by Tim Downs
Donovan swung one leg over the tape just as the deputy hoisted it high overhead and held it there. Donovan turned and looked at him. “I already flossed this morning.”
“Sorry.” The deputy released the tape and took a step back.
“Thank you.”
“Gonna be a hot one,” the deputy observed.
“It’s getting there.”
“Too hot for June. Too hot for this time of morning.”
“Right on both counts.”
“They tell me you boys are gonna be in charge here.”
“That depends on what we find. Where are these graves?”
“Right over there.”
Donovan looked across the field but saw nothing. Until a month ago this area of rural Virginia had been thick virgin woodland—but now the area had been scraped clean for two hundred yards on all sides, leaving nothing but featureless brown loam littered with gray-green rock as far as the eye could see. Masses of bulldozed trees lay in twisted piles, awaiting an endless caravan of trucks that would haul them off to paper mills farther to the south; red flags fluttered atop pillars of soil that stood like castle parapets, marking the level of the original surface before excavation had begun.
“Want me to show you?” the deputy offered.
“Just point. If you don’t mind, I like to get my own first impressions.”
Fifty yards ahead Donovan came to a ridge where four rectangular holes lay side by side in the earth, each just a few yards from the next. There were no headstones, but a crude wooden cross made of two-by-fours had been hammered into the ground to mark the head of each grave. The land around the crosses had not yet been disturbed by the excavators and bulldozers, but at the foot of each grave the ground suddenly dropped off, forming a short vertical cliff that exposed the end of each grave as if a four-toothed giant had taken a bite from the hillside.
Donovan could see at a glance what had happened: Some hapless construction worker had sunk the teeth of his backhoe into the rocky Virginia hillside, unaware that he was about to discover the location of a long-forgotten graveyard. It was a fairly common occurrence these days, especially in areas like rural Virginia where people had been living and dying for four hundred years. Survivors moved westward, towns expanded in unpredictable directions, and old graveyards like this one were gradually covered over and forgotten, awaiting the day—sometimes centuries later—when some unfortunate builder would stick a shovel in the ground and find a skull staring back at him. It was just bad luck, that’s all, hard on the nerves and even harder on the checkbook— because every time it happened, the builder was required by law to stop construction until every single grave was identified and carefully moved to a new location. Heaven help you if the graveyard turned out to be sizable, and even heaven couldn’t help you if somebody famous turned out to be buried there—because then the historic preservation people got involved, and that’s when things really got expensive.
But that’s the law, Donovan thought, and it didn’t matter to the law whether your intended building project was just a new backyard septic tank or a project the size of this one—a thousand-acre super-regional mall and entertainment complex that would eventually include hotels, a water park, office condominiums, and a million and a half square feet of prime retail space predicted to attract “destination shoppers” from everywhere east of the Mississippi.
It doesn’t matter who you are either—whether you’re just a lowly Virginia homeowner with backed-up toilets or the guy who’s bankrolling this place—a man who, just five months from now, would probably become the next president of the United States. The law doesn’t care; no matter who you are or what you’re building, you’re going to stop everything until those graves are relocated, no matter how long it takes and no matter what it costs—and you’re going to pick up the check.
But that’s not why Donovan was there; the FBI wasn’t in the grave relocation business. There was something different about this graveyard. The construction workers here had found something else—something much more serious.
He approached the first grave and carefully placed one foot beside the opening, easing his 220-pound frame forward to make sure the edge would support his weight without crumbling. He leaned over the opening and peered down.
There, at the bottom, was the body of Nick Polchak.
Donovan cocked his head to the left to view the body right side up. Nick was dressed the way he always was, the only way Donovan had ever seen him—in baggy cargo shorts that always exaggerated the leanness of his long legs. He wore a collared short-sleeved shirt that looked as if he had selected it blindfolded from a rack at Goodwill— which he might very well have done. The shirt draped away from his body like a cape, and underneath it he wore a gray Penn State T-shirt; the top of the logo was just visible above his large hands, which were folded across his chest with the fingers interlocked, causing his knuckles to blanch like knots in a rope. His feet were shoved sockless into a pair of well-worn Nikes, and his legs were incongruously crossed at the ankles as if he were lounging on a beach chair instead of lying at the bottom of a grave.
Donovan looked at his face. There they were, as always—Nick’s enormous spectacles. Without those glasses Nick was legally blind, but with them he possessed extraordinary close-up vision, almost as if he had two microscopes straddling his nose—a valuable asset for a man who had spent his life studying the microscopic features of blowflies and maggots. After all these years the glasses had become a permanent fixture of his face; Donovan had sometimes wondered if he would even recognize Nick without them.
But Nick’s face looked different this time; this time his eyes were closed—something Donovan had never seen before. His huge brown eyes no longer floated like two chestnuts, distorted and magnified by the thick lenses. His eyes were closed now, and the lenses looked like a pair of empty TV screens.
Donovan shook his head. “I knew I’d find you like this someday. It was only a matter of time.”
