“Hell, no. The river would have scoured any loose bones out long ago. The only reason I found these is because they were in the car. The femur was fastened to the steering column with barbed wire. I had to dig my hand up from under to reach it.”

“Oh, man,” Henry breathes. “Oh, shit. After all this time.”

“Check this out,” says Kirk, his eyes flashing. From the new bundle of paper he brings out another brown piece of bone. This one is long and thin, with a rusted piece of barbed wire still embedded in it.

A rush of adrenaline flushes through me.

“Jesus Lord,” Henry breathes. “Morehouse was telling the truth. That’s Luther Davis.”

“Maybe,” I say with caution born from experience. “Boys, we are in dire need of expert help.”

Henry gazes reverently at the find as though at a perfect new specimen of Australopithecus. “Were there enough bones under that car to be two people?”

“You’ll have to move it to find out. But you guys haven’t seen the showstopper yet.” He removes what looks like a fossilized vertebra from the newspaper. “This was buried under a couple of inches of mud. Looks like part of a backbone to me.”

“What’s special about it?” Henry asks.

Kirk rolls the bone over in his fingers and points to a small, dark protrusion with his other hand. “See this?”

Henry squints at the bone like an orthopedic intern. What is it?”

“A bullet.”

The reporter’s hand flies to his mouth.

“Can you tell what caliber it is?” I ask.

“No, but it’s small.”

“Nine millimeter?”

Kirk scrapes the encrusted projectile with a fingernail. “Closer to seven, I’d say. Hard to tell with the mineralization. But the owner of this vertebra was definitely shot in the spine.”

While Henry looks stricken, Kirk says, “You want me to go back down there and try to bring up some more? With that landowner on the lookout, I’d have to make a night dive.”

“No!” his girlfriend snaps from the passenger window. “You heard Penn. It’s time to bring in the law.”

“I didn’t say that exactly,” I point out. “But we probably don’t have any choice.”

Henry appears torn. “I don’t like the idea of turning this over to Sheriff Walker Dennis.”

“I know, but this parish is his jurisdiction, first and foremost. We ought to give Walker a shot at doing the right thing.”

“Even if Sheriff Dennis is honest, I worry about leaks in his department. He’s got some deputies with family connections I don’t like. I know an expert down at LSU that even the FBI consults in murder cases. They call her the Bone Lady. Nobody in the world could tell us more about these bones than she could, and we wouldn’t have to show the sheriff anything until we were sure.”