Free Scavengers by Steven F. Havill Page B

got here, she took a bunch of pictures, and then I dug down as carefully as I could, at one corner. You know, maybe somebody just buried a bunch of garbage or something. Or maybe it was nothing at all. I took about five little bites with the shovel, and uncovered the tip of one of his shoes. With my fingers, I dug down just far enough to determine that there was a foot inside the shoe, and stopped.”
    The phone in Estelle’s pocket chirped, and she fished it out. The conversation was brief and one-sided. She snapped the phone closed. “They just turned on the service road down in Maria,” she said. “That’s what…almost eleven miles? So we’ve got about twenty minutes if they’re really hustling.” She turned in place, head down. With the toe of her boot, she loosened a small mound of sand and watched the wind rearrange it. “Any tracks have been obliterated long since,” she said. “And that’s too bad, because we’ve got some questions here.” Without moving, she turned and looked at the grave. “Forty-five feet, nine inches from here to the grave,” she said, tapping the vertical steel of the tower. “And how far in the opposite direction to the shovel?”
    “It’s sixty-one feet from the tower’s northwest leg.”
    “And so we’ve got more than a hundred feet between the grave and the shovel that dug it…if we want to make the logical assumption that the two are related.”
    “That’s a far toss,” Linda Real said. “But it doesn’t make sense that they’d throw the thing in the first place.”
    “No, it doesn’t. Did you check it for blood or anything like that?” Estelle asked Jackie.
    “Not yet. I haven’t touched it. Linda took pictures of it in place, and I flagged the bush. I didn’t touch the shovel. There were no tracks in the immediate area, nothing but the shovel. And the way it’s caught in the bush, it sure
looks
like it was thrown.”
    “But from where?” Estelle said. “No one’s going to dig a grave way over here, and then when they’re finished, wind up and hurl the shovel about a hundred feet west, assuming that they’d miss the framework of the towers. And assuming that they could throw it that far in the first place.” She thrust her hands in her pockets. “Why throw it at all?”
    “I wonder how many more of these little surprises we’ve got out here,” Tom Pasquale said. He grinned at Jackie Taber. “You see any more patterns, Picasso?”
    “No,” Jackie replied without a trace of humor. “Except I’ll be willing to bet that when we move Juan here, we won’t find any ID. That’s a pattern. And whatever weapon took off the back of John Doe’s head over by the MacInernys’ could sure enough have punched that big hole through this young man’s chest. That’s a pattern.”
    “The answer’s with the shovel,” Estelle said more to herself than anyone else. She ducked her head against the wind, hunched her shoulders, and walked across the rough prairie toward the creosote bush in whose angular, spiky limbs the tool had lodged.
    She walked around the bush, turned her back to the wind, and knelt, hands on her thighs. “TemperRite,” she said, reading the remains of the label on the handle. The tiny rectangular price tag was worn smooth, the printing nothing but a faint trace.
    Jackie Taber knelt beside her. “The finish on the handle is smooth enough that we’re going to get some prints if we’re lucky,” Estelle said. “And we’ve got a price tag that might give us a point of purchase.” She rested her hands on the ground and leaned close. The shovel was turned slightly, and she could see the back of the blade, where the steel formed a deep groove to the handle socket.
    “And there we have it,” she whispered. Against the earth-polished steel, the dark russet of dried blood might as well have been glow-in-the-dark paint. Caught in the folded steel, near the junction of metal blade and wooden handle, were several hairs. She leaned back