Then: "Wait." One of the cops held out an arm to stop another, then knelt in the hole. "Is that a rock?"
He pulled off his glove and probed the soil with his fingers. A moment later he came up with a white object. "What is it?" Lucas asked, squatting next to the hole. Del moved in beside him, and the cop handed the white thing to Lucas.
Lucas turned it in his hand and looked at Del. "Finger bone," Del said.
"I think," Lucas said. He looked up at Hammond. "We better stop digging, and get the state crime lab down here. We gotta excavate these things an inch at a time."
"Ah, sweet Jesus," Hammond said. "Sweet fuckin' Jesus."
THE DRIZZLE CONTINUED. The sheriff showed up and sent two deputies back into town to find some tarps to build tents over the supposed graves. Lake began working on a larger plot. The state crime people showed up at midafternoon and looked at the six sites that Lake had outlined.
The officer in charge, Jack McGrady, had worked with Lucas on another case. "We're gonna get some generators and lights from the highway department. We'll get some more tents up and get at it."
Lucas had shown him the bone in an evidence bag. "The question we all had… is it possible that it's not human?"
McGrady held the bag up to the sky, looked at the bone for a few seconds, then handed it back to Lucas. "It's human. A phalange-a little short and squat, so it's probably from a thumb."
"A thumb."
"Probably. Can't tell you what era… Wish you'd picked a better day for this. You know, sunny and cool."
Lucas looked down the hillside and at the cop cars lined up along the gravel road, two at each end, with their light bars flashing. "Sorry," he said, and he was. Then: "What do you mean, 'era'?"
"Bones last a long time. This is kind of a pretty hillside, with a view. Maybe you've turned up a settler graveyard. Just by coincidence."
"I don't think so," Lucas said.
"Neither do I."
LATE IN THE afternoon, Lucas and Del went back into Cannon Falls, to the cafй, and ate open-faced turkey sandwiches with mashed potatoes. The cafй did a steady business, large quiet men in coveralls, coming and going, and smelling of wet wool, mud, and radiator heat.
"Mashed potatoes count as a vegetable?" Del asked.
"Not these," Lucas asked. "These are some kind of petroleum derivative."
They ate in silence for a moment, then, "If those are all graves up there, we've got a busy little bee on our hands," Del said.
"They're all graves," Lucas said. "I can feel it."
"In your bones?"
"Not funny."
"Okay, so we're looking for sources where he might have gotten the bodies for his drawings. If we can find those, maybe we can track back to his computer; we've got a photograph that he might have taken. We have a kind of physical description. We're putting together lists of everybody that all the drawings-what would you call them, victims?-we're putting together lists of everybody they know. What else?"
"Ware thinks he might be a priest."
"That doesn't make any sense," Del said. "A priest who was an art student? In Menomonie? Ware's either jerking us around, or we really don't know what's going on."
"But he didn't say for sure that the guy was a priest, just that something he said made Ware think he might be a priest."
"That's no help." Del picked up a glob of potato on a spoon and contemplated it. After a minute, he said, "Okay. Answer me this. You know the chick whose picture got pasted up on the bridge across the river?"
"Yeah?"
"Why was she picked out?" Del asked. "What'd she do to piss him off, that he went after her like that? Why was she treated different?"
Lucas leaned back in his chair and said, "Ah, shit. Why didn't we think of that before? Something's gotta be going on there."
"So we start pulling her apart," Del said.
"And maybe we check with the archdiocese, and see if they had any priests who were art students."
"In Menomonie."
A waitress came by with a pot of coffee. She was a pudgy young woman with heavily teased honey-blond hair. "Are you the cops digging up the Harrelsons' woods?"
Del nodded. "Yup."
"We heard you found a whole bunch of skeletons." Her jaw dropped open, waiting for the inside information.
"We don't know what we have," Lucas said politely. "We're still digging."
"That's a lonely place out there," she said. "Sometimes kids used it like, you know, a lover's lane. Park down there at the bottom, then get a blanket and go up on the hill. But it was always spooky."
"Really," Del said. "You ever go up there?"
"Maybe," she said. "And maybe not. You want seconds on them potatas? We got plenty more."
AT SIX, LUCAS called Weather from the site and told her that he wouldn't be home until very late. "Trying to avoid your obligations, eh?" she asked.
"You sound like a fuckin' Canadian, eh?" he said. "Maybe I can get out of here a little earlier than that…"
THE HILL WAS lit by a half-dozen sets of powerful lights, plus lower-powered reading-style lights in an Army-surplus command tent. A diesel generator hammered away from the roadside, and the parking strip smelled like a bus stop.
Each grave had been covered by a broad tarp, and three of the six graves were being excavated by two-man teams; progress was slow, the excavation being done with small Marshalltown trowels. Along the road, three TV trucks were sitting in the rain, their crews warm inside, and unhappy: They would rather have been wet outside, with some close-up tape.
Lake came by just after dark, squatted next to Lucas, and said, "We've finished the next plot, going out another twenty-five meters in every direction, and I think you've got all the graves identified. There are two more spots that we're gonna stake out as possibles, but they're not as clear as the others."
"Good. Six is enough. If it is six."
Lake, with water dripping off the bill of his hat, said, "I'll tell you something, Lucas: You're gonna find bones in every one of those holes."
THE FIRST GRAVE, the one where the finger bone had been found, was the first to produce clothing-a polyester shirt that Marshall recognized as a brand sold at Wal-Mart. McGrady, squatting next to the grave, looked up at Lucas and said, "So it's not a settler site." They went back to the command tent, and Lucas called Rose Marie to give her the news. He was just off the phone when one of the members of the excavation team called, "Jack: we got a skull," and as Lucas and McGrady recrossed the hillside, "And we got hair."
They got to the grave and looked into the hole. The skull looked almost like a piece of a dirty-white coffee cup. The guy in the hole touched the edge of the bone with the tip of his trowel and said, "Looks like blond hair."
McGrady got down on his knees to look, then said, "All right. Go to brushes and art knives. Careful with the hair."
Lucas nodded. "How long to clean out the graves?"
"We'll be working around the clock. We got TV now, so there's gonna be some pressure. These first three, if they're shallow, we'll have by midnight, I think. The rest by tomorrow. You heading out?"
"I'll stick around for the first three," Lucas said. "But we need to get working on the IDs as quick as we can. I've got a name for you, and there's some dental stuff available on her."
"If her jaw's intact, I can give you a quick read tomorrow morning, then," McGrady said.
DEL WENT BACK into town and returned with a thermos full of coffee. Lucas was drinking a cup when he saw a large man in a camouflage rain suit join Marshall on the hillside. The two bent together, and the new man put his arm on Marshall's shoulder as they talked; another Dunn County deputy, Lucas thought.
Clothing and bones were coming up in two of the three holes. Lucas had done a tour, spoke briefly with Marshall, looked curiously at the large man with him, but Marshall offered no introductions. Lucas wandered off to the command tent, where Del was talking with a group of coffee-drinking deputies.