“Would it have mattered?”

“No—but I like to play hard to get.”

“Any trouble finding the place?”

“It’s hard to miss.”

“Have you had a look around yet?”

Nick motioned for Donovan to follow him; he led him around to the bottom of the ridge where the foot of each grave lay exposed like a row of open ovens. “It’s pretty obvious what happened,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“The builders were excavating this hillside—you can tell from the surveyor’s markers that this entire area is scheduled to be removed. They brought in a thirty-ton Komatsu excavator with a backhoe attached to the front.”

“How do you know that?”

Nick pointed over his shoulder, and Donovan turned and looked: Twenty yards behind them sat a thirty-ton Komatsu excavator with a backhoe attached to the front.

“Are you sure you’re an FBI agent?” Nick asked.

“Keep going.”

“The bucket of the backhoe looks about three feet wide. I figure the operator made about six passes through the hillside before he finally noticed something; by that time he had exposed the ends of these four graves. He probably figured there might be more, so he stopped.” Nick pointed to the openings and traced an imaginary line from left to right. “You can see that the caskets are buried at varying depths—that’s typical of an older graveyard. I’d say the average depth is about four or five feet.” He stepped up to the grave on the left and pried a crumbling splinter of wood from the edge of the hole. “The casket is almost completely decayed. It’s definitely old; a forensic anthropologist might be able to give us a date—possibly even an identification if they’re lucky enough to find any artifacts among the remains.”

He pointed to a thin layer of stones stacked across the top of the casket. “You find this sometimes in older graves,” Nick said. “The stones were put there to keep predators from digging their way in. It also keeps the ground from settling once the casket rots away.” Above the layer of rock was an inch or two of compacted soil, and above that was the open space where Nick had been lying.

“You can see that they started to excavate each of the graves. The workers probably figured, ‘Hey, they’ll have to be moved anyway—might as well get started.’ They got pretty far on the first one there—but the second grave was different. They stopped digging when they found this.”

Nick pointed to a foot-thick layer of soil that remained above the second casket. Long thin strips of grayish-white bone peeked out from beneath the dark soil.