The Bone Yard (19 page)
Authors: Jefferson Bass
“Sir, no offense,” Angie persisted, “but how the hell are we supposed to search an area this big in that amount of time?”
“Swiftly and efficiently, I suppose.” He gave her a tight smile. “You’ve got technology for this, right? Didn’t FDLE spend a lot of taxpayer dollars on a ground-penetrating radar system? Isn’t this exactly what that technology’s designed for?” Angie opened her mouth, and I expected to hear the words
root finder
, but Riordan held up a cautionary hand, so she kept quiet and he went on. “Like the sheriff said, do whatever the hell you have to do, but get it done tomorrow. Good night. And good luck.” With that, he, too, left, though his departure was not as showy as the sheriff’s. It reminded me of an old saying, an insult I’d first heard as a kid: don’t go away mad; just go away. He just went away.
Stu looked from me to Angie. “So. What next?” Angie shook her head glumly; Stu frowned and chewed his cigar.
“I have an idea,” I said.
A
flurry of phone calls, explanations, and pleadings ensued over the next three hours. What we needed was hard to find, and when we needed it was almost instantly. The whirlwind of calls and arrangements occurred against a backdrop of logistical and vehicular chaos, because the ten trainees who’d helped with the search needed transportation back to the law enforcement academy in Quincy, and Stu’s vehicle needed to be ferried to the new scene from Pettis’s cabin. Eventually all the logistical and vehicular loose ends were tied up beneath the buggy glare of the work lights, but by the time we left the scene, it was going on eleven o’clock. Two junior FDLE agents remained behind, camped out in the cab of the crime-scene truck, sharing night-shift guard duty with Sheriff Judson’s unsociable deputy.
Following a dozen sets of tire tracks, Stu’s Jeep and Angie’s Suburban lurched and scraped down the unfamiliar dirt road. A half mile down, we found ourselves passing the makeshift cemetery of pipe crosses. It made macabre sense, I supposed, that the clandestine graves would be located in the same general area as the marked graves, but hidden farther—geographically farther and morally farther—from what had passed for civilization at the school. As our headlights illuminated them, the crosses cast long shadows that reeled and skittered as we jounced and angled past.
From the cemetery we easily made our way back to the burned-out ruins of the reform school, and then the blacktop road and the county highway. On our way back to the Twilight, we dashed into a lonely-looking Circle K to snag a late “dinner”—the Waffle Iron was long since closed, and even the convenience store was about to shut down when we showed up. In the gritty passenger seat of the Suburban, I dined on a bruised banana, a pack of stale peanut-butter crackers, and a pint of chocolate milk as we headed for the proverbial barn—the pestilential barn—that was the Twilight Motor Court. It was midnight by the time we turned off the blacktop and into the sandy parking lot. Ten minutes after midnight, I got out from under the dribbling shower, folded down the biohazard-laden bedspread, and crawled between the dingy sheets of the lumpy bed.
Tired as I was, I expected to close my eyes and find myself spiraling swiftly into sleep.
Instead, I found myself spiraling deep into memory, spinning thirty years back in time and fifteen hundred miles away. I found myself in South Dakota, seeking the long-lost graves of dead Indians.
V
ickery had asked me how I’d gotten into forensic cases, and the answer had been “South Dakota.” South Dakota was also where I’d first thought that if I wanted to move the earth—or at least a few long layers of it—a diesel engine and a wide steel blade might pinch-hit for a lever and a place to stand.
The engine and the blade were on an earthmoving machine—an aging LeTourneau “Tournapull”—and as it coughed and rumbled forward on the prairie, it carried my hopes and my potential ruin with it. A fraction of an inch at a time, the Tournapull’s angled blade eased down into the South Dakota soil and shaved off a layer, the way a carpenter’s plane shaves a sliver of pine off a plank. In this case, though, the sliver was eighty feet long, ten feet wide, and two hundred years deep.
I’d spent the prior year—the summer after earning my master’s degree in anthropology—leading a crew of students at this same archaeological site, an Arikara Indian village whose timber-and-sod huts had once housed hundreds of people. Inhabited between the early 1700s and the early 1800s, the village was now on the verge of being inundated by the rising waters of a new reservoir. Anything we hoped to learn about the village and its inhabitants would have to be learned fast—unless we wanted to call in scuba divers. The previous summer, the water level had been twenty feet below the site’s lowest areas; now waves were lapping at the very margins of the village.
