At first, I wrote the quiet drive off to the contrasting personalities of my passengers. Dennis DeFlorio was as much a slob as Tyler was neat and precise, and they were not given to idle chats under the best of circumstances. But the farther we drove, the more I began to share their lack of enthusiasm for the search. Looking for the gun would be a long and tiresome procedure, and probably a fruitless one at that. Moreover, if by some miracle we did locate it, what would it prove? It would no longer have any prints on it, and any serial numbers would doubtless lead nowhere; a man of Fuller’s intelligence and caution would hardly have left behind a gun so easily traceable. The net result, if this all proved accurate, would be another brick wall, and although our efforts had only just begun, I was already feeling a sense of futility. We’d made some progress on the case, but nothing had brought us any closer to the solution of a more than twenty-year-old homicide.
By the time we arrived at Coyner’s house, Kunkle was already there with the rented metal detector, predictably giving voice to all our doubts. “Hey, Joe, we really going to hunt around for this guy’s gun?”
“Yeah. Anyone seen Coyner?”
Sammie, sitting in the passenger seat of her car with her legs stretched out toward the breathtaking view of the valleys below, answered, “I knocked-no answer.”
I checked my watch. “Okay, let’s get moving; we’ve got about five hours of light left.”
Tyler held up a canvas bag he’d brought along, adding without humor, “And flashlights for everybody.”
The general mood did not improve much during the afternoon, even with Tyler’s discovery, after painstaking work with tweezers and a magnifying glass, of the blackened remains of a letter in the wood stove. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell us more, since his conclusions were based on a few minute scraps of shiny ash.
It was, however, the sole highlight of the afternoon. The rest of our time was spent crisscrossing Fuller’s horticultural masterpiece in two teams, one detector apiece, stopping every few feet to investigate whatever set the machines off. Sometimes the reason was an old nail, a lost tool, the remains of a container; other times nothing was found, and when the area was rechecked after some digging, the detector stayed mute. J.P. hypothesized about the effects of iron in the soil; Kunkle was both less charitable and more crude.
At sunset I feared that morale had dipped so low I would have to call it quits. Instead, I had Tyler radio for the department’s emergency services van, equipped with portable halogen lamps, by whose light we continued along our narrow, predetermined search grids. I kept hopefully silent while the others punctuated their work with increasing complaints about the cold, the equipment, and their fate in general.
Since there were five of us, the odd member of the group sat out a quarter hour while the other four worked on. At around 7:45, the sun long since set, I was sitting on Fuller’s front stoop, watching the others shuffling through their paces near the edge of the woods, their shadows sharp-edged by the harsh lights, when for the hundredth time I heard the persistent complaint of one of the detectors. I saw Sammie’s diminutive form stop, while Dennis’s bulk dropped to all fours and began to scratch the earth’s surface with a hand spade he’d borrowed from the toolshed. He sat back on his haunches a few minutes later, a small pile of dirt by his side, and Sammie played the detector across the surface of the shallow hole once more. The chirping reached my ears again.
I got up and walked toward them, hearing Dennis swearing as he bent to his task again, scooping out larger clods, assisting the spade with his other hand now. Once more, Sammie swept over the hole with the detector’s broad, flat, horizontal disk. It sounded a third time.
“Goddamn it,” Dennis growled and reached into the hole.
“What’d you think?” I asked Sammie.
She shrugged noncommittally, but her eyes were tightly focused on Dennis’s work. “Beats me. First time it’s been this deep.”
Tyler and Kunkle crossed over to us, having marked their spot with their own machine. Without asking, Willy fell in next to Dennis, his one powerful hand making his own spade work like a miniature steam shovel.
After they’d gone down about two feet, I interrupted them, aware of Dennis’s heavy breathing and the gleam of sweat on the back of his neck. “Try it again.”
The detector repeated itself, its irritating alarm now egging us on. I switched places with DeFlorio. Kunkle stayed where he was, muttering, “This better be something, or I’m out of here. This is bullshit.”
“At least it’s easy digging,” I commented, half to myself.
“Yeah-I noticed that,” Willy said in a voice that made me pause to look up at him.
He grinned back at me. “Kind of makes you wonder.”
It was true, I thought. Vermont soil is notoriously “bony”-as rock-strewn as a boulder field-and all afternoon, in response to the detectors’ urging, we’d been proving that generality correct. But here, the consistently soft, almost wet earth moved under our spades as in a well-tilled garden-except that we were far below the level of Fuller’s lovingly tended soil.
At three and a half feet, Dennis and J.P. were hanging on to us for dear life, trying to keep us from falling into the narrow hole. Each scoop of the spade now had to be followed by a grunting heave back up to the surface so the dirt wouldn’t slide back to the bottom, but neither Willy nor I would be relieved. Driven by the detector’s persistence, we were now convinced we were close to discovery, although Willy, true to form, disguised his own excitement by muttering, “Probably a fucking Model T under here.”
We all knew it as soon as my spade made contact, sending up a single sharp clang that froze us all in position.
“Shine a light in here,” I ordered.
Four bright halos cascaded into the hole where I was hanging almost upside down. I stuck the spade into the soft earthen wall around me and used my bare hand to brush the dirt away.
“What the hell is that?” In their craning to see, I felt someone’s grip loosen on my legs, then felt myself slide down the hole until my nose was almost flat on the bottom.
“Goddamn it.”
When I scooped the earth away, I discovered a bright, shiny stainless-steel globe, about the size of an orange. I carefully worked my fingers to either side of it, trying to gain some definition. It was attached to two darker, grittier objects that extended from it at a forty-five degree angle, like shafts from the apex of some oversized drafting compass. Indeed, now that I could see it better, I knew the metal ball was actually a hinge, beautifully designed, immaculately crafted, and surgically precise.
“Pull me back up.”
They dragged me over the edge and went back to staring at our small, twinkling treasure, ignoring me as I tried scraping some of the mud from my stomach and face.
“It’s some sort of machine,” Dennis said tentatively.
“In a way,” I answered. “It’s an artificial stainless-steel knee joint, and it’s attached to a skeleton.”
10
“Hello, Lieutenant.”
I turned away from the jumble of people setting up staging and equipment by the roped-off grave site and saw Beverly Hillstrom coming toward me. I had called her right after discovering the skeleton, to ask her advice on how to deal with it. It was now 10:00 A.M. the following morning.
I smiled at her with genuine pleasure and shook her slim, elegant hand. “Doctor. It’s wonderful to see you; I thought one of your regional MEs would be attending. I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I wasn’t going to initially, but then I couldn’t resist it. Besides, once I’d recommended a forensic archaeologist, I thought the least I could do was to introduce him personally.”