“Great,” Sayer said again, taking a moment to absorb the whole scene. Isolated but easily accessible. Their killer probably only had to drag the bodies a few dozen feet. Any reasonably fit person could be their killer. “All right. How do I get down to my team?”
“The rope ladder from the sinkhole rim,” Piper said.
Sayer tried to smile but probably grimaced instead. She tucked her beads back in her pocket as she wondered just how much climbing down some damn rope ladder was going to hurt her shoulder.
She headed back up to the sinkhole and was just about to descend into the cave when an angry voice bellowed from the woods, “Maxwell Cho!”
* * *
A lanky, red-faced man in a crisp blue police uniform stormed into the clearing. He zeroed in on Max. “Where is she?”
“Kyle”—Max held his hands up as if in surrender—“we don’t know anything yet.”
“I know you found human remains.” The policeman pointed a finger at Max and advanced toward him, thrusting his finger in the air. “Is she here?”
Kona moved closer to Max, sensing a threat.
Sayer stepped in between Max and the angry police officer. “I’m FBI Senior Special Agent Altair. And you are?”
The slender officer was significantly taller than Sayer and he stared over her head at Max.
“Officer…?” Sayer demanded his attention.
He finally looked down at Sayer, nose flaring. “I apologize. Kyle Nelson, chief of the Rockfish Gap Police.” He firmly shook Sayer’s offered hand, eyes burning with enough animus that Sayer almost shuddered. His long face twitched slightly, contorting his mouth into a grimace.
“Who exactly are you looking for, Chief Nelson?” she asked loudly.
He spoke with a soft Southern twang, but his voice was edged with malice. “I came to see if you all found my sister. She went missing seventeen years ago and I thought maybe … and then I get here to find Max Cho at the scene.” Kyle spat Max’s name.
Sayer turned to look at Max, who was wide-eyed, one hand still held up, the other on Kona’s head to calm the dog.
“You didn’t mention a missing girl,” she said to Max.
Kyle Nelson snorted. “Of course he didn’t.”
Sayer could feel the tension crackling in the air between Max and Kyle. “Okay, I’m not sure what’s going on here, but standing over our crime scene is not the place to work it out. Right now I need to secure the scene, get the evidence teams going, and then I want to hear more about this. Chief Nelson, once we’ve set up our home base, I’ll ask you to come in and tell me everything about your sister. But for now I’m going to ask you to head back to town.” She turned to Max. “We’ve got a bunch of park rangers standing around with nothing to do. Max, you and Piper organize a grid search of the surrounding area. Have them look for signs of recent activity, pieces of trash, anything at all. Make it a mile radius.”
The local police chief took a measured breath as if fighting to control his emotions. Max dropped his hands and nodded sharply.
“All right, Agent Altair. I apologize for storming up here.” Kyle bowed his head slightly. “I’ll plan to come talk to you later today. In the meantime, if you’d like, I can send up an officer to help secure things.”
“Offer appreciated. Let me get the lay of the land and I’ll let you know when we could use some help.”
Kyle bowed again, glared one more time at Max, and strode away. At the edge of the clearing, he looked back at the sinkhole. “Agent Altair, it’s possible you just found my sister.…”
Now that his rage had drained, Sayer caught a glimpse of sorrow in his eyes. “I understand,” she said.
He was asking for respect for the dead.
SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, VA
Heart still beating fast from the confrontation between Max and Kyle, Sayer climbed onto the rope ladder leading down into the cavern. Just what she needed, tension between the local cops and one of her agents.
Sayer’s scar pulled painfully as she lowered herself down, distracting her from the drama above. She breathed deeply, acknowledging the pain, trying to let the sensation roll away like her physical therapist suggested. Rather than roll away, the feeling balled up around her shoulder and she was clenching her teeth by the time she got to the cavern floor.
She took another deep breath and shook out her arms, trying to release the tension. She turned to assess the scene but was suddenly blinded by the floodlights. For a brief moment her only sensory input was the sound of rain muted into a distant rumble.
