KIRK BOISSEAU DRIVES a scarred Nissan Titan with kayak racks mounted over its bed and roof. His truck is parked in the side lot of Easterling’s Music Company, a family-owned music store that’s surely connected in spirit to Albert Norris’s long-vanished emporium. The owner, a man nearly my father’s age, is a gifted musician and a country philosopher in the mold of Will Rogers. His store sits right beside Carter Street, the busy main thoroughfare of Vidalia, Louisiana, and thus makes a convenient but unobtrusive place to pick up the bones Kirk found in the Jericho Hole.

When I pull my Audi to the far side of the Titan, I find Henry Sexton standing beside the truck’s passenger window, where Kirk’s girlfriend, Nancy something, is sitting. Henry’s Explorer must be parked behind the store. The reporter’s face is bright with excitement, but Nancy’s is lined with concern.

By the time I climb out of my car, Kirk has gotten out and come around to my side of the truck. The ex-marine’s face shines like that of a boy who just dug up a dinosaur bone. An inch taller than I, Kirk has a waist no bigger than a woman’s and the shoulders of a mountain gorilla, the result of good genes and kayaking miles every day on the Mississippi River.

“Where’s the fossil?” I ask.

He grins and reaches through the passenger window, down between Nancy’s legs, then brings up a foot-long object wrapped in wet newspaper. When he unwraps the soaked paper, I see a dark brown cylinder with a rounded head at one end. I’ve visited the burial sites of many murder victims, and in seconds my brain categorizes this artifact as the distal end of a femur.

“Human for sure?”

“It’s no chimpanzee,” Kirk says.

If the bone is in fact a human femur, then I’m looking at what must be the lower three-quarters of it. Below where the hip should be—the trochanter and other protuberances—the bone appears to have been crushed.

“The water mineralized this?” I ask.

“Obviously!” Henry Sexton exults, shivering with excitement. “Do you realize what this means?”

“Is this all you brought up?” I ask, trying to stay focused.

Kirk reaches into the truck and brings up more wet newspaper. “Three more in here. I think the whole skeleton is down in the Jericho Hole, but it’s got a car sitting on it.”

“What make of car?” Henry asks sharply.

Kirk purses his lips. “I’m not sure. I was focusing on the bones. It was a convertible, I know that.”

Henry’s eyes bug halfway out of his head. “Luther Davis drove a 1957 Pontiac Bonneville convertible!”

“Did it look like a Pontiac?” I ask.

Kirk snorts in derision. “It looked like a big hunk of rust lying upside down.”

“Were the bones just loose on the bottom?” asks Henry.