LIEUTENANT JEFF STUTZMAN TURNED ON HIS SIGNAL, SLOWED THE Chevy Suburban, and made a left onto Route 13 off Indian Highway. It had been a pretty drive through Montana farmland, but his mind hadn’t registered much of the quiet stretch. Instead, he’d been thinking about the phone call he’d gotten on his cellular thirty minutes earlier from Todd Pitsinger, the owner of the contracting company they’d been using to excavate David Reece’s property.
“It could be another body,” Pitsinger had said, and Jeff’s mind flashed to the way the first one had looked in the bottom of the sinkhole: the skeletal remains lying on their side and partly buried in the mud, the open jawbone half visible, the left eye socket black with sludge.
The Reeces’ property was half a mile east of Route 13 and six miles east of Wolf Point. The BNSF Railway ran north of here, and the Missouri River was within walking distance to the south. Technically, this was the town of Macon, but there was nothing out here, just farmland and open sky, the smell of cows and dirt and vanishing economic opportunity.
There was a time, Jeff thought, when people had made a decent living here, when a place like David Reece’s farm could turn a profit most years, and even the lean years weren’t that lean. It was different now. Montana had been slow to adapt to changes in technology. The evolution of large corporate farms made it difficult for many of the smaller operations to compete. People discovered easier ways to make a living, and some of them—especially the young folks—had left Montana for better opportunities elsewhere. Erin Reece had been one of those people, and she was not alone. There were fewer families with children now, and smaller class sizes at the local elementary school. Jeff’s daughter, Kayla, was one of only thirteen students in her fifth-grade class. When Jeff attended Northside twenty-three years ago, there were at least twice that many. There was something horrible in those numbers. What did it mean, he wondered, when a town could no longer hold on to its children?
Jeff turned onto the dirt driveway and followed it back. It ended at a single-story farmhouse whose white wooden exterior looked as if it had been recently painted. It had a wraparound porch, dark blue shutters, and a porch swing hanging from a set of chains to the right of the front door.
It was a small farm by Montana standards, a hundred and eighty-six acres. With Erin’s permission, they’d moved the cattle and other livestock to a neighboring property, where David’s farmhand, Travis Cooper, could continue the dairy operation in the midst of the investigation.
He grabbed his brown wide-brimmed hat from the passenger seat and stepped out of the Suburban. There was a tractor not far from the house near a large oak tree, and a rope and tire swing dangled from one of the tree’s branches. He counted three men standing next to the tractor, two of them leaning on shovels. A fourth man, Pitsinger, was walking toward him.
“Thanks for coming out,” Todd said. “I don’t know what we’ve found yet, but . . . I think it might be something.”
“What is it?” he asked as they walked toward the spot where the men were congregated.
Todd didn’t answer right away. Instead he joined the others standing at the lip of an excavated section of earth. The hole was about ten feet across, fifteen feet in length, and six and a half feet deep.
“The GPR picked up a disruption in the layering of the soil here,” he said. “At first we figured it was a root from the oak tree. It didn’t make sense for a body to be buried so close to the house.”
Jeff glanced over at the GPR machine. “Ground-penetrating radar” was the technical term for it, but it looked more like a lawn mower than anything else. Todd’s company used it to identify underground utility lines and other potential hazards at a work site. It could be used to look for other things as well, however—bodies buried in the earth, for example. Granted, it was an imperfect science. The radar detected shifts in the horizontal layering of the soil. A blanket or a coffin could cause such a disturbance, but so could a rock, tree root, or any other object buried in the ground.
“The first body was discovered at the rear section of the property,” Todd said. “If there’s anything else out here, it stands to reason that he would’ve buried it in the same general area.” He lifted his head and pointed to the young man standing to his left. “Joshua here’s the one who found it.”
Jeff nodded at the slim, pimple-faced boy who barely looked old enough to vote. The kid looked up long enough to give Jeff a crooked smile, then dropped his gaze. “I was calibrating the instrument and getting a baseline. The tree root helps with that.”
“But you didn’t find a tree root, did you? You found something bigger.” Jeff focused his eyes on the thing at the bottom of the hole. “A piece of wood,” he said. “You’ve identified the corners.”