We’d worked feverishly the prior season. Gridding the entire site into hundreds of five-foot squares, marked by stakes and string, we’d dug down by hand, inch by inch, through dozens of test squares. Over the course of the summer we’d managed to find and excavate thirteen graves—great progress, by most measures, but maddeningly slow in the face of the rising waters. It hadn’t been easy to convince the Smithsonian—the expedition’s sponsor—to let me trade my trowel for a road grader this season; they worried about the damage that heavy equipment could inflict on fragile old bones. I argued that even though the technique was experimental and seemingly risky, there was much to gain and virtually nothing to lose by bringing in earthmoving equipment. Saying no posed zero risk of damaging bones, but it also offered zero hope of recovering more than a relative handful of skeletons. In the end, I won an important but provisional victory: I could cut one eighty-foot trench with the grader, and if the technique proved successful at finding graves without damaging bones, I could forge ahead full speed.
But despite my confident arguments in Washington, D.C., I’d felt anxiety carving into me as the steel blade sliced into the soil. I was counting on the wind that swept across the Great Plains, unrelentingly but also consistently. Year after year, decade after decade, the wind carried powdery alluvial soil—the infamous dust of the dust bowl—across the Plains, sifting it down amid the grass stalks at the steady rate of one inch every ten years. So sixteen or eighteen inches down—in theory, at least—the Tournapull would uncover what had been the surface layer back to the early 1800s, when the village had been abandoned, fire-building and pot-breaking had moved elsewhere, and grave digging had ceased. We’d see the ground the Arikara had worked with hoes fashioned from bison scapulae. We’d find, I hoped, the circular graves they’d scooped out to bury warriors who’d fallen in battle, women who’d died in childbirth, children who’d succumbed to smallpox, the invisible new enemy unleashed by the whites.
The eighty-foot test cut lay alongside a row of squares we’d excavated a year before—squares that had contained many of the thirteen graves we’d found. I was gambling that this area was part of a larger burial ground, and that somewhere in the next eighty feet, the blade would intersect and reveal more graves.
As the machine crawled along, I checked the cut’s depth repeatedly with a wooden stake I’d cut to length. To play it safe, the machine would make multiple passes, each one shaving off another two inches of topsoil. The soil was grayish brown, almost as fine as flour or cocoa powder. As the blade bit deeper and deeper into the earth, the walls of the trench began to resemble a cutaway drawing from a soil-science textbook. Below the mat of roots, the soil was darker and denser, sprinkled with round pebbles and the occasional larger rock—the size of a fist or a grapefruit—that had once been a mighty boulder, before its encounter with the glacier. Whenever I saw one of the larger rocks, I worried that it might be a skull, that the grader just cut through a grave and a destroyed a skeleton. My relief upon seeing that no, it was just a rock, was mixed with disappointment: no, it was just a rock.
Pass by pass—two inches, four, six, eight, ten, twelve—my anxiety deepened along with the cut. Perhaps my bold experiment was a failure. Perhaps I’d laid out a swath that contained no graves at all . . . or perhaps graves galore dotted the ground on either side of my trench, their skeletal inhabitants grinning at my foolishness in picking exactly the wrong path. Or perhaps there were indeed graves in the grader’s path, but the blade somehow masked them in its passage.
Midway along the ninth pass of the eighty-foot cut, just as I started to despair, my eye caught a subtle difference in the surface of the exposed dirt.
There
: eighteen inches down, was a faint, familiar circle in the soil, three feet across, slightly darker in color and almost imperceptibly looser in texture than its surroundings—like a powdery version of a fresh asphalt patch plugging a big highway pothole. Could I be imagining it? I knelt to examine it, my heart racing. At the nearer edge of the rim—the edge first crossed by the steel blade—the soil within the circle had separated slightly from the soil outside the circle. The curved, quarter-inch gap marked a line where looser, disturbed dirt had been pulled away from the denser, undisturbed soil surrounding it. On the far side of the circle’s rim, the blade had shoved a corresponding handful of the loose dirt outside the margin of the circle, where it had tumbled onto the packed dirt in a miniature avalanche.
