and spat tobacco juice. “Sorry for the surprise. We were surprised, too.”

“Surprised? A
surprise
? Is that what you call it when you bring a search party into my county without so much as a by-your-leave? Is this what FDLE calls a surprise party? Because I’ll tell you, Vickery, I do not take kindly to surprises. Not in my county.”

Vickery flushed. “I understand, Sheriff. It was a tough call. We were on a crime-scene search, and the trail led straight across the creek. Led to these three graves. I wish they were on the other side, in Apalachee County, but they’re not. So here we are.”

“And here is where you can get the hell out of right now.”

“Right now? How?”

“I don’t give a good goddamn, Agent Vickery. Not my problem. You found your way in here easy as pie. You can find your way right back out again. You’re good at following a trail, looks like. Ought to be a lot easier to follow it back out, now that it’s been beaten down by you and your posse.”

“You’ve got three shallow graves here, Sheriff. How do you aim to handle them? What kind of forensic resources have you got in Miccosukee County for excavating multiple graves?”

“A kind that’s none of your damned business, pissant. Now, you can turn around and walk out of here, or I can call in my deputies and we can haul you down to the Miccosukee County Jail. But I don’t think you’d like it there, because I got some prisoners right now that have serious anger-management issues. They don’t like authority figures, and I figure they’d go ape-shit over a bunch of snotty-nosed FDLE folks.”

The standoff was interrupted by the brief whoop of a siren. A silver SUV paused at the broken strip of crime-scene tape, eased forward, and then backed up beyond the margin of broken tape and parked. The door opened and Riordan, the prosecutor, strode through the ferns in his fancy, city-slicker clothes, managing to look both out of place and yet somehow right at home. By the time he reached us, a ragged caravan of vehicles had begun arriving and parking behind the silver Lexus. First came the crime lab’s black Suburban, driven by Whitney, one of the crime-scene techs I’d met at the Pettis place. The Suburban was followed by a Miccosukee County Sheriff’s cruiser, driven by a deputy who chose to remain in the car, the engine running. Eventually FDLE’s crime-scene truck lumbered into view, announced by a new round of scraping and snapping as it bulled a wider, higher swath through the branches than the smaller vehicles had cleared.

Last to arrive was a pickup towing a generator and light tower, the sort of high-intensity work lights used by highway crews at night. As the number of people, vehicles, and pieces of equipment multiplied, the nature of the scene changed. We’d arrived to a scene of lush natural sights, sounds, and smells: shades of leafy green, mossy gray, and crumbling brown; a chorus of woodpeckers, insects, and chirping frogs; the scent of honeysuckle, magnolia blossoms, pine needles, and decaying leaves. Now all those were being trumped by the fluorescent colors of crime-scene paraphernalia;, the rumble of vehicles and generators; and the acrid fumes of gasoline, diesel, and sweat.

The prosecutor huddled with Sheriff Judson and Stu. I heard raised voices—actually, only one raised voice, which was the sheriff’s. He paused in his tirade long enough for Stu to give some low answer that I couldn’t make out; occasionally I caught a few sentences in Stu’s voice and, eventually, a long, conciliatory-sounding summation by the prosecutor. Finally I heard my own name; I strained to hear what was being said about me, but a silence followed the words
Dr. Brockton
. After a moment, my name was repeated—louder this time—and I realized with a guilty start that Stu wasn’t talking
about
me; he was talking
to
me.

“Sorry, I was daydreaming,” I answered.

“Could you come confer with us for a minute?”

“Sure.” I jogged over, and Stu introduced me to the sheriff.

Riordan nodded a hello. “We appreciate your helping us out,” he said. “I gather this is more than you’d bargained for when you offered to take a quick look at that first skull for FDLE.”

“A little more,” I admitted. “But it’s an interesting case, and I’m glad I can help.”

