‘According to this thing,’ Garcia said, wiping his forehead and nodding at his smartphone, ‘the spot we’re looking for should be just past these trees here.’ He indicated a cluster of trees just ahead of them.
They circled around the trees to get to the other side.
‘This is supposed to be it,’ Garcia said, checking his smart-phone screen and looking around the area they were in. ‘Please excuse my ignorance on this subject, but how accurate are these longitude and latitude coordinates?’
‘That really depends on two main factors,’ Hunter explained. ‘The position on the Earth’s surface or, more specifically, the latitude at which the measurement took place, and the data referenced to represent the Earth.’
Garcia stared back at his partner, blank-faced. ‘And for those of us who do not speak nerd, what does that mean?’
Hunter smiled. ‘Sorry. Well, in short, the more numbers you have to the right of the decimal point, the more accurate the location. It can be accurate down to a fraction of an inch if a person so wishes.’
‘Decimal point?’ Garcia queried, checking the coordinates that he had entered into his map application – 34°15’16.9”N 118°14’52.4”W. ‘Shit, there’s only one number to the right of the decimal point here. So this position is probably just a rough ballpark.’
‘Not that decimal point,’ Hunter came back. ‘It has to be converted into longitude and latitude decimal form.’
Garcia paused. ‘Do you know how to do that?’
‘We don’t have to. The application you’re using on your phone has already done it for you, I’m sure. It should be either next to, or directly under the coordinates you entered into the search box.’
Garcia checked his phone again. Hunter was right. Directly under the coordinates that Garcia had entered into the map application were two different numbers: 34.254694 and -18.247889.
‘OK,’ Garcia said. ‘So we have a figure with six numbers to the right of the decimal point here.’
Hunter nodded. ‘That will probably guide us to the location with inch-perfect precision.’
Garcia looked at the ground they were standing on. There wasn’t much vegetation, just turf and a few loose rocks. ‘So this is it, really. We are on it.’
Hunter dropped the pickax and the headlamp he was carrying. ‘I guess we better start digging then.’ He readied the shovel in his hands.
Garcia put the pickax and the crowbar to one side and used his shovel to push the loose rocks out of the way.
The ground was hard, but wasn’t as solid as it looked or as they expected it to be. It had been patted down, which indicated that it had been disturbed before.
Hunter and Garcia dug side by side. Even with the soil being a lot softer than they had expected, the work was laborious and progressed slowly.
‘I told you this wouldn’t be as easy as you thought it would,’ Garcia said, checking the sky. They hadn’t been digging for very long and the sun was already about to disappear behind the horizon. ‘It’s getting dark, and we forgot to bring water.’
Both of their shirts were drenched in sweat.
‘Yes,’ Hunter agreed. ‘That was a mistake. My mouth is as dry as a bag of roasted peanuts.’ He paused and reached for his head-lamp. ‘Look, let’s carry on for another half an hour. If we don’t get anything, then in the morning we take it to the captain and see if we can get clearance for a digging expedition with what we have.’
‘Fine,’ Garcia said with a nod. ‘But if she declines, you’re going to come back here tomorrow and carry on anyway, aren’t you?’
‘Probably,’ Hunter admitted.
Garcia shook his head as he picked up his headlamp. ‘Half an hour – that’s all.’
‘You can time it,’ Hunter said, switching his headlamp on.
‘I will,’ Garcia replied, setting the timer in his smartphone for thirty minutes and showing it to Hunter, who nodded and began digging again.
Garcia turned on his headlamp and also went back to work.
They didn’t need another half an hour. Twelve minutes later, Hunter’s shovel hit something that produced an odd sound – solid, but hollow at the same time.
Both detectives stopped dead.
‘Whatever that is,’ Garcia said, ‘ . . . it’s not soil.’
Hunter used the tip of his shovel to scrape away some dirt, before going down on his knees to use his hands.
‘Solid wood,’ he said, using his knuckles to knock against the new surface he had found.
Hunter got back on his feet and, though visibility had deteriorated due to a moonless night sky, their headlamps were powerful enough to allow them to carry on shoveling for another hour, until they had revealed the top of a rectangular wooden box that looked to be about two feet wide by six feet in length. The wood used was light in color and very sturdy. The killer had used twelve nails to seal the box shut.
‘Shall I call it in?’ Garcia asked, putting down his shovel. ‘We’re going to need a full lineup here – forensics, a digging team, lights, everything. This entire area will need to be dug for other graves.’
‘We need to open this first,’ Hunter said, nodding at the wooden box.
‘Don’t you think it’s better to wait for forensics and reinforcements? They’ll be able to pull this whole casket out of the ground, and they’ll be much better equipped to preserve whatever needs to be preserved when that lid comes off.’
‘Agreed,’ Hunter said. ‘But all we’ve done here is find a box in the ground, Carlos. This isn’t an LAPD investigation. Not yet. For all we know, this box could be full of marshmallows. For us to call it in, we need a body.’
Garcia blew into the palms of his hands, which were by then red-raw and hurting like crazy. He wanted to argue with Hunter, but he knew that his partner was right.
‘All we need to do here,’ Hunter said, ‘is use the crowbars to remove the nails and pry open the lid.’
Lifting the nails from the lid wasn’t as easy as they hoped it would be. Whoever had nailed that lid shut had used heavy-duty round wire nails that were two inches long. It would’ve been easier to use the crowbars to smash open the lid instead of extracting the nails, but they wanted to keep the casket as intact as they possibly could.
Being extra careful to keep the wood from even chipping was a painstaking job and it took Hunter and Garcia almost twenty-five minutes to extract all twelve nails. As the final one came off, the two detectives looked at each other, their foreheads wet with sweat, their faces smeared with dirt. With their headlamps on, they looked like a pair of coalminers.
‘You grab that end,’ Hunter said, ‘and I’ll grab this one. We lift it together.’
They got down to their knees again and reached for the lid, which was about an inch thick, weighing somewhere in the region of twelve to fifteen pounds. The whole box looked to have been built with solid planks of wood that had been cut to size, all of them about an inch thick.
Doing their best to keep the lid as level as possible to try to avoid any dirt slipping into the box, they carefully lifted it up and to one side until they were finally able to see what lay inside the makeshift casket.