As I leaned closer, my eye caught a flash of color amid the drab soil. Taking my trowel from the back pocket of my pants, I flicked away crumbs of soil with the tool’s triangular tip, revealing a tiny sphere of cobalt blue, pierced by a cylindrical hole. The blade had uncovered a blue glass bead, the sort used as currency by the Indians and early white traders. The bead told me beyond a doubt that this circular disturbance in the prairie soil was the grave of an Arikara Indian, containing bones and a few possessions and trade goods for the afterlife.
Over the rumble and growl of the diesel engine, I heard a shout and looked up. Doug, one of the ten undergraduate students on my summer crew, was standing in the cut ten feet beyond me, pointing at the ground and waving his straw hat in excitement. I stood for a better look. By now the grader was nearing the end of the swath we’d marked with flags. Between where I stood and where the machine was slowing to an idle, the other nine summer students were dancing, pointing, and dropping to their knees in the dirt, clustering around another half-dozen faint circles, another half-dozen graves.
I raised my trowel high above my head and cut loose with what I imagined to be the battle cry of a triumphant Arikara warrior. The students stared at me, then, one by one and two by two, they joined in.
U
nlike whites, the Arikara tended to bury their dead in a folded position, either sitting up or lying on one side, tightly tucked in a fetal position. The reason was simple: two hundred years ago, the Indians had only the simplest of tools. To dig graves, they used crude hoes, which they made by lashing a buffalo scapula to a stick or to a buffalo femur. These Bone Age tools were wielded by women, for burying the dead was considered women’s work. Try burrowing down through prairie sod with a buffalo bone and you, too, would surely settle for a compact, shallow grave, just as the Arikara squaw who’d dug this grave had doubtless done.
Pulling rank, I claimed the first grave as my own private dig and began troweling into the soil. A few inches down, I came to a layer of crumbling wood, the remnants of the sticks and brush that had been put here two centuries before to deter scavenging by coyotes and rodents. Carefully I teased the wood fragments apart, setting them on a wire screen that would be used to sift everything that came from the ground.
The dirt was soft and the work went quickly—“summertime, and the diggin’ is easy,” I heard myself singing—and before long I felt the tip of the trowel contact something hard. Probing gently for the object’s boundaries, I found that it was large and round, and a few minutes later, I was looking at the top of a cranial vault, stained a dull grayish brown from two centuries in the prairie soil. I used the trowel to lift powdery triangles of soil from around the skull, and then switched to an artist’s brush to dust the skull itself.
The skull was that of a young adult male, large and robust, with a heavy brow ridge and prominent muscle markings. The left side of the skull had been crushed. By what, I wondered: a horse’s hoof? a cavalry soldier’s rifle butt? a Sioux war club? Reaching down, I touched the skull gently, tracing the edges of the gaping hole, brushing the intact bone surrounding it. As my fingers grazed the forehead, they encountered an unexpected roughness in what should have been smooth bone. Brushing away more dirt, I leaned down to inspect the forehead. In a crude arc from one side to the other, the forehead bore the jagged, ragged cut marks of a hasty scalping. A foe, probably a Sioux warrior, had sliced through the front of the scalp and then given the hair a hard yank, peeling the hair and skin backward, off the top of the head, and all the way down to the back of the neck. If the Sioux brave had survived the battle, he would have displayed the scalp triumphantly, boasting of his prowess, when it came time to count coup and tally the number of Arikara they’d killed.
In my mind’s eye, I pictured the triumphant Sioux warrior, and then, in my imagination, I
became
the triumphant Sioux warrior. And at that moment—when the boundary between past and present, between South Dakota and north Florida, between reality and magic, turned shimmery and elusive and impossible to pin down—sleep finally caught up with me.
Or so I assume, because the next thing I knew, my cell phone was warbling to tell me that it was 5:30
A.M.
, and the rattling, musty air conditioner was reminding me emphatically that I was in bungalow number three at the Twilight Motor Court. And the Twilight was neither dream nor vision.
D
ay was breaking—oozing up out of the steamy ground of the panhandle, more like it—as we approached the turnoff to the reform school. The eastern sky was turning a watery gray, and by that hint of light, I saw the hulking yellow shape beside the highway. “Looks like maybe somebody up there likes us,” I said. Pulling ahead of the gear-laden trailer, we led the way down the blacktop to the school.
Then, as we neared the faint turnoff of the dirt road that led past the cemetery and beyond, to the unmarked graves, I saw the strobing blue lights of a Miccosukee County sheriff’s car blocking the lane. “Somebody up there might like us,” muttered Vickery, “but somebody down here definitely doesn’t.”
