The Bone Yard

by Jefferson Bass

  “And here is where you can get the hell out of right now.”

  “Right now? How?”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn, Agent Vickery. Not my problem. You found your way in here easy as pie. You can find your way right back out again. You’re good at following a trail, looks like. Ought to be a lot easier to follow it back out, now that it’s been beaten down by you and your posse.”

  “You’ve got three shallow graves here, Sheriff. How do you aim to handle them? What kind of forensic resources have you got in Miccosukee County for excavating multiple graves?”

  “A kind that’s none of your damned business, pissant. Now, you can turn around and walk out of here, or I can call in my deputies and we can haul you down to the Miccosukee County Jail. But I don’t think you’d like it there, because I got some prisoners right now that have serious anger-management issues. They don’t like authority figures, and I figure they’d go ape-shit over a bunch of snotty-nosed FDLE folks.”

  The standoff was interrupted by the brief whoop of a siren. A silver SUV paused at the broken strip of crime-scene tape, eased forward, and then backed up beyond the margin of broken tape and parked. The door opened and Riordan, the prosecutor, strode through the ferns in his fancy, city-slicker clothes, managing to look both out of place and yet somehow right at home. By the time he reached us, a ragged caravan of vehicles had begun arriving and parking behind the silver Lexus. First came the crime lab’s black Suburban, driven by Whitney, one of the crime-scene techs I’d met at the Pettis place. The Suburban was followed by a Miccosukee County Sheriff’s cruiser, driven by a deputy who chose to remain in the car, the engine running. Eventually FDLE’s crime-scene truck lumbered into view, announced by a new round of scraping and snapping as it bulled a wider, higher swath through the branches than the smaller vehicles had cleared.

  Last to arrive was a pickup towing a generator and light tower, the sort of high-intensity work lights used by highway crews at night. As the number of people, vehicles, and pieces of equipment multiplied, the nature of the scene changed. We’d arrived to a scene of lush natural sights, sounds, and smells: shades of leafy green, mossy gray, and crumbling brown; a chorus of woodpeckers, insects, and chirping frogs; the scent of honeysuckle, magnolia blossoms, pine needles, and decaying leaves. Now all those were being trumped by the fluorescent colors of crime-scene paraphernalia;, the rumble of vehicles and generators; and the acrid fumes of gasoline, diesel, and sweat.

  The prosecutor huddled with Sheriff Judson and Stu. I heard raised voices—actually, only one raised voice, which was the sheriff’s. He paused in his tirade long enough for Stu to give some low answer that I couldn’t make out; occasionally I caught a few sentences in Stu’s voice and, eventually, a long, conciliatory-sounding summation by the prosecutor. Finally I heard my own name; I strained to hear what was being said about me, but a silence followed the words Dr. Brockton. After a moment, my name was repeated—louder this time—and I realized with a guilty start that Stu wasn’t talking about me; he was talking to me.

  “Sorry, I was daydreaming,” I answered.

  “Could you come confer with us for a minute?”

  “Sure.” I jogged over, and Stu introduced me to the sheriff.

  Riordan nodded a hello. “We appreciate your helping us out,” he said. “I gather this is more than you’d bargained for when you offered to take a quick look at that first skull for FDLE.”

  “A little more,” I admitted. “But it’s an interesting case, and I’m glad I can help.”

  The prosecutor cleared his throat. “Sheriff Judson was wondering how long it might take us to excavate these graves. He has limited manpower, and he’ll need to assign a deputy to the scene while we’re here. Agent Vickery here says you’re the expert.” He nodded at Stu, as if I might be unsure who Agent Vickery was. Stu returned the nod, as if confirming that he had indeed said that. “The sheriff’s hoping maybe we can be through by midnight. What do you think?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “I think it’s a bad idea to excavate graves and search an area this big in the dark. The lights on that tower are bright, but they won’t begin to illuminate this whole area. Besides, even with bright lights, we’re bound to miss things we’d see in the daylight.” I added, “With all due respect, the people in these graves are already dead. They can’t get any deader by morning.”

