23

LETTY'S HOUSE, SIX miles south, had been on the far fringe of the cell-phone net. The dump was out of it. "Gonna have to go get the FBI guys," Lucas said.

"I can run back with the truck, if you guys want to scrape around here," Del suggested.

"That'd be good." Lucas tossed him the keys. "The insurance certificate is in the door pocket. Don't use it."

"What am I gonna hit out here?"

Del took off, and Lucas, Letty and Ruth began walking around the dirt surface of the dump, Letty using her crutch on about every fifth step. She could feel the sprain, she said, but they'd packed her leg in ice at the hospital, and had kept the ice on it for most of the next day, and that had helped. "I'll be running in a week," she said.

"It probably wouldn't hurt to stay off it, though," Lucas said. "Much as you can, anyway."

"Drives me crazy."

"Yeah, well… I know. Always drove me crazy, too."

They chatted about old injuries for a while, as they wandered around. The dump was large, probably covering half a square mile, but most of the surface was covered with snow. Lucas had been to dumps before, and knew generally how they worked: the garbage and trash was dumped in the working area and was covered with a layer of dirt. Then another layer of trash went down, followed by another layer of dirt. When a predetermined level was reached, the whole thing was capped with an impervious layer of clay that would tend to sheet water off to the sides. The dump would also have a clay bottom, beneath all the layers of trash, to prevent contamination of the local groundwater.

It was, in a way, like a clay-and-garbage pie, with the clay acting as the crust, and the garbage the filling.

If Singleton was the killer, and if he'd buried his victims at the dump, he would have chosen an area already disturbed by the bulldozer, they decided. Over the rest of the area, the surface was frozen solid, and any grave-shaped hole would have shown through to the bulldozer driver.

"Do people come out here? I mean, other than the dump guy and you?" Lucas asked Letty.

"Oh, sure. Especially during hunting season. People want to get rid of deer hides and heads and so on, they'll put them in a garbage bag and bring them out and throw them in the pile. Or maybe they've got something too big to put out for the trash, they'll haul it over in their truck and throw it in. They're not supposed to, but they do."

"So it wouldn't be completely unusual to see somebody out here?"

"No. When I'm trapping out here, I probably see somebody half the time." She carried the rifle across the cast on her left arm, the muzzle pointing up at the sky. Lucas had been watching her handle the gun, and decided that she was safe enough.

"This all looks pretty raw," Ruth called. They walked over to her. She was standing on a patch of dirt thirty feet wide and fifty long, rumpled beneath the snow, softer-feeling-a bulldozer runway that led to the feeding edge of the landfill.

Lucas kicked some of the snow off, then stooped and picked up some dirt, looked at it, tossed it aside, and brushed his hands. "We oughta get the dump guy out here," he said. "Maybe he saw something strange."

After exploring the area of raw dirt, they drifted back toward the shooting range, and Lucas borrowed Letty's rifle and bounced one of the cans around. Then Letty asked about his pistol, and Lucas took out the.45 and showed her how it worked.

"Same kind of sight picture as with the rifle," he said. He stepped away from her, aimed at one of the cans, which was now about forty feet away, and fired once, missing right by three inches. He frowned, fired again, and again missed right, by only a half-inch this time, but also a little high. A third shot sent the can skittering away.

"Let me try," Letty said.

"It's gonna feel heavy, with only one hand on it," Lucas said. He gave her the pistol, showed her how the safeties worked.

She held the pistol out straight from her side, her head turned so that she was looking over her right shoulder. After a moment, she said, "Squeeze," and fired a round. She missed the can by three feet to the right, a foot low. "Holy cow," she said. "What'd I do?"

"Try once more," Lucas said. He heard truck noises back at the gate.

Letty pointed the pistol, but the barrel was shaking, and after a few seconds she took it down. "I'm not strong enough one-handed," she said.

Lucas took the gun from her, spent a couple of seconds pulling down on the can, let out a half-breath and smashed the can a second time.

"You got a string tied to the can, right?" Del called from the direction of the gate.

Lucas turned around, and saw Del with four of the California FBI crewmen walking across the dump toward them. Lucas popped the magazine from the.45, jacked the shell out of the chamber, thumbed it back in the magazine, then took a fresh magazine out of his holster and seated it in the pistol butt. The half-used magazine went into the holster.

"Good time to quit," one of the Californians said, talking through the snorkel of his snorkel parka. "If you'd kept it up, I would have been tempted to take out my piece and kick your sorry ass. No offense, ladies."

"I don't want to seem insulting, or vulgar, but none of you fuckin' FBI humpty-dumpties can shoot half as well as Del over there, and I personally can shoot several times better than Del," Lucas said.

"Au contraire,"Del said. "You can hold your end up on the nice, heated, lighted range. But out here, in the real world, you can't hold a candle to me. Though you're right about the fuckin' FBI humpty-dumpties."

Ruth looked at Letty and said, "Oh, God. This is why you should never get married, honey. These people got a rivulet of testosterone running through them, and anything can set it off. A cheese sandwich can set it off."

The lead Californian was digging under his parka and produced a.40 Smith. "You are a bunch of rural people who have never seen good shooting, so you don't have to apologize for what you just said."

One of the other Californians jerked the back of his coat and he turned, and they conferred, snorkel to snorkel. Then the lead Californian turned back to Lucas and said, "Uh, are we doing this for free? Or is there some money in it?"

They spent twenty minutes banging away at cans, without conclusion, but they all felt better afterward. Lucas then showed the crew the area that needed to be surveyed, and the lead man suggested that they needn't survey all of it. "We can do stripes; we don't even have to set up guidelines, because on that thin snow, we can see where we've been… We can do it in a couple of hours, quick and dirty. Done before dark, anyway."

THE CREW HAD a radar set mounted on a wagon, which the Californians rolled back and forth over the raw patch. The radar was pointed down into the dirt, and returned echoes from lumps of differing density. The data was fed into a memory module, which was dumped into a laptop back in one of the FBI trucks. The laptop then produced a density map of the surface covered.

Striping the dirt patch took an hour and a half. Halfway through, Ruth and Letty, bored and a little cold, decided to head back to the church and eat. "Stop by when you're going back to Armstrong," Letty said. "I want to know how it comes out."

When the striping was done, the lead Californian dumped the data to the laptop, let it churn for a few minutes, then tapped a few keys and a map began scrolling up. Two-thirds of the way from the back edge of the dirt strip, toward the working edge of the landfill, he said, "Whoops."

"Got something?"

"Got a hole. We got it on the third and fourth runs. It looks like it's, uh, four feet long and three feet wide."

"Anything else?"

"Mostly what look like tread tracks from the bulldozer, both current ones and some buried ones… but the hole cuts through all of that. It looks like there're a few inches of packed stuff, then it goes soft." He tapped the computer screen. "You can see the edges of it."