His shoe covers crinkle as he crosses to one of the larger fragments and bends for a closer look. “Some kind of nonporous material. Quite deteriorated.”

I squat beside him. “Doc, it looks like pieces of a garbage bag.”

He tosses me a knowing look. “That doesn’t bode well for whatever happened to this individual.”

Uneasy questions pry into my brain. Did this person suffer some kind of fall and die? Was he crawling around under the old barn and got stuck? Was he working down here and suffered a heart attack? Or did someone murder him, place his body in a garbage bag, and dump it?

I think about the scarcity of bones, and something dark nudges at my brain. “If those fragments are indeed from some type of bag—a garbage bag, for example—we could be looking at foul play.”

“Bones always have a story to tell,” the doc says to me.

“I suspect the owner of these particular bones didn’t have a happy ending.”

* * *

It takes nearly three hours for the forensic anthropologist to arrive. I used the time to start documenting the scene, taking several dozen photographs, including close-ups of the bones and the scraps of plastic, as well as the surrounding ground. I also walked the immediate area, looking for anything that might offer an explanation for the bones or for additional bones scattered by animals. I’m sipping a bottle of water one of the Boy Scouts brought over to me, when Tomasetti’s Tahoe, a Holmes County Sheriff’s Department cruiser, and a silver Prius pull in and park in the weeds a prudent distance from the scene.

Doc is sitting in his Escalade, talking on his smartphone. A Holmes County deputy and I are standing near my Explorer, exchanging theories and getting sunburned. Two men I don’t recognize get out of the Prius. Sheriff Mike Rasmussen is the driver of the sheriff’s department cruiser. The four men approach.

“I heard someone found some bones out here,” the sheriff says.

I give his hand a firm shake. “A couple of Boy Scouts found a skull while they were cleaning up.”

“Hope they weren’t too traumatized.”

“More intrigued, I think.”

“Dead bodies always make for good ghost stories.”

Tomasetti reaches us, looking at me a little too intently. “Chief.”

I feel a little conspicuous going through the formality of a handshake; we share the same bed every night, and I’m pretty sure Rasmussen knows we’re living together. For the sake of professional decorum, we go through the motions, anyway. “Hi, John.”

He turns to the forty-something man at his side. “This is Lyle Stevitch, the forensic anthropologist from Lucas County I told you about.”

Stevitch sticks out his hand. “Don’t believe a word he told you,” he says with a smile.

He’s a studious-looking man with wire-rimmed glasses and a precision goatee that conjures images of Burl Ives. He looks more like a college professor than a forensic anthropologist, but already his eyes are drifting past me toward the caution tape, and I know he’s anxious to get started.