"It's all I had," Lucas said. They all looked up at the sky, then Lucas asked, "Where's the radar guy?"

"He's up in the woods with his helper," Hammond said. "They're setting up reference points. We were waiting for you."

"What do you think? Bunch of bodies?" asked the deputy named Dave.

"I can't take the chance," Lucas said. "I'd say it's about one in ten."

"Good. We got, like, two shovels, and I got an idea who'd be using them."

"LARRY LAKE?" LUCAS asked. He was struggling up the steep hillside, slipping on the oak leaves, Del, Hammond, and Marshall trailing behind.

"That's me." Lake was a lanky man with an uncontrolled beard and aviator-style glasses. He wore a red sailing-style rain suit with green Day-Glo flashes on the backs and shoulders. His face was wind-tanned, and two pale blue eyes peered out from behind the glasses. He was standing beside a yellow metal box on a tripod, which was set up over Aronson's grave. As Lucas came up, he saw that the metal box housed a lens. "Are you Davenport?"

"Yeah."

"I better get paid. This is miserable."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. How long is it gonna take?"

"I got my guy over there setting up the last of the reference pins, so we'll start the survey in ten minutes or so. I'm gonna get a cup of coffee first."

"How long is it gonna take after that?"

Lake shrugged. "Depends on how much you want surveyed. We could show you some of it in a couple of hours, a lot more this evening, more tomorrow… whatever you want. We could do the whole hill in about three days. We're using this grave as a center point…" He touched his ear, and Lucas realized that what looked like a plastic tab near his mouth was actually a microphone. Lake, talking to the mike, said, "Yeah, Bill. Yeah, the cops came up. Just a sec." To Lucas and the others: "This'll take a second, then we'll go some coffee."

He looked through the lens on the survey instrument, sideways across the hill to where Bill was holding a red and white survey rod with a knob on top. Lake said, "Two forward, a half left. A half forward, one inch right. Two inches back, one half inch right. You're good-put in a pin. Yeah. Yup. Down at the truck."

AT THE TRUCK, Lake's assistant got a gallon thermos out of the Subaru and started pouring coffee into paper cups, as Lake explained what he'd been doing. "We set up four control points around the center, which is at Aronson's grave, so we've got a big rectangle laid out on the hillside. The next thing is, we stretch lines from the pins at the top of the hill to the pins at the bottom. Those lines are marked at one-meter intervals. Then we stretch another string across the hill, between the vertical lines, as a guide. We'll walk back and forth with the radar, along the string, and move down the hill one meter with every sweep. We can probably get you a fifty-meter-square block in about two hours."

"If there's a grave, how do you find it later?" asked Del.

"Our computer'll actually generate a map, to scale," Lake said. "If we find a possible site fifteen yards north and five yards east, it'll show on the computer plot, and then I'll just use the total station-"

"The total station's the box on the tripod," one of the deputies said.

"-I'll just use the total station to spot the center of the suspected site, and you guys-not me-start digging."

"How accurate is it?" Lucas asked.

"At that distance?" Lake looked up the hill. "A couple thousandths of an inch."

THE WORK WAS even more miserable than it looked. Lucas and Del, alternating with Hammond and Marshall, stretched a long piece of yellow string between the corresponding one-meter markers on the vertical strings of the survey box, so it resembled the letter H. The cross string had to go around trees, got caught in branches; whenever it got tangled, whoever went to untangle it inevitably slipped on the sodden leaves and slid in the mud down the hill.

Lake, in the meantime, walked back and forth across the hillside, straddling the yellow string, with two boxlike radar units hanging down from one shoulder. After the cops figured out the routine, the work went quickly, except for the falls. An hour into it, Lucas noticed that neither Lake nor his assistant ever fell down.

"How come?" Lucas asked.

"We're wearing golf shoes," Lake said. He picked up his feet to show Lucas the spikes.

"You've done this before," Del said.

"Once or twice," Lake said.

LAKE HAD EXPECTED some results in two hours, but the rain, the falls, the jumble of trees stretched the two hours into three. When they'd run the last line between the bottom points of the survey box, Lake said, "Let's throw the gear into the truck and run into town. Find a cafй."

"How long will it take you to process?" Lucas asked.

"We'll dump the information into the computer on the way into town. We'll pull up some preliminary results right there."

They went to the High Street Cafй in Cannon Falls, took over the round booth by the window, and dragged some chairs around the open side. A half-dozen coffee drinkers sat down the length of the breakfast bar, farmers waiting out the rain. They made no attempt not to stare as Lake produced a fifty-foot extension cord, got a waitress to plug it in, and started the computer. "Data looked pretty good going in," Lake muttered. "It's not like we came up dry."

"Can you actually see bodies?" asked Marshall.

"No, no. Nothing like that. What we see are soil changes. They'll look like grave shapes."

"Trouble is," his assistant chipped in, "sometimes you see a lot of grave shapes, especially in the woods like that. If a tree tipped over fifty years ago, and its roots pulled up a hole in the ground, the radar'll see it."

Lucas looked at the screen. One word: Processing.

They all ordered pie and coffee, and Del leaned over and said, "Still processing."

"Takes a while," Lake said. He said that two months before, he'd been in North Dakota looking for a graveyard that was about to be flooded by a dam. "They knew pretty close where it was, but they thought it was a family thing. Five or six graves. Turned out that there were a hundred and seventy graves in there. They were pretty unhappy. They had like X number of dollars budgeted for moving graves, and they had to come up with like twenty X. People get pretty cranked up about moving granddaddy's bones. On the screens, the graves looked like holes in one of those old IBM punch cards."

As he said it, the screen blinked: Processing Complete.

"Here we go," Lucas said.

Lake pushed his pie away, pulled the laptop closer, tapped a few keys, and a new message came up: Generating Plot. The new message lasted only a few seconds, then changed to Plot Complete. Lake tapped a few more keys, muttered, "There's Aronson's grave, that's the midpoint. Let's go up to the Number One point and scan east."

He manipulated the built-in pointing stick on the keyboard and began scrolling. "There's one," he said after a few seconds.

"A grave?" Lucas asked. He could see the deeper gray-shaded form on the plot.

"Don't know," Lake said. "Looks pretty small. This is all to scale, and it's less than a meter across."

"Pretty round, too," his assistant said.

They were all pressing in behind Lake now, watching the screen, which was showing a flat field composed of various shades of gray. The possible graves showed up as a darker gray in the background. They scanned across the hillside, then back, and across again, moving down the field in one-meter increments.

"Another one," Lake said.

"That could be one," his assistant said. "Let's get the coordinates."

"Let's just scan the whole thing first," Lake said. "That looked like a tree hole to me."

"There's one," Lucas said.

" 'Nother tree hole," Lake said.

"How can you tell tree holes?" Del asked.