He smiled weakly. “Of course you’re sure. But is it human?”
“One way to find out….”
She used her cell phone to snap three quick pictures from different distances, then eased the trowel in and met resistance.
Pulling the trowel out, she moved six inches farther from the square and tried again.
This time, no resistance.
She dug down, repeating the process all around the object until she had a perimeter.
Then she snapped more photos, before digging up as much ground as she could without disturbing the object.
With that done, she dug with the only tool she had more control of than the trowel — her hands.
The more she cleared, the more photos she took.
Unable to help, Booth walked a few steps away and made a cell-phone call.
When he finished, he said, “That was Woolfolk.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Jorgensen’s spilling his guts. He’s talking so much they can’t shut him up. It’s like a Dr. Phil show out of control.”
“I don’t know what—”
“Bones, he’s been killing gay men for fifty years.”
“…That does fit the time frame of our made-to-order skeletons.”
Booth was shaking his head. “Yeah, but he’s denying that.”
“He is?”
“And if he’s done it, why would he? He’s copped to over thirty murders, but Woolfolk says he vehemently denies delivering the skeletons.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah — the guy who did that? Must have been sick, he says.”
She went on digging. “Keep talking. Tell me more.”
“Woolfolk says word on the street is that the other crime families are turning against the Gianellis.”
She frowned and glanced at him, pausing in her work. “Turning on their own?”
“You’ve got to understand,” Booth said. “The Gianellis run most everything, and what they don’t run, they don’t want. They’re public figures… they’re like rock stars or something. You remember John Gotti?”
She nodded.
“The older Gianelli’s the same sort of gangster. He craves the attention, the crowds, and the younger Gianelli is even worse. And ever since Al Capone attracted too much attention with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre… you have heard of that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, ever since, and particularly in modern times, the mob has sought to be a low-profile operation.”
She pulled the object free from the ground. “There.”
“Human?” Booth asked, moving closer.
Brennan held up a skull that was dirty but otherwise whole.
A human skull.
“Jackpot,” Booth said.
“Could be,” Brennan granted, “if we can match dental records.”
She swiveled the skull so Booth could see the back. “And I’m thinking maybe this is the cause of death….”
She pointed to where two small caliber bullets had bored through the back of the skull.
“Double tap,” Booth said. “Mob-style execution.”
“We’re going to need more people,” Brennan said, “and ground-penetrating radar.”
“You have but to ask,” Booth said, getting out his cell phone. “I think we just found ourselves a Mafia graveyard.”
“Whatever it is,” she said, “this is most likely the source of our skeletons… and there are probably more.”
Booth called for help and then, as he was putting the cell away, his eyes panned toward the construction site and froze.
Then he was smiling, his eyes wide.
“What?”
“That’s why,” he said. “The construction’s coming too close to the graveyard! They had to move it. They couldn’t risk us finding all these bodies!”
“Possible,” she allowed, not wanting to go much further without proof.
“It’s logical, Bones. Just the kind of thing you like. The mob’s been burying guys out here for God only knows how long, and now with the drought exposing their hiding place, and the encroaching construction? They had to move the bodies. More than that, get rid of them…. Then, to throw us off the track, they put us on the trail of a serial killer.”
“How would they even know about that?” she asked skeptically.
“Trust me, no one knows what goes on in their city better than the Outfit.” He waved his arms. “The cops, us feds, we’re just trying to keep our heads above water; but the mob guys? They know everything, anything that might help them turn a buck.”
“There’s a certain logic to what you say,” she admitted.
“Thank you.”
“But how does knowing about a madman like Jorgensen help them ‘turn a buck’?”
He frowned, just a little.
“Don’t mean to rain on your parade,” she said.
“No. Valid point. Gotta think about that, Bones…. Don’t let me stop you.”
If they were standing in the middle of a graveyard, she was going to be busy for a very long time.
She surveyed her surroundings.
This was a big area to search. Would be more like one of those mass graves in Bosnia or Guatemala.
Booth was on his phone again, this time relaying news of their find to the higher-ups while Brennan poked around the ground, wondering how many sorry souls had taken the one-way ride on the Dunes Express.
Knowing that, dead gangsters or not, they deserved the dignity of identification.
10
The inland marsh site swarmed with agents, cops, and crime scene techs.
Not only had Booth and Brennan narrowed the focus of their search, a combination of science, drought, and luck had helped them win the forensics lottery: actually finding a skull.
Already the Chicago PD was going through missing persons records, trying to get a dental match with Brennan’s discovery, while the same information had been forwarded to the FBI computers.
The skull itself would be sent to Brennan’s staff at the Jeffersonian for them to add their insights and expertise.
Right now Brennan was supervising a pair of techs operating the ground-penetrating radar. To their right, a Chicago PD Crime Scene Unit was literally dug in, doing exploratory work in spots flagged as potential graves.
Other FBI agents had searched the area and found signs that the park had been home to considerable digging, particularly the ground nearer the construction site; still other agents were searching farther down the trail in either direction.
Several agents were at the Visitor’s Center and ranger station, questioning anyone they could find. Still other FBI personnel, down at the Dirksen Building, had started delving into any mob-related crimes that might have a victim who ended up here. (That would be a long list.)
For his own part, Seeley Booth had been thinking.
Seemingly unconnected pieces — pieces from what he’d thought were separate puzzles — were fitting together; he was seeing things from a different angle. Now he could flip the situation one hundred eighty degrees and examine it from the bad guy’s point of view.
This was obviously mob-related: dead Outfit members made up at least part of the two wired-together skeletons, and now a double-tapped skull in sandy soil tied to those skels. Coincidences didn’t come that big, and Booth — like most law enforcement officers — didn’t believe in small coincidences….
The mob had been burying bodies out here for years, the Dunes Express; that much seemed indisputable.
So, why move them?
The road construction was the obvious answer, plus the drought bringing deep buried bodies near the surface, both fueling the worry that if one body might be discovered, so would more.
And if the authorities ever got an idea of how many one-way rides had been taken out here, well, there’d be hell to pay. Better to move ’em out.