Robert Tanenbaum - Malice

"Well, actually no, the lowest values on the readout will be directly above the car," Swanburg answered. "And none of it will look like a car. Remember when you were a kid and someone, maybe a teacher, put iron filings on a piece of paper and then rubbed a magnet underneath? Do you remember the shape the iron filings created?"

"It looked like a butterfly," Marlene said.

Swanburg beamed. "Exactly. The iron filings lined up in a sort of halo around the negative and positive ends of the magnet-sort of like the outer edges of a butterfly's wings."

"So when we find this butterfly's wings we dig down between them," Marlene said.

"Now you're thinking," Swanburg replied. "At least that's the plan."

"Will we know how deep to dig?"

Swanburg shook his head. "Nope. A gradiometer measures magnetic intensity, not depth."

"Okay, set on this end," Reedy yelled. He looked around and suddenly seemed to realize he was one man with a lot of area to cover, and it was already past noon with the sun high overhead and the snow slushy for walking. "Uh, anybody have an idea on where to start?"

"Where the owl caught the mouse," Lucy called out. The others looked at her. "Humor me," she said, and walked across the field until she found where the tips of the owl's wings had left the slightest imprint on the snow where it seized its prey. "Right here, Jim, try right here."

Reedy glanced at the crowd around Swanburg with an amused look on his face. "Actually, I was kidding," he said to Lucy. "We usually divide up the search area into grids so that I don't miss a section. I start in one corner and work from there."

"That will take a long time," Lucy said. "Please, start here. If it doesn't pan out, then go back to your grids."

Reedy tilted his head, looking at Lucy, then shrugged. "Why the hell not," he said, and walked over to Lucy, who bent down and picked something up off the ground.

It was a white feather. "For good luck," she said.

With a half-smile on his face, Reedy began to walk in the direction of the owl's flight path, which had gone from south to north. The smile disappeared and he shouted, "Are you seeing what I'm seeing, Jack?"

"Sure am! You think you got that thing calibrated right?"

Marlene looked at the computer screen and saw the distinctive shape of a butterfly's wings with dark