“Sayer,” a sharp voice greeted her.
A sharp voice she recognized.
“Dana?”
A weatherworn woman in her early fifties materialized. Small as a mosquito and tough as nails, forensic anthropologist and expert medical examiner Dana Wilbanks still had the same bright green eyes and narrow smile she’d had when Sayer met her years ago. Before Sayer’s fiancé, Jake, was killed, the three of them had spent countless hours together at the local pub just outside the FBI offices at Quantico.
Two little skull earrings dangled from her ears as she threw her arms wide and wrapped Sayer in a tiny bear hug.
“Holt didn’t tell you I was here?”
Sayer returned her hug. Though the wiry woman only came up to Sayer’s shoulders, she still had a grip. “Holt told me a medical examiner was here, but I didn’t know you were back! I thought you were digging up bodies in the Congo. What are you doing here?”
The world’s foremost expert on mass graves, Dana had left the FBI to join the United Nations. Last Sayer heard, she was off to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help the UN document war crimes.
“I just got back yesterday.” Dana pulled off her work gloves, revealing tiny callused hands. “I guess with all the scandal, the MEs from Quantico are stretched thin, so they called in a favor. I’m officially on loan from the UN while we unravel this mess. And wouldn’t you know it, Holt couldn’t even give me a day off before assigning me a case.” She reached out and put a warm hand on Sayer’s shoulder, a stark contrast to the chilled air. “I hear you went and got yourself shot.”
“Only a little shot,” Sayer said, a joke she’d repeated hundreds of times. According to the FBI psychologist, she felt the need to downplay her injuries in the hope that no one would think her abilities were diminished.
“Hey, getting shot is no small thing.” Dana saw right through her ruse. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
Sayer nodded curtly, not wanting to discuss her injury any further. Certainly not in front of anyone else. “So, what do you have for me here?”
Dana gave her a momentary squint to see if she was really okay before turning her attention to the crime scene. “Well, my old friend, I give you … bones!”
“You don’t say,” Sayer deadpanned.
“I do say! In my expert opinion, I see lots and lots of bones.”
Sayer gave her a “very funny” look and turned in a slow circle, careful not to tread beyond the small clearing around them. Dana wasn’t kidding. Bones were scattered on the ground in every direction.
As with any forensic excavation, a grid of strings was laid out in perfect squares crisscrossing the entire fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cavern. Two evidence techs moved cautiously among the remains, photographing the squares one by one. A third tech sat sketching the scene.
Dana’s face grew serious. “Based on the volume of bones here, assuming they’re all human, I’d guess we have six or seven victims. Honestly, this is the most confusing mass grave I’ve ever seen. Not the largest by a long shot, but definitely the messiest. I’m talking massive ongoing disturbance to the bones.”
“How so?”
“There’s no stratigraphy.” Dana crouched down and pulled a trowel from her back pocket. She used it to gently lift a long bone. “Usually a mass grave is dug, bodies are dumped in, and then they’re covered with dirt. Even if they’re in the ground for a while, you can tell which bones go together and what or
der the victims were deposited. But there’s no rhyme or reason here.” Dana pointed with the trowel. “See?”
Sayer leaned forward to see better.
“This is a femur, but it’s far too long to go with the scatter of bones immediately around it. I’ll have to measure when we get it to the lab, but I’d say this femur most likely belonged to a tall individual, upward of six feet. But this skull right next to it probably belonged to a petite person. And this pelvis looks like a young female, maybe early twenties. They’re all jumbled together in a pile and they’re all heavily damaged. It’s like someone took apart a bunch of skeletons, shook them up in a bag, and dumped them down a hole. It will take us all day just to document the site.”
Dana ran a frustrated hand through her cropped gray hair. “In silver-lining news, I don’t see any children.”
