I turned on ESPN and put it out of my mind.
“… killed two soldiers at a bus stop last year. No party has claimed responsibility for this year’s bombing… In Blue Earth, the search intensifies for 67-year-old Thomas Hall, the apparent victim of a single-vehicle accident. His truck was found early Sunday outside town, where it had crashed into a tree off the eastbound lane. Search-and-rescue teams are widening the scope of their hunt, but have not been successful in locating Hall. WMNN news time, six fifty-nine.”
It was Tuesday morning, and the clock radio had awakened me, but I wasn’t ready to get out of bed yet. When the phone rang several minutes later, I was still half asleep. I picked it up and had to clear my throat before speaking.
“I woke you up, sorry,” the voice on the other end said.
“Shiloh?” He sounded strange.
Vang laughed. “I really did wake you,” he said. He sounded very chipper. I sat up, a little embarrassed. He went on, “There’s a grave out in Wayzata we’ve got to look at.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s the story?” I asked.
“They don’t know yet. A woman called this morning. She lives in the same neighborhood-I mean, the same area-with a released sex offender, a child molester. Last night she saw him out with a flashlight, digging, his car parked nearby.”
“And she knew it was a grave how?”
“Well, she said the hole looked about the right size to be a grave. She didn’t see him put anything in it. He was filling it in, actually. I guess she lives on a hill, has a pretty good view of the area, so she could watch awhile.”
“Is she part of a neighborhood watch?”
“Not officially, but this guy-his name’s Bonney-makes everyone out there nervous. They all got the flyer about him being a released sex offender. This woman woke up at four A.M. worrying about what she’d seen and finally decided to call us. So now we’re digging.”
I sat up, feeling more awake. “We’ve really got a warrant to dig on his property? Probable cause seems pretty weak. Didn’t anyone suggest we just talk to this guy first?”
“They sent a patrolman to do that,” Vang said. “He’s not home, and he’s not at work, either, even though he’s on the schedule. Nobody likes it. But here’s the good part: He didn’t actually dig on his own property. The lot on the other side of his back fence is undeveloped county land. That’s where he was digging.”
“Ah,” I said.
“So, no warrant needed,” Vang confirmed. “Should I pick you up? I’m at home right now, but I could come straight over.”
I pushed the blanket off my legs with my free hand. “Yeah, that’d be good,” I said. “I can be ready in fifteen minutes.”
Thirty-five minutes later, Vang and I were standing on an acre of peaceful countryside near Wayzata Bay. Despite its proximity to the city, this was a place more rural than suburban in its flavor, with plenty of land between houses; I could see why Vang had called it an “area” rather than a “neighborhood” on the phone.
The crime-scene unit van was parked at the edge of the road, and two officers were digging. Amateur graves are usually shallow, and exhuming them is work too delicate for a backhoe.
Marijuana farmers sometimes cultivate their crop deep in isolated public lands. The obvious advantage is that the growers have to be caught on-site for the crop to be linked to them, as opposed to having the incriminating plant on their own property. If Bonney had in fact killed someone, he had a similar incentive not to bury on his own property. He hadn’t gone very far, but perhaps he’d felt it wiser not to travel with a body in his car.
Vang and I had just finished reading through the new missing-persons reports and be-on-the-lookouts for the last forty-eight hours; in addition, Vang had a printout of Bonney’s criminal record.
“I don’t get a vibe off any of these missing persons,” I said. “All adults or late teens.”
“They don’t seem like Bonney’s type, do they?” Vang agreed.
“No. Besides, you read his record, right? Sexual battery, child molestation. But he’s never killed anyone, or even come close.”
Vang listened but said nothing.
“Sometimes sexual predators progress to worse crimes, like homicide,” I said. “But there just hasn’t been a disappearance in the last forty-eight hours that seems to match up with this guy burying someone in a field near his house.” I watched one of the officers pause and gingerly scrape aside some wet soil. Vang and I were keeping our distance for now, letting them do their work with a minimum of disturbance to the ground and surroundings. “Usually, you’ll have a pretty good idea about these things. You’ll get a call that someone’s found a body and you’ll know right away, ‘We found Jane.’ I don’t get that feeling here.” I sighed. “You know what I think? I think Bonney burned a damn casserole until the pot was beyond salvaging and took the whole mess out and buried it. His neighbor up the hill saw it, lay awake until a little hole became a yawning grave, and called us. Sometimes I think this whole sex-offender thing, with disclosure and flyers and neighborhood meetings, has gotten way out of hand.”
I cut myself off. Shiloh had only been gone two days and already I was channeling him, spreading his unpopular liberal views to my new partner. “If they find something bad, maybe we’ll ask for a warrant for the house,” I said, backpedaling. “If not, let the parole officer make the surprise visits to look for a violation. It’s his job.”
“If I’d known it was going to take this long for them to disinter, I’d have stopped for coffee,” Vang said.
“When they make you go out to the sticks at seven-thirty in the morning on a situation like this,” I agreed, “coffee may be the highlight of the trip.”
In truth, it wasn’t coffee I wished I’d taken time for but a shower. There’s something a shower provides that has very little to do with actual cleanliness. It’s punctuation: without one, traces of yesterday and last night and bed cling to you, no matter how alert you feel, how you’re dressed, or what you’re doing.
The breeze picked up, coming from the direction of the lake. We couldn’t quite see the water from where we were; it was obscured by bare, skinny trees that made up in number what they lacked in individual heft.
“Does my voice really sound like your husband’s?” Vang asked, and I remembered how I’d answered the phone.
“Not really, the more I-”
“Hey, look at that,” Vang interrupted.
I broke off and looked at the crime-scene officers. They were carefully lifting something wrapped in a green garbage bag out of the ground.
“It’s definitely not a casserole dish,” I admitted.
“But it looks kind of small to be a person,” Vang said. We were already walking over. “Unless it’s a kid.”
“Or it’s not a whole person,” I said, and Vang winced.
The first officer, Penhall, took his camera and photographed the bagged form where it lay just next to the hole it had been lifted from.
Officer Malik took a penknife and, pulling the bag away from the object inside, slit the bag lengthwise without disturbing the knot at the top.
The first thing I saw as the blade slid through green plastic was tawny blond hair. But what was inside was blond all over: a golden retriever. Some dried blood matted the fur.
“Aw, shit,” Malik said. It was hard to tell if he spoke as a dog lover or a technician who’d just wasted a lot of time.
“Well,” Penhall said, “hold on. This guy killed a neighbor’s dog, that’s pretty serious.” He looked at Vang and me for validation.
“Could you take the wrap all the way off?” I said.
Malik did. I looked at Vang and raised an eyebrow.
“It just looks like a dog that got hit by a car to me,” Vang observed.
Malik was nodding agreement.
“Then why take the trouble to bury it?” Penhall asked.