“The first grave is marked ‘Jeff McGraw,’ and all the others are marked with the name of the boy that was in there,” I said. I caught myself talking in a very low voice, as if I could disturb the dead. “The two graves where the boys weren’t local, they have names on them, too. Maybe there was ID on the bodies. The northernmost one reads ‘Chad Turner,’ and the other one is ‘James Ray Pettijean.’” I scooted my chair a little closer to Tolliver’s. “I guess they’re all being autopsied now,” I said. It really didn’t make any difference what happened to the body after the soul was gone; it was dross. Somehow, there being so many of them gave me the cold grue.

“There wasn’t anything remaining at the grave site?” Tolliver asked, careful of the fact that ears might be listening.

“No,” I said, just as carefully. No souls, no ghosts; and there’s a big difference. I’ve seen souls lingering around fairly fresh bodies every now and then. I’ve only seen one ghost.

Pell Klavin and Max Stuart came in just then. The two SBI agents looked very tired. I wondered if there were more agents coming to help them. The two men dragged out chairs and slumped in them, right across from us; between us lay the map.

“What can you tell us that we don’t already know?” Stuart said.

I was irritated that he didn’t even try to observe a common courtesy, but then I thought of poring over the dead boys’ biographies all night, and I excused the two agents. I wouldn’t have been inclined to offer meaningless courtesies, either.

“Probably nothing,” I said. “All I do is find bodies. I’m good at that, but I’m not a detective.”

“We can’t keep finding them like this.”

“That’s all of them, I think. That’s surely all the dead on that piece of property.”

“How do you know he hasn’t buried a few somewhere else?”

“I don’t. But there’s no cutoff date.”

They both leaned forward, eager for an explanation.

“There’s a wide spread of death dates,” I said. “There’s years’ worth of killing, at least six. And the McGraw boy’s only been dead three months. Unless the killer’s been active for a very long time, chances seem good that all his victims are there together. He may have an earlier burial ground. He’ll start a new one, for sure. But I’m thinking that one probably has all the past few years’ victims in it.” I shrugged. Just my opinion.

Stuart and Klavin exchanged glances.

“Oh, and all the ones that are there, they were all killed in the same place,” I said. “So it seems to me if that’s the favored killing spot, all the bodies are there.”