“She does this little skipping thing. Watch, she’ll do it again. See, she calls the dog over, and then she hands it some kind of treat. Now she’ll send it off again, and when she does—there! Did you see it? She sort of skips along beside the dog for a few steps—like those people at the dog shows do when they run around in circles with the dogs.”

“This isn’t a dog show,” Nick said.

“It is right now.” Kegan pointed to her feet; Nick looked under the table and saw a technician curled up taking a nap.

“What time did you guys get here?” Nick asked.

“Seven, seven thirty—she was already here.”

“She ran you off ?”

“After about thirty minutes. She said we were a ‘distracting scent.’”

“That’s what she told me yesterday.”

“I can understand it with you—me, I bathe.”

“Did you get a chance to look at anything?”

“I got a quick look at the first grave.”

“And?”

“The skeleton’s in pretty bad shape—somebody stomped all over it. The victim was a male, judging by the head of the femur and the coarseness of the eyebrow ridge. I couldn’t measure the skull—it was smashed flat—but I found the external occipital protuberance, the place where the neck muscles attach. It was large with heavy muscle markings— another male characteristic.”

“What about age?”

“The wisdom teeth are fully formed, so it’s definitely an adult. I found a piece of the cranial vault intact; the sutures are mostly fused but still clearly visible—that puts him in his thirties or forties. I’m not sure about his height yet—I’ll know more when I can pull the femur and put it on an osteometric board—but I took a quick measurement. I’d guess he was about six foot, maybe a little less—but that’s just a guess.”

“Race?”

“The nasal opening is narrow and there’s a horizontal dam at the base—plus the tops of the molars are smooth. Those are characteristics of a Caucasoid skull.”

“Any chance of getting an ID from the teeth?”

“It’s possible, but like I said, the skull was crushed flat. That means we’ve lost the tooth alignment and jaw structure. We’ve got the individual teeth, but it’ll take time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We’ll need an odontologist for that—and even then we might have a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Time. If this skeleton is as old as I think it is, there won’t be any dental records to match it with.”

“How old do you think it is?”