I made anXwith my shovel blade and moved to an area two feet from the rookie.
I began on one side of the hole, noting the bushy growth of grass in the area. Quinones started on the other, the two of us digging smaller holes around Richie. When we hit nothing, we adjusted course until we heard the same sound.
After fifteen minutes, we had dug a trench around a shape, two feet by six. I walked over to my SUV and opened the back. Grabbed a set of gloves, a sweatshirt, and a pocketknife from my bag.
Gloving up, I crouched near the hole. Using my sweatshirt as a broom, I swept the dirt aside, pulling it up and out of the hole. Then I dug with my hands. Slowly, more of a shape came into view. Little bits of dirt poured back over the edges into the hole, but I kept wiping them out and away while Quinones waited for the cloud of dust to pass.
When I was ready, I flipped open my knife and made a cut through a strip of dirty brown fabric at one end of the hole. Reaching inside with my hand, I felt more dirt, which I moved aside, my fingers finally locating something solid.
Quinones took a step back. The dust cloud cleared again, revealing what I’d already assumed from touch: a human skull.
“Son of a bitch,” the detective said.
I stared at it. “Rounded frontal bone,” I said. “Smooth supraorbital ridge. And a pointed jawline that slopes gently toward the ear. All of which makes this likely an adult female.”
Quinones was shaking his head and pacing. “I can get a tractor out here in an hour. Dig up this whole area.”
I handed the skull to Richie, who had gloved up, too.
“That’s unlikely to produce results,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Quinones said. “The other bodies were found in a line. Remember? Vegetables? Planting patterns?”
“There’s no space in that direction,” Richie said, pointing at the fence. “If you go the other way, the dirt gets too hard. This way, too soft and close to the river.”
Quinones looked frustrated.
“There are other areas we suspect may be relevant,” I clarified. “From your county map. But they’re larger and more difficult to survey. This was the small one. To test out our theory.”
“Other areas with bodies?” Quinones’s voice spiked.
I nodded, and my phone rang. “One second, Detective.”
I walked a few feet away. “Mr. DeLillo,” I answered my phone. “Thank you for returning my call. Your timing is perfect.”
Tristan DeLillo was a camera specialist who lived a half hour west of Jacksonville and had consulted with me on a previous case. Twelve years earlier, he’d been among the first to attach a camera to a drone. For some time, he shot commercials. But the business got crowded, and DeLillo moved on, connecting increasingly more advanced tech to his drones. I had texted him an hour ago.
“Are you still running airborne search teams?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he replied.
DeLillo’s team was contracted for various types of rural search, but the technology I wanted to use was different.
In recent years, scientists had discovered that as bodies decompose, they produce so many nutrients that the soil around them dramatically alters. The expression for the mass that is created as a victim rots is a cadaver decomposition island, or CDI. DeLillo’s drones, mounted with near-infrared sensors, or NIR, could detect human remains by searching for these islands.
“This job will require NIR and may take a few days to get funded,” I said. “Can you start sooner, before a formal purchase order comes through?”
“I thought you moved to Miami,” DeLillo said. “There’s fellas in your area that can—”
“I’m back up inyourarea,” I interrupted him. “In a town called Shilo.”
DeLillo was familiar with the city. He told me to send him detailed information about where his team would be searching and what type of cameras were required.
In addition to NIR, I intended to leverage traditional infraredimaging. These sensors could be calibrated to detect the chemical signature that extra nitrogen, released from the dead bodies, had on the growth of plants directly atop a body dump site. This was something that would be relevant with victims buried less than thirty-six inches from the surface and wrapped only in cloth. The plant life growing there would reflect infrared in a way that other plants in the area would not. A drone flying overhead could register the contrast between both areas.
By the time I hung up, Richie and Quinones had pulled more dirt away from the hole, revealing a full skeleton, wrapped loosely in strips of either linen or bamboo.
Bones go through their own decomposition process, which is called diagenesis and can last a year or two decades, depending on what part of the bone degrades first, the protein of the structure or the minerals. Temperature and the amount of water in the ground also play a role. We would need to study the bones carefully, looking for tiny cracks or flakes—areas where minerals from the soil had filled in miniscule voids in the bone structures and fossilized them.
