Nikki O’Keefe rolled across her bed toward the ringing telephone, shoved away the pillow she’d cuddled while she slept, and groped through the mess on the bedside table. A stack of books teetered and fell as she lifted the receiver. "Unh?"

"Agent O'Keefe?"

"What?"

"This is Retha. We got a call last night from Hedge Row School. Sheriff Worden tol’ me you might wanna check it out."

"Last night, Retha?" Nikki shook her head and swung her feet out of the bed. The voice of the dispatcher at the Skye County Law Enforcement Center sounded fuzzy in her ears, until she remembered she was still wearing the ear plugs she used to protect herself from the snoring couple who lived in the other half of her duplex. She pulled out the plugs.

"Last night when?"

"Twenty-two hundred hours."

Ten P.M., Nikki translated silently. Her bedside clock said five forty-seven. She pushed a tangle of black curls away from her face, irritated by a distinct wish to find the empty half of her bed filled with a drowsy and warm Scott Walker, who languidly would scratch her back. "Some kid run off?"

"They found what they think are human remains."

She bit down her urge to ask why the dispatcher waited nearly eight hours to call about a possible homicide.

Retha answered the unspoken question. "I thought you’d want to wait until daylight."

"Don’t worry, Retha, you did fine." If she upbraided the dispatcher, she’d pay with a hundred late-night calls about trivia. "Isn’t it still dark?"

"By the time you get out there, it’ll be sunup."

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Barely sunup, Nikki thought, frowning at the pink sky above the trees as she finished her hike down the bushy slope below Hedge Row School. The trail opened onto the campsite. A boy, all knees and elbows and a big head with a burr haircut, huddled against a wiry young man. They looked as if they needed to be wrapped in a blanket. Nikki had come without a coat, the morning only pleasantly chilly on the short walk from her duplex to her car. Here the air felt colder.

"Pete?" Nikki spoke to the older one.

The camp counselor nodded, blinking behind his wire rims.

"And you must be Ernie?"

The boy scooted under the arm of the counselor and watched Nikki without answering, his eyes hungry. She recalled what the Hedge Row superintendent told her when she called during the ten-mile drive from Pawnee Bend to the school. The boy was nine years old, and three or four years behind. He struggled with severe learning disabilities. What they used to call retarded, Nikki thought. She’d heard of Hedge Row but never been there before. It was a school for children of this type.

She tried smiling. "Are you tired, Ernie?" He didn’t answer. "Nice to know I still have my way with kids," she muttered while she bent to see the tiny lacework of bones that lay on one of the log seats around the fire pit. Fingers, wrist, arm, an elbow joint, all less than four inches long. Part of an animal skeleton, she thought for an instant, before she recognized the unmistakably human bend of the thumb.

A whiff of smoke from a smoldering log stung her eyes. For a moment, Nikki’s effort went to keep the arm from fleshing out and becoming a live piece of her old nightmare. She sensed the kid and the counselor staring. Remote thunder gave her an excuse to end her study of the bones and look above the treetops. Not thunder, she realized, but the rumble of a jet above the streaky clouds. There hadn’t been rain worth talking about since July.

She made a scan of the campsite. Brush grew close on all sides but one, where there was a flat, leafy area. "In here is where you fell?" Nikki pointed across the log.

Ernie followed the direction of her finger, nodded, and looked down again. Pete stood and dusted off the seat of his shorts. "We were on a camp out."

Nikki had preferred Pete on the ground. Standing put him above her, even though the cross-training shoes she’d worn for the hike down the hill added half an inch to the five-four she measured in flats. She hated always giving up height.

'You're a detective?" Pete asked.

"Skye County doesn’t have a detective. I’m a field agent with the Kansas State Police." She’d dressed in one of the six nearly identical black skirt and jacket sets in her closet. Her blouse felt too thin. Pete inspected her, and she knew he was wondering why he couldn’t see the strap of a shoulder holster. As she started to step over the log into the bare space, she turned and asked Ernie, "Is there poison ivy or anything?"

He checked with Pete, got a nod, and told her, "Huh-uh. Itchy stuff has three leaves."

The shadows held a few thin weedy things she couldn’t name, but nothing with three leaves. Crossing the log, she glanced back to catch Ernie burying his eyes in his arms.

An old tree held back the stubby undergrowth. Nikki stepped off the area below the tree, measuring the bare space as six feet by ten. She knelt, put her hand beneath the floor of leaves, and pushed three fingers into the dirt. The soil gave way easily to her fingernails, until she hit something solid and round. Sweeping away loose earth and moldy bits of leaf, she uncovered a human skull hardly bigger than an orange. At the edge of the hole in the ground where she’d scooped out the soil, she saw another piece of white. Touching, she felt bone, and she knew from the shape she’d found the top of another small skull.

Pete swore in a whisper. Ernie pushed his face into Pete’s sweatshirt and started to sob.

Nikki returned the skull to the hole, covered it with leaves, and backed out of the burial place, nearly stumbling over the log. She forced herself to breathe slowly while she wiped the dirt from her hands. "I want you to stay clear of this area. And keep the others away. Completely clear. Understand?"

Pete wriggled his glasses. "When are you coming back?"

"As soon as I can get help."

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