light through the leaf canopy for the past hour. “If you keep it at roughly the same angle, you should be able to go straight that way and hit the road in ten or fifteen minutes. Then you can follow it back to the car.”
Yung nodded. “I’ll see you there. You have my number if you find anything?”
Grimaldi assured her she did, and then we watched Yung navigate away from us through the trees, until her black-clad figure was gone from sight. Grimaldi turned to me. “You OK moving ten or fifteen feet in one direction, and I’ll go ten or fifteen in the other, and we’ll walk a parallel track back the way we came?”
“Sure.” Twenty or thirty feet wasn’t enough that we’d lose each other, but we could cover more ground that way.
So Grimaldi paced off to the west, and I paced off to the right, in the direction Leslie Yung had disappeared, and we headed back toward the car at a more than polite distance. The sounds of Yung’s passage—the swishing of leaves, and the occasional cracking of a dry branch or muttered curse—had faded now, so she must be making good time toward the road.
Grimaldi and I shuffled northward. Carrie stayed asleep, and I kept one arm up over her small body to keep her from any accidental harm. I used the other to push aside branches and vines that got in my way.
“Are there rattlesnakes around here?” I called out to Grimaldi.
She gave me a look, potent even across the twenty-five feet that separated us. “You’re the local. Shouldn’t you know?”
“I never spent much time in the woods,” I said. “You’re more of the outdoorsy type. Besides, this was your idea.”
She sighed. “Yes, there are rattlesnakes here. Timber rattlesnake and pygmy rattlesnake. Also cottonmouths and copperheads. They all bite.”
“Lovely.” I started to look around even more carefully, and lifting my feet higher. I probably looked like a majorette—minus the twiddlestick. “Is it the right time of year for venomous snakes?”
“They hibernate when it’s cold,” Grimaldi said, scanning left to right as she shuffled, “but it’s warm enough by now that I figure they’ve come out. So the answer’s probably yes.”
“Lovely.”
I found myself looking more for snakes than for bones, and told myself to stop. There’s being cautious, and then there’s being afraid enough to forget what your job is.
I widened my area of inspection, though, so I’d see any snakes coming, and it was because I did that I saw it. “Hey!”
“What?” Grimaldi’s voice said.
“Come here. I think I may have something.”
She changed direction and came toward me.
“Look out for snakes,” I added, as she crashed through the underbrush.
She gave me a look, but didn’t comment. Just stopped beside me. “What?”
“That.” I pointed. “Over there, past that log. Is that a rock? It looks very smooth and regular to be one.”
And just in case it wasn’t—just in case it was what I thought it was: the top of a skull—I wanted someone else to go over and touch it.
Grimaldi looked at it. Her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. “Stay here,” she told me.
“No problem.” I had no need to go any closer. But I watched carefully as she made her way forward, observing the ground closely before she put her foot down. I didn’t think she was looking for snakes.
She scrambled over the fallen log—it sported some moss and a colony of fungi on top—and bent over the… let’s be charitable and call it a rock.
It wasn’t a rock, though. I’d known it as soon as I caught sight of it. And Grimaldi’s body language—the set of her shoulders, like she’d half expected and half dreaded it—was confirmation.
But I asked anyway. “It’s him?”
She glanced up at me. “It’s somebody. Definitely a skull, and I see some other bones, too.”
“I’ll call Yung,” I said, lifting my phone.
“You have the number?” Grimaldi kept poking at the ground with the toe of her boot.
Of course I didn’t. “You call Yung. I’ll call Rafe. And tell him to tell the sheriff to add a search warrant for the property to the warrant for the RV.”
Grimaldi nodded, fishing for her phone. “Either one of us is going to have to stay here with the remains, or we need some way of marking the spot.”
I nodded, and then held up a finger as the phone was answered in my ear. “Darlin’.”
“Rafe,” I said. “We found bones.”
There was a beat. “In the woods?”
“Of course in the woods. Where else would we