Angie pulled alongside the cruiser, and Vickery got out to confer with the deputy. He returned a moment later, his cell phone at his ear. “There’s good news and bad news,” he reported as he snapped the phone closed.
“What’s the good news?” asked Angie.
“The good news is, Sheriff Judson is on his way out here.”
She made a face. “That’s the
good
news? What the hell is the bad news?”
“The bad news is, I might have to arrest him.”
“Ouch,” said Angie. “That could be ugly.”
“Maybe I won’t have to. Riordan’s on his way out here, too.”
The sheriff arrived first, parking his truck behind us with his strobes and his spotlights on us full force, as if we were suspects. He got out and approached the Suburban, his silhouette casting an immense shadow. Vickery drew a deep breath. “Showtime. Or show
down
, more like. Y’all mind coming with me for moral support? Or to witness my demise? You can tell people I died bravely.” Our doors opened in unison; they closed in unison.
“Morning, Sheriff,” said Vickery. The sheriff made no answer, so Vickery went on. “We’re anxious to get back to our crime-scene search, since you’d like us to complete it today. Any particular reason your deputy is blocking the access road?”
“Doesn’t look like you’re here to search a crime scene,” said the sheriff. He pointed at the flatbed trailer and the massive machine it carried. “Looks like you’re here to build a damn highway.”
Just then the silver Lexus arrived, and Riordan joined our conclave. He wasted no time with pleasantries. “What’s the problem, Sheriff?”
“Problem is, I say you can have a day to dig up a few old bones, and you-all want to come in here and start cutting roads. That’s not the deal we had.”
“We’re not cutting roads, Sheriff.”
“Then why you bringing in the goddamn road-cutting machinery?”
Riordan turned to me. “Dr. Brockton, would you explain why we need the equipment?”
“Of course. Sheriff, the problem is, we’ve got an area half the size of a football field to search for more graves. We could probe and excavate the whole area by hand, but that would take days, maybe even weeks. Using this road scraper, we can peel back the vegetation and the top layer of soil, so we can see areas underneath where the ground’s been disturbed. When we find those, we know where to check for more bones.”
The sheriff stared at me, then at Riordan. Finally he shook his head. “No.”
Riordan tilted his head slightly. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean
hell
no. This is my county. I am the law here. Nobody can fire me but the governor, and I have the authority to limit the scope of this crime-scene search. You can bring in all the shovels and fancy-ass PhDs, you want. For the next twelve hours. But get that damn machine out of here.”
Riordan didn’t speak for a while; finally he shook his head and, just as the sheriff had done, said, “No.” He gave another, smaller shake—wistfully, I thought, regretting the clash of wills—then went on. “Sheriff, I’ve opened an investigation into these deaths—I have some authority, too—and I’ve got a warrant authorizing us to locate and excavate any graves on that piece of land, using whatever tools and equipment we deem necessary. I can’t fire you, but I can arrest you, and if that road isn’t open in sixty seconds, you and your deputy will both be charged with obstruction of justice.” He studied the cruiser that was blocking the way. “I think it’ll be interesting to see what a road grader does to that car when it pushes it into the trees. Not what the machine was designed for, but I suspect it’ll do the job.”
Two minutes later, Riordan was ordering the scraper’s operator to unload his machine and clear the road. I wasn’t sure the nervous-looking equipment operator would actually follow that order, if the prosecutor’s push came to the sheriff’s shove. Luckily—and surprisingly—the sheriff backed down. The Miccosukee County deputy killed his strobes and crept down the dirt road toward the Bone Yard. Our motley convoy followed: the Avalanche of the pissed-off sheriff, the Lexus of the prosecutor, our Suburban, and, bringing up the rear, the goosenecked lowboy trailer hauling the mammoth machine that I hoped would reveal how many graves—how many dead boys—were hidden in the Bone Yard.
If we’d had more time, the sheriff’s mistaken idea—that we’d brought the equipment to cut a road to the site—would have been worth carrying out. The tractor trailer had no trouble negotiating the mile of cracked and weedy blacktop that led to the ruins of the burned school. But progress slowed to a snail’s pace after that, when the blacktop gave way to dirt and the dirt to ruts through the woods. The low trailer bottomed out more than once on the uneven surface, and as it crept around bends in the road, scores of saplings bent, tore, and snapped. The mile to the school had taken less than five minutes; the first half mile toward the Bone Yard seemed to take forever. It took nearly an hour to reach the halfway mark—the clearing with the eleven graves marked by metal crosses—and when he learned that the roughest stretch was yet to come, the driver parked the trailer and unloaded the scraper, and the machine lumbered the last half mile under its own steam.
