Artifacts (23 page)

Everybody has to eat, even the most frenzied workaholic. Even frenzied workaholics digging up dead bodies. By mid-afternoon, the excavators had washed dirt and death from their hands and dug out their sack lunches. Faye, for one, was mightily enjoying her peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich.

Even when hungry, Faye was a slow, meditative eater. As she munched, staring into space, her eyes focused on the pine tree directly in front of her, a few dozen yards away. There was an odd scar on its trunk. Glancing around, she noticed another scarred trunk, one tree to the left.

She rose, still gnawing on her sandwich, and went to see if she could tell how the trees got wounded. Sheriff Mike dogged her steps like he thought she was going to throw gasoline on his precious crime scene and set it alight. Something about the marks on those trees gave her the shivers.

“The bullets. The ones that killed Sam and Krista,” she said, thrusting her fingers into one of the splintery cavities.

“That’s where we found them,” Sheriff Mike said.

Faye pulled her hands away from the living wood where traces of her friends’ blood might yet remain.

“Could you tell where the shooter was standing?”

“Just to the right of that big live oak.”

Faye faced the pine in front of her, braced herself against it, then leaned to the right. “So, if we assume a right-handed shooter, then we can assume he—”

“Or she.”

“Yeah. We can assume whoever it was hid behind that tree—which would have been easy since it’s at least five feet wide—then leaned or stepped out just far enough to get a clear shot at Sam and Krista.” She eyeballed the two scars, extrapolating their trajectories. “It wouldn’t have taken an especially good marksman to pull it off. They weren’t standing far away from the shooter—just a few feet this side of the same tree he was hiding behind.”

It only took a second for what she had just said to sink in.

She looked at the sheriff’s face, where recognition was also dawning, and said, “When Sam and Krista died, they were standing smack on top of the mass grave. I can’t believe you didn’t realize this sooner.”

Sheriff Mike muttered, “I’ve been working under duress,” then stood silent for a full minute. When he spoke again, Faye wondered whether he might have cracked under the strain. Why else would he ask, “There’s no need for Sandra Day O’Connor to know about this slip-up, is there?”

Faye, the sheriff, and Magda huddled over a communal bag of tortilla chips. Faye was half-listening to Magda expound on things metaphysical. She’d heard more than one of the professor’s monologues on the convergence of destiny and entropy.

Magda must have moved on to more down-to-earth issues, because Faye’s attention stopped wandering.

“Somebody shot those kids just because they were standing on top of an unmarked grave,” Magda rambled on. “They needn’t have died. We’d never have found those bodies with the simple survey we were doing. With ground-penetrating radar, maybe. Look at that line of flags. We would have passed ten or twenty feet from the bone pit without ever knowing it was there.”

The long line of weathered surveying flags that Sam and Krista had planted on their last day on Earth seemed to stand up and wave at Faye.

“Where is the field notebook?” Faye blurted, jumping up and upsetting the bag of chips in the process. “Where’s the notebook Sam and Krista were using that day?”

“In the shed with all the others,” Magda said.

Faye headed for the shed as fast as her workboots would allow.

“Where are you going?” the sheriff asked sharply.

“To look for the killer’s handwriting,” Faye said, amused by how quickly Magda and Sheriff Mike got to their feet.

Faye deferred to the sheriff when it came to handling the notebook. He seemed to have forgotten his initial objections to letting her and Magda loiter around his investigation, now that they had proven useful. Besides, while she knew a few things about digging up secrets, she knew absolutely nothing about preserving fingerprint data.

They found the field notebook lying atop a short stack of identical books, which was only logical since it was the last one used. The sheriff donned gloves, then opened his pocketknife. Leaving the notebook lying where it was, he slid the tip of the knife blade under the edge of each page and turned them gingerly, one by one.

“Find the last page they wrote on,” Faye said.

The sheriff nodded that he heard her, but he didn’t change his deliberate pace. Page one, page two, page three, page four. Seeing Krista’s handwriting on each sheet made Faye so jumpy that she wanted to urge him to work faster, but she held her tongue because she didn’t want Sheriff Mike to revise his new and improved opinion of her.

Halfway into the notebook, Krista’s entries stopped. Faye studied the last entry. It was written the evening before the two students were killed, and Krista had recorded exactly what Magda had told her to record: the location of each of the planned sampling sites.