“I’ll take whatever good news I can get.” Sayer let the full weight of the scene sink in. As her eyes roved over the bones, she imagined all the lives cut short, all the people who didn’t get the chance to grow old. Was Kyle Nelson’s sister among the dead? “What do you think that means? All the bodies were tossed in here at the same time? Were they killed and stored elsewhere, then dumped here as a pile of disarticulated bones? Or is this animal intrusion?”
“Those are all possibilities, but I won’t know until I can get a better look. After we document everything today, we should be able to start exhuming the bones tomorrow. It’ll be a slow process.”
“Any sense how long these bones have been here?”
“Not yet. I see some degraded scraps of cloth, so I’m hoping those might help us figure out what happened here. At least give me a timeline to work with.” Dana paused, clearly unhappy about something.
“What is it?” Sayer recognized uncertainty on Dana’s face.
“Well, I’m not sure I should say anything at this point.”
“About…,” Sayer prompted.
“This.” She pointed the tip of her trowel to the end of a long bone. “See how the ends of the bone are smooth, almost polished?”
Sayer squinted. “If you say so.”
“This is something called pot polish.” Dana cringed, as though saying the words hurt.
“Okay, and what does pot polish mean?”
Dana sighed. “Pot polish is hugely controversial in the world of bones. It means that it is entirely possible that these people were cooked before they were dumped here. The bones get this kind of polish from rubbing along a pot in boiling water. It’s almost always interpreted as a sign of cannibalism.”
“What?” Sayer’s voice rose. “Is this some kind of cannibal dump site?”
“No. That’s why I hesitate to bring it up until I can take a better look. I’m not seeing any signs of butchery that you’d expect to see if someone ate these people. No cuts from flesh removal. None of the bones are crushed to get at the marrow.”
“So, cooked but not eaten.… What the hell did we just stumble on?” Sayer asked, eyes scanning the cavern floor.
Dana remained silent.
“All right.” Sayer finally felt ready to shift into active-investigation mode. “I’m going to make sure Agent Cho has the grid search going and I’ll check back in half an hour or so.”
Before she left, she took one last look at the bones. They were her responsibility now and she felt the weight of their former lives heavy on her as she pulled herself back out of the cave.
* * *
Once she was satisfied that Max and Piper had the grid search under way, Sayer found Dana and her evidence techs by the vehicles loading small boxes into the back of the FBI van.
“The park rangers have offered to let us use their southern station as our home base. I’m sending my team there now to set up the lab,” Dana said loudly over the increasingly heavy rain. “I’d like to start pulling bones out of here by tomorrow, and we need a sterile place to put them.”
“Great. I’ve got Max and Piper off on the area search.” Sayer glanced over at Dana. “You sure you’re comfortable working at the ranger station without a full lab?”
“Yeah, I was able to requisition all the mobile equipment we brought back from the Congo.” Dana bounced on her feet to stay warm. “According to that big park-ranger lady, the ranger station nearby is massive and even has a small medical facility that’ll be perfect for any analysis I want to do. I guess they shut the southern station down and only use the northern one, so the whole place is ours.”
Sayer watched Dana’s team drive away in the van. “Great, that will definitely be better than cramming into a building down in Rockfish Gap. So, did you want to take another look at the scene without your team here?” She grimaced up at the rain, tugging at her poncho, which had completely failed to keep the rain at bay.
Dana pulled a thermos from her bag and offered it to Sayer as they walked back to the sinkhole. “Coffee?”
Sayer gratefully took the thermos and swigged the warm liquid. She sighed as it took the edge off the chill. “You are a goddess.”
“True. Yeah, I just like to take a look at a scene without the techs swarming it. It allows me to make sure I don’t miss any contextual clues. Give me a minute to think, if you don’t mind.” They reached the tarp above the sinkhole and Sayer stared out into the downpour.
She knew that the medical examiner had her own process, so she waited quietly. They fell into companionable silence, listening to the sounds of the forest. Rain pattered rhythmically on the tarp above them. Squirrels rustled through the underbrush. The haunting calls of a wood thrush echoed through the damp trees.
