the inn, where Trey was finishing up his work. Her gaze followed the white line that stretched from the post to a tree two hundred feet away.
“You find where he stood when he fired the shot?” the sheriff asked Trey.
“Yep, and according to the laser and this cord, he was about my height.” Trey jerked his head toward the bare white oak tree where he’d attached the string. “There’s a marker on the ground where the leaves are disturbed. The cord hits me about shoulder high when I stand by the marker.”
“Good work.”
He held out a piece of metal. “Got this out of the post. Looks like a .22 long rifle.”
“Does that mean he used a rifle?” she asked.
For the first time, Trey’s eyes met hers, his expression going from unreadable to concerned.
“Not necessarily. There are semi-automatic pistols that fire .22 longs, but I’d say this time a rifle was used.” Trey rolled his shoulders and turned to the sheriff. “If you don’t need me, I’m heading back to the jail.”
“Good work, Trey, but I need the trajectory for another bullet before you leave.” The sheriff pointed in the direction they’d just come from. “The bullet is in a tree east of the live oak. It has a ribbon around it.”
Trey glanced at Emma, his brown eyes soft. “I’m glad he didn’t hit you,” he said.
“Thanks. Me too.” She hugged her arms to her waist. Trey could be caring, and he wasn’t really a bad guy, but she just didn’t see a future for them.
His eyes narrowed. “We’ll catch whoever did it, I promise you that.”
Sometimes Trey even surprised her. As he walked toward the live oak, Emma caught sight of a man approaching them. “I think this is my GPR operator,” she said. If it was, he was early.
Nate turned toward the man. “Good. I’d like him to run the machine over the pit. See if he can tell if anything is buried there.”
She met the older man at the front steps of the inn. “Randy Gibson?”
“That’d be me,” the lanky Gibson replied.
“I’m glad you didn’t get my message about waiting until later,” she said.
“I did, but I was already on my way. What’s going on?”
Emma explained the situation. “Before we get started on my project, the sheriff wants you to explore the site where the intruder was digging when I interrupted him.”
“I can do that. I assume my machine arrived.”
“Yes. It’s chained to a steel post at the tractor shed over there.”
She pointed him in the right direction and then handed him the key to the lock. While he went after the machine, Emma joined the sheriff and Sam at the backhoe, where Chris was photographing the hole the intruder had dug. It was about a hundred feet from the only marker in the cemetery, but not near any of the flags that marked the slave graves. Turning, she took in the split-rail fence that had been knocked down to get the machine in place.
“What do you suppose the intruder was digging for?” she asked.
“Good question,” Nate said.
Emma looked around. “Did the metal detector alert to anything?”
“A couple of bottle caps,” Sam replied. “Probably your teenagers drinking beer.”
Once boards were placed over the pit, Randy started the GPR machine, which resembled an oversized lawnmower with a screen attached to the handle. He slowly worked his way across the site and repeated the action two more times. “Do you have a plot diagram of the cemetery?”
She had grabbed the folder for the project earlier and leafed through it. “Here,” she said, handing him a map from the archeological project. “This is from the University of Southern Mississippi research project in 2000. The flags you see correspond to the graves they recorded.”
Ground penetrating radar hadn’t been available to the students who conducted the cemetery survey. Instead, steel probes had been used to identify the randomly scattered graves. Randy ran the machine over the grave nearest them, then returned to the pit and repeated the process.
“Definitely something here.” Randy turned the paper so that the arrow pointing north lined up. After studying it, he checked his screen. “According to this paper, there shouldn’t be anything buried here, but take a look at this.”
Sam and Emma and Nate crowded next to him. “What do you have?” Sam asked.
“Let me bring up both screens,” Randy said. “The bottom screen shows the burial plot from over there,” he said, pointing about fifty feet away. “The top screen is where the pit is—let’s call it