Stranded

him.
    “If you’re correct,” and he paused while his Adam’s apple danced up and down. He seemed to be having some difficulty swallowing this news. Finally he continued, “That would mean we’ve got two bodies here. Not one.”
    “Again, it’s just an educated guess.”
    “I heard your partner say you’ve got like a premed background or something like that.”
    “Premed doesn’t make me a bone expert, Sheriff. We’ll know soon enough when the real experts get here.”
    Maggie stopped herself from telling the county sheriff that there could be even more bodies buried on this old farmstead.
    Sheriff Uniss was already too jumpy and now she noticed the blinking had set off a nervous twitch at the corner of his left eye. His entire body seemed twitchy—feet shifting, long arms crossing then dangling until he hitched his thumbs into his belt, an unsuccessful effort to stop the constant motion.
    His nervous energy reminded Maggie of the scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz
. Gray strawlike hair stuck out from under his ball cap. His clothes, however, portrayed a sense of discipline. He wore blue jeans with creases that looked freshly pressed, a red-and-gray-plaid flannel shirt, and a small notebook and two pens stuck out of his vinyl-protected breast pocket. Despite the mud, his gray and black cowboy boots were shiny and polished.
    Earlier Sheriff Uniss had told Maggie and her partner, R. J. Tully, that he had seen “a few mangled bodies” from car accidents. He had said it in a way that might offer the credentials needed to handle a possible murder victim. Instead, it only reinforced in Maggie’s mind that this guy—no matter how organized and well intentioned—would be in way over his head with a murder investigation. Especially if there were more bodies. It was much too early to know, but Maggie had a gut feeling that this might be the site she and Tully had spent the last month searching for.
    Maggie glanced at the two young sheriff’s deputies leaning on their mud-caked shovels at the edges of the crater. Unlike their boss, they wore brown uniforms, shirtsleeves rolled up, hats left back in their vehicles. They eyed the chunks of dirt surroundingthe bones as though expecting more to pop out from the ground.
    Fifty feet behind the deputies, a crew of construction workers waited beside the Bobcat and backhoe loader that had turned up this mess. The men had taken up residence next to one of the remaining outbuildings. Late yesterday afternoon the workers had accidentally dug up what they believed might be an old cemetery. They had already leveled several buildings on the farmstead and had only just begun to dig the foundation for a new wildlife preserve’s information center.
    The bones made the crew stop. The accompanying smell made them back clear off. It was Maggie’s understanding that the foreman called the sheriff and the sheriff—in the hopes of finding a simple explanation—called the property’s previous owner, only to discover that she had been dead for almost ten years. Her executor had just sold the land to the federal government after leaving the property vacant for almost a decade. He was, according to the sheriff, now en route, despite being three hundred miles away when he received the sheriff’s call and despite having no explanation for the newly discovered bones. In fact, it was the executor who suggested the federal government be notified. After all, they were now the owners of this mess.
    As for Maggie and Agent Tully? It was a fluke that they were here at all.
    They had flown into Omaha early that morning on an unrelated matter, an entirely different search. Their flight from D.C. had been a rough one. Maggie’s stomach still roiled just at the thought of the lightning and rain that greeted their aircraft. She hated flying and the roller-coaster ride had left her white-knuckled and nauseated. When they stopped for gas and discovered freshhomemade doughnuts inside the little shop, Maggie bought only a Diet Pepsi. Tully raised an eyebrow. She rarely passed on doughnuts. Thankfully his concern dissipated after his second glazed cruller.
    For weeks they had been spending a lot of time together either in cramped offices back at Quantico or on the road. Somehow they managed to remain patient with each other’s habits and quirks. Maggie knew Tully was just as tired as she was of highway motels and rental cars, both of which smelled of someone else’s perfume or aftershave and fast