Quinones stared at me. “Can I ask how you arrived at those coordinates?”
“I began with the housing project where the three bodies were found,” I said. “It had been purchased by a real estate investor, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“And that purchase occurred in between the women going missing and the three bodies being found?”
“Why does that timing matter?” he asked.
“Before the sale, that land was on the border of two spaces,” I said, “public and private. Neither of them was fenced off. Do you know what the company was doing the day they found the bodies?”
“Grading the land, I think,” Quinones said.
“They were digging for a retaining wall,” I corrected him. “To block off water that naturally overflows from the Sestes River.”
Richie spoke up, his eyes on his phone where he took notes. “We looked at land with similar attributes, Detective. A floodplain. The edge of public and private land. And like the other parcel, up against the county line.”
“You have a theory?” Quinones asked.
Richie looked to me, and I nodded for him to keep going.
“Someone is burying bodies in naturally fertile areas,” he said, tapping at the map in front of me. “Areas that might have disputed jurisdiction.”
“Half this county is naturally fertile,” Quinones said, shaking his head.
“Not this much,” I said. “Here, a body could be buried in just thirty inches of hard dirt and still rot quickly.”
“And it’d be far enough down to not rise up,” Richie added.
I tapped at the map. “This area gets drained multiple times a year from the Sestes River. If someone buried a woman there, the land would have heavy growth on the topsoil in under ninety days. It would provide quick cover.”
Quinones pursed his lips and nodded, his eyes narrowing as if in thought.
“The bodies found last year,” I said. “They were thirty-six inches apart, correct? Buried in a straight line.”
“Yeah,” he said. “What’s that mean?”
“People familiar with planting patterns might naturally walk off that distance,” I said. “Statistically, twenty-four and thirty-six inches apart are the most common recommended distances for planting vegetables.”
“Vegetables.” He snorted. “Right. That sounds important.”
My affect was not so low that I didn’t notice the sarcasm. But did I care? Not at all.
“You get the shovels?” I asked.
“Three,” he said.
I gathered my things and placed the files and maps into my satchel. “Then let’s go.”
We piled into my SUV and headed fifteen minutes southeast. Quinones said little as I drove, and neither Richie nor I filled the silence.
As we traveled along a small state route, the Sestes River passedunder the road. We moved over a bridge and watched it flow back the other way. Along the roadside, someone had constructed a barnlike structure from shipping containers, cutting the sides off each one and piling them atop each other. Under the giant structure, I counted forty-three propane tanks.
The road turned, and islands of longleaf pine rose up. In the slivers of light that came through the trees, the river turned with the road and away from it. The water was a pea-green color, and Richie held my phone out, directing me. “There,” he said, pointing down an embankment off the state highway.
The trees pulled away from us, and I moved onto a gravel path that took us five hundred feet down an incline. As I glanced over, my phone directed us to the coordinates.
Nine hundred feet away.