  Vickery smiled. The sheriff worked his jaw muscles, and the veins in his neck bulged, but before he could explode, the prosecutor asked smoothly, “And if we start the search in the morning, how long would you estimate it might take to recover the bones from the graves?”

  I’d already been giving this matter some thought, since the clock was ticking on my two-week window of availability. “Well, that all depends,” I hedged.

  The sheriff spat another string of brown juice into the ferns. “Depends on what?”

  “Depends on how many more graves there are.”

  The sheriff’s rheumy eyes bored into me. “The hell you say.”

  I held his look. “We know there are three. At least three. Who’s to say we won’t find four, or fourteen, or even forty?”

  “Bull shit.”

  I shrugged. So far, two line searches of the grove by the recruits had failed to disclose any more open graves, but I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of additional, undisturbed ones.

  “There might be more, there might not. But we won’t know until we look.”

  “Look where-all? You plan to turn my whole damn county into a crime scene?” When he said it, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the whole county might be a crime scene, and I remembered Vickery’s words—“this whole world’s one big crime scene”—but I kept those thoughts to myself.

  The prosecutor spoke up. “Sheriff, I don’t think anybody’s suggesting we go overboard. But Dr. Brockton has a point. If we know of three graves in this specific area, we need to make sure there are only three. And to do that, we have to take a closer look.”

  The sheriff spat again. “You go digging around on some damn fishing expedition here, there’s gonna be newspaper and TV reporters crawling all over the place.”

  “If we don’t go digging around,” said Riordan, “there’ll be even more reporters crawling around, doing stories about cover-ups in Miccosukee County.” He said it calmly, as if he were stating an obvious, neutral fact, but I thought I detected a hint of a threat in the prosecutor’s words. I wasn’t the only one who detected it; Vickery and Angie both carefully avoided making eye contact with anyone, and the tendons in the sheriff’s neck tightened, stretching his wattle into webs of splotchy flesh.

  “Tomorrow,” growled the sheriff.

  “Great. We’ll start tomorrow,” agreed Riordan.

  “You’ll finish tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean do whatever the hell you have to do, but get it done tomorrow. I want your fancy asses out of my county twenty-four hours from now.”

  “We’ll do our best,” said Riordan. I was impressed with how coolly and levelly he managed to say it.

  “I said tomorrow,” repeated the sheriff.

  “And I said we’ll do our best.”

  The sheriff spun on his heel and stalked away. He conferred briefly with his deputy, then slammed the door of his truck, and with impressive force, I thought, for a man his age. As he fishtailed away, his wheels—which boasted the glossy sidewalls and deep tread of new tires—flung shreds of ferns and dirt into one of the open graves.

  Angie knelt and studied the ferns beside the spot where Judson had been standing, then—using a glove she fished from her pocket—she carefully plucked and bagged the end of a fern. The leaves were damp and slimy with what I realized was a mixture of tobacco juice and spit. Angie had just collected a DNA sample from Sheriff Darryl Judson.

  “That went well,” said Riordan. He motioned Angie over, without seeming to grasp what she’d just done, then looked around our small huddle. “Okay, how do
we make that happen?”

  Stu and Angie looked at each other, then at him. Stu said, “Make what happen?”

  “Clear this scene in twenty-four hours.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Angie. “Right?”

  “Wrong. We need to recover these three sets of remains and do whatever additional searching we need to do by the end of the day tomorrow. Unless we find something else by then—and by ‘something else’ I mean more graves—we need to pack up and roll out of here at sundown.”

  “Sir, no offense,” Angie persisted, “but how the hell are we supposed to search an area this big in that amount of time?”

  “Swiftly and efficiently, I suppose.” He gave her a tight smile. “You’ve got technology for this, right? Didn’t FDLE spend a lot of taxpayer dollars on a ground-penetrating radar system? Isn’t this exactly what that technology’s designed for?” Angie opened her mouth, and I expected to hear the words root finder, but Riordan held up a cautionary hand, so she kept quiet and he went on. “Like the sheriff said, do whatever the hell you have to do, but get it done tomorrow. Good night. And good luck.” With that, he, too, left, though his departure was not as showy as the sheriff’s. It reminded me of an old saying, an insult I’d first heard as a kid: don’t go away mad; just go away. He just went away.

