Page 52 of Obsession

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Finding the impression the skull made in the ground had knocked Emma’s feet out from under her. She stared down at where she’d been cleaning. Seeing it drove home in a way the toe bone hadn’t that a person had been murdered and buried here.

“You okay?” Sam asked.

He’d climbed out of the pit, and she looked up. “Yeah,” she said. Emma turned back to the bucket of dirt she’d accumulated and lifted it up to him. “It’s just that...” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “All of a sudden, what we’re doing here is too real.”

He knelt and held out his hand. “Why don’t you take a break?” he asked gently.

No, she needed to get this job done so that whoever was buried here could have justice.

Almost as if he’d read her mind, he said, “A short break won’t stop the progress. And it’ll give you the energy to finish.” When she still hesitated, Sam said, “I know how you feel—pretty sure it’s the same thing I feel whenever I investigate the murder of a John Doe. You want to discover the victim’s identity so you can give the family closure.”

Maybe a break would be a good idea. Then she could go back to work refreshed. “Have you investigated many John Doe cases?” she asked once he’d lifted her out of the pit.

“Enough.”

She dusted her knees off and looked back at the hole that was the length and width of a grave. “How do you keep doing it? I never want to do this again.”

“I won’t say you get used to it, because you never do,” he said. “But you learn to distance yourself, kind of like a medical examiner.”

Medical examiner. Emma couldn’t do that job either. “Where did Nate go?”

“To his SUV. He lost reception and wanted to touch base with the office on his radio.”

She looked over the two mounds of dirt. The smaller pile they’d taken out today wouldn’t have to be sifted, but the one dug with the backhoe had to be processed once they excavated the pit. She would be sifting it weeks from now.

“Whoever removed the skeleton didn’t have much time last night,” Sam said, uncapping a bottle of water before handing it to her. “He’s bound to have left something behind other than a small bone and a shoe print.”

She tilted the bottle up and took a welcomed sip. “Any news about the kind of shoe it was?”

“A Nike.”

That only eliminated about half the population of Adams County. “How long do you think the intruder was here?”

“Trey and Clayton were put out of commission sometime between ten and eleven,” he said. “I arrived a little after midnight and the intruder was gone, but I got the feeling he hadn’t been gone long.”

“That’s two hours at most.” Once again she looked at the fresh dirt piled beside the pit. “Of course, he wouldn’t have been trying to preserve the site, and he used the backhoe to dig down another foot.”

“He might have even scooped the remains up with the backhoe.”

Her fingers itched to get back to work, but first she checkedher watch. Four o’clock. It would take two hours to drive to her mom’s, leaving an hour before she needed to change. Emma set the timer on her watch for sixty minutes and gingerly climbed down into the pit again. She didn’t understand why she hurt all over. It’d only been her hand that had been injured. Of course, she’d hit the bottom of the pit pretty hard, jarring her. Couldn’t let Sam know how badly her hand hurt. If he knew, he’d want her to stop, fearful that she would further injure her hand. But she couldn’t stop. Something drove her to discover who had been buried in the grave.

Sam jumped down into the pit with her. Time passed quickly as they scraped layer after layer away and dumped the dirt in buckets. A chill settled over the area as the sun hung low in the sky. She scraped over the ground again and met resistance. “I think I have something here.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Something hard, though.” She looked around for a dental pick, but she must have taken it out of the pit. “Do you have a pick?”

“Hold on a sec.”

Once she had the tool, she used it to scrape at the object and caught her breath when a red stone appeared. “It looks like a ruby.” Excitement buzzed in her chest.

Sam leaned over her shoulder as she brushed away more dirt and then used the dental pick to remove dirt from around the object. It wasn’t long before a whole stone appeared, obviously the top of a ring. This time they both caught their breath as a university name came into view.

No.

Her hand shook. It wasn’t a ruby but a garnet with Mississippi State University engraved around it and the year 1878—the year the university was founded. The ring was identical to a smaller one in her jewelry box that she’d received in the spring of her junior year,just like Ryan had.He’d worn his ring the night of their birthday dinner. Her heart pounded in her chest. It couldn’t be his.

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