By the time the machine was in position it was nearly 9
A.M.
, and the rumble of the idling diesel sounded more and more like the ticking of a clock. I’d stuck survey flags in the ground to mark the initial path I wanted it to follow, and Angie had sent the remaining techs scurrying ahead with metal detectors. Their search yielded a small midden of objects, but as evidence, the only crime they seemed to point to was redneck littering: beer cans, bottle caps, Vienna sausage tins. As soon as Angie gave me the all-clear signal, I walked toward the scraper and beckoned it forward. With a roar and a billowing cloud of diesel smoke, my Florida earthmoving experiment began.
The machine I’d used in South Dakota had been called a Tournapull, a clever word that managed to combine the name of the inventor, R. G. LeTourneau, with the suggestion that the scraper—a two-wheeled blade-and-hopper assembly towed by a tractor—was highly maneuverable. Its latter-day Florida counterpart, manufactured by Caterpillar, was
not
a Tournapull; the operator had indignantly informed me that it was an “open-bowl scraper.” To me, that didn’t sound like a macho earthmoving machine; to me, “open-bowl scraper” sounded like the rubber spatula my mother had used when she was frosting chocolate cakes. But I didn’t give a fig what the machine was called, so long as it worked.
Behind the blade of the behemoth was a vast, bellylike hopper, slung so low it nearly dragged the ground. The dirt removed by the blade would be collected continuously in the hopper, which would need to be emptied regularly. As I gave hand signals to guide the operator, the scraper eased forward and the blade eased down, a fraction of an inch at a time. When the depth of the cut reached two inches, I signaled the operator and he locked the blade in position. The machine crept across the ground, ripping up ferns, leaves, sticks, scrub growth, vines, and shallow roots. Just as I’d done a quarter century before in the South Dakota prairie, I walked behind the scraper, this time in a Florida live-oak forest.
The first pass was the slowest, the gnarliest, the most debris-laden. As the machine bulled and tore a path beneath the spreading canopy, a windrow of limbs and shredded brush piled up alongside the cut. When he reached the end of the hundred feet we’d marked off, the operator circled back and shoved the debris farther to the side, to give the machine and us a bit of breathing room and make it easier to monitor the depth of the cut.
The second pass—which bit down another two inches, as would each successive pass—proceeded more smoothly, with less ripping and grumbling. The machine chewed forward and downward, a ponderous, insatiable beast, feeding upon the very earth itself.
By the third pass, the hopper was filling, the topsoil was giving way to clay, and I was giving in to serious worries. What if the technique that had worked so well in South Dakota couldn’t simply be transplanted to Florida? What if I’d unintentionally sold everyone a bill of goods? If we failed to find more graves, there would surely be hell to pay. The bill wouldn’t come to me, of course—I could simply tuck my tail between my legs and slink back to the safety of Tennessee—but Sheriff Judson would doubtless find a way to wreak vengeance on Vickery, possibly on Riordan, and perhaps even on Angie as well: the three people who embodied the invasion of his county and the challenge to his authority.
There was another possibility, of course. It was possible that no matter what techniques or technologies we harnessed, no matter how much time we invested, we’d never find anything more, because perhaps there were no more graves to be found. Perhaps the dog had already done a thorough job. And shouldn’t I be hoping for that, after all: hoping that only three boys were buried here, no more? And yet, though I felt a tingle of shame, I scanned the ground avidly for signs of another burial.
A
t the end of the third cut, instead of making a U-turn and starting a fourth pass, the operator raised the blade and made for a briar patch at the far end of the site, where we’d decided we’d dump the dirt. There was a slight chance, of course, that we were dumping dirt atop a dozen undiscovered graves, but that was a chance we’d have to take; the dirt had to go
somewhere
, and putting it at the farthest edge of the site seemed a reasonable gamble. When he reached the briar patch, the operator opened a pair of large doors in the machine’s belly—like bomb-bay doors in a B-52—and dropped the load. Then he looped back and resumed where he’d left off.