  Stu looked from me to Angie. “So. What next?” Angie shook her head glumly; Stu frowned and chewed his cigar.

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  A flurry of phone calls, explanations, and pleadings ensued over the next three hours. What we needed was hard to find, and when we needed it was almost instantly. The whirlwind of calls and arrangements occurred against a backdrop of logistical and vehicular chaos, because the ten trainees who’d helped with the search needed transportation back to the law enforcement academy in Quincy, and Stu’s vehicle needed to be ferried to the new scene from Pettis’s cabin. Eventually all the logistical and vehicular loose ends were tied up beneath the buggy glare of the work lights, but by the time we left the scene, it was going on eleven o’clock. Two junior FDLE agents remained behind, camped out in the cab of the crime-scene truck, sharing night-shift guard duty with Sheriff Judson’s unsociable deputy.

  Following a dozen sets of tire tracks, Stu’s Jeep and Angie’s Suburban lurched and scraped down the unfamiliar dirt road. A half mile down, we found ourselves passing the makeshift cemetery of pipe crosses. It made macabre sense, I supposed, that the clandestine graves would be located in the same general area as the marked graves, but hidden farther—geographically farther and morally farther—from what had passed for civilization at the school. As our headlights illuminated them, the crosses cast long shadows that reeled and skittered as we jounced and angled past.

  From the cemetery we easily made our way back to the burned-out ruins of the reform school, and then the blacktop road and the county highway. On our way back to the Twilight, we dashed into a lonely-looking Circle K to snag a late “dinner”—the Waffle Iron was long since closed, and even the convenience store was about to shut down when we showed up. In the gritty passenger seat of the Suburban, I dined on a bruised banana, a pack of stale peanut-butter crackers, and a pint of chocolate milk as we headed for the proverbial barn—the pestilential barn—that was the Twilight Motor Court. It was midnight by the time we turned off the blacktop and into the sandy parking lot. Ten minutes after midnight, I got out from under the dribbling shower, folded down the biohazard-laden bedspread, and crawled between the dingy sheets of the lumpy bed.

  Tired as I was, I expected to close my eyes and find myself spiraling swiftly into sleep.

  Instead, I found myself spiraling deep into memory, spinning thirty years back in time and fifteen hundred miles away. I found myself in South Dakota, seeking the long-lost graves of dead Indians.

  Chapter 21

  Vickery had asked me how I’d gotten into forensic cases, and the answer had been “South Dakota.” South Dakota was also where I’d first thought that if I wanted to move the earth—or at least a few long layers of it—a diesel engine and a wide steel blade might pinch-hit for a lever and a place to stand.

  The engine and the blade were on an earthmoving machine—an aging LeTourneau “Tournapull”—and as it coughed and rumbled forward on the prairie, it carried my hopes and my potential ruin with it. A fraction of an inch at a time, the Tournapull’s angled blade eased down into the South Dakota soil and shaved off a layer, the way a carpenter’s plane shaves a sliver of pine off a plank. In this case, though, the sliver was eighty feet long, ten feet wide, and two hundred years deep.

  I’d spent the prior year—the summer after earning my master’s degree in anthropology—leading a crew of students at this same archaeological site, an Arikara Indian village whose timber-and-sod huts had once housed hundreds of people. Inhabited between the early 1700s and the early 1800s, the village was now on the verge of being inundated by the rising waters of a new reservoir. Anything we hoped to learn about the village and its inhabitants would have to be learned fast—unless we wanted to call in scuba divers. The previous summer, the water level had been twenty feet below the site’s lowest areas; now waves were lapping at the very margins of the village.

  We’d worked feverishly the prior season. Gridding the entire site into hundreds of five-foot squares, marked by stakes and string, we’d dug down by hand, inch by inch, through dozens of test squares. Over the course of the summer we’d managed to find and excavate thirteen graves—great progress, by most measures, but maddeningly slow in the face of the rising waters. It hadn’t been easy to convince the Smithsonian—the expedition’s sponsor—to let me trade my trowel for a road grader this season; they worried about the damage that heavy equipment could inflict on fragile old bones. I argued that even though the technique was experimental and seemingly risky, there was much to gain and virtually nothing to lose by bringing in earthmoving equipment. Saying no posed zero risk of damaging bones, but it also offered zero hope of recovering more than a relative handful of skeletons. In the end, I won an important but provisional victory: I could cut one eighty-foot trench with the grader, and if the technique proved successful at finding graves without damaging bones, I could forge ahead full speed.

