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A half hour after we’d started the search, we halted once more. This time it wasn’t to inspect an animal burrow or to re-form ranks; this time it was to figure out how, and whether, to cross a coffee-colored stream that lay in our path. Angie, who’d zoomed her GPS all the way in to pinpoint where Jasper had crossed, pointed to a narrow, muddy notch in the bank. “Dog tracks,” she said, and I saw that she was right. “That was a damn good collar.” I squinted at the map, which showed a narrow blue squiggle corresponding to the brown water before us. The fine print that bordered the squiggle sent a chill down my spine: the stream was named Moccasin Creek, and I was reasonably certain the name wasn’t a reference to footwear.
Moccasin Creek moved sluggishly between high, eroded banks bordered by overhanging branches. Lurking amid the leaves, camouflaged by the foliage, were countless snakes, I felt sure, draped liked venomous garlands, just waiting to drop upon us as we waded, neck-deep, in the murky waters. My nightmarish reverie was interrupted by Vickery. “Mind if I take a look at that map?” I handed it over, and he studied it briefly. He stepped closer to the bank and peered upstream and downstream, then huddled with Angie and me. “We could have big problems if we cross this creek,” he said quietly.
“I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s nervous about snakes,” I said.
“Huh?” Vickery looked puzzled. He reexamined the map, then shook his head. “Actually, Doc, I’m more worried about humans than reptiles.” Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “We’re in Apalachee County right now,” he went on. “But over there? The other bank? That’s Miccosukee County.”
“Oh, good grief,” Angie groaned. “So what?”
I was inclined to take Angie’s view. “No offense,” I ventured, “but FDLE has jurisdiction statewide, right? You can go into any county in Florida.”
“Theoretically, yeah,” said Vickery. “But like I told Pettis the other day, we have to be invited by the locals — in this case, the Miccosukee County Sheriff’s Office. And Miccosukee County Sheriff Darryl Judson is not an inviting kind of guy. He’s old as dirt, hard as nails, and mean as a stepped-on cottonmouth.”
“Oh, come on,” Angie said. “Really, Stu? You’re actually worried about crossing a little bitty corner of Miccosukee County?”
“Hey, I’ve been around a long time, but I need to hang on a little longer to get my pension,” Vickery shot back. “Three years longer, to be precise. I’ve heard stories about Sheriff Judson. He’s got friends in high places — his father was a state senator or some such, back in the day — and he’s got dirt on other folks in high places, too. I never heard of anybody who won a pissing match with Sheriff Judson.”
“Can’t we claim innocence by way of ignorance? That we were walking in the woods and we didn’t know what county we were in? Circle back and ask for forgiveness instead of permission?”
He shook his head. “If Judson made a big stink and the brass took a close look at your GPS or the maps Nat printed out for us, they’d see the county line. Then they’d have to decide if we were lying or just stupid. That would make it even worse.”
“Stu, we’re working a homicide,” she argued, “and we have got reason to believe that it’s linked to a prior homicide — more than one, in fact — that was committed in Miccosukee County.”
“The fact that a dog might — emphasis on might—have dug up these age-old skulls in Miccosukee County,” he retorted, “is not going to carry a whole hell of a lot of weight with a territorial sheriff whose private kingdom has just been invaded.”
“Think about the guy who killed Pettis,” she challenged. “Maybe he already knows where the skulls came from, maybe not. But he’s got the collar, and he’s got a head start on us, right?” Vickery nodded grudgingly. “If he’s looking, and he gets there ahead of us, he might wreck the scene. Can we afford to take a chance on that?”
“You’re not the one whose neck is on the line,” he retorted. “I’m the case agent. If anybody gets hung on the cross by Sheriff Judson or one of his Tallahassee cronies, it’ll be me.”
“Call Riordan,” said Angie. “If he tells us to keep going, it’s on him, not you, right?”
Vickery frowned. “Shit.”
