Robert Tanenbaum - Malice

"Coming in nice and clear," Swanburg yelled back.

Adare had explained to her earlier that day that he planned to send his aircraft up with a specialized camera that would send its images back to the laptop computer as a three-dimensional contour map. The first step would be to locate the Bucyrus steam shovel, and then, by aligning the image the plane's camera was sending back over the photograph taken of the Cadillac, get an approximate direction the photographer on the ground had been facing.

"Then when we've narrowed the search area, we'll look at the contour map and guesstimate the probable flow pattern of the groundwater through the area," Adare said. "That's where the pipes and dogs will come in."

"Of course, that's assuming the steam shovel is a relic and hasn't moved," Swanburg noted. "If it has, then we'll try something else."

The steam shovel had not moved and a short time later, the team was looking across a stretch of the gravel pit toward the ancient mechanical dinosaur, perhaps a mile away. It was still a lot of ground to cover, and the searchers were well aware that as soon as word about the raid on the Unified Church got out, the group's lawyers were likely to come crawling out from under their rocks, seeking injunctions to stop their work.

"We need to get this done today," Charlotte Gates said.

As Adare had said, now was when the pipes and dogs came in, as well as a lesson in subsurface hydrology. As the team gathered around the truck, Reedy pulled a large six-foot-long canvas duffel bag out and explained that "the easiest way to look at what we're going to do is to imagine that you're standing above an underground river.

"Essentially, water flows underground the same way it does above," he said. "Gravity pulls it downhill, and it follows the path of least resistance, although over time, water is a powerful force for change and will make its own path, as in the Grand Canyon."

Reedy went over the facts. One, the car was buried somewhere between them and the steam shovel. However, the photographer had not been high enough for them to be able to accurately gauge the distance between the car and the shovel. "Unless you have more of a perspective from the air, distances can be deceiving in a photograph. Nor do we know if the photographer used a zoom lens and cut out some of the distance between himself and the car."

Therefore, they were going to have to "feel our way upriver, so to speak, and narrow the search area as much as we can. And that," Reedy said, unzipping the duffel and pulling out long, thin pipes, "is where these babies come in. I had them made special by a tent company-titanium, pointed on the end for penetration, and drilled in several places in that first couple of feet to allow water to seep in."

Warren took up the narrative. "We've noticed in the past with the dogs that they would hit on groundwater that came to the surface hundreds of yards below a grave farther up a hill," he said. "Then we had one case where the dogs kept hitting on the leaves of a bush but weren't interested in the ground around it. We dug up the bush, thinking maybe it had grown up on top of the grave. There wasn't a body, but the dogs were all over the water at the bottom of the hole. It was our botanist who said that kind of bush had very deep roots and suggested that the roots had pulled the scent up into the bush and it was coming out of the leaves. That's when we came up with the idea of using these pipes to tap into the groundwater and letting the dogs sniff the tops to see if they'll hit."

Like tag-team wrestlers, Reedy jumped back in. "The idea is to narrow a search area downstream from a suspected grave by placing the pipe in an arc across the flow of that underground river you're standing on. Then, through a process of elimination, we'll let the dogs follow the scent back upstream."

Taking one last look at the contour map, Reedy and Adare set off with the pipes and began to hammer them into the ground, spacing them about twenty feet apart in an arc. Then they moved another fifty feet "upstream" and hammered in another set of pipes.

As they were working, Jojola and Tran arrived and filled everybody in on the operation over at the Unified Church compound. "Ireland's guys have about eight hard-core types holed up in a barrack, but they're not going anywhere," Jojola said.

"How long before our racist friends start calling their lawyers and word gets out?" Marlene asked.

Tran laughed. "Ireland can move fast when he wants," he said. "But he can also move slow. He's taking his time processing everybody. Then he's going to load them all up on the county jail bus and ship them to the 'pokey,' where he'll process them again."

Two hours later, the group was standing with Warren and his dogs. The hounds had followed the scent up and to the right of the main "stream" until reaching a set of pipes the dogs had no interest in. "I'd say we're now upriver from the grave," the dog handler reported.

Everyone turned and looked at the snow-covered field between themselves and the last set of pipes where the dogs had "hit" on the scent. The area was half the size of a football field. They sighed collectively, thinking about the work still to be done, when a snow-white owl flying low above the ground swooped in and snatched a mouse from a spot near the middle of the field. Lucy looked at Jojola, who nodded, but they said nothing.

The next step fell to Reedy, who went back to the truck and returned with an eight-foot-long pole with what looked like white coffee cans attached to either end. He plugged a cable from the pole into a harness apparatus that he slipped on and then opened the chest pack, which contained a readout screen.

Reedy flipped a few switches and began to walk slowly over a piece of ground, then called out to Swanburg, who with Ned's help had moved his table and computer to the search site. "You getting this, Jack?"

"Clear as a bell," Swanburg shouted.

Marlene, who had walked over to stand behind Swanburg so she could see the computer screen, couldn't tell what she was looking at that was so clear. It looked like a bunch of colorful globs reminiscent of the psychedelic poster she'd hung in her college dorm room.

"That's called a gradiometer," Swanburg said, pointing to where Reedy was making adjustments to the machine on his chest. "I won't go into all the scientific mumbo jumbo. But the short explanation is that the earth is essentially an enormous magnet with magnetic fields running north and south. As we all know, ferrous materials-objects made of iron, including the steel used to build Cadillacs-can become magnetized and will have magnetic fields of their own, also running north and south. These can be differentiated from the earth's fields, as well as any objects around them, with the gradiometer, which essentially gives us this colorful map that indicates the intensity of any particular magnetic field. Right now, it's not picking up much of anything, thus the confused blobs."

"Can that thing be used to find gold?" a rough voice behind Swanburg asked.

R. P. Brown had strolled up behind Swanburg, where he'd been trying to act uninterested while still peeking over the scientist's shoulder with Marlene.

Swanburg chuckled. "Sorry, R.P., no. It's only good for objects with iron content."

"Damn," Brown swore. "Then what the hell good is it."

"Well, it has many uses," Swanburg observed. "Obviously, it's handy for finding buried iron, like ore deposits, or utility pipes, or we've even used it to find buried steel drums, one of which had a body stuffed inside, and other illegally dumped toxic wastes. In this case, we're hoping to find a 2003 Eldorado."

Brown was unimpressed and went grumbling back to his Sally. But Marlene hung around and kept asking questions. "So when Jim walks over the car, one of those blobs will suddenly look like a bird's-eye view of a Cadillac?"