The prosecutor cleared his throat. “Sheriff Judson was wondering how long it might take us to excavate these graves. He has limited manpower, and he’ll need to assign a deputy to the scene while we’re here. Agent Vickery here says you’re the expert.” He nodded at Stu, as if I might be unsure who Agent Vickery was. Stu returned the nod, as if confirming that he had indeed said that. “The sheriff’s hoping maybe we can be through by midnight. What do you think?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “I think it’s a bad idea to excavate graves and search an area this big in the dark. The lights on that tower are bright, but they won’t begin to illuminate this whole area. Besides, even with bright lights, we’re bound to miss things we’d see in the daylight.” I added, “With all due respect, the people in these graves are already dead. They can’t get any deader by morning.”

Vickery smiled. The sheriff worked his jaw muscles, and the veins in his neck bulged, but before he could explode, the prosecutor asked smoothly, “And if we start the search in the morning, how long would you estimate it might take to recover the bones from the graves?”

I’d already been giving this matter some thought, since the clock was ticking on my two-week window of availability. “Well, that all depends,” I hedged.

The sheriff spat another string of brown juice into the ferns. “Depends on what?”

“Depends on how many more graves there are.”

The sheriff’s rheumy eyes bored into me. “The hell you say.”

I held his look. “We know there are three. At
least
three. Who’s to say we won’t find four, or fourteen, or even forty?”

“Bull
shit
.”

I shrugged. So far, two line searches of the grove by the recruits had failed to disclose any more open graves, but I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of additional, undisturbed ones.

“There might be more, there might not. But we won’t know until we look.”

“Look where-all? You plan to turn my whole damn county into a crime scene?” When he said it, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the whole county might
be
a crime scene, and I remembered Vickery’s words—“this whole
world’s
one big crime scene”—but I kept those thoughts to myself.

The prosecutor spoke up. “Sheriff, I don’t think anybody’s suggesting we go overboard. But Dr. Brockton has a point. If we know of three graves in this specific area, we need to make sure there are
only
three. And to do that, we have to take a closer look.”

The sheriff spat again. “You go digging around on some damn fishing expedition here, there’s gonna be newspaper and TV reporters crawling all over the place.”

“If we
don’t
go digging around,” said Riordan, “there’ll be even more reporters crawling around, doing stories about cover-ups in Miccosukee County.” He said it calmly, as if he were stating an obvious, neutral fact, but I thought I detected a hint of a threat in the prosecutor’s words. I wasn’t the only one who detected it; Vickery and Angie both carefully avoided making eye contact with anyone, and the tendons in the sheriff’s neck tightened, stretching his wattle into webs of splotchy flesh.

“Tomorrow,” growled the sheriff.

“Great. We’ll start tomorrow,” agreed Riordan.

“You’ll finish tomorrow.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean do whatever the hell you have to do, but get it done tomorrow. I want your fancy asses out of my county twenty-four hours from now.”

“We’ll do our best,” said Riordan. I was impressed with how coolly and levelly he managed to say it.

“I said tomorrow,” repeated the sheriff.

“And I said we’ll do our best.”

The sheriff spun on his heel and stalked away. He conferred briefly with his deputy, then slammed the door of his truck, and with impressive force, I thought, for a man his age. As he fishtailed away, his wheels—which boasted the glossy sidewalls and deep tread of new tires—flung shreds of ferns and dirt into one of the open graves.

Angie knelt and studied the ferns beside the spot where Judson had been standing, then—using a glove she fished from her pocket—she carefully plucked and bagged the end of a fern. The leaves were damp and slimy with what I realized was a mixture of tobacco juice and spit. Angie had just collected a DNA sample from Sheriff Darryl Judson.

“That went well,” said Riordan. He motioned Angie over, without seeming to grasp what she’d just done, then looked around our small huddle. “Okay, how do we make that happen?”

Stu and Angie looked at each other, then at him. Stu said, “Make what happen?”

“Clear this scene in twenty-four hours.”

“You’re kidding,” said Angie. “Right?”

“Wrong. We need to recover these three sets of remains and do whatever additional searching we need to do by the end of the day tomorrow. Unless we find something else by then—and by ‘something else’ I mean more graves—we need to pack up and roll out of here at sundown.”