Free Dead Shall Speak (An FBI/Romance Thriller Book 10) by Morgan Kelley Page A

you could take a look. Those poor victims have been through enough.”
    Chris, while already calculating the ramifications, knew there was nothing he could do about it. Sometimes, you had to do anything to save as much evidence as possible.
    They’d worked with less before. This was a minor bump in the road.
    “I’ll get started,” he offered, handing Tony a pair of gloves. “Want to join me in the hole?” Chris asked.
    “I’ve missed this,” the anthropologist stated. Truly, he had. There was nothing like the easy familiarity of doing the same job you’d done for years. It was great to put his mind on autopilot, allowing himself to just be a Fed.
    As they climbed into the hole, Ethan noticed that Doctor Armstrong was keeping her distance. When he motioned to her, she didn't hesitate to head his way. It appeared that she was grateful to be away from the victims.
    “What happened?” he asked. “While they do their part, I need someone to debrief me on the situation.”
    She gave him the entire story, making sure to leave nothing out. “I didn't know I was about to move onto the next victim. We were careful with marking the graves before we began the tedious process of clearing them. Bones in the ground this long are more fragile due to the leaching of minerals. When I started working on the last skeleton, I found a hand.”
    Ethan had received the initial reports. “Was it attached?”
    “At first, I didn't know. Then when Tony had us start to pull back layer upon layer of dirt, we saw that it was a full skeleton, and it was intact.”
    Callen looked around the field. It was like a cemetery, just minus the headstones. “How deep were all the other victims buried?”
    Jaxon pulled out her tablet. “The deepest grave we found was four and a half feet down.” She flipped through her information. “The shallowest graves happen to be the new bodies, and we have them tagged at barely three feet deep.”
    That was interesting.
    It was possible that these victims were dumped and hastily covered over. This gave Ethan something to ponder. They had thirty plus year old graves, and now fresh ones. Was it the same killer coming back to finish it up, or a new one playing copycat?
    From the grave, Chris got their attention. “These aren’t bodies misplaced from the body farm. They didn't lose any of their ‘guests’.”
    Callen leaned over the edge to check out the victims. “I almost regret asking this, but what the hell is a guest on a body farm?” he asked. It sounded wrong and revolting all at once, like so many things he’d discovered in the FBI. “Or don’t I want to know?”
    Chris Leonard stood, brushing the dirt from his knees. “It’s where the anthro department gets donated cadavers, and they place them out in the field to rot. It’s a teaching situation, so they put them in abandoned cars, barrels, in the ground, hanging from trees, and other scenarios to study the effects of nature on death.”
    He looked appalled. “Wait, why?”
    “To learn.”
    There was so much to say to that. Callen stared down at the now uncovered bodies in horror. In his mind, he was picturing rotting corpses hanging from tree branches like macabre Christmas decorations.
    Yeah, that was damn disgusting. He was so glad that he was liaison and not someone who had to play in the dead full time.
    “That’s nasty. I knew you doctors were freaks.”
    “Anything for science,” Chris Leonard replied.
    To him, as a Native American, death was just as sacred as life. One didn't flaunt it, hang it from a tree, or mock the Great Spirit.
    It was just… wrong.
    Once you were gone from this world, you deserved to rest in peace until your spirit could cross over. Science or not, the premise of studying a corpse was revolting. Weren’t there enough bodies found every day that scientists could learn from the victims as they solved their crimes?
    “I can tell that they’re not donations,” Chris stated, holding up a little black box.