She turned and gestured to a short, wiry man whose face was as bushy with black hair as his head was gleamingly bald. His eyes looked enormous behind thick, dark-framed glasses, and he squinted at me slightly as we exchanged formalities, as if considering what a slice of me would look like under a microscope.
Hillstrom beamed between us, the immaculate hostess. “Dr. Boris Leach-Lieutenant Joe Gunther.”
Leach’s eyes shifted away from me after a cursory glance, focusing instead on the activities by the hole. His hand was cold and limp in mine, and I dropped it as soon as I could.
“Lieutenant, I take it no one has aggravated the hole any further?” He stepped around me and ducked under the yellow Mylar “Police Line” we’d used to surround the site.
Hillstrom patted my arm quickly and smiled, encouraging me to ignore Leach’s arrogant tone of voice. I realized then she wasn’t here purely out of professional curiosity. When I’d called her about the skeleton, she’d warned me that Leach was no Miss Manners; she’d obviously decided upon reflection to run interference between us.
I lifted the barrier for her and we followed in Leach’s wake. “It’s just the way we left it last night, except for what your assistant dropped off a while ago.”
He stood at the edge of the hole, now illuminated by the bright, cool sunlight. The metal knee joint shone like a white spark, nestled in its pit. He looked around suddenly, “Where’s the backhoe? I told Henry specifically to request a backhoe. I can’t be expected to remove four feet of dirt by myself. It’s idiotic… Pointless.”
I held up my hand to interrupt him. “It’s coming, Doctor; it should be here in a few minutes. What about everything else?”
That sidetracked him for a while. He left us to examine the pile of equipment his twitchy, birdlike assistant Henry had brought in a pickup truck some forty-five minutes earlier.
Watching him, I muttered to Hillstrom, “Too many years digging in the Gobi Desert?”
She smiled like an indulgent mother. “Take the bad with the good, Lieutenant. This man is very good.”
Leach returned from his inventory and fixed me with his fierce owl-wide eyes. “Who’s the forensics man on your team?”
“J. P. Tyler.” I shouted over to J.P., who was doing his own surreptitious examination of Leach’s assembled hardware.
Rather than waiting for Tyler to join us, Leach marched off and made his own introductions. Both men took hammers and large spikes and set off toward opposite trees near the grave site. Once there, they drove the spikes into the trunks, fastened them to the ends of two reeled measuring tapes, and unrolled the tapes toward the hole, establishing both a double set of fixed surveying points and an accurate triangulation system. From now on, all maps of the site would feature the two trees, and all items on that map would be measured from them. Indeed, even as I was admiring the simple efficiency of the plan, I saw Leach thrust a drawing pad, a pencil, and a ruler into Tyler’s hands.
At that point, Leach shouted over to Hillstrom. “You can play photographer now, if you want to earn your keep.”
Hillstrom merely chuckled and pulled a camera from the bag hanging off her shoulder. Even considering our friendship, it never would have occurred to me to address her in such a tone.
From that point on, Dr. Leach was like a caricature general in the field, shouting orders to his troops and doing most of the work himself.
After a quick sketch of the scene as it was, the surface debris of leaves and stray stones was cleared away to reveal the true topography of the land. Shovels were handed out, and slowly, inch by inch, the top layer of soil was removed over about a ten-foot-by-five-foot area, revealing at first a uniform mantle of dark, moist, nutrient-rich dirt.
I wandered near Hillstrom at one point in this drawn-out process and asked how deep we were going to go. She shook her head in shocked amusement. “Not to worry. That’s why he was asking for the backhoe. Soil like this is divided into two parts: The upper layer can be about eight inches deep, like it is here, and it tends to be dark and rich. Below it is the lighter-colored, generally sandier layer, which usually goes down until you hit ledge or water or whatever. The premise is that if you dig a grave, you’ll punch through the top and burrow into the lower layer, but when you later fill in the hole, the dirt you throw in will be a mixture of both dark and light. So, years later, if you skim the dark topsoil off a larger surrounding area, chances are you’ll discover one spot in the lighter, deeper soil that looks slightly different, because it’s been disturbed. That’s how you know exactly where your grave is.”
“But we know where the grave is,” I persisted, unembarrassed to display my archaeological ignorance.
“Yes, but we don’t know its orientation or size. People rarely dig nice big, deep rectangular holes for their murder victims. They do what they can in a hurry, crunch their victims up as tightly as possible, and stuff them in. Boris and I have found them headfirst, balled up, and cut into pieces. It’s amazing.”
Her explanation was right on the mark. At about one foot down, a barely perceptible darker patch, about three and a half feet around, distinguished itself from its pale surroundings. The hole we’d dug the night before was right at the edge of it.
The backhoe had long since arrived, accompanied but not operated by the high-strung Henry, whom Leach put to work laying out wooden stakes and a grid. Once a cut line was established, the machine started digging a wide, deep trench right next to the grave site.
Leach stood next to me as we watched the backhoe at work. “You ever been to a dig before?” he asked suddenly without looking at me.
“No.”
“Well, it’s a pain in the ass to dig straight down. The position’s uncomfortable, the visibility stinks, and the dirt keeps falling back into the hole. Plus, if the body’s still ripe, the stench comes straight up at you. Much easier to put a trench alongside the site and work at it in comfort, directly in front of you. Then it’s more like emptying a chest of drawers, from the top one down.”
I was about to thank him for this unexpected tidbit when he left as abruptly as he’d come, signaled to the backhoe operator to stop, and jumped over the trench like some bespectacled billy goat, falling to his knees at the point where the light dirt and the mixed dirt met. He used a long knife to cut a cake-sized wedge between them and then signaled to me to join him.
I knelt down by his side, and he pointed at the cleavage the wedge had left behind. “Shovel marks left by whoever dug the hole. You can see from the scalloped cut that it was a spade-shaped shovel, about twelve inches wide at the base and slightly curved.”
He looked up suddenly. “Beverly-where the hell are you? You want to take possession of this mess fast, you’ve got to help me out.”
Hillstrom, standing nearby, shook her head silently and joined us, focusing her camera on the evidence as Leach laid out a ruler for comparison. In the meantime, I called over to Dennis to check the toolshed for a shovel fitting Leach’s description. As I did so, I noticed State’s Attorney James Dunn quietly joining the crowd at the police barrier, as irresistibly drawn to this death scene as he was to all the ones I’d ever attended during his tenure. I’d realized by now that we’d be here most of the day; it astounded me that Dunn’s specialized curiosity would allow him to abandon the office for so long on such short notice. Hard to keep a man from his personal interests. I gave him a small wave and went back to being a spectator.
The trench now complete, Leach set to work in earnest, scraping the side of the dirt wall before him until the faintest change in color indicated he was right at the wall of the narrow, vertical, cylindrical grave. Then, as he’d told me he would, he set to work removing the dirt from the top down.
By the time he’d reached the artificial knee, Dennis had returned with a shovel, and we took a brief pause to document that we had indeed found a match for the scars in the dirt. This was no small matter to me privately, for while everyone else was narrowly focused on the task at hand, I was still wondering if the body in the hole had anything at all to do with Abraham Fuller. The shovel was a comforting bridge over that gap. It didn’t prove culpability; it didn’t even point at Fuller, since it was perfectly possible that the shovel was Coyner’s and that he’d buried Old Kneecap before Fuller had appeared on the scene. Nevertheless, it was a link, until something better came along.