Stranded

again—only this time with a hand trowel—so close to the bag she couldn’t avoid the smell or avoid seeing the writhing mass of maggots every time the plastic flapped open.
    She had borrowed a pair of boots from the construction crewthat swallowed her feet. Buzz, the foreman, had also offered her a ball cap, reassuring her that it was brand-new, even showing that it still had the sales tag dangling. It seemed easier than trekking all the way back to their rental to unpack their gear. So she had accepted the ball cap before she’d noticed the saying embroidered on the front:
Booty Hunter
.
    It could be worse, she thought as she adjusted the cap and ignored Tully’s grin.
    Maggie and Janet filled their buckets, one scoop at a time. Both were cautious, sliding the trowels in slowly and ready to stop at any hint of resistance or even a faint scrape of something that didn’t sound like dirt. Buzz and the three members of his construction crew, along with Sheriff Uniss’s deputies—and even Howard Elliott—had formed two assembly lines, one to take and replace Maggie’s bucket and the other Janet’s.
    Maggie and Janet handed off the blue plastic buckets full of dirt. Then the buckets made their way down the lines, each man handing it to the next without moving, to avoid stepping more than necessary in the mud.
    At the end of the lines were the other two CSU technicians, Matt and Ryan, who spilled the buckets across a three-foot-by-six-foot designated area on top of the grass. At a later time the techs would be able to sift through the dirt chunks. Right now, they all just wanted to remove the garbage bag, intact, place it in a body bag, and send it on its way to a medical examiner.
    “Outdoor scenes are the toughest,” Janet admitted to Maggie.
    She wiped a sleeve of her sweatshirt across her forehead. Her long sleek dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail and stuck out the back of her navy CSU cap. Her smooth skin showed only slight laugh lines at the eyes and Maggie guessed that she was her age—mid to late thirties.
    Maggie could tell that Janet was a veteran at collecting forensic evidence, despite her age. She had taken command of the process with ease immediately after their arrival, allowing Tully to address other issues, like the flow of information. Maggie could see him still on his cell phone. At times she noticed him jotting down notes on anything he managed to pull out of his pockets. She knew that later he’d be trying to decipher his scratch marks on the backs of gas station receipts, his boarding pass, even a napkin with smudges from his chocolate doughnut.
    “You have any idea who’s inside?” Janet asked Maggie.
    “No.”
    The woman looked at her and raised an eyebrow like she didn’t appreciate secrecy when they were ankle-deep in mud.
    “We’ve been tracking a killer for about a month now,” Maggie said, but she wasn’t willing to tell anyone about the map that had led her and Tully here. “We suspect this farm might be his dumping ground.”
    “Yeah, we heard about the bones.”
    Janet glanced around the property but Maggie saw her attention go to the woods that lined the back of the farmstead. She was thinking the same thing Maggie and Tully had.
    Before she could say anything more, Maggie told her, “We have a cadaver dog team on its way.”
    “Don’t forget to have them check if there’s a storm cellar.”
    It was Maggie’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
    “Most of the old farms have them somewhere on the property for tornado shelters. Last year we found a woman and two kids. Husband claimed his wife had left him and taken the kids.”
    She shook her head at the memory and Maggie could see it was still fresh.
    “One of them was just a baby, not even two years old.”
    Janet stopped digging. Shadows started devouring the last streams of daylight. They didn’t have much time if they hoped to remove the garbage bag before dark, but Maggie stopped digging, too, waiting, giving the woman time to do what she needed to put the image away and return to the task at hand.
    “But hopefully we got enough evidence to nail the bastard.”
    She offered Maggie a weak smile, more a thanks for understanding than an indictment on the weight of the evidence.
    They were almost to the top of the black garbage bag when Maggie’s trowel met something more solid than a clump of dirt. She set the trowel aside and with gloved fingers she raked at the dirt until she saw white.
    Janet had