Brennan said, “Thanks,” and ended the call.
She brought Booth up to speed on what she had learned, and within minutes they were in the car headed for Indiana.
Booth had an Indiana map in the glove compartment and Brennan unfolded it as he drove.
“The Indiana Dunes?” Booth asked.
“Yes… What are you thinking?”
His eyes narrowed. “I’m thinking maybe it’s the Dunes Express….”
She had all but forgotten the odd expression Lisa Vitto had used, in relation to her missing boyfriend, that night at Siracusa.
In her defense, since then Brennan had suffered a mugging, numerous painkillers, and passing out at the Field Museum; but as soon as Booth spoke the words “Dunes Express,” the case made sudden sense.
“A mob dumping ground,” she said, “a burial ground for traitors and enemies.”
“Where else do missing mob accountants and washed-up Outfit muscle wind up, after the lights go out?”
Her heart pounding, she said, “All right — what do we do?”
“How big is the area again?”
“According to Jack, several hundred acres.”
He shook his head, jaw set. “Do we even know what we’re searching for?”
“Graves, of course.”
“But probably not with little headstones and white crosses marking them.”
“Probably not.”
“And the best part?” Booth said miserably. “It’s in a swamp.”
“Marsh, actually.”
He barked a laugh. “Marsh, swamp, what difference does it make?”
“Swamp has a higher water table. If they were disposed of in a swamp, the bodies most likely would be hidden underwater instead of buried.”
His eyes bored into her.
Hers bored back at him. “Would you please not stare at me when you’re driving?”
He returned his gaze to the road. “What I was trying to say is… it’s going to be hard.”
“Unlike all the easy times we’ve had,” she said.
That got a dry chuckle out of him.
“It is a big area,” she allowed.
“It’ll take a ton of agents to search the area, and most of them won’t have any idea what they’re looking for.”
Brennan thought it over. “Narrow the field, and we could bring in ground-penetrating radar.”
Around them, traffic slowed as they ran into Chicago’s inevitable construction. Brennan watched out the window as they entered the Chicago Skyway, the scenery becoming more and more desolate.
The South Side had long been the neglected section of the city, made up predominantly of the working poor and those who were not even that lucky. As the road turned east toward Gary, the prospects did not improve.
The steel industry, which had once made Gary a thriving community, had for the most part turned to rust; and many of those left living here wore the faces of Titanic passengers as the water rose over the deck.
They might still be alive, but nothing was left to look forward to except death and release.
Brennan’s phone chirped, obliviously good-natured, and she answered it to find Jack Hodgins on the other end again.
“What have you got, Jack?”
“That dust I told you about before?”
“Yeah?”
“It was on all the bones of the other two skeletons, too… but in such small amounts I couldn’t get a breakdown. This time? There was enough.”
“You gonna keep me in suspense?”
“Sixty-four percent lime.”
She hunched over, straining her seat belt. “Jorgensen’s basement?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dr. Brennan…. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Sixty-four percent lime, twenty-three percent silica, seven percent alumina, three percent each of iron oxide and sulfur trioxide.”
Brennan took only a second to put the pieces together. “Cement.”
“Cement.”
“I thought you said the Indiana Dunes — where did the cement come from?”
Jack said, “My guess? A construction site or a demolition site. Whatever it is, it’ll be in or near the Indiana Dunes Inland Marsh. And your bodies came from that patch of the Dunes.”
They were off the expressway now, and Booth had turned east onto a two-lane highway, traffic finally moving again.
“Also,” Jack said, “I’ve found traces of Typha, Cyperaceae, and Potamogetonaceae.”
“Cattails, bulrushes, and pondweed,” Brennan said. “That helps.”
“The marsh is on Highway 12, south of the highway in Indiana.”
“We’re on our way there now,” Brennan said. “You want me to paste the gold star on your chart, or can you handle it yourself?”
A grin was in his voice. “I’ll wait for you, Doctor.”
They rang off and she updated Booth as he drove.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Highway 12.”
She glanced around at a low-slung cityscape. On the North Side, railroad tracks ran parallel to them, woods beyond that, Lake Michigan beyond the woods. After a while a sign near the tracks said Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad.
She asked Booth, “How did you know to go this way?”
“I stashed Musetti down the road in a place called Ogden Dunes.”
“As in Dunes Express?”
Booth looked pained.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Truth hurts.”
“You’ve been out here recently then, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Was there any construction?”
He considered that. “They’re renovating some of the homes along the lake.”
“Are they using a lot of cement?”
“Not particularly, they’re wood homes… but the Homeland Security Department is building a two-lane highway from the interstate to the south to U.S. Steel to the north.”
“Homeland Security?” Brennan asked.
“Steel is considered intrinsic to national security. No steel, no tanks, no Humvees, no gun barrels. The HSD wants the road into the plant to be secure, so they’re building it themselves.”
“Where at?”
He pointed off to the left. “That over there?”
She could see the huge steel mill up the road a little north of the South Shore railroad tracks. “Yeah, U.S. Steel.”
“Right,” he said. “The road will come up to it from the right.”
“Where’s the marsh?”
“That’s the west edge of it.”
Brennan sat forward again. “They’re building the road through the marsh?”
“Not quite, but close.”
She stared at him.
“Don’t go tree hugger on me now, Bones. Wasn’t my idea to put the road there.”
She stared harder.
“Hey, they’re almost finished with it. Be done before winter. Seriously, I wouldn’t have put it there either, but I wasn’t consulted.”
She didn’t tell him that her reaction was not environmentalist in nature… at least, not entirely.
They passed the construction of the northbound highway, which was still a good half mile south of crossing Highway 12, and would have to bisect both 12 and the railroad tracks before it reached U.S. Steel.
She wondered why, if the HSD wanted the road secure, they would cross this highway and the tracks. This didn’t make a lot of sense, but in her dealings with the FBI, she’d found that making sense did not seem to be high on the federal government’s priority list.
She gave up trying to understand the government and watched the prevailing westerly wind carry dust past the car window.
Booth hit his right turn signal just as Brennan saw a sign for the Indiana Dunes Inland Marsh.
He pulled into the parking lot and turned again, stopping with the front bumper facing a log rail.
They alighted, and Brennan stretched.