He bent down and picked up a pebble from the ground. He held it out over the open grave, aimed carefully, and released it. It bounced off the center of Nick’s forehead.
Two soft brown orbs suddenly blinked open. “Hey, watch it—you could kill a guy that way.”
“What are you doing down there?”
“I was taking a nap—until somebody tried to bury me.”
“You were taking a nap in a grave?”
“It’s the coolest place I could find. It was empty—nobody was using it.”
“I’m not paying you to take naps,” Donovan said.
Nick’s eyes widened. “You’re paying me this time? Maybe I am dead.”
“It was just an expression.”
“I figured.”
Nick climbed to his feet and began to dust himself off. The grave was shallow, no more than three feet deep, and the lip of the opening was even with Nick’s waist. He extended his hand up to Donovan, who braced himself and hoisted Nick out of the hole with a single powerful tug. The two men stood face-to-face now; Nick was slightly taller than Donovan, but the FBI agent outweighed him by at least thirty pounds.
Donovan looked at Nick’s face and smiled.
Nick shook his head. “You do that every time, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Grin like a gargoyle the first time you look at my glasses.”
“It’s either that or scream and run.”
“Look who’s talking. I have to look at you through these glasses.”
Donovan glanced down at Nick’s legs. “Man, don’t you ever get any sun?”
“I’m a college professor,” Nick said, “not a field agent with the Federal Bureau of I-travel-to-exotic-hot-spots-and-save-the-world.”
“Is that my job? I wish somebody had told me.”
“How’s Macy doing?”
“She’s good, Nick. She’s pregnant—did I tell you?”
Nick paused. “Is that a good thing?”
“It’s the best.”
“Yeah, I’ll be sure and tell her that. When did you get up here?”
“About an hour ago. I drove up from NC State this morning.”
“Just in time for your afternoon nap.”
“An FBI agent told me he’d be here to meet me. Like most government officials, he lied.”
“Then you got my message.”
“You were lucky. We’re in summer sessions right now—I don’t have any classes.”
“Would it have mattered?”
“No—but I like to play hard to get.”
“Any trouble finding the place?”
“It’s hard to miss.”
“Have you had a look around yet?”
Nick motioned for Donovan to follow him; he led him around to the bottom of the ridge where the foot of each grave lay exposed like a row of open ovens. “It’s pretty obvious what happened,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“The builders were excavating this hillside—you can tell from the surveyor’s markers that this entire area is scheduled to be removed. They brought in a thirty-ton Komatsu excavator with a backhoe attached to the front.”
“How do you know that?”
Nick pointed over his shoulder, and Donovan turned and looked: Twenty yards behind them sat a thirty-ton Komatsu excavator with a backhoe attached to the front.
“Are you sure you’re an FBI agent?” Nick asked.
“Keep going.”
“The bucket of the backhoe looks about three feet wide. I figure the operator made about six passes through the hillside before he finally noticed something; by that time he had exposed the ends of these four graves. He probably figured there might be more, so he stopped.” Nick pointed to the openings and traced an imaginary line from left to right. “You can see that the caskets are buried at varying depths—that’s typical of an older graveyard. I’d say the average depth is about four or five feet.” He stepped up to the grave on the left and pried a crumbling splinter of wood from the edge of the hole. “The casket is almost completely decayed. It’s definitely old; a forensic anthropologist might be able to give us a date—possibly even an identification if they’re lucky enough to find any artifacts among the remains.”
He pointed to a thin layer of stones stacked across the top of the casket. “You find this sometimes in older graves,” Nick said. “The stones were put there to keep predators from digging their way in. It also keeps the ground from settling once the casket rots away.” Above the layer of rock was an inch or two of compacted soil, and above that was the open space where Nick had been lying.
“You can see that they started to excavate each of the graves. The workers probably figured, ‘Hey, they’ll have to be moved anyway—might as well get started.’ They got pretty far on the first one there—but the second grave was different. They stopped digging when they found this.”
Nick pointed to a foot-thick layer of soil that remained above the second casket. Long thin strips of grayish-white bone peeked out from beneath the dark soil.
“That’s the humerus up there. You can see the ball of the shoulder joint and a little bit of the clavicle underneath. The crest of the pelvis is just visible there, and down here—” He pointed to the soil at the end of the grave; the jagged stumps of four small bones projected from the earth like tree roots where the backhoe had cleanly severed them. “This is a tibia and fibula,” Nick said. “Here’s the other pair right beside them. You can see that the legs were pressed close together; my guess is that the body was buried on its side, most likely in a fetal position.”
“Why?”
“When you fold a body up, it requires a smaller hole. It’s a real time-saver when you have to dig the hole yourself.”
Donovan looked at him. “You worry me sometimes.”
“Two bodies in the same grave,” Nick said, “the owner downstairs and a renter in the apartment above. It’s pretty clever if you think about it. What better place to hide a body than a graveyard?”
