Trey was being extremely professional. She saw the reason why when Nate Rawlings stepped around the corner of the house with Sam and two more deputies. She recognized the older one. Martha Cooper was the first female hired by the Adams County Sheriff’s Department and had to be getting close to retirement age. Emma didn’t recognize the freckle-faced redhead holding a metal detector. “Good morning, Martha,” she said and nodded. “Sheriff.”
“Morning.” He nodded toward the deputy with red hair. “I don’t think you’ve met Chris Wilson. He’s from Vicksburg and is our unofficial photographer-slash-deputy.”
She exchanged nods with the young deputy and then turned back to the sheriff. “Have you discovered anything?”
“Nothing new, just the hole by the backhoe. Do you know why anyone would be digging around the slave cemetery?”
That had puzzled her last night. “No. Any type of excavation here at Mount Locust is strictly forbidden.”
“That’s what I thought,” Nate said. “I’d like you to take me through what happened again, this time showing me your movements.”
His request wasn’t unexpected, and Emma had been rehearsing the events in her mind. While the sheriff opened the recorder app on his smartphone, she glanced at Sam, and the memory of his arms wrapping around her last night rocked her heart. Why was she torturing herself this way? Shuttering her thoughts, Emma focused on Nate and took him through her actions, ending with jumping off the porch.
“Then I crawled to the woods there,” she said, and walked the path she’d taken. Scuffled leaves helped retrace her steps as the men followed.
“This is where I hid,” she said when they reached the live oak with limbs that dipped down to the ground. A curtain of moss swayed in the light northerly breeze.
“He wasn’t trying to be quiet,” she said, remembering the heavy footsteps. “He fired at me again, and there should be a bullet in one of these trees. Then I heard the sirens. That’s when he took off.”
“Do you think it could have been more than one person?”
She thought a minute. “There was really no way I could tell.”
The sheriff shut off the recorder and motioned to Chris, who was holding the metal detector. “Let’s see if we can find that bullet.”
He raised it, sweeping up and down the nearby tree trunks. When it went from silent to full sound midway up the trunk of a basswood tree, he stopped. “Should be here.”
After a brief search, Sam found the bullet embedded a good eighteen inches higher than Emma’s five-foot-three height.
“Either your shooter was a bad shot or he didn’t mean to hit you,” Sam said. “This is twice he fired over your head.”
“So he was just trying to scare me?” If so, he’d done a good job.
“Or scare you off.” Nate ran his hand over his short hair. “Get a trajectory on the bullet,” he said to Martha.
“Trey’s still using the laser kit,” she replied.
“Budget cuts.” The sheriff spat the words out. “Don’t see how the county expects us to do our job without the proper tools.” He turned to Sam. “Don’t suppose you have one?”
Sam shook his head. “We have the same problem. I don’t even have one trajectory kit.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Might as well see what Trey’s found. Tie a ribbon around the tree, and then see if you can find any cartridges with the metal detector.”
Martha and Chris stayed behind while Emma, Sam, and Nate trekked back to the inn, where Trey was finishing up his work. Her gaze followed the white line that stretched from the post to a tree two hundred feet away.
“You find where he stood when he fired the shot?” the sheriff asked Trey.
“Yep, and according to the laser and this cord, he was about my height.” Trey jerked his head toward the bare white oak tree where he’d attached the string. “There’s a marker on the ground where the leaves are disturbed. The cord hits me about shoulder high when I stand by the marker.”
“Good work.”
He held out a piece of metal. “Got this out of the post. Looks like a .22 long rifle.”
“Does that mean he used a rifle?” she asked.
For the first time, Trey’s eyes met hers, his expression going from unreadable to concerned.
“Not necessarily. There are semi-automatic pistols that fire .22 longs, but I’d say this time a rifle was used.” Trey rolled his shoulders and turned to the sheriff. “If you don’t need me, I’m heading back to the jail.”
