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his BLT and savored its taste. He was starved. He wasn’t planning to do anything but eat and rest during the break but Kohl asked if it was all right if she gave him some of her initial conclusions on the excavation.
    Bosch had his mouth full. After he swallowed he asked her to wait until his partner came back. They talked in generalities about the condition of the bones and how Kohl believed that the shallow nature of the grave had allowed animals to disinter the remains and scatter the bones—possibly for years.
    “We’re not going to get them all,” she said. “We won’t come close. We’re going to quickly reach a point where the expense and the effort won’t be worth the return.”
    Edgar returned with another plate of fried chicken. Bosch nodded to Kohl, who looked down at a notepad she had on the table to her left. She checked some of her notations and started talking.
    “The things I want you to be mindful of are the grave depth and location terrain. I think these are key things. They’re going to have to play somehow into who this child was and what happened to him.”
    “Him?” Bosch asked.
    “The hip spacing and the waistband of the underwear.”
    She explained that included in the rotten and decomposed clothing was the rubber waistband, which was all that was left of the underwear that had been on the body when it was buried. Decomposition fluids from the body had led to the deterioration of the clothing. But the rubber waistband was largely intact and appeared to have come from a style of underwear made for males.
    “Okay,” Bosch said. “You were saying about grave depth?”
    “Yes, well, we think that the hip assembly and lower spinal column were in undisturbed position when we uncovered them. Going on that, we’re talking about a grave that wasn’t more than six inches to a foot deep. A grave this shallow reflects speed, panic, a host of things indicative of poor planning. But—” she held up a finger “—by the same token, the location—very remote, very difficult—reflects the opposite. It shows careful planning. So you have some kind of contradiction going on here. The location appears to have been chosen because it was damn hard to get to, yet the burial appears to have been fast and furious. This person was literally just covered with loose topsoil and pine needles. I know pointing all of this out isn’t necessarily going to help you catch the bad guy but I want you to see what I’m seeing here. This contradiction.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “It’s all good to know. We’ll keep it in mind.”
    “Okay, good. The other contradiction—the smaller one—is the backpack. Burying it with the body was a mistake. The body decomposes at a much faster rate than the canvas. So if you get identifiers off the bag or its contents, it becomes a mistake made by the bad guy. Again poor planning in the midst of good planning. You’re smart detectives, I’m sure you’ll figure all this out.”
    She smiled at Bosch and then studied her pad again, lifting the top page to look beneath it.
    “I think that’s it. Everything else we talked about up at the site. I think things are going very well up there. By the end of the day we’ll have the main grave done. Tomorrow we’ll do some sampling in the other grids. But this should probably wrap by tomorrow. Like I said, we’re not going to get everything but we should get enough to do what we need to do.”
    Bosch suddenly thought of Victor Frizbe’s question to the cadet at the lunch wagon and realized that the reporter might have been thinking ahead of Bosch.
    “Sampling? You think there’s more than one body buried up there?”
    Kohl shook her head.
    “I have no indication of that at all. But we should make sure. We’ll do some sampling, sink some gas probes. It’s routine. The likelihood—especially in light of the shallow grave—is that this is a singular case, but we should be sure about it. As sure as we can be.”
    Bosch nodded. He was