Dana finally interrupted their communion with nature. “All right, let’s head down and take a look with fresh eyes.”
A faint bubbling sound filtered through the pounding rain.
“Do you hear that?” Sayer asked.
Dana tilted her head, listening. “Is that running water?”
Sayer swiveled her head, trying to figure out where it was coming from. “In the cave?” She shone her flashlight down. A shallow wash of water ran along the cave floor.
Dana joined her and grimaced at the sight of bones getting caught up in the water. She let out a low moan. “Well, that explains the pot polish.”
“What?” Sayer looked around, trying to understand where the water was coming from.
“The disarticulated bones. The polished ends. There is no cooking pot, the cave is the pot. Look, the water is running down the chute and turning over the bones. This must happen every time it rains, tumbling them around the cave like a washing machine. The bones’ edges get ground smooth. No wonder this grave is such a mess.”
“Should we try to stop it before it turns everything over? Maybe we can divert the water. It’s got to be running in from the chute.”
Dana nodded and they ran out into the rain toward the chute entrance. Sayer jumped off the small rock ledge into a few inches of water pooling along the rocks. The water poured in over the top of her fancy waterproof boots, filling them to the brim.
“The ledge is acting like a funnel, running water down the chute and right into the cave!”
Dana jumped next to her. “We can just run the water off if we build a dam here.”
They began scooping rocks into a semicircle in front of the chute. Once they had a pile of rocks, they rushed back and forth with armfuls of thick clay, packing it into the cracks. After working together for almost twenty minutes, they stood to admire their creation.
Water flowed off either side of the small dam.
“Looks like it will hold for now,” Sayer said, scraping mud off her gloves.
She looked down at herself, coated with mud from head to toe. Her poncho hood had slipped off in their frantic work and rain trickled along her back, even down her legs. Water sloshed in her boots. Sayer looked over at Dana. Her once-red coat was streaked ashy brown. Her pants and boots were caked with wet clay. A single clod of mud dangled from her bangs.
Sayer let out a snort. Dana looked at her, surprised
, but then looked down at herself. Then over at Sayer. Her eyes creased with laugher. “And I came home from the Congo for some downtime, a nice clean bed, some fancy food.…”
* * *
After making sure their small dam would hold, Sayer and Dana climbed down into the sodden cave through the sinkhole entrance.
A thin layer of fresh mud covered everything. Their carefully laid-out grid was in shambles. Dana’s equipment was soaked.
“Dammit, what a disaster. I should’ve been able to predict this,” Dana said as they surveyed the scene. “This kind of destruction of a grave … it’s just…”
“Not your fault, Dana.”
The medical examiner sighed loudly and gathered herself. “You’re right.” She clapped her hands with resolve. “In good news, this means that careful documentation as we exhume the bones has just become totally unimportant.”
“How so?” Sayer asked.
“Well, we would normally document and carefully pull out bones one at a time, because how they relate to each other in situ could tell us a lot about how they were deposited.”
“In situ, like in place?”
“Exactly. But now that I know the remains have been heavily disturbed, I know that their current position doesn’t tell us anything about how they were deposited. So, really, great news,” she said, clearly trying to convince herself. “It would’ve taken at least two or three weeks to carefully excavate a grave this size. Now we can yank them out in a day and get to work in the lab.”
Sayer and Dana wandered carefully among the bones.
“Could these bones be really old? I mean, what if we’ve stumbled into some ancient Native American burial site or something?” Sayer asked.
“Fair question.” Dana crouched down and pulled a flashlight off her utility belt. “But I think I can rule that out.”
“Oh, yeah?” Sayer stopped to watch Dana, who had clearly found something.
Dana slid on a latex glove and reached out to gently touch one of the bones, as if apologizing before gingerly probing her fingers down underneath. She plucked something out, slowly pulling up a small rusted buckle; a long piece of rotting canvas followed, a few more buckles, a high collar.
Buried Page 3