Chosen Prey

guy?”
    “He’s up in the woods with his helper,” Hammond said. “They’re setting up reference points. We were waiting for you.”
    “What do you think? Bunch of bodies?” asked the deputy named Dave.
    “I can’t take the chance,” Lucas said. “I’d say it’s about one in ten.”
    “Good. We got, like, two shovels, and I got an idea who’d be using them.”
     
    “L ARRY L AKE?” L UCAS asked. He was struggling up the steep hillside, slipping on the oak leaves, Del, Hammond, and Marshall trailing behind.
    “That’s me.” Lake was a lanky man with an uncontrolled beard and aviator-style glasses. He wore a red sailing-style rain suit with green Day-Glo flashes on the backs and shoulders. His face was wind-tanned, and two pale blue eyes peered out from behind the glasses. He was standing beside a yellow metal box on a tripod, which was set up over Aronson’s grave. As Lucas came up, he saw that the metal box housed a lens. “Are you Davenport?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I better get paid. This is miserable.”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah. How long is it gonna take?”
    “I got my guy over there setting up the last of the reference pins, so we’ll start the survey in ten minutes or so. I’m gonna get a cup of coffee first.”
    “How long is it gonna take after that?”
    Lake shrugged. “Depends on how much you want surveyed. We could show you some of it in a couple of hours, a lot more this evening, more tomorrow . . . whatever you want. We could do the whole hill in about three days. We’re using this grave as a center point. . . .” He touched his ear, and Lucas realized that what looked like a plastic tab near his mouth was actually a microphone. Lake, talking to the mike, said, “Yeah, Bill. Yeah, the cops came up. Just a sec.” To Lucas and the others: “This’ll take a second, then we’ll go some coffee.”
    He looked through the lens on the survey instrument, sideways across the hill to where Bill was holding a red and white survey rod with a knob on top. Lake said, “Two forward, a half left. A half forward, one inch right. Two inches back, one half inch right. You’re good—put in a pin. Yeah. Yup. Down at the truck.”
     
    A T THE TRUCK, Lake’s assistant got a gallon thermos out of the Subaru and started pouring coffee into paper cups, as Lake explained what he’d been doing. “We set up four control points around the center, which is at Aronson’s grave, so we’ve got a big rectangle laid out on the hillside. The next thing is, we stretch lines from the pins at the top of the hill to the pins at the bottom. Those lines are marked at one-meter intervals. Then we stretch another string across the hill, between the vertical lines, as a guide. We’ll walk back and forth with the radar, along the string, and move down the hill one meter with every sweep. We can probably get you a fifty-meter-square block in about two hours.”
    “If there’s a grave, how do you find it later?” asked Del.
    “Our computer’ll actually generate a map, to scale,” Lake said. “If we find a possible site fifteen yards north and five yards east, it’ll show on the computer plot, and then I’ll just use the total station—”
    “The total station’s the box on the tripod,” one of the deputies said.
    “—I’ll just use the total station to spot the center of the suspected site, and you guys—not me—start digging.”
    “How accurate is it?” Lucas asked.
    “At that distance?” Lake looked up the hill. “A couple thousandths of an inch.”
     
    T HE WORK WAS even more miserable than it looked. Lucas and Del, alternating with Hammond and Marshall, stretched a long piece of yellow string between the corresponding one-meter markers on the vertical strings of the survey box, so it resembled the letter H. The cross string had to go around trees, got caught in branches; whenever it got tangled, whoever went to untangle it inevitably slipped on the sodden leaves and slid in the mud down the hill.
    Lake, in the meantime, walked back and forth across the hillside, straddling the yellow string, with two boxlike radar units hanging down from one shoulder. After the cops figured out the routine, the work went quickly, except for the falls. An hour into it, Lucas noticed that neither Lake nor his assistant ever fell down.
    “How come?” Lucas asked.
    “We’re wearing golf shoes,” Lake said. He picked up his feet to show Lucas the spikes.
    “You’ve done this before,” Del