Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

Court. Sheriff Mike couldn’t shake off the thought of nine black-garbed men and women peering over their reading glasses at him and asking, “You did what?”
    What would he answer if this case survived appeal after appeal and reached the Supremes? “I was trying to expedite the investigation, Your Honors,” seemed feeble.
    Perhaps if he hauled Dr. Magda Stockard and her implacable companion, Faye Longchamp, to Washington with him, Their Honors would see his point.
    The negotiations had been interminable, but the two women weren’t entirely obstinate. They had agreed to his compromise and now they crouched just outside the yellow tape he had used to demarcate a ridiculously tiny crime scene. He crouched a few feet away from them, inside the tape with his forensic technicians. In a sense, he was supervising his technicians’ work, but Magda and Faye were supervising them all.
    The women had two distinct approaches to making him miserable, but they achieved the same result. Faye would gesture at a technician, reach over the yellow tape, and hand him an ax, saying only, “For that root.”
    Magda would squawk, “Jesus! If you pull that root any harder, the goddamn live oak’s going to fall on all our heads. Don’t you know what you’re doing to the stratigraphy?” Then she would hurl a machete or a shovel in the offender’s general direction.
    How was he going to explain the sheer quantity of items that entered the crime scene from the hands of civilians, mere bystanders? And how would he explain the fact that those two civilians were making copious notes on every scrap of evidence he uncovered, all the while instructing his photographer on the precise angle from which she should shoot each bone?
    For the evidence consisted entirely of bones, and there were a lot of them. They had been there a long time, maybe so long that the archaeologists were right to lay claim to the site. Maybe the Supremes would take that into account when they judged the detective work he was doing here.
    A second small femur surfaced and he wondered again what had happened to the child. Everybody agreed that there was only one child in this hole, probably a boy of nine or ten. Nobody was willing to say yet that there was only one adult. The old tree had reached out for the bodies in the years since they were buried, entangling them in its roots, shoving them out of their original positions. And somebody, a human somebody, had come along later and dug the bodies up, reburying them and scrambling their remains even further.
    The principal find of the day was a pelvis. When Sheriff Mike heard that it had belonged to a woman who had borne children, his first thought was It’s not Abby . Then he thought of the two small femurs and shuddered, because there is no easier prey than a mother. Nab the child, and she will follow you anywhere to get it back. Threaten the child, and she will hand over her own life just to save her baby. Even if her baby’s thirty years old.
    Besides the adult skull and pelvis and the two little leg bones, a number of vertebrae and ribs had surfaced. People had lots of backbones and ribs, and it would take a practiced eye and skill with a cleaning brush to tell whether they’d uncovered one C4 vertebra or ten.
    Early in the day, he’d assigned a technician to catalog those smaller bones and, for better or worse, the poor guy was getting plenty of help from Faye, who was leaning far into the crime scene to peer at the evidence. He had explained to both Faye and Magda that they should picture a humongous sheet of plate glass, starting at the ground, running through the crime scene tape, and extending toward the heavens. He told them to by God stay on their side of the glass. Faye seemed to have pictured in her mind a humongous sheet of Saran Wrap. She was stretching it with impunity.
    Then somebody cried, “I’ve got another pelvis, but it’s in bad shape. I’m not sure I should uncover it any more.” Sheriff Mike watched in disbelief as Faye dropped to all fours and slithered under the tape. Magda hurdled it, crying, “Bless you for your responsible field technique. I want a look at that pelvis myself.”
    Sheriff Mike joined the huddle around the half-excavated pelvis. As one, Faye, Magda, and the responsible field tech said, “Adult male,” and Magda looked the sheriff right in the eye. “You’ve got three bodies here.”

    Everybody has to eat, even the most frenzied workaholic. Even frenzied