“Then you think the renter was murdered.”
“So do you—you wouldn’t have called me if you didn’t. This is a rural area, Donovan, there are plenty of places to bury a body—nobody has to double up. In older cities when the graveyards got overcrowded they used to bury people on top of each other, but always in a casket and always in ceremonial fashion—laid out on their backs nice and comfy so they could all ‘rest in peace.’ Nobody buried people like this— tucked up in a ball without even a wooden box to call home. This guy was murdered all right—a forensic anthropologist can probably verify that by looking for bullet fragments or cut marks on the bone. The question is, ‘Who is this guy? And who killed him—and why?’ What you need is a postmortem interval—you need to establish time of death so you can begin to assemble a list of suspects. I suppose that’s why you sent for a bug man—that’s why you need me. What I can’t figure out is why you’re here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why is the FBI involved in this? Why do you guys care?”
Donovan nodded to the remaining graves. “The third grave is just like the first one,” he said. “One grave, one body. But the fourth grave is just like this one—there’s a second body buried on top of the original casket. That strongly suggests the same person committed both murders.”
“So?”
“There’s a lot of land still to be excavated here—there’s no telling how many more graves they might find. They’ve already found two of these double graves; there could be more. You know how the FBI classifies these things: three or more murders with the same modus constitute a serial killer—that’s when we get involved.”
“Okay—but why are you here? If I remember correctly, aren’t you a counterterrorism agent?”
“That’s right.”
“Does the FBI suspect that this has something to do with terrorism?”
“No.”
Nick waited.
“It’s a little . . . complicated.”
“I’m listening.”
Donovan paused. “Remember the last time we worked together?”
“In New York, in TriBeCa, a couple of years ago. I remember clearly—you didn’t pay me that time either.”
“Well, that turned out to be a big case for me. It seems I stopped a guy who was planning to attack the city with bubonic plague.”
“I remember reading about that—on the cover of the New York Times, in fact. Not bad—that must have been a shot in the arm for your career.”
“To say the least. The Bureau takes a lot of heat these days; we get so many complaints and criticisms that when something actually goes right we want to make sure everybody knows about it.”
“So they want everybody to know about you.”
“I guess so. They pulled me off the field and brought me down to Washington. The camera seems to be following me right now, and I suppose they want to take advantage of it. It’s kind of a PR job, really. I go to a lot of parties; I do a lot of interviews.”
“They pulled you off the field? Is that what you wanted?”
“They didn’t ask.”
“I’m asking.”
“Some days I could slash my wrists,” Donovan said, “but that’s another story. To answer your question, I’m standing here with you because this is where they want me right now.”
“Here? Why?”
Donovan nodded to the massive excavation site that surrounded them. “The Patriot Center—that’s what they’re planning to call this place. It’ll be the largest mall in the eastern U.S., situated right off I-66, the main east-west corridor out of Washington, D.C., just an hour from the city. A thousand acres of Virginia countryside—and one man owns the whole shebang.”
“Who?”
“John Henry Braden.”
“Senator Braden?”
�
��In five months it’ll be President Braden, according to the buzz in Washington. This is all his land, Nick—not just the Patriot Center, but as far as the eye can see—most of it belongs to him.”
“That was a pretty good investment.”
“Can you imagine what will happen to the value of his land once the Patriot Center is completed? And not just around here—all along the I-66 corridor. Braden owns land all along the way.”
“How can one man afford to buy so much land?”
“He didn’t buy it; he inherited it. It’s been in his family for decades— centuries, from what I hear. Braden is one of those old Virginia blue bloods. The man has deep roots, and deep roots make deep pockets.”
“I suppose his people all came over on the Mayflower.”
“Are you kidding? Braden can trace his family tree all the way back to Jamestown—he looks down his nose at the stragglers who came over on the Mayflower.”
“I still don’t get it,” Nick said. “What if Braden does have a lot of money on the line here? Why does the FBI care?”
“Politics. Braden sits on some very influential committees—the sort of committees that decide the annual budget for the Department of Justice, which determines the annual budget for the FBI. Get the idea? If Braden wants something from the FBI, all he has to do is ask.”
“And you think he asked for you?”
“That’s what I hear.”
“Why you? The FBI has all kinds of people who could handle this. If Braden wants you here, he probably wants the camera that’s following you.”
“I agree.”
“But why would Braden want this kind of publicity?”
“Because he’s running for president of the United States, and every presidential candidate needs to appear tough on crime. He’s got a horse farm in Middleburg—about half an hour east of here. John Henry Braden can’t have a serial killer operating in his own backyard; whatever develops here, he wants the American public to see that he’s on top of it.”
“Sounds like a risky move to me. What if it turns out worse than he thought? This could backfire on him.”
“It could—but he’s betting it won’t, and in the meantime he looks like a man of courage and conviction. That’s important; Braden wants voters to know that he won’t put up with crime in his own state, and he won’t put up with it when he’s in the Oval Office.”