Chosen Prey

said.
    “Once or twice,” Lake said.
     
    L AKE HAD EXPECTED some results in two hours, but the rain, the falls, the jumble of trees stretched the two hours into three. When they’d run the last line between the bottom points of the survey box, Lake said, “Let’s throw the gear into the truck and run into town. Find a café.”
    “How long will it take you to process?” Lucas asked.
    “We’ll dump the information into the computer on the way into town. We’ll pull up some preliminary results right there.”
    They went to the High Street Café in Cannon Falls, took over the round booth by the window, and dragged some chairs around the open side. A half-dozen coffee drinkers sat down the length of the breakfast bar, farmers waiting out the rain. They made no attempt not to stare as Lake produced a fifty-foot extension cord, got a waitress to plug it in, and started the computer. “Data looked pretty good going in,” Lake muttered. “It’s not like we came up dry.”
    “Can you actually see bodies?” asked Marshall.
    “No, no. Nothing like that. What we see are soil changes. They’ll look like grave shapes.”
    “Trouble is,” his assistant chipped in, “sometimes you see a lot of grave shapes, especially in the woods like that. If a tree tipped over fifty years ago, and its roots pulled up a hole in the ground, the radar’ll see it.”
    Lucas looked at the screen. One word: Processing.
    They all ordered pie and coffee, and Del leaned over and said, “Still processing.”
    “Takes a while,” Lake said. He said that two months before, he’d been in North Dakota looking for a graveyard that was about to be flooded by a dam. “They knew pretty close where it was, but they thought it was a family thing. Five or six graves. Turned out that there were a hundred and seventy graves in there. They were pretty unhappy. They had like X number of dollars budgeted for moving graves, and they had to come up with like twenty X. People get pretty cranked up about moving granddaddy’s bones. On the screens, the graves looked like holes in one of those old IBM punch cards.”
    As he said it, the screen blinked: Processing Complete.
    “Here we go,” Lucas said.
    Lake pushed his pie away, pulled the laptop closer, tapped a few keys, and a new message came up: Generating Plot. The new message lasted only a few seconds, then changed to Plot Complete. Lake tapped a few more keys, muttered, “There’s Aronson’s grave, that’s the midpoint. Let’s go up to the Number One point and scan east.”
    He manipulated the built-in pointing stick on the keyboard and began scrolling. “There’s one,” he said after a few seconds.
    “A grave?” Lucas asked. He could see the deeper gray-shaded form on the plot.
    “Don’t know,” Lake said. “Looks pretty small. This is all to scale, and it’s less than a meter across.”
    “Pretty round, too,” his assistant said.
    They were all pressing in behind Lake now, watching the screen, which was showing a flat field composed of various shades of gray. The possible graves showed up as a darker gray in the background. They scanned across the hillside, then back, and across again, moving down the field in one-meter increments.
    “Another one,” Lake said.
    “That could be one,” his assistant said. “Let’s get the coordinates.”
    “Let’s just scan the whole thing first,” Lake said. “That looked like a tree hole to me.”
    “There’s one,” Lucas said.
    “ ’Nother tree hole,” Lake said.
    “How can you tell tree holes?” Del asked.
    “They got a certain kind of oval shape, egg shape, with the wide part uphill. . . . There’s one,” Lake said.
    Two more scans, then Lake said, “Uh-oh.”
    “What.”
    He stopped the scan. “Look at this.” He was talking to his assistant. “That looks artificial.”
    “Just like a grave,” his assistant said. “Let me get the coordinates on this one.”
    He jotted the coordinates down, then Lake resumed scanning, stopping only a few meters farther along. “There’s another one. . . . No wait, we’re at zero, zero.”
    “What’s that?” Lucas asked.
    “That’s the center point. That’s Aronson.”
    “So the first thing you thought maybe was a grave, that was on this same level?” Lucas asked.
    Lake nodded. “Yup. Five meters east.”
    “Goddamnit,” one of the cops said. Marshall humped forward, pressing close to the computer. “A grave looks different from anything else?”
    “Yeah.