“Good work, Trey, but I need the trajectory for another bullet before you leave.” The sheriff pointed in the direction they’d just come from. “The bullet is in a tree east of the live oak. It has a ribbon around it.”
Trey glanced at Emma, his brown eyes soft. “I’m glad he didn’t hit you,” he said.
“Thanks. Me too.” She hugged her arms to her waist. Trey could be caring, and he wasn’t really a bad guy, but she just didn’t see a future for them.
His eyes narrowed. “We’ll catch whoever did it, I promise you that.”
Sometimes Trey even surprised her. As he walked toward the live oak, Emma caught sight of a man approaching them. “I think this is my GPR operator,” she said. If it was, he was early.
Nate turned toward the man. “Good. I’d like him to run the machine over the pit. See if he can tell if anything is buried there.”
She met the older man at the front steps of the inn. “Randy Gibson?”
“That’d be me,” the lanky Gibson replied.
“I’m glad you didn’t get my message about waiting until later,” she said.
“I did, but I was already on my way. What’s going on?”
Emma explained the situation. “Before we get started on my project, the sheriff wants you to explore the site where the intruder was digging when I interrupted him.”
“I can do that. I assume my machine arrived.”
“Yes. It’s chained to a steel post at the tractor shed over there.”
She pointed him in the right direction and then handed him the key to the lock. While he went after the machine, Emma joined the sheriff and Sam at the backhoe, where Chris was photographing the hole the intruder had dug. It was about a hundred feet from the only marker in the cemetery, but not near any of the flags that marked the slave graves. Turning, she took in the split-rail fence that had been knocked down to get the machine in place.
“What do you suppose the intruder was digging for?” she asked.
“Good question,” Nate said.
Emma looked around. “Did the metal detector alert to anything?”
“A couple of bottle caps,” Sam replied. “Probably your teenagers drinking beer.”
Once boards were placed over the pit, Randy started the GPR machine, which resembled an oversized lawnmower with a screen attached to the handle. He slowly worked his way across the site and repeated the action two more times. “Do you have a plot diagram of the cemetery?”
She had grabbed the folder for the project earlier and leafed through it. “Here,” she said, handing him a map from the archeological project. “This is from the University of Southern Mississippi research project in 2000. The flags you see correspond to the graves they recorded.”
Ground penetrating radar hadn’t been available to the students who conducted the cemetery survey. Instead, steel probes had been used to identify the randomly scattered graves. Randy ran the machine over the grave nearest them, then returned to the pit and repeated the process.
“Definitely something here.” Randy turned the paper so that the arrow pointing north lined up. After studying it, he checked his screen. “According to this paper, there shouldn’t be anything buried here, but take a look at this.”
Sam and Emma and Nate crowded next to him. “What do you have?” Sam asked.
“Let me bring up both screens,” Randy said. “The bottom screen shows the burial plot from over there,” he said, pointing about fifty feet away. “The top screen is wher
e the pit is—let’s call it Section A. See these? They’re called anomalies.” He pointed out rounded lines on the screen. “This is the known grave. Compare it to Section A.”
“It looks the same,” Emma said.
“Yes, but look at the difference in depth,” he replied. “According to the screen, whatever is in Section A is only buried a little over four feet deep. That’s much shallower than the six feet for the older grave.”
Emma examined the squiggly lines on the screens. A chill chased over her. What if someone had recently buried a body? And what if they had returned last night to move it? She tried to think if anyone had gone missing recently.
Ryan.
No. It’d been ten years, and she refused to believe her brother was dead. She looked up. “Maybe it’s from the Civil War time and a landowner buried their gold or silver here.”
“Not impossible,” Randy said. “But wouldn’t it have been found in 2000?”
9
Can you tell how long ago the ground was disturbed?” Sam asked, staring at the screen on the GPR machine. He’d like to believe gold or silver was buried in the pit, but he had a bad feeling about the site.
