Chosen Prey

For some reason, people have always made them rectangular, even though the bodies don’t go in the ground that way. You can pick them out by the squared corners.” Lake manipulated the pointing stick, continued scanning, then stopped again. “Holy ducks, there’s another one.”
    “Grave?”
    “It looks artificial,” Lake said. He looked at Lucas. “I’ll tell you what. You can never tell what’s underground, but . . . if that’s not a grave, I’ll kiss your Aunt Sally on the lips.”
    He found a third, on the same line, a moment later, then scanned back and found the lower portions of the three possible graves. “They’re not only rectangular, they’re just about five feet long. Something less than two meters.”
    “Keep going,” Lucas said.
    “Ah, look at this,” Lake said a moment later. “We’ve got another one. Let me look at this. . . . Look, it’s right between two of the graves above, but one level down. It’s plotted out like a graveyard.”
    In the end, they found two dozen anomalies, including all the tree holes and natural gullies that had refilled with sediment. Six, Lake said, could be graves.
    “Better get the sheriff right now,” Hammond said. “If these things really are graves, it’s gonna be a bad day at black rock.”
    Lucas looked at Del and said, “Six.”
    “Maybe they’re tree holes.”
    Lucas looked at Lake, who shook his head. “I’m not saying for sure that they’re graves, but they’re artificial, and Aronson’s grave fits right in the pattern.”
     
    T HEY WENT BACK to the hillside site in a convoy, and within ten minutes, as Lake was setting up his total station, a half-dozen more cars arrived. Sheriff’s deputies were scattered around the hillside in yellow rain slickers, four or five of them with shovels. Lake used the total station to guide his assistant across the hillside with the reflector pole. “There,” he called. “You’re standing on it.”
    Lucas stepped over to look: just another piece of hillside covered with leaves, with two small tree seedlings sticking out of it. Neither of the trees was bigger in diameter than his index finger. “No hole,” he said.
    A couple of cops had come over, bringing shovels. “Let us in there,” one of them said.
    He and the second cop began scraping at the surface, cleaning away the leaves, and the air was suffused with the scent of wet spring mold. “Scrape it, don’t dig down,” Hammond said, standing off to the side.
    “Take it real slow,” Marshall said. “Ain’t no hurry now.”
    Lake spotted the other suspected sites as the cops scraped at the first one, but they held off digging the others to concentrate on the first. Less than six inches down, one of the cops grunted and said, “This is a hole.”
    “What?” Lucas peered into the muddy gap in the ground. He couldn’t see anything but dirt.
    “I can feel it,” the cop said. He looked at the other cop. “Can you feel the edge of the hole?”
    “Right there? It feels . . .”
    “That’s it,” the first cop said. “We’re in the hole part here.”
    Still scraping, they defined the hole. “That looks like nothing more’n a grave,” Marshall said to Lucas. Lucas nodded, and a minute later, Marshall stepped off down the hill and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. Lucas looked around the hill. All morning, the cops had been chattering as they took turns working down the hill with the radar set. Now there was nothing but the sound of the shovels and the occasional grunt of the diggers. Del caught his eye and shrugged.
    Then: “Wait.” One of the cops held out an arm to stop another, then knelt in the hole. “Is that a rock?”
    He pulled off his glove and probed the soil with his fingers. A moment later he came up with a white object. “What is it?” Lucas asked, squatting next to the hole. Del moved in beside him, and the cop handed the white thing to Lucas.
    Lucas turned it in his hand and looked at Del. “Finger bone,” Del said.
    “I think,” Lucas said. He looked up at Hammond. “We better stop digging, and get the state crime lab down here. We gotta excavate these things an inch at a time.”
    “Ah, sweet Jesus,” Hammond said. “Sweet fuckin’ Jesus.”
     
    T HE DRIZZLE CONTINUED. The sheriff showed up and sent two deputies back into town to find some tarps to build tents over the supposed graves. Lake began working on a larger plot. The state crime people showed up at midafternoon and looked at