from beside the pier, I found three spheres that looked and felt like baked clay. They weren’t uniform in size, but each fit easily into my palm. A few small fragments from that bag had the feel of bone, that damp, ossified roughness of something that might once have been alive. But even if they were bone, we had no way to know if it was human. We also discovered two teeth that looked human, but I’d seen hog teeth that looked like they came from people, so I encouraged Nadine not to jump to conclusions. Our ultimate judgment was that we weren’t qualified to make any sort of valid analysis of those samples.
We were walking back to our respective rooms to get what sleep we could when she said, “Sorry about the kiss. I figured that was the best play.”
A smile came to my lips. “It wasn’t exactly hardship duty.”
Nadine smiled, too. “No.”
“Well, good night. For the second time.”
“Night.”
I waited for her door to close, then went into my bedroom. I needed a shower but was too exhausted to take one. As I kicked off my shoes, it struck me that I was living in a different world from the one I’d awakened in that morning. In the span of seventeen hours, I had lost two pillars of my childhood to violent death. Strangely, Sally Matheson’s death unsettled me most. Unlike Buck, who had pushed his luck past the point of prudence, Sally had seemed beyond the reach of violence. Untouchable, like a TV actress from my youth. And yet she was dead. For five months I’d been waiting for my father to die, and suddenly Paul’s mother had preceded him into the grave. As I lay in bed and tried to sleep, I saw the dancers on the Aurora roof opening up a circle as though fleeing a suicide bomber, only to reveal Max and Sally arguing viciously while a rock-and-roll legend watched them from his stage. God only knew what wild rumors that scene would inspire.
Before Nadine and I headed for town this morning, I gave her a key to my house and the code to my gate—2972 (Jet’s birthday, but Nadine doesn’t know that). I told her that if anything felt wrong during the day, if she sensed even the slightest danger, she should consider my house a refuge. If the drive seemed too far, she could come to the Watchman building. A few minutes ago, she texted to let me know that while her customers are obsessed with the shooting of Sally Matheson, our story suggesting that Buck was murdered at the industrial park is running a close second. And while public opinion seems split on Max’s guilt, it’s running 100 percent against me, Ben Tate, the coroner, and Buck himself.
After dropping Nadine at her shop this morning, I delivered half the dirt I’d collected from the paper mill site to Byron Ellis’s home. The coroner figures the county might fire him today, but he has a lawyer and two well-known black activists ready to protest any such move. In the meantime, he’s glad to have the soil samples to distract him from the politics. Byron’s no archaeologist, but he feels confident that he can determine whether the samples contain any blood or bone. Quinn Ferris is picking up the rest of the dirt later today. Quinn assures me she can get the samples to an expert at LSU in Baton Rouge, who can tell us exactly what Buck was digging into when he was murdered.
Since my texts with Nadine, I’ve been trying to settle on my next move. Thirty minutes ago, one of my reporters told me Max Matheson was due to be arraigned soon. I’ve put off dealing with in-house issues until I hear how that went. I’ve also kept my burner phone close, but I’ve heard nothing from Jet since last night. And though it’s been tough, I’ve obeyed her order not to try to reach her. I’m hoping Ben Tate’s forceful inquiries made the locum tenens pathologist nervous enough to do an honest autopsy on Buck, but I won’t know until I get a look at the report, which I might not see until the afternoon.
When my iPhone rings, I curse, wishing it was the burner. But at least it’s Carl Stein, the reporter covering Max’s arraignment.
“How’d it go, Carl?”
“The judge just granted Max bail.”
“How high?”
“A million bucks. For a hundred grand cash, he gets to walk free till trial.”
A hundred