But that’s the law, Donovan thought, and it didn’t matter to the law whether your intended building project was just a new backyard septic tank or a project the size of this one—a thousand-acre super-regional mall and entertainment complex that would eventually include hotels, a water park, office condominiums, and a million and a half square feet of prime retail space predicted to attract “destination shoppers” from everywhere east of the Mississippi.

It doesn’t matter who you are either—whether you’re just a lowly Virginia homeowner with backed-up toilets or the guy who’s bankrolling this place—a man who, just five months from now, would probably become the next president of the United States. The law doesn’t care; no matter who you are or what you’re building, you’re going to stop everything until those graves are relocated, no matter how long it takes and no matter what it costs—and you’re going to pick up the check.

But that’s not why Donovan was there; the FBI wasn’t in the grave relocation business. There was something different about this graveyard. The construction workers here had found something else—something much more serious.

He approached the first grave and carefully placed one foot beside the opening, easing his 220-pound frame forward to make sure the edge would support his weight without crumbling. He leaned over the opening and peered down.

There, at the bottom, was the body of Nick Polchak.

Donovan cocked his head to the left to view the body right side up. Nick was dressed the way he always was, the only way Donovan had ever seen him—in baggy cargo shorts that always exaggerated the leanness of his long legs. He wore a collared short-sleeved shirt that looked as if he had selected it blindfolded from a rack at Goodwill— which he might very well have done. The shirt draped away from his body like a cape, and underneath it he wore a gray Penn State T-shirt; the top of the logo was just visible above his large hands, which were folded across his chest with the fingers interlocked, causing his knuckles to blanch like knots in a rope. His feet were shoved sockless into a pair of well-worn Nikes, and his legs were incongruously crossed at the ankles as if he were lounging on a beach chair instead of lying at the bottom of a grave.

Donovan looked at his face. There they were, as always—Nick’s enormous spectacles. Without those glasses Nick was legally blind, but with them he possessed extraordinary close-up vision, almost as if he had two microscopes straddling his nose—a valuable asset for a man who had spent his life studying the microscopic features of blowflies and maggots. After all these years the glasses had become a permanent fixture of his face; Donovan had sometimes wondered if he would even recognize Nick without them.