I was waiting for him. Anxiously waiting. He lowered the blade again, farther, bringing the cut to eight inches, a depth I confirmed by measuring the wall of the trench. As another layer peeled from the ground, the coolness of the underlying earth caused the moisture in the air to condense, giving the clay a moist sheen in the glinting light.
Barely twenty yards after the grader had resumed its course, the blade snagged and yanked at the remnants of a root that had pushed its way down into the clay. But then, as the machine tore the root from the ground, I realized that the soil clinging to the root wasn’t pure clay; the clay was mixed with darker, looser topsoil. That same mixture, I saw with mounting excitement, extended well beyond the spot where the root had burrowed in. As I drew close and leaned down, I found myself peering down on an oval patch of disturbed soil, roughly two feet by four feet, Roughly the same dimensions as hundreds of Arikara Indian graves I’d excavated so many years ago in South Dakota. Silently, so as not to raise doubts about my sanity, I raised a triumphant war whoop.
Late in the morning, a Winnebago-like RV lumbered and scraped its way into the site—a mobile command post, Angie informed me. I wondered what Sheriff Judson thought about this latest development. Actually, I had a pretty good idea what the sheriff thought about it, since he chose to boycott the scene. What I didn’t know was what cajoling or threatening Riordan had done to get the command post onto the site.
Shortly after noon, a siren whooped from the direction of the command post, followed by a loudspeaker announcement that lunch was available in the tent.
Tent? What tent?
Then I noticed that at some point since the command post’s arrival, a big canvas canopy had been raised beside it, and underneath the canvas were tables loaded with food and drink.
I hadn’t realized I was hungry, but I ate ravenously—two smoked-turkey wraps, three bags of potato chips (which helped replenish all the salt I’d sweated out), and half a dozen peanut-butter cookies, washed down with a quart of milk. I consumed all that food, inhaled all that food, in the space of ten minutes, then went out to put teams of forensic techs to work excavating the first three graves.
Angie, as the ranking forensic analyst at the site, was serving as the crime-scene coordinator, but she had delegated the excavations to me, asking me to supervise the teams that would recover the bones from each grave. I assigned three people to each grave: one person to wield the trowel; one to photograph each bone as it was recovered; and one to list, label, and bag the evidence. Fortunately, three of the forensic techs had received basic osteology training—Rodriguez; Raynelle, a pale young brunette who drawled her words as if she’d grown up in Miss’sippi but who pierced her ears and nostrils as if she’d toured with a heavy-metal band; and Thad, an African-American man who said little but seemed to notice everything. The supplies on the FDLE crime-scene truck included Tyvek sheets for collecting hair and fiber evidence, and I spread one beside each of the graves. “As you recover the bones, lay them out in anatomical order, as best you can,” I said. “I’ll check in periodically and answer whatever questions you’ve got.”
A
ngie was quick with a tape measure and good with a sketch pad, I’d noticed at the cemetery. But now, confronted by a search scene that was half the size of a football field, she’d gone higher tech. From a nylon bag and a hard-shelled case aboard the crime-scene truck, she unpacked a sturdy aluminum tripod and a black instrument that appeared to be a pint-sized mailbox, with a small LCD screen in one end and what looked like a rifle scope on top. The scope was a laser, and the rig was a laser mapping system, a twenty-first-century version of a surveyor’s transit, capable of measuring and charting distances and positions with pinpoint precision. Angie set the tripod at the center of the site, in the small patch of unscraped ground that lay between the graves Jasper had uncovered, and screwed the mapping system to the top. Once she’d powered up the system, she sent Whitney scurrying across the site with the prism, a collapsible measuring rod fitted with optical reflectors at one end. As Whitney paused briefly at various landmarks—the three graves within spitting distance, the live oaks that marked the site’s borders, the additional grave uncovered by the scraper—Angie pressed buttons on a keypad, saving the coordinates of each point. Later, the system’s software could be used to create a 3-D map of the entire site, including the overall layout, the locations of the graves, even the location and depth of bones or other pieces of evidence as the graves were excavated. The laser system took more time to unpack than a tape measure and a sketch pad, but once it was up and running, the two women worked as a fast, efficient team: Whitney moved efficiently from spot to spot, holding the prism within the laser’s line of sight and radioing details to Angie—“grave two”; “skull”; “pelvis”; “left hand bones”; “thoracic vertebrae”; and so on. Angie deftly swiveled the laser to track the prism, pressed buttons to capture data points, and added labels from a drop-down menu on the computer screen.
