Page 44 (2/2)

The hly four feet by six feet The clay was broken and infused with pale, shredded roots, freshly shorn and torn froed wound in the earth’s sed over the lu no one else had seen, tucked beneath a clod of clay Kneeling just outside the in of the oval mound, he leaned down, his nose practically in the dirt “Cartridge case,” he said “That was careless of so around: “Ki the na the end of the rod beside the piece of brass

“Got it,” Boatman called a moment later

Still kneeling, McCready took a twig froling it to catch the light, he peered closely at the ton Nineents; McCready dropped the case into it, and the agent sealed and labeled it, then set it in one of the plastic bins

He sat back on his heels “All right We’re burning daylight, so let’s get to it Boat in: shovel till you see so—dirt, leaves, twigs, everything but the air Hell, screen the air, too” He waved a hand in a sweeping gesture that enco area as well “Might be more brass, buried or scattered around the periphery Maybe cigarette butts, too, if we’re lucky or the shooters are stupid Maybe they left us some DNA”

“Maybe a signed confession, too,” joked one of the agents McCready did not laugh, so no one else did, either

“All right,” he said “Dig in Easy does it, though If our CI’s playing straight with us, we’ve got three bodies here—the two buyers and our undercover guy Way the CI tells it, the traffickers never intended to sell; their plan all along was to kill the buyers, keep the coke, and uys’ turf”

“Nice folks,” muttered someone

“Aren’t they all?” someone else responded

THEY BEGAN BY DEFINING THE MARGINS OF THE grave with probes—thin, four-foot rods of stainless steel, each topped by a one-foot horizontal handle Pressed into the soft earth of a fresh grave, the slender shafts sank easily; encountering hard, undisturbed soil, though, they balked and bowed, resisting The probes weren’t actually necessary; the perirave was clearly visible, once the leaves and the slight mound of excess fill dirt had been rehness, and McCready was a Bureau man all the way There would be no shortcuts today, for himself or his team

Once the grave’s outline was flagged andinside their biohazard suits—began digging They started with shovels, working at thedown a foot all the way around before nibbling their way toward the carnage they expected to unearth at the center After a gri and the rasping and ringing of shovel blades against soil and rocks, one of the agents—Starnes, a young woman whose blond hair spilled from the hood of her moonsuit like a saint’s nimbus—paused and leaned in for a closer look “Sir? I see fabric Looks like maybe a shirtsleeve”

McCready knelt beside her With the triangular tip of a thin trowel, he flicked away crumbs of clay “Yeah It’s an arm Lose the shovels Switch to trowels Let’s pedestal the remains”

Teaty hours later, digging doard and inward frole of lie rese match, or a pile of tacklers on a football field It also reminded McCready, for some odd reason, of an ancient Roman statue he’d seen years before, in the Vatican Museums: a powerful sculpture of acoils of sea serpents Maybe the reason wasn’t so odd after all, he realized: like the chilling figures frozen in stone, these threethat had slithered up behind theical monster

McCready photographed the entwined bodies frorew steadily stronger as the day—and the corpses—got hotter “All right,” he said finally “Give rass Let’s lift them out one at a time I’ll want pictures after each one”

It took another half hour to lay out the corpses, faceup, on the open body bags By then, several of the techs were looking green around the gills, though no one had vorave—the eyes gone to nizable, just barely, as the ’s briefing “This one’s Haskell, our undercover guy,” he said grimly

“So the CI was telling us true,” said Kioes bad, turns into a shoot-out”

“Looks like it,” said McCready “But just to be sure, let’s ask hi over one shoulder toward the trees on the far side of the clearing “Hey,” he called out “You—Brockton Step out from behind that tree And keep your hands where I can see them”

The teaed He did not appear to be a seedy speci world The erous, and as he raised his hands, a broad smile creased his face

“YOU—BROCKTON,” I HEARD MCCREADY CALLING “Step out from behind that tree And keep your hands where I can see them”

“I’ froot a PhD, and I’ move, and I’ll lecture you to death!” The joke—ents, as I’d hoped it would “I’m Dr Bill Brockton,” I added as I approached “Welcorave, which was ringed with evidence flags and sweat-drenched FBI forensic techs Peering into the hole, I saw that they had excavated all the way down to undisturbed soil, four feet down The clay there was deeply grooved, as if it had been clawed by an immense monster I, in fact, was thatthe grave with a backhoe

I’dentombed deep inside Neyland Stadiue football that the University of Tennessee had erected beside the eed beneath the stadiuirders, was Stadiu of offices, classrooy Depart one side of a curving, quarter-mile corridor, one that underscored the hall in Stadium Hall At midafternoon, when McCready had texted to say that the training exercise was nearly finished, I’d hopped into h wooden gate and down through the woods, stepping carefully to avoid treading on the bodies and bones scattered throughout the three-acre site: donated corpses whose postmortem careers were meticulously scrutinized, itemized, and immortalized, in photos, journal articles, scholarly dissertations, and law-enforcement anecdotes

r />

Officially, y Research Facility, but a few years before, one of McCready’s waggish FBI colleagues had dubbed it “the Body Farm,” and the moniker—popularized by crihly that even I, the facility’s creator, tended to call it by the catchy nickna Evidence Response Tea exercises like this one With a ready supply of actual human corpses, plus plenty of privacy, the facility was the only place in the nation—possibly in the entire world—where forensic teams could hone their skills in such realistic scenarios

The three corpses just unearthed by McCready’s tearadually attracted a cloud of blowflies, soerness—from the faces of the dead to the eyes and nostrils of the quick, causing the agents to squint and swat at the unwelcoe mound of sifted dirt, plus piles of clay clods and rocks too big and too hard to pass through the quarter-inch wire round beside the dirt lay the screen and—atop the arette butts, and one wad of chewing guum wrapper

I scrutinized the screen, then the bodies, then the hole in the ground, taking ents “That’s it? That’s all you got?” Their expressions, which had been confident and proud a moment before, turned nervous when I added, “So y’all just ran out of stealances, they returned to the edge of the grave, their eyes scanning its floor and walls I chuckled “Kidding,” I said, and a chorus of good-natured groans ensued “Okay, so tell me what you’ve learned from the scene”

I pointed at Kient Kioodiroans, as the dreadful pun sank in “What else does that rut tell us, besides the fact that the puddle had dried up by the time the tracks were made?” McCready had textedwith their observations about the tire iave him a hint “How many sets of tracks did you cast?”