  But despite my confident arguments in Washington, D.C., I’d felt anxiety carving into me as the steel blade sliced into the soil. I was counting on the wind that swept across the Great Plains, unrelentingly but also consistently. Year after year, decade after decade, the wind carried powdery alluvial soil—the infamous dust of the dust bowl—across the Plains, sifting it down amid the grass stalks at the steady rate of one inch every ten years. So sixteen or eighteen inches down—in theory, at least—the Tournapull would uncover what had been the surface layer back to the early 1800s, when the village had been abandoned, fire-building and pot-breaking had moved elsewhere, and grave digging had ceased. We’d see the ground the Arikara had worked with hoes fashioned from bison scapulae. We’d find, I hoped, the circular graves they’d scooped out to bury warriors who’d fallen in battle, women who’d died in childbirth, children who’d succumbed to smallpox, the invisible new enemy unleashed by the whites.

  The eighty-foot test cut lay alongside a row of squares we’d excavated a year before—squares that had contained many of the thirteen graves we’d found. I was gambling that this area was part of a larger burial ground, and that somewhere in the next eighty feet, the blade would intersect and reveal more graves.

  As the machine crawled along, I checked the cut’s depth repeatedly with a wooden stake I’d cut to length. To play it safe, the machine would make multiple passes, each one shaving off another two inches of topsoil. The soil was grayish brown, almost as fine as flour or cocoa powder. As the blade bit deeper and deeper into the earth, the walls of the trench began to resemble a cutaway drawing from a soil-science textbook. Below the mat of roots, the soil was darker and denser, sprinkled with round pebbles and the occasional larger rock—the size of a fist or a grapefruit—that had once
been a mighty boulder, before its encounter with the glacier. Whenever I saw one of the larger rocks, I worried that it might be a skull, that the grader just cut through a grave and a destroyed a skeleton. My relief upon seeing that no, it was just a rock, was mixed with disappointment: no, it was just a rock.

  Pass by pass—two inches, four, six, eight, ten, twelve—my anxiety deepened along with the cut. Perhaps my bold experiment was a failure. Perhaps I’d laid out a swath that contained no graves at all . . . or perhaps graves galore dotted the ground on either side of my trench, their skeletal inhabitants grinning at my foolishness in picking exactly the wrong path. Or perhaps there were indeed graves in the grader’s path, but the blade somehow masked them in its passage.

  Midway along the ninth pass of the eighty-foot cut, just as I started to despair, my eye caught a subtle difference in the surface of the exposed dirt. There: eighteen inches down, was a faint, familiar circle in the soil, three feet across, slightly darker in color and almost imperceptibly looser in texture than its surroundings—like a powdery version of a fresh asphalt patch plugging a big highway pothole. Could I be imagining it? I knelt to examine it, my heart racing. At the nearer edge of the rim—the edge first crossed by the steel blade—the soil within the circle had separated slightly from the soil outside the circle. The curved, quarter-inch gap marked a line where looser, disturbed dirt had been pulled away from the denser, undisturbed soil surrounding it. On the far side of the circle’s rim, the blade had shoved a corresponding handful of the loose dirt outside the margin of the circle, where it had tumbled onto the packed dirt in a miniature avalanche.

  As I leaned closer, my eye caught a flash of color amid the drab soil. Taking my trowel from the back pocket of my pants, I flicked away crumbs of soil with the tool’s triangular tip, revealing a tiny sphere of cobalt blue, pierced by a cylindrical hole. The blade had uncovered a blue glass bead, the sort used as currency by the Indians and early white traders. The bead told me beyond a doubt that this circular disturbance in the prairie soil was the grave of an Arikara Indian, containing bones and a few possessions and trade goods for the afterlife.