Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

workaholics digging up dead bodies. By mid-afternoon, the excavators had washed dirt and death from their hands and dug out their sack lunches. Faye, for one, was mightily enjoying her peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich.
    Even when hungry, Faye was a slow, meditative eater. As she munched, staring into space, her eyes focused on the pine tree directly in front of her, a few dozen yards away. There was an odd scar on its trunk. Glancing around, she noticed another scarred trunk, one tree to the left.
    She rose, still gnawing on her sandwich, and went to see if she could tell how the trees got wounded. Sheriff Mike dogged her steps like he thought she was going to throw gasoline on his precious crime scene and set it alight. Something about the marks on those trees gave her the shivers.
    “The bullets. The ones that killed Sam and Krista,” she said, thrusting her fingers into one of the splintery cavities.
    “That’s where we found them,” Sheriff Mike said.
    Faye pulled her hands away from the living wood where traces of her friends’ blood might yet remain.
    “Could you tell where the shooter was standing?”
    “Just to the right of that big live oak.”
    Faye faced the pine in front of her, braced herself against it, then leaned to the right. “So, if we assume a right-handed shooter, then we can assume he—”
    “Or she.”
    “Yeah. We can assume whoever it was hid behind that tree—which would have been easy since it’s at least five feet wide—then leaned or stepped out just far enough to get a clear shot at Sam and Krista.” She eyeballed the two scars, extrapolating their trajectories. “It wouldn’t have taken an especially good marksman to pull it off. They weren’t standing far away from the shooter—just a few feet this side of the same tree he was hiding behind.”
    It only took a second for what she had just said to sink in.
    She looked at the sheriff’s face, where recognition was also dawning, and said, “When Sam and Krista died, they were standing smack on top of the mass grave. I can’t believe you didn’t realize this sooner.”
    Sheriff Mike muttered, “I’ve been working under duress,” then stood silent for a full minute. When he spoke again, Faye wondered whether he might have cracked under the strain. Why else would he ask, “There’s no need for Sandra Day O’Connor to know about this slip-up, is there?”

    Faye, the sheriff, and Magda huddled over a communal bag of tortilla chips. Faye was half-listening to Magda expound on things metaphysical. She’d heard more than one of the professor’s monologues on the convergence of destiny and entropy.
    Magda must have moved on to more down-to-earth issues, because Faye’s attention stopped wandering.
    “Somebody shot those kids just because they were standing on top of an unmarked grave,” Magda rambled on. “They needn’t have died. We’d never have found those bodies with the simple survey we were doing. With ground-penetrating radar, maybe. Look at that line of flags. We would have passed ten or twenty feet from the bone pit without ever knowing it was there.”
    The long line of weathered surveying flags that Sam and Krista had planted on their last day on Earth seemed to stand up and wave at Faye.
    “Where is the field notebook?” Faye blurted, jumping up and upsetting the bag of chips in the process. “Where’s the notebook Sam and Krista were using that day?”
    “In the shed with all the others,” Magda said.
    Faye headed for the shed as fast as her workboots would allow.
    “Where are you going?” the sheriff asked sharply.
    “To look for the killer’s handwriting,” Faye said, amused by how quickly Magda and Sheriff Mike got to their feet.

    Faye deferred to the sheriff when it came to handling the notebook. He seemed to have forgotten his initial objections to letting her and Magda loiter around his investigation, now that they had proven useful. Besides, while she knew a few things about digging up secrets, she knew absolutely nothing about preserving fingerprint data.
    They found the field notebook lying atop a short stack of identical books, which was only logical since it was the last one used. The sheriff donned gloves, then opened his pocketknife. Leaving the notebook lying where it was, he slid the tip of the knife blade under the edge of each page and turned them gingerly, one by one.
    “Find the last page they wrote on,” Faye said.
    The sheriff nodded that he heard her, but he