Page 17 of Obsession

“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 ofpaper. “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 turnedleft 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.

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