Chapter 12 - The Forensic Excavation
The backhoe’s diesel engine had been roaring since seven in the morning, sending plumes of gray exhaust into the frosted branches of the apple orchard.
By eleven o'clock on Friday, the concrete floor of the pump house had been shattered into two hundred jagged slabs, hauled away by county dump trucks under the direct supervision of the New York State Police Major Crimes Unit.
Dr. Ronald Kincaid stood on the edge of the pit, wearing an orange hard hat and heavy leather work gloves, his wooden cane planted deep in the loose, wet gravel beneath the old foundation. Beside him, holding an electric ground-penetrating radar sled, was an anthropologist from the state museum in Albany named Dr. Aris Thorne.
"Look at the density anomalies on the monitor," Thorne said, pointing to a series of vertical purple bands that disrupted the gray strata of the glacial drift. "Four feet down, beneath the original nineteen-seventy pour. That’s not natural limestone deposition. That's a trench backfilled with unslaked lime and crushed shale."
Investigator Miller stepped down into the muddy excavation, his trench coat hem soaked with oily groundwater. He used a square-nosed spade to peel back a six-inch crust of blue clay.
The spade struck something hard with a dry, hollow chink.
Not stone.
Cast iron.
Miller knelt in the muck, scraping away the wet dirt with his gloved fingers until the curved lid of an old milk-transport can emerged from the clay. The brass tag soldered to the rim was blackened with corrosion, but under the glare of the work light, the engraved lettering was still legible: VANCE DAIRY – CAN NO. 14 – 1988.
"Get the dental picks," Kincaid commanded, his voice dropping into that cold, surgical gravel. "Do not force the seal. The gasket is lead-soldered."
Two technicians in white paper coveralls descended into the trench with a cordless rotary cutter, slicing through the solder joints with delicate, vibrating hums that sent showers of green copper sparks into the wet ditch.
When the lid pulled away, a smell spilled into the cold mountain air that made three of the municipal laborers turn toward the ditch and violently heave their breakfast into the weeds.
It was not the smell of fresh decay; it was the ancient, mummified stink of quicklime, cedar sawdust, and dehydrated organic tissue preserved in an airtight cylinder for nearly forty years.
Inside the thirty-gallon milk can, wrapped in six layers of rotting burlap and bound with rusted baling wire, lay the skeletal remains of an infant, its skull resting against a small, silver baptismal medal bearing the initials C.V. – 1989.
Beside the infant’s ribs lay a single, six-inch length of split rattan, dried and blackened with age, knotted at two-inch intervals.
Kincaid took off his glasses, his eyes burning as he looked at the little lead-sealed medal.
"Warren had an older sister," Kincaid whispered, his memory reaching back through thirty-five years of county death certificates. "Clarissa. The official record says she died of sudden infant death syndrome during the winter blizzard of eighty-nine. Evelyn Vance brought the death certificate to the town clerk herself, signed by her father, the old judge."
Miller straightened up from the trench, his face gray as unplaned fir, his hands clenched into fists so tight the leather of his gloves creaked.
"She’s been doing it since eighty-nine," Miller said, looking toward the ridge where the red brick farmhouse stood stripped and silent behind the yellow police tape. "Every time a woman in that house brought a child into the world that didn't bend to her hand, she had the cane ready in the brine."
"And the men?" Dr. Thorne asked, shining his flashlight into the dark recess beneath the southern footer of the pump house, where the ground-penetrating radar was clicking with an ominous, continuous chatter. "What about the secondary anomalies further along the drainage line?"
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Miller didn't answer. He turned to the backhoe operator, his arm rising in a sharp, chopping motion.
"Dig," the investigator commanded. "Dig all the way down to the bedrock. I want every shovel of dirt from this ditch put through a half-inch screen. If there is another bone in this ground, I will have it on the grand jury table before the sun goes behind the mountain."