Not that those locations were meaningful, in and of themselves. They were recorded in relative coordinates, each one measured from a reference point. The first sampling point, for instance, was labeled “[12, 18]”, meaning that it was twelve feet east and eighteen feet north of the reference point. Unless she knew the location of the reference point—and she was wholeheartedly certain that Krista had documented that point somewhere in this notebook—then this list of bracketed numbers could refer to sampling sites in Peru.

Faye didn’t need the reference point and she didn’t need to locate the actual sampling sites documented here. The fading line of orange flags that marked them quite well was still standing. But those flags couldn’t tell her who had stuck them in the ground. This notebook could.

Someone had altered Krista’s notebook entries.

The
y
-coordinate had been changed from 3 to 18, with three barely perceptible swoops of a waterproof felt-tip. The change from 13 to 28 was a bit more discernible, but the killer was deft with a pen. Changing 33 to 48 had required blotting out the three and starting again, but the purpose of data notebooks was to record science on the fly. Corrections were inevitable. Nothing on this page would call attention to itself unless the reader, like Faye, had some notion of what they were looking to find.

“He moved the flags. They’re fifteen feet north of where Krista put them,” she said. “Our archaeological survey would have found the bodies if we’d dug where we were supposed to. And I bet he tried to dig them up first, to keep that from happening, but he couldn’t manage it because of the roots entangled in the bones. That’s why the soil was recently disturbed.”

“He killed Sam and Krista and moved the flags to keep us away from the old grave,” Magda said. “They’re dead because they were doing their job.”

Faye and Magda allowed the sheriff to shoo them out of the storage shed before he hurried away to fetch his fingerprint technician.

Faye watched the sheriff’s excavation crew dig bones out of the ground until the sun gave out. After reading Krista’s notebook, she had taken a walk along Seagreen Island’s waterfront, near where she had found the empty boat on the awful day Sam and Krista died. The tiny island where Abby had rested all those years lay just over the horizon.

It had taken a full afternoon of sitting on her butt and watching other people work, but she’d pieced the data together into a logical whole and she didn’t like its shape. She and Joe had found Abby the night before Sam and Krista died. The sheriff agreed with her that Sam and Krista were killed to stop them from uncovering the mass grave under the oak tree. So one person was responsible for all five bodies found on Seagreen Island.

There was evidence that the killer had slept on Seagreen Island the night Sam and Krista were shot. It was possible (maybe likely) that the same person, while boating to and from the island, saw her dig Abby up. Abby’s bones went missing within a day or two. Was the person who took them the same person who killed her? Did the same person kill Krista and Sam and the nameless people under the live oak? Was the same person piloting the boat that had scared her and Joe away from Abby’s grave?

The old murders and the new murders had tied themselves into a neat knot. The murderer was still loose and still killing people. Hiding what she knew about Abby was wrong, but it didn’t cause anyone great harm. She could have gone on doing that forever and still have been able to live with herself. But she couldn’t risk waking up one morning and finding that Sam and Krista’s murderer had killed again.

She would give herself twenty-four hours to marshal her resources. That small delay could do no harm. Abby’s bones were the most important piece of evidence and they were gone. She would need the time to gather the earring, the religious medal, and all her photocopies documenting Abby’s life and death, because it was important that she be able to support her theory that Cedrick Kirby killed Abby and the people buried under the live oak on Seagreen Island. Even though no one had seen him in years, logic said that he had returned to kill Sam and Krista. She needed the sheriff to listen to her. He was going to think she was scum when he found out about her chronic withholding of information. She might as well get used to being treated like scum. She didn’t imagine that bankruptcy court and prison were going to boost her self-esteem any.

Delaying her moment of reckoning by just one day would help her in another way. It would give her time to gather up as much money as she could. She would need plenty of money to pay a lawyer, to pay the fines, to maybe pay her taxes while she was in jail and out of the workforce.

Who was she kidding? She wouldn’t need to pay her taxes. Joyeuse was as good as gone.

Faye was glad to go home and leave Seagreen Island behind her, and she was sorry for Deputies Claypool and Thornton, who were left to guard the evidence.

Rejecting Joe’s offer of supper felt like slapping a puppy on the nose, but Faye had no appetite. Still, she wished she hadn’t told him what they’d found on Seagreen Island before she dragged herself to bed.

“A man. A woman. A child. Dead and lying in pieces under the ground.”