“I’d say there were a lot of years between the slave graves and this one.”
“Can you tell if there’s a body in it?” Nate asked.
“Afraid not, but the disturbance matches the size of the graves,” he said. “It’ll take excavating to know for sure what’s down there.”
“Something we’ll start this afternoon,” Nate said.
Randy nodded. “I have an appointment in Jackson later this afternoon, but you have the equipment assigned to you for a week.” He turned to Emma. “Would you like me to show you how to operate it?”
“That would be great,” Emma said. “But how will we know when we reach the bottom?”
“You’ll have to keep checking the screen. When you reach compacted ground, it will look like this.” He pointed to the fairly straight lines below the pit.
Sam listened in as Randy explained how to operate the GPR machine. When he finished, Randy handed Emma a sheet of paper. “These are step-by-step instructions if you forget, but if you need to, give me a call,” he said.
“Thanks.” Emma studied the sheet of paper as Randy walked away.
Nate turned to Sam. “Do you think we need to get a court order since this is National Park Service property?”
Sam rubbed the back of his neck. The only other time he’d had to excavate on park service land was when a dog had dug up a human bone, making a court order unnecessary. But this wasn’t as cut and dried. “What do you think?” he asked, glancing at Emma.
She looked up from the instruction sheet. “Since someone hot-wired the backhoe and excavated this area, I believe my superintendent will view it as a crime scene and give the go-ahead. Nate, do you want to check? Or do you want me to do it?”
“Since it’s your site and your supervisor, why don’t you,” he said.
While Emma walked a short distance away until she was out of the trees and made the phone call, Sam brought up the flowers again.
“And she doesn’t have a clue who they’re from?” Nate asked.
Sam shook his head. “There’re no security cameras unless a neighbor has one, and even then, I doubt it’d capture anything at the apartment building.”
“Flowers. And a message with no name.” Nate rubbed his jaw. “My suspicious nature makes me think the shooting could be connected to her receiving flowers—the shooter pointing out that she can’t hide from him?”
A real possibility. “That makes sense.”
“I heard you talking to Trey about it. If he’d sent the flowers, he would’ve wanted credit.” The sheriff checked his watch. “I’m leaving for the jail shortly. I’ll follow up with him on this.”
Sam looked up as Emma came closer. “The superintendent agreed that it sounded like there was enough evidence to warrant a thorough investigation without a court order,” she said.
Nate blew out a breath. “Good. I hate getting court orders. Especially with Judge Tate out of town. The only other judge available gives me a hard time.”
“Getting a court order would have been easy compared to going through a 106 compliance review,” she said. “Believe me, you don’t want to do that.”
From Nate’s mystified expression, Emma had lost him at the 106 compliance review part. “This is a historic site and that means you would be dealing with the historical society,” Sam said. “There would be paperwork involved and a committee who would rule on whether you could dig here.”
“Then I’m doubly blessed,” Nate replied. “As soon as we can get someone to operate the backhoe, we’ll get started.”
Emma cleared her throat. “Um, the superintendent also suggested I should be part of the excavation. She wants me to sift for artifacts in every scoop of dirt shoveled out of the ground.”
Nate crossed his arms over his broad chest. “I’m assuming we can pile the dirt up and don’t have to wait for you to sift it, right?”
“That’ll work,” Emma replied. “We’ll only want to use the backhoe for probably another twelve inches, then we’ll use shovels and finally trowels and a brush.”
Sam bit back a smile at the excitement in Emma’s voice. She was itching to take part in discovering what was buried, and it was hard not to catch her enthusiasm. Hopefully she wouldn’t find a body.
Sam checked his watch. Eleven fifteen. Part of him was relieved that it was time to leave for Port Gibson and the noon meeting with his Ridgeland counterpart. He was getting a little too comfortable being around Emma. It surprised him when another part of him wished he could cancel the meeting and stay on at Mount Locust. Not good.
