Twice Buried by Steven F. Havill

flashlights,” he said.
    In a spot where over the years leaves and runoff had deposited the makings for soft dirt at the base of the escarpment, the ground was disturbed by recent digging. The layer of leaves had been disturbed, too. I could see the line farther up the bank where the neat seasonal layering of the leaves had been interrupted.
    When whoever it was had finished digging, they’d swept leaves back in place, trying to conceal the spot.
    “So what do you suppose is there?” I asked.
    Deputy Bob Torrez, methodical and careful as usual, snapped off his flashlight and slipped it in his pocket. “Do you want to wait until morning to dig it up?”
    I started to reply but Sheriff Martin Holman beat me to it. “Right now,” he said. “I don’t think we should wait. If this is somehow connected, and if we wait until morning, then the trail will just be colder than it already is.”
    “Sir?” Torrez asked, looking at me.
    “The sheriff is right,” I said.
    Torrez immediately turned to the other deputies. “We’ll be a while taking the photos before we disturb anything. Tony and Paul, why don’t you bring up the burro.”
    The burro was the small portable generator that would provide all the light we’d need to make an artificial daytime in this lonely spot.
    While the deputies assembled their equipment, I made arrangements for the removal of Stuart Torkelson’s remains. He’d lain out in the cold long enough.

14
    I couldn’t think of anything much more macabre than opening a possible grave on a starless, moonless, wind-swept December night. I gave Linda Rael a choice—the safe, warm comfort of a locked patrol car or the dark, cold, blustery pasture.
    Shivering against the wind, she clutched camera bag and notebook and followed me across the field toward the spot where the burro chugged away, powering four big arc lamps. For a radius of fifty feet around what we assumed was a gravesite, the light was brighter than high noon of a cloudless June day.
    “What’s buried there?” she asked and I had to give her credit. There was more excitement than apprehension in her voice. Still, with fifty yards to go, she walked past me, her pace accelerating until she reached the reassuring light and the circle of armed cops.
    “We don’t know,” I said to her back. I wasn’t willing to guess.
    Before disturbing the soil, we completed a grid search, thoroughly inventorying the contents of each square meter of an area a dozen times bigger than any possible grave might be.
    “You think we need photos, too?” Torrez asked at one point and I nodded.
    “Film’s cheap.”
    Finally, at nearly four in the morning, with the first small pellets of moisture salting the air, we began to dig. Working like a bunch of archaeologists with badges, we removed the loose dirt a shovelful at a time, dumping the soil through a small, coarse screen. It was the same sort of screen that folks hunting Anasazi remains would use to sift out projectile points, pot shards, or bone fragments. We didn’t care about the pot shards.
    As the deputies worked, I realized that the young reporter was standing so close to my elbow she was almost leaning on me. Her breath pumped out in rapid exhalations and her eyes never left the spot of disturbed earth.
    “Do you need a warrant to excavate someone’s private property like this?” she asked at one point, and I shook my head.
    “Not when the owner gives us permission.”
    “Do you think Mr. Fuentes had anything to do with this?”
    “We don’t know, Linda. Well, wait a minute. No, we don’t think he did.”
    Before she had a chance to question that, Tony Abeyta stopped digging, the tip of the shovel in the dirt. “I hit something,” he said.
    Five minutes later, enough dirt had been gently removed that all of us could see the patch of brown fur.
    “Looks like a dog or something,” Abeyta said.
    “I imagine you’ll find three of them, then,” I said.
    Linda Rael looked up at me