Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

didn’t change his deliberate pace. Page one, page two, page three, page four. Seeing Krista’s handwriting on each sheet made Faye so jumpy that she wanted to urge him to work faster, but she held her tongue because she didn’t want Sheriff Mike to revise his new and improved opinion of her.
    Halfway into the notebook, Krista’s entries stopped. Faye studied the last entry. It was written the evening before the two students were killed, and Krista had recorded exactly what Magda had told her to record: the location of each of the planned sampling sites.
    Not that those locations were meaningful, in and of themselves. They were recorded in relative coordinates, each one measured from a reference point. The first sampling point, for instance, was labeled “[12, 18]”, meaning that it was twelve feet east and eighteen feet north of the reference point. Unless she knew the location of the reference point—and she was wholeheartedly certain that Krista had documented that point somewhere in this notebook—then this list of bracketed numbers could refer to sampling sites in Peru.
    Faye didn’t need the reference point and she didn’t need to locate the actual sampling sites documented here. The fading line of orange flags that marked them quite well was still standing. But those flags couldn’t tell her who had stuck them in the ground. This notebook could.
    Someone had altered Krista’s notebook entries.
    The y -coordinate had been changed from 3 to 18, with three barely perceptible swoops of a waterproof felt-tip. The change from 13 to 28 was a bit more discernible, but the killer was deft with a pen. Changing 33 to 48 had required blotting out the three and starting again, but the purpose of data notebooks was to record science on the fly. Corrections were inevitable. Nothing on this page would call attention to itself unless the reader, like Faye, had some notion of what they were looking to find.
    “He moved the flags. They’re fifteen feet north of where Krista put them,” she said. “Our archaeological survey would have found the bodies if we’d dug where we were supposed to. And I bet he tried to dig them up first, to keep that from happening, but he couldn’t manage it because of the roots entangled in the bones. That’s why the soil was recently disturbed.”
    “He killed Sam and Krista and moved the flags to keep us away from the old grave,” Magda said. “They’re dead because they were doing their job.”
    Faye and Magda allowed the sheriff to shoo them out of the storage shed before he hurried away to fetch his fingerprint technician.

    Faye watched the sheriff’s excavation crew dig bones out of the ground until the sun gave out. After reading Krista’s notebook, she had taken a walk along Seagreen Island’s waterfront, near where she had found the empty boat on the awful day Sam and Krista died. The tiny island where Abby had rested all those years lay just over the horizon.
    It had taken a full afternoon of sitting on her butt and watching other people work, but she’d pieced the data together into a logical whole and she didn’t like its shape. She and Joe had found Abby the night before Sam and Krista died. The sheriff agreed with her that Sam and Krista were killed to stop them from uncovering the mass grave under the oak tree. So one person was responsible for all five bodies found on Seagreen Island.
    There was evidence that the killer had slept on Seagreen Island the night Sam and Krista were shot. It was possible (maybe likely) that the same person, while boating to and from the island, saw her dig Abby up. Abby’s bones went missing within a day or two. Was the person who took them the same person who killed her? Did the same person kill Krista and Sam and the nameless people under the live oak? Was the same person piloting the boat that had scared her and Joe away from Abby’s grave?
    The old murders and the new murders had tied themselves into a neat knot. The murderer was still loose and still killing people. Hiding what she knew about Abby was wrong, but it didn’t cause anyone great harm. She could have gone on doing that forever and still have been able to live with herself. But she couldn’t risk waking up one morning and finding that Sam and Krista’s murderer had killed again.
    She would give herself twenty-four hours to marshal her resources. That small delay could do no harm. Abby’s bones were the most important piece of evidence and they were gone.