“Yeah,” Todd said, “those are the corners. It’s six and a half feet down—the top of it anyway. We used the tractor’s backhoe to dig the first four feet, then switched to shovels for the rest of it.”
“Good,” Jeff said. “It’s important not to damage it.”
“Right,” Todd said, “although I wasn’t thinking about the wood. I didn’t want to slice through the remains of a body with the backhoe.”
They were silent for a while, looking down at it.
“It’s the top of a wooden rectangular box,” Jeff said. “That’s what you’re telling me.”
“Yes. That’s what it looked like on the GPR. That’s what got us digging.”
“What are the measurements?”
Todd put a hand on his hip. “The section we’ve exposed is seventy-two inches long by twenty-eight inches wide.”
Jeff thought about it for a moment. “It’s short for a coffin.”
“Is it?”
“Yes,” he said. “A standard coffin is about eighty inches in length.”
Todd frowned. “There’s nothing standard about this one. There are nails around the perimeter, hammered into the lid. If you ask me, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance the thing was built right here on the premises.”
“Why here?”
Todd looked at him. “Because if you’re killing people and burying them on your property, it’s a bad idea to have professionally made caskets delivered to your house.”
Jeff reached up with his left hand and adjusted his hat. “No,” he said, “that’s not what I’m asking.”
“What then?”
“We found the other one toward the back of the property. Why is this one all the way up here?”
“Hell if I know. Maybe there’s another twelve of them spread out around the property.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but like you said, it doesn’t make sense. And assuming there’s a body inside, why is it buried in a coffin? The other one wasn’t.”
“That’s for you to figure out, Lieutenant.”
Jeff put his hands on his gun belt and looked down at the box.
“It could be nothing,” Todd said. “Maybe somebody buried their dog here. You want us to open it? I’ve got a hammer in the truck. We could pull those nails out for you. Wouldn’t take but a minute.”
“No,” he said. “Let’s take our time with this. I need to call my boss and get some more people out here. He’ll want photographs, forensics . . . the whole nine yards.”
“And if the thing is empty, or the only body is the remains of a bloodhound from days gone by?”
Jeff looked at him. “I hope it’s empty. I want it to be empty. Don’t stop looking, though. The presence of this . . . thing . . . increases the likelihood that you’ll find others.” He reached out and put a hand on Todd’s shoulder. “Find me some more,” he said. “Find me everything that’s out here.”
Todd nodded and walked with him back to the truck.
“You okay?” Jeff asked. “You think you and your boys can finish this?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just that . . . I mean . . . all those nails . . .”
“What about them?”
“It’s like he wanted to keep something out. Or maybe,” he said, “he was trying to keep something in.”
There it is, Jeff thought. It was something he’d wondered about, too. If he’s right, there will be scratch marks on the inner surface, and bloodstains from fists pounding on the wood.
“Listen,” he said, “we’ll get some folks out here to take a look. Once we get that lid off, we’ll see what we find. Until then, I don’t think there’s any need to let our imaginations get the best of us.”
“Okay, we’ll get on with it then.” Todd paused a moment, as if he wanted to ask something else or maybe quit the job altogether.
“You can do this,” Jeff told him. “Just try to stay focused.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean . . . it’s just another job, right?”
“No, it’s not. These are people’s lives we’re dealing with. It’s their chance to be found.”
“Right.”
Jeff opened the Suburban’s heavy metal door, but he stood there for a moment with his hand on the roof. “The more I do this job, the less I believe in justice,” he said. “It’s not that it doesn’t exist. It’s just . . . so much different than what you want it to be.” He shook his head. “Find everything you can. If there are more bodies out here, they deserve a proper burial. The families of these people have suffered enough.”
Jeff started the engine, turned the truck around, and accelerated down the driveway. He would talk to the chief first, but he wanted to do it in person. On the drive back, he spoke with Maggie from dispatch and asked for an officer to be stationed at the entrance to the property. “No access in or out without prior authorization,” he instructed, and for the rest of the trip he thought about David Reece lying in his hospital bed, and how the past is never buried as deeply as we imagine.