“Yes, there’s Grunyan’s Pond and Pine Landing Lake. And several streams.”

“Have they been searched?”

“Yes. A couple of us dive, and we’ve searched as well as we can. Nothing’s come to the surface, either. Both of those spots are well used, and anything that came up and a lot of things that went down would have been found, if they’d been there to find. And I’m sure the pond’s clear. Still, it’s possible that there’s something in the deepest part of the lake.”

The sheriff clearly believed that wasn’t likely.

“What did the missing boys have in common?”

“Besides their age range? Not much, except they’re gone.”

“All white?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“All go to the same school?”

“No. Four of them to the local high school, one of them to the junior high, one of them to the private academy, Randolph Prep.”

“The past five years, you said? Do they vanish at the same time of year?”

She looked at a file on her desk, opened it. Flipped over a few pages. “No,” she said. “Two in the fall, three in the spring, one in the summer.”

None in the winter, when the conditions would be worst for an outdoor interment—so she was probably right. The boys were buried somewhere.

“You think the same person killed them all,” I said. I was guessing, but it was a good guess.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I think.”

It was my turn to take a deep breath. I’d never handled anything like this. I’d never tried to find so many people. “I don’t know a lot about serial killers,” I said, and the two dread words dropped into the room like unwelcome visitors. “But from what I’ve read and seen on television, I believe they tend to bury their victims in the same geographic conditions, if not in the exact same location. Like the Green River Killer dumping most of his victims in the river.”

“That’s true,” she said. “Some of them prefer the same location. Then they can visit it over and over. To remember.” She’d done her homework.

“How do you think I can help?”

“Tell me how you work. How do you find bodies?”

“My sister does two things,” Tolliver said, launching into his familiar spiel. “She can find bodies, and she can determine the cause of death. If we have to search for a body, obviously that’s going to take longer than someone taking her to the local cemetery, pointing to a grave, and wanting to know what killed the person in the grave.”

The sheriff nodded. “It costs more.”