Nick and Alena had talked about it all the way back to her trailer just a few hours ago. Trygg had alerted on a scent blowing in from the lake, but the odor of ancient remains submerged beneath several feet of water would have been too faint for the dog to detect—the wind would have dispersed the weak scent too widely. But the dog did pick up the scent—that meant the odor was strong and the remains must be fresh, probably still in a putrefying state—and Nick had a feeling he knew who the remains belonged to. He needed to find that submerged body—but he had another body to check out first.

He went back to the grave and began to dig again. Even if he did find human remains here, he knew he couldn’t excavate the grave by himself— he needed Kegan’s help for that. But he couldn’t exactly ask for her help just on the hunch that they might be there—he needed to know first. He actually found himself wishing that he could tell Danny about all of this—that way he would have the full resources of the FBI at his disposal. He could excavate the entire graveyard and dredge the lake for the submerged body too. But how was he supposed to tell Danny? How could he explain how he just “happened” to find another lost graveyard without mentioning Alena? Gunner was right: Nick got Alena involved in all this, and now it was Nick’s responsibility to keep her out of it—even if it did make his work painfully slow.

Half an hour later the trowel hit something solid—but not with a plink as it did when it struck one of the endless fragments of stone. Nick scraped away the soil with his fingers until he saw the smooth ivory surface of bone. He needed to be certain this was not just some random fragment or the bone of a predator that had tried to dig down to the casketed remains. He carefully scraped away more dirt and found what appeared to be the iliac crest of a human pelvis staring back at him.

He continued to remove dirt from around the bone. He found shreds of fabric—a sure sign that the remains were fairly recent. He carefully pushed the pieces of fabric aside and dug deeper until his fingers felt something hard and smooth—the dislocated head of a humerus, perhaps. But when he tugged on it, the object gave way in his hands. He picked it up and looked at it; he blew on it and brushed the dirt away. It was spherical, just smaller than a golf ball, with a notch cut in one side. In the center of the notch was a kind of metal tongue. He pushed down on it with his thumb.

CLICK clack.