"Asshole," Marcy said. To Lucas: "He did. We agreed that it might not be a bad idea to have dinner sometime."
"So it's a little indefinite," Lucas said.
"If you want to call getting picked up at seven o'clock tonight indefinite," she said.
"Be nice if the rain stopped. You know, big date and all," Lucas said.
"We can always find a place to get warm," she said.
He never won.
LUCAS TALKED TO the Goodhue County sheriff. He promised he'd get permission to enter the property around the Aronson grave site.
"It's probably nothing," Lucas said. "But if it is something… it's gonna be ugly."
"Glad you called."
When he'd set up a rendezvous by the Goodhue grave site, Lucas called around until he found an engineering consultant who used ground-penetrating radar to look for pipelines, missing utilities, old cemeteries, and ancient campgrounds. The guy's name was Larry Lake, and he ran a three-man company called Archeo-Survey, Inc.
"Last time I worked for you guys, it took two months to get paid," Lake said. "I had to threaten to have your patrol cars attached."
"That's 'cause you didn't find anything and nobody wanted to be blamed for the bill when you didn't find anything. It was a pretty big bill."
"I'm a certified civil engineer, not a burger flipper," Lake said. "If I bring fifteen thousand or twenty thousand bucks' worth of equipment out in the rain, I need to get paid."
"I promise you," Lucas said. "You'll get the money in a week. If it pans out, of course, you'll be famous. Probably get on one of those forensic TV shows."
"You think?"
"It could happen."
THAT EVENING, WEATHER showed up with a big black leather Coach travel bag for her sixth consecutive sleepover. Lucas dropped The Wall Street Journal on the floor next to his chair and said, "I've figured it out. You hate me and you're trying to fuck me to death."
"In your dreams," she said. "The fact is, I'm gonna get pregnant. You volunteered. The second fact is, I'm right around my fertile period and I'm trying to blanket it."
"Blanket it."
"Yes. So if you don't mind, bring yourself back to the bedroom. It'll all be over in a few minutes."
THE RAIN CONTINUED overnight, spitting against the windows, but by morning had changed from a steady pelting storm to a steady miserable drizzle. Weather left early, as usual, and Lucas got another hour of sleep before he climbed out of bed, cleaned up, and rolled out of the driveway in his Tahoe.
Del was waiting in his driveway, under the eaves of the garage, already dressed in a rain suit. His wife stood beside him, wearing a heavy sweater. "You guys be careful," she said. "The roads are slippery. Get some decent lunch somewhere. Eat something with vegetables, like a salad or something."
In the truck, Del said, "Jesus Christ-vegetables."
The drive to south Dakota County took forty-five minutes, a slow trip against rush traffic, "Money, Guns, and Lawyers" bumping out of the CD player, the wipers beating time. The roadside ditches were showing long strips of water, and Del told a story about a Caterpillar D-6 that once sank out of sight, was never recovered, and was presumably on its way to China after encountering a bog in weather just like this.
When they arrived, they found a green Subaru Forester parked on the shoulder of the road, with a magnetic door-sign that said Archeo-Survey, Inc. Just beyond were three sheriff's cars and a battered Jeep Cherokee. One of the cars had its light bar flashing out a slow-down warning. A half-dozen men in slickers turned to look at them as they pulled off the road.
"Cop convention," Del grunted.
Lucas parked, got out of the truck, walked around to the back, lifted the hatch, found his rain suit, and pulled it on. Del waited until he'd pulled the hood tight around his face, then they walked down the road to introduce themselves to the others.
"Don Hammond, chief deputy down here," said the largest of the cops. "These guys are Rick and Dave. You know Terry Marshall." Marshall nodded at Lucas; little flecks of rain speckled his steel-rimmed glasses, and he looked tough as a chunk of hickory. Hammond continued: "The sheriff'll stop out later. You sure picked a good morning for it."
"It's all I had," Lucas said. They all looked up at the sky, then Lucas asked, "Where's the radar guy?"
"He's up in the woods with his helper," Hammond said. "They're setting up reference points. We were waiting for you."
"What do you think? Bunch of bodies?" asked the deputy named Dave.
"I can't take the chance," Lucas said. "I'd say it's about one in ten."
"Good. We got, like, two shovels, and I got an idea who'd be using them."
"LARRY LAKE?" LUCAS asked. He was struggling up the steep hillside, slipping on the oak leaves, Del, Hammond, and Marshall trailing behind.
"That's me." Lake was a lanky man with an uncontrolled beard and aviator-style glasses. He wore a red sailing-style rain suit with green Day-Glo flashes on the backs and shoulders. His face was wind-tanned, and two pale blue eyes peered out from behind the glasses. He was standing beside a yellow metal box on a tripod, which was set up over Aronson's grave. As Lucas came up, he saw that the metal box housed a lens. "Are you Davenport?"
"Yeah."
"I better get paid. This is miserable."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. How long is it gonna take?"
"I got my guy over there setting up the last of the reference pins, so we'll start the survey in ten minutes or so. I'm gonna get a cup of coffee first."
"How long is it gonna take after that?"
Lake shrugged. "Depends on how much you want surveyed. We could show you some of it in a couple of hours, a lot more this evening, more tomorrow… whatever you want. We could do the whole hill in about three days. We're using this grave as a center point…" He touched his ear, and Lucas realized that what looked like a plastic tab near his mouth was actually a microphone. Lake, talking to the mike, said, "Yeah, Bill. Yeah, the cops came up. Just a sec." To Lucas and the others: "This'll take a second, then we'll go some coffee."
He looked through the lens on the survey instrument, sideways across the hill to where Bill was holding a red and white survey rod with a knob on top. Lake said, "Two forward, a half left. A half forward, one inch right. Two inches back, one half inch right. You're good-put in a pin. Yeah. Yup. Down at the truck."
AT THE TRUCK, Lake's assistant got a gallon thermos out of the Subaru and started pouring coffee into paper cups, as Lake explained what he'd been doing. "We set up four control points around the center, which is at Aronson's grave, so we've got a big rectangle laid out on the hillside. The next thing is, we stretch lines from the pins at the top of the hill to the pins at the bottom. Those lines are marked at one-meter intervals. Then we stretch another string across the hill, between the vertical lines, as a guide. We'll walk back and forth with the radar, along the string, and move down the hill one meter with every sweep. We can probably get you a fifty-meter-square block in about two hours."
"If there's a grave, how do you find it later?" asked Del.
"Our computer'll actually generate a map, to scale," Lake said. "If we find a possible site fifteen yards north and five yards east, it'll show on the computer plot, and then I'll just use the total station-"
"The total station's the box on the tripod," one of the deputies said.
"-I'll just use the total station to spot the center of the suspected site, and you guys-not me-start digging."
"How accurate is it?" Lucas asked.
"At that distance?" Lake looked up the hill. "A couple thousandths of an inch."
THE WORK WAS even more miserable than it looked. Lucas and Del, alternating with Hammond and Marshall, stretched a long piece of yellow string between the corresponding one-meter markers on the vertical strings of the survey box, so it resembled the letter H. The cross string had to go around trees, got caught in branches; whenever it got tangled, whoever went to untangle it inevitably slipped on the sodden leaves and slid in the mud down the hill.