Booth was trying hard to salvage Jorgensen as their man. “But he could have another burial plot, right?”
“Sure,” she agreed. “If he was striking at transients, and gay ones at that… the kind of people who, unfortunately, are able to fall off the planet without anyone much noticing, well… he could have been extremely ambitious, over all these years. And needed, and used, various sites.”
Booth nodded crisply, then turned to Greene, asking, “What about Jorgensen’s former residence?”
“We get the evidence here we’re probably gonna get,” Greene mused, “we could go back there and dig some more — but back in the day?”
By this Greene apparently meant during the first investigation of Jorgensen — the unsuccessful one that had led to a court order against the detective.
“Back then,” Greene was saying, “we didn’t find a goddamn thing.”
Booth said, “Which means he may have had an off-site burial ground, and—”
Brennan interrupted, uncomfortable with how fast the FBI agent was moving. “Booth, he could have buried his victims in sandy soil anywhere within, I don’t know, a hundred miles. It’s useless to speculate. We’ll work what we have here, and go from there.”
Booth seemed about to retort, but thought better of it, putting a lid on; his eyes told her he knew she was right.
A tech arrived and conducted a sweep of the crawlspace with GPR, leaving behind yellow markers to indicate the probable location of bodies.
Dr. Wu and her tools arrived half an hour later.
She and Brennan donned coveralls, white paper masks covering both mouths and noses, and latex gloves; then they carted the tools into the laundry room and prepared to go down into the crawlspace.
The laundry room looked different now — extension cords running everywhere, a motor humming from a fan she could not see but knew must already be down in the crawlspace. Light leached up through the open hatch, a sign that Lieutenant Garland had complied with her requests.
He appeared in the doorway to the garage. “Everything all right?”
Brennan raised a finger in a just-a-moment manner.
Then she lay on the floor so she could drop her head through the hole and look around in the crawlspace.
Halogen work lights were placed at intervals along the perimeter, all pointed in one direction, so they looked like they were chasing each other.
Nice, Brennan thought.
By not having them pointed into the middle of the crawlspace, Garland had illuminated the area without forcing Brennan and Wu to stare directly into a lamp every time they turned toward the wall.
Two fans spun at a low setting, moving the air around, but not enough to create mini-duststorms, when the anthropologists began digging.
Withdrawing her head from the hole, she grinned at Garland and gave him a thumbs-up. “Perfect, Lieutenant.”
He raised a hand to his brow in a small salute. “We aim to please, Doctor. Good hunting. But it may cost you….”
“Oh?”
“I have your novel in the car. I want to talk you out of a signature.”
Before she could respond, he disappeared.
After dropping through the hole, Brennan took the tools from Dr. Wu before the other anthropologist joined her on the dirt floor.
On their hands and knees, Brennan led Dr. Wu to the exposed portion of hand she had found before. The Field Museum rep had brought a digital camera and a camcorder, so that every step of the way, they could document what they found.
“You want me to start here?” Dr. Wu asked, through her mask.
“Yes. I’ll start at one of the other markers.”
But before she did, Brennan paused to watch her colleague.
Dr. Wu snapped a photo, then worked from the small portion of exposed hand, slowly unearthing the rest of the body.
Though they had worked together in the lab, Brennan wanted to see how her counterpart handled herself in the field; and she found Dr. Wu to be as careful and tenacious as herself.
For her part, Brennan started against the opposite wall, slowly working her way down with a small garden trowel.
This was not work for the impatient.
People thought anthropologists and archeologists just stuck a shovel in the dirt, dug around something, popping it out of the earth, dusting it off, then, presto, displaying it in the nearest museum.
That was hardly an accurate portrayal, and when you were digging up a body that had been buried with the idea of keeping it from being discovered by the authorities, the stakes were much higher.
Many of Brennan’s peers listened to classical music, or mastered some breathing method, to keep themselves calm while they plied their trade. Brennan simply concentrated on not missing anything and doing the job with the thoroughness it deserved.
If there were bodies down here, those people might have families who loved and missed them, and had been tortured for months or years or even decades, never knowing what happened to someone precious to them.
Brennan could give those families closure, providing remains for society’s rituals of burial and mourning; but more than that, she could help catch the killer who had taken a loved one away.
All she had to do was concentrate, be thorough, and not miss any clues.
Brennan wasn’t probing long before she felt the edge of the trowel touch something that was definitely not dirt.
Now she slowed even more, her trowel moving inches at a time. She moved the dirt out of the hole and looked down to see a bare patch of white skin…
… the front of a shin, tiny strands of brown hair barely visible in the dirt.
Jorgensen was apparently still in the serial killer business, despite his age, judging from the remains they had found so far.
Neither of these bodies was far along into decomposition. Brennan was amazed and appalled that a man of seventy — granted, one in phenomenal physical condition — had killed and buried at least two more victims.
Of course, this “old man” had not so long ago nearly dispatched a Chicago cop, an FBI agent, and herself as well. Feisty, an adjective she usually associated with active seniors, did not begin to cover William Jorgensen. The only concession he seemed to have made to his declining years was in the mode of his burials: the victims were surprisingly close to the surface.
As she uncovered more of the body, she soon found out why.
The body had been doused with lime.
Brennan knew that many killers who tried to dispose of bodies by burial believed that lime sped up the process of decomposition. She did not know the origin of that particular urban legend, but she knew the exact opposite was true.
Not only did lime not promote decomposition, at shallower depths, like these, lime actually impeded it.
At the end of eight hours, with midnight drawing near, the two anthropologists had exhumed the two bodies they’d been working on, and found signs of three more.
They took a break until daylight, then came back and started again.
And by the end of the day, they had reclaimed the other three bodies, found a sixth, and excavated that as well. Another sweep of ground-penetrating radar confirmed that they had gotten everything.
None of the bodies was reduced to bone, none had been in the ground for more than a couple of years, and although some decomposition was present, these victims all went straight to the coroner for autopsy.
Several things had become clear to Brennan when, for the last time, she left the crawlspace.
William Jorgensen was a serial killer who had been at it for quite some time, six bodies within the last two or three years for sure. Of this there was no doubt.
She and Dr. Wu had excavated all the bodies that were in the crawlspace and yet something did not jibe with this case, in terms of Jorgensen being part of the assembled skeletons that had led them here.