“See you later,” he said and double-timed it to his SUV, leaving Emma as she surveyed the rest of the cemetery with the GPR machine. He gunned the vehicle out of the parking lot and turned left on the Trace while he calculated the twenty-five miles to Port Gibson against the fifty-mile-an-hour speed limit. Barely enough time, but he set the cruise control on fifty.
Sam made it with minutes to spare, and the meeting with District Ranger Evan McCall went well. Their districts overlapped up around Jackson, and McCall had wanted a face-to-face to work out a schedule for patrolling the area. With Brooke Danvers still at the trial in Jackson and then off tomorrow, Sam was short-staffed, and McCall agreed to take on the bulk of patrolling over the weekend.
When he arrived back at Mount Locust, it was nearly three thirty. The pile of loamy soil deposited beside the hole had grown and the backhoe had been moved a few yards from the site. Someone had erected a tent over the pit, where two NPS maintenance men were shoveling dirt out. A familiar scent tickled his nose. Sassafras. There were several of the trees nearby, and they must have cut into a root. Emma had shed her jacket in the sixty-degree weather and leaned over a contraption made from PVC pipe.
With her unaware of his presence, he took the opportunity to observe her. Her petite frame filled out the ranger uniform very nicely. She’d put her coppery curls up in a ponytail and looked like a teenager. Unexpectedly she looked up and caught him admiring her.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the PVC pipe.
She straightened up, stretching her back. “It’s a shaker screen for sifting dirt. I invested in it after I took archeology classes and had to lug a wooden one to the different sites. Plus, it’s perfect for my height—I don’t have to bend over as far. Still backbreaking, though.” Emma turned to the men. “Hold up a second and let me check the depth.”
She stuck a yardstick in the hole. The depth was thirty-two inches, and she nodded to them. “Let’s get the next six inches, and after that you’re free to leave. I’ll excavate the rest.”
“I don’t remember you taking archeology,” Sam said.
Her face flushed, and he didn’t think it was from the heat. “My last year. Took a forensic one, as well.”
Sam was impressed. He nodded at the mound of dirt
. “You’ve been busy, but sifting it will take forever.”
“Can’t be helped.”
He nodded that he understood. “Is Nate back?”
“Yes, but I think he walked over to the inn, or maybe the visitor center.”
It would be dark in another two hours, and at the rate Emma was sifting, she would barely make a dent in the pile. Besides that, the investigation was in his backyard, and he needed to be a part of it. “How about if I help?”
“In those clothes?” She eyed him. “I know you said you wanted to help, but neither of us considered how dirty you would get. You’d never get the stains out or your shoes clean again. But I appreciate your offer.”
“I think I can fix that. Do you have a key for the maintenance building so I can change?”
“You have work clothes?” she asked.
“Yep.” Sam always carried sneakers and a pair of jeans and a T-shirt in his SUV in case he wanted to change out of his uniform.
She fished a ring of keys from her pocket and handed it to him. “It’s the skinny one.”
“Thanks! Be right back.”
He jogged the quarter mile to his SUV, grabbed his clothes, and unlocked the maintenance building. There was an office on either end of the building with a kitchen and bathroom in the middle. The office to his left evidently belonged to the maintenance supervisor—while it was neat, it had none of Emma’s personality in it. A quick look at the other office confirmed his hunch—the oak desk had a photo of Emma with her parents, a cheery flower arrangement sat on the bookcase, and several photos of Mount Locust adorned the walls.
He closed the bathroom door behind him and changed into the jeans and short-sleeved shirt, ruefully realizing a shirt with longer sleeves would have been warmer than the close-fitting T-shirt that hugged his abs. It would have to do since it was the only extra shirt he had.
His heart quickened as he remembered the brief flash of appreciation in Emma’s eyes when he offered to help. Don’t go there. She would only break his heart again.
10
What do you want me to do?” Sam asked.
Obsession Page 5
