The Narrows

nodded without conviction. She glanced at Dei as she did so.
    "Perfectly."
    "Good. Then, Cherie, take her away. Take her sightseeing." They left the RV and Dei led her toward the first small tent.
    "You certainly ingratiated yourself with him," she said to Rachel as they went.
    "It's funny. Some things just never change. I think it might be impossible for a bureaucracy to evolve, to learn anything from its mistakes. Anyway, never mind. What do we have here?"
    "So far we have eight bags and gas on another two. We just haven't gotten to them yet. Classic inverted pyramid."
    Rachel knew the shorthand. She had invented some of it. Dei was saying eight bodies had been recovered and readings from gas probes indicated there were another two bodies still interred and waiting for excavation. Tragic history created data from which models of similar behavior were formed. It had been seen before, a killer who returns with victims to the same burial spot follows a pattern, the newer burials radiating out from the original in an inverted pyramid or V pattern. So was the case here, with Backus either unintentionally or consciously following a pattern based on data he helped accumulate as an agent.
    "Let me ask you one thing," Rachel said. "He was talking to Brass Doran on the phone in there. She's got to know about the Backus connection, right?"
    "Yes, she knows. She found the prints on the package."
    Rachel nodded. At least.she had one confederate she could trust and who was in the know.
    They reached the tent and Dei pulled back the entry flap. Rachel went in first. Because the overhead venting flap was open it was not dark in the tent. It was only dim. Rachel's eyes adjusted immediately and she saw a large rectangular hole in the center of the tent. There was no fill pile. She assumed the dirt and rock and sand removed from the grave had been shipped to Quantico or the field office lab for sifting and analysis.
    "This first site is where the anomalies are," Dei said. "The others are straight burials. Very clean."
    "What are the anomalies?"
    "The reading on the GPS came back to this spot. Sitting here when they got here was a boat. It was-"
    "A boat? Here in the desert?"
    "You remember that preacher I told you started this place? He dug a canal for the spring water to fill. We figure the boat came from back then. It had been sitting here for decades. Anyway, we moved it, sank a probe and started digging. Anomaly number two is that the grave contained the first two victims. All the other graves are individual."
    "These first two, were they buried at the same time?"
    "Yes. One on top of the other. But one was wrapped in plastic and he had been dead a lot longer than the other. Seven months longer, we think."
    "So he sat on one body for a while. Wrapped it for safekeeping. And when he had the second he realized he had to do something and so he came out to the desert to bury them. He used the boat as a marker. As a sort of gravestone and for himself because he knew he'd be back with more."
    "Maybe. But why'd he need the boat if he had the GPS?"
    Rachel nodded and felt a little buzz of adrenaline start to tick in her blood. The brainstorming had always been the best part of the job.
    "The GPS came later. Recently. That was just for us."
    "Us?"
    "You. The bureau. Me."
    Rachel moved to the edge and looked down into the hole. It had not been deep, especially for two bodies. She stopped breathing through her mouth and took the fetid air in through her nose. She wanted to remember this.
    "IDs yet?"
    "Nothing official. No contact with kin yet. But we know who some of them were. Five of them at least. The first one was three years ago. The second seven months after that."
    "Have you built a cycle?"
    "Yes, we have it. About an eight percent reduction. We think the last two will bring us up to November."
    Meaning that the intervals between the killings were decreasing by eight percent from the initial seven-month period between killings one and two. Again, it was familiar. The decreasing interval was common in case history, a symptom of the killer's diminishing control of his urges at the same time his belief in his invincibility grows. You get away with the first one and the second comes easier and sooner. And so on.
    "I guess that makes him overdue," Rachel said.
    "Supposedly."
    "Supposedly?"
    "Come on, Rachel, it's Backus. He knows what we know. He's just playing with us. It's like Amsterdam. He's gone before we even recognize it is him.