of clothing and personal effects salvaged from the kill sites and placed in bags that were also numbered. Most were carefully arranging bones, creating incomplete jigsaw skeletons with a few ribs and a jaw bone and a shattered hand. Or a femur, a pelvis and bits of spine. Or matching forearms, one with a fingerless hand still attached.
The collections on each tarp, I knew, had been found in geographic proximity to each other. But it would take DNA testing to match all the pieces that had been scattered over longer distances by scavengers and the stream.
Every intact skull I saw had a ragged hole at the back of the head.
“Execution style,” I overheard a nearby county cop say. “Stand ’em up or kneel ’em on the edge. Put the gun up near their head. Then—” he pointed at one of the skulls with his right index finger and jerked his thumb upward “—bang. A quick push and you’re done.”
That, I thought, explained the sheriff’s off-the-cuff comment to the media. He probably figured the ravine for a dryland equivalent of a pair of cement overshoes. Certainly, the Shawnee National Forest could be as impenetrable as the deepest lake. And a bullet to the brain was just as permanent as drowning.
I looked back down at the remains nearest my feet. A single item on a corner sheet. It was the cap of a skull, the bone still half covered with skin, soil clumping the hair, making the color impossible to determine. And on the sheet beside that, a pair of femurs, their heads tucked in next to the hip sockets they fit in, looked almost porous and polished clean.
I waylaid one of the FBI technicians, a younger guy with a pleasant face whom I’d noticed earlier. Then, he’d been standing off to one side, staring over the bodies laid out before him, looking more than a little overwhelmed. Now, he was moving efficiently along the perimeter, dividing his attention between two incessantly squawking walkie-talkies.
I managed to catch him in a moment when he wasn’t talking into either.
“This has been done over a lot of years, hasn’t it?” I said.
He hesitated as he searched for my ID, then noticed the Maryville PD badge I’d retrieved from my SUV and clipped to my waist.
“Oh, you’re the one who got this circus started. You and your partner.”
No point in telling him that Chad wasn’t my partner.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
“You should be,” he said, suddenly grinning. “To answer your question unofficially, some of these bodies may have been down there for twenty years or more. But a couple of them—like number six over there—are a lot more recent. Maybe just a few months old.”
One of the walkie-talkies crackled to life, demanding his attention.
I mouthed a “thank you,” carefully kept the relief I felt from showing in my expression, and left him to his work.
These murders, I thought, had nothing to do with my sister, nothing to do with the secret that had prompted her to threaten me. This place was someone’s killing field—someone’s dumping ground—when Katie and I had still been children. Maybe even before we’d been born. And it was too much of a coincidence to believe that the remains I’d found on the ledge were unrelated to the bodies down in the ravine. As the search progressed, I was confident that other victims would be discovered along the edge of the ravine.
I continued my walk around the perimeter. Looking. Listening to the conversations around me. Gathering information I feared that “cooperation” through official channels would be much slower to provide.
A tall, thin man with wire-framed glasses and wispy hair had been moving from one set of remains to the next, squatting down close to each sheet to look carefully at them. Sometimes turning a skull over to examine it or using calipers or a tape to measure a rib or a piece of spine or a bone from an arm or leg.
An intact rib cage and spinal cord with a bit of clothing still clinging to it seemed to catch his attention for a moment.
“Scoliosis,” he murmured.
Then he moved on to the adjacent sheet. Number nine.
Behind him, a young woman carrying a clipboard made another quick note, as she did whenever he spoke.
Another time, he pointed to the forearm with the partial hand still attached.
“See that. Teeth marks. Gnawed the fingers right off.”
The young woman nodded, looked a little green and took another note as she moved away from sheet number eleven.