“I'm not doing much good here,” Flowers said. He'd gone back south, still pecking away at the case of the girl found on the river-bank. “My suspect's about to join the Navy to see the world. Which means he won't be around to talk to.”
“All right. Listen, meet Del and me tomorrow at the Widdlers' shack. Wear old clothes.” They hooked up at eleven o'clock in the morning, out at the Widdlers' place, the highway in throwing up heat mirages, the cornfield rustling in the spare dry wind, the sun pounding down. They unloaded in front of the shack, which had been sealed by the crime-scene crew. Flowers was towing a boat, and inside the boat, had a cooler full of Diet Coke and bottles of water.
Lucas and Del were in Lucas's truck, and unloaded three rods of round quarter-inch steel, six feet long; Lucas had ground the tips to sharp points.
He pointed downstream. “We'll start down there. It's thicker. Look at any space big enough to be a grave. Just poke it; it hasn't rained, so if it's been turned over, you should be able to tell.”
Flowers was wearing a straw cowboy hat and aviator glasses. He looked downstream and said, “It's gonna be back in the woods, I think. Probably on the slope down toward the river. If he thought about it, he wouldn't want to put her anyplace that might be farmed someday.”
“But not too close to the river,” Lucas said. “He wouldn't want it to wash out.”
They were probing, complaining to each other about the stupidity of it, for an hour, and were a hundred yards south of the house when Flowers said, “Hey.” He was just under the edge of the crown of a box elder, thirty feet from the river.
“Find something?”
“Something,” Flowers said. They gathered around with their rods, probing. The earth beneath them had been disturbed at some time- squatting, they could see a depression a couple of feet across, maybe four feet long. The feel of the dirt changed across the line. But there was also an aspen tree, with a trunk the size of a man's ankle, just off the depression, with one visible root growing across it.
“I don't know. The tree…”
“But feel this…” Flowers gave his rod to Lucas. “You can feel how easy it went down, how it got softer the lower you go… and then, doesn't that feel like a plastic sack or something? You can feel it…”
“Feel something,” Lucas admitted.
They passed the rod to Del, who said he could feel it, too. Lucas wiped his lower lip with the back of his hand: sweaty and getting dirty. “What do you think? Get crime scene down here, or go get a shovel?”
They all looked up at the shack, and the cars, and then Del said, “Would you feel like a bigger asshole if you got a crew down here and there was nothing? Or if you dug a hole yourself and it was something?”
Lucas and Flowers looked at each other and they shrugged simultaneously and Flowers said, “I'll get the shovel.”
While Flowers went for the shovel, Del probed some more with the rod, scratched it with the tip of a pocketknife, pulled it out and looked at the scratch. “Three feet,” he said. “Or damn close to it.”
They decided to cut a narrow hole, straight down, one shovel wide, two feet long.
The ground was soft all the way, river-bottom silt; grass roots, one tree root, then sandy stuff, and at the bottom of the hole, a glimpse of green.
“Garbage bag,” Flowers grunted. Fie lay down, reached in the hole and began pulling dirt out with one hand. When they'd cleared a six-inch square of plastic, Del handed him his knife, and Flowers cut the plastic. Didn't smell much of anything; Flowers pulled the sliced plastic apart, then said to Lucas, “You're standing in the light, man.”
Lucas moved to the other side of the hole, still peering in, and Flowers got farther down into the hole, poked for a moment, then pushed himself out and rolled onto his butt, dusting his hands. “I can see some jeans,” he said.
The crime-scene supervisor gave them an endless amount of shit about digging out the hole, until Lucas told him to go fuck himself and didn't smile.
The guy was about to try for the last word when Flowers, his shirt still soaked with sweat and grime, added, “If you'd done the crime-scene work right, we wouldn't have had to come down and do it for you, dick-weed.”
“Hey. You didn't say anything about a fuckin' graveyard.” “It's all a crime scene,” Flowers said. He wasn't smiling, either. “You shoulda found it.”
They took two hours getting the bag out of the hole. Lucas didn't want to look at it. He and Flowers and Del gathered around the back of Flowers's boat and drank Diet Cokes and Flowers pulled out a fishing rod and reel and rigged a slip sinker on it, talking about going down to the river and trying for some catfish. “Got a shovel, we'll find some worms somewhere…” The crime-scene guy came over and said, “It's out. Whoever it is had a short black haircut and wore thirty-six/thirty-four Wrangler jeans, Jockey shorts, and size-eleven Adidas.”
Lucas was bewildered. “Size eleven? Jockey shorts?”
And, one of the crime-scene guys said a few minutes later, whoever it was still carried his wallet. Inside the wallet was an Illinois driver's license issued eight years earlier in the name of Theodore Lane.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Del asked.
The crime-scene guy called for a bigger crew with ground-penetrating radar and a gas sniffer. Two dozen people milled around, talking about secret graveyards, but there was no real graveyard.
At three o'clock they found the only other grave that they would find. It was fifty yards south of the first one, in an area that Lucas, Del, and Flowers had walked right over. The top of the grave was occupied by a driftwood stump, which was why they missed it. The bottom was occupied by Gabriella Coombs, curled into a knot in a green plastic garbage bag, wasted and shot through with maggots, almost gone now…
At home that night, after taking a twenty-minute shower, trying to get the stink of death off him, Lucas went down to dinner and grumped at everyone. Coombs was going to haunt him for a while; chip a chunk off the granite of his ass.
The other thing that bothered him a bit was that he knew, from experience, that he'd forget her, that in a year or so, he'd have put her away, and would hardly think of her again.
He'd gotten down a beer and was watching a Cubs game, when Weather came with the phone, and handed it to him. The medical examiner said, “I took a look and can tell you only one thing: it's gonna be tough. Nothing obvious on the body, nothing under her fingernails. We'll process anything we find, but if there wasn't much to start with, and it's been days since she went into the ground…”
“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “There's gotta be something.”
There was; but it took him a while to think of it.
Lucy Coombs came to the door barefoot and when she saw Lucas standing there, hands in his pockets, asked through the screen door, “Why didn't you come and tell me?”
Coombs had gone to look at her daughter at the medical examiner's. Lucas had avoided all of it: had sent Jerry Wilson, the original St. Paul investigator in the Marilyn Coombs murder, to tell Lucy that her daughter's body had been found.
Now, standing on her porch, he said, “I couldn't bear to do it.” She looked at him for a few seconds, then pushed the screen door open. “You better come in.”
She had a plastic jug of iced tea in the refrigerator and they went out back and sat on the patio, and she told him how she, a man that she thought may have been Gabriella's father, and another couple, had traveled around the Canadian Rockies in a converted old Molson's beer truck, smoking dope and listening to all the furthest-out rock tapes, going to summer festivals and living in provincial parks… and nailing a couple of other good-looking guys along the way. “I always had this thing for hot-looking blond guys, no offense.” “None taken.”
“Summer of my life. Good time, good dope, good friends, and knocked up big-time,” she said, sitting sideways on a redwood picnic-table bench.