“Come on, Stu, grow a backbone,” she snapped. “Are you really just gonna mark time for the next three years? Is that who you want to be?” Vickery reddened; he snatched his cigar from his mouth and rolled it angrily between his thumb and fingers. “That poor son of a bitch back there died trying to help us,” she pressed. “Don’t we owe him at least a good try?” Vickery’s jaw clenched and unclenched. As he continued rolling the cigar, I noticed the pressure of his grip increased. Shreds of tobacco sifted through his fingers as he slowly crushed the cigar to bits.
“Goddammit,” he muttered. “You’re right.”
Angie smiled. “Good man. You want to call Riordan anyhow? Just to cover your ass?”
“Not particularly, but I guess I have to.” He pulled the phone from his belt and dialed the prosecutor. “So,” Vickery began after a few throat-clearing preliminaries, “we think we’re closing in on the bones… I hope so, too. But we have a slight wrinkle, and I figured you’d want a heads-up… Well, unfortunately, the damn dog didn’t pay too much attention to county lines and jurisdictions when he went sniffing around, if you catch my drift… What I mean is, we’ve tracked the dog as far as the Apalachee County line. If we want to keep tracking him the rest of the way to his hunting ground, we’ve got to cross into Miccosukee County… Yes, sir, I’m sure about that. I’m looking at his paw prints right now where he came across the creek from Miccosukee. Exactly, that’s Sheriff Judson’s county… I know, I know — Judson does put the ‘dick’ in ‘jurisdiction,’ doesn’t he?” Vickery forced a laugh. “Well, we just didn’t know — the GPS track from the collar didn’t show us the county lines… Yes, sir, you’re right, you’re absolutely right. We should’ve taken a closer look. But we didn’t. So here we are, out here in the middle of nowhere. Out here in the middle of a search that we think might lead to something… With all due respect, sir, I disagree. I believe we ought to keep going… No, sir, I don’t want to start a shooting war with the sheriff. But I also don’t want to let a hot trail go cold… No, sir, I don’t think it can wait till tomorrow… Look, whoever killed Pettis took the collar off the dog. You’re aware of that, right?… No, sir; no, sir, I am not condescending to you, I’m just making sure you’re aware that the collar’s gone… So the killer might be able to download the same data we’ve got, cover the same ground we’re covering.” Angie had made this same argument to Stu; now, she shook her head doubtfully and appeared about to interrupt him, but Stu held up a hand to shush her. “No, sir, I don’t know that to be a fact, but I just don’t think we can afford to take that chance, can we? What I do know is that if we spend twenty-four hours kissing the sheriff’s ass, our chances of finding whatever’s out here in the woods get worse, not better… I understand that this puts you in a tough spot, and I wish the dog had stayed in his own damn county, but he didn’t. If you tell us not to go on, we won’t, but I hope you won’t do that… All right, thank you, sir… You’ll call the sheriff? Okay, I appreciate that… Yes, sir, I’ll be sure to keep you posted… I guarantee it — you’ll be the first to know if we find anything… Sorry to put you on the hot seat. Thank you, sir. Talk to you soon.” I had never heard so many “sirs” in such swift succession, but they seemed to have helped. Vickery hung up, blew out a long breath, and shook his head. “Well, that was fun.” He turned to the group and put on a smile. “Okay, people, let’s find a way to cross Moccasin fuckin’ Creek that won’t get us drowned or snakebit.”
The steep, narrow notch where Jasper had crossed the stream looked risky, so Angie asked for volunteers to seek out an easier place to cross. She recruited two to jog upstream and another two downstream. “Turn around in ten minutes,” she instructed, “whether you’ve found a good crossing or not. We don’t have time for a big detour.” While they explo
red, we studied the detailed maps Nat had printed out for us. On the other side of the creek, the dog’s track was practically a beeline for half a mile or so, then it reached a spot where he seemed to loiter and explore. “That, I’m hoping, is where we might find something,” she said.
Her phone rang — an incongruous, startling sound, deep in the woods as we were. “Hi, Nat. What’s up?… Really? No kidding?… Hang on a second. Let me put you on speaker, so Stu can hear, too.” She flipped open the phone and pressed a button. “Nat, you still there?”
“I am,” came the computer analyst’s voice.
“Okay, back up and start over, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m getting data from the tracking collar again. Remember, I left the receiver in the fire tower and rigged it to a satellite link? So if I got a signal from the collar again, it would send the new data to my computer?”
“I remember. Go on,” Vickery prompted.
“A minute or two ago, I started seeing the collar again. Looks like it’s on a county road, about four miles south of Pettis’s place. Moving away fast — sixty, seventy miles an hour. It’ll be out of range again in a second.”
“Call Operations,” Vickery ordered. “Tell ’em we need everybody who’s anywhere near that road. Stevenson might be the nearest, but I don’t know where he is.”
“Hang on, hang on, it’s slowing down!” James’s voice was loud, distorted. “It’s stopping! It’s stopped! Wait. Oh, crap, it’s gone. We’ve lost it again.”
“Out of range?” asked Vickery. “How’d it go out of range, if it was stopped?”
“Oh, wow. The place where it stopped? It’s a bridge over a river… Let’s see… the Miccosukee River. I betcha the collar’s drifting down to the bottom of the river right now.”
“Shit,” cursed Vickery. “Call Operations. Give ’em the location. See if we can seal off that road. Get ’em to pull in the local cavalry, too. Which county?”
“Uh… Bremerton on one side of the river, Miccosukee on the other.”
“Shit. Same jurisdictional mess we’re in out here in the woods. Okay. Tell Operations we need help from both counties. We need to question anybody who’s on that road, anybody who might’ve been.”
* * *
As Vickery was winding up the conversation with Nat James, the pair of recruits who’d jogged downstream returned with good news. A large tree had fallen across the stream only a few hundred yards away, they reported; the trunk was two feet in diameter, with branches that could be held for balance most of the way across.
Angie tied a strip of crime-scene tape to a tree trunk beside the muddy notch in the bank, to make sure we could pick up the trail again directly across from where we stood. Five minutes later, when the other pair of trainees returned from their search in the opposite direction, we headed downstream to the fallen tree. It was indeed a fine makeshift bridge, I thought.
Stu didn’t think so. He sized up the trunk nervously. “I thought it would be fatter.”
“Jesus, Stu,” said Angie, “it’s as wide as a sidewalk.”
“But not as flat. And a lot higher up.”
“Tell you what,” she offered. “You can watch everyone else go across and see how they do. Then, if you’re still nervous, you don’t have to do it.”
He considered this only briefly. “Nah, that’s okay. It’s like jumping off the high dive the first day of swimming season. The longer you think about it, the scarier it gets. Might as well get it over with.” With that, he plucked the cigar from his mouth and hoisted himself onto the trunk, making the move with surprising agility for a sixty-year-old with a bit of a belly. He walked quickly, on the balls of his feet, extending both arms for balance, making small circles in the air with the cigar to compensate for his occasional wobbles. When he reached the opposite bank, he pivoted on the trunk. “Okay, quit stalling, you yellow-bellied, lily-livered cowards,” he called. “We’re burning daylight here.”
Angie was the last to cross. Before hopping off the trunk, she tied a long streamer of tape as high in a branch as she could reach so we could find our bridge more easily in the dark, if need be. We walked quickly up the Miccosukee bank of the stream until the yellow tape, the paw prints, and the GPS confirmed that we were back on the dog’s trail. “Okay,” Angie told the group, “from here, we’ve got about another half mile or so where he was moving pretty straight and fairly fast. So line up, spread out, and let’s go.”
Our progress was slower on this side of the creek; at some point the land here had been cleared, and what had grown back, in place of pines and live oaks, was a field of briars. Game trails, including the one the dog had followed, formed low, narrow tunnels through the stickers, but without crawling on all fours, we were forced to pick our way through, and our progress was punctuated by a chorus of curses and yelps.
There were supplemental curses from Vickery when he learned that Stevenson, two other agents, and four county deputies had failed to apprehend any vehicles within miles of the bridge across the Miccosukee River, and a network of side roads made it impossible to seal the area. Vickery looked close to flinging his phone into the briars; he settled instead for snapping his cigar in two and then hurling it away.
Thirty sweaty, scratchy minutes after we’d entered the briar patch, the stickers thinned out, giving way once more to live oaks, pines, and waist-high ferns. Angie called a halt and scrutinized the GPS screen. “Okay, we’re getting close to an area where the dog hung out and wandered around awhile,” she said, “so look sharp.”
We’d barely started forward again when she held up a closed fist — the “stop” signal — and pointed. Ten yards ahead, directly in her path, was a low heap of dead ferns and freshly scattered dirt. Angie crept forward, motioning for me to join her. I moved slowly, inspecting the ground carefully before each step. Angie reached the spot before I did; when I joined her, she was staring down into a shallow hollow, roughly a foot in diameter and a foot deep. Paw prints and claw marks edged its rim. Within the hole, I saw shreds of black plastic sheeting. And jutting from the tattered plastic and the clumped dirt, I glimpsed the ends of three ribs.
Chapter 20
Angie unslung her camera, removed a bundle of survey flags from her belt, and began flagging and photographing the grave. She started with wide-angle shots, showing the grave amid the wooded setting, then she worked her way closer, taking medium shots of the disturbed earth. Gradually she moved in for close-ups of the hole and the exposed bones within it.
Vickery phoned the prosecutor. “Mr. Riordan, we’ve just found a shallow grave. It’s been recently disturbed… Yes, sir, unfortunately, we are in Miccosukee County… Well, we haven’t excavated it yet, but several bones are exposed, and Dr. Brockton feels pretty confident they’re human…” I was surprised to hear him laugh. “Well, I guess we could dig it up and move it across the creek into Apalachee. But then we’d have to kill all these trainees so we don’t leave any witnesses.” He laughed again, which I hoped was a sign that on the other end of the call, the prosecutor was making his peace with the jurisdictional briar patch into which we’d strayed.
As Vickery talked and Angie photographed, I began to explore the surrounding ground. Angie had waved the recruits back, to keep them from trampling the scene, but she’d asked me to take a look around. She didn’t have to ask twice.
We were in another grove of massive live oaks — immense, sprawling trees that must have been hundreds of years old. At their bases, they were wider than my arms could span; ten to fifteen feet above the ground, their trunks branched into six or eight or ten or twelve secondary trunks, each one twice as big around as I was. The limbs that spread from these secondary trunks were blanketed with resurrection ferns — named, Angie had told me, for the way they shriveled up and “died” during dry spells, then came back to life at the return of rain. Over the decades, some of the trees had lost large portions to disease or storms, and some of the trunks were splitting and half rotted. Yet there was remarkab
le life and beauty in the ancient trees, even the ones that were starting to die. Overhead, their branches laced together into a canopy that was as high, as wide, and as beautiful as the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Beards of Spanish moss, some of them twenty feet long, hung from the limbs and swayed gently in the late-afternoon breeze. The leaves and ferns and moss caught most of the sun; what light sifted through, to the lush carpet of ferns on the ground, was filtered by the foliage to a soft, silvery green.
And in the sifted, silvery-green light, beneath the resurrection ferns, I saw a second grave, also freshly disturbed, about thirty feet beyond the first.
A stone’s throw from the second grave, I saw a third.
This—this—had to be the Bone Yard.
* * *
After his conversation with the prosecutor, Vickers phoned FDLE’s operations center to call in the crime-scene cavalry — and to confer on the best way to get them to our location. As it turned out, we were only a mile north of the ruins of the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory, although the school lay in yet another county. “Interesting,” Vickery observed, “that the school itself, and the official cemetery, are in Bremerton County, but these graves are hidden up in this little corner of Miccosukee County. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”
Once Vickery had grasped our proximity to the school, he sent the academy trainees skirting the edge of the grove of oaks. At the far end, one of them found the remnants of an overgrown dirt road — a track that headed in the direction of the school. The dispatcher in the operations center would send reinforcements to the school; meanwhile, Vickery would send two of the recruits to lead them the rest of the way to us.
Ninety minutes after Angie had spotted the first grave — and thirty minutes before we were likely to run out of daylight — we heard the low whine of an all-wheel-drive SUV laboring through the woods, its progress punctuated by the screechings of underbrush and tree branches scraping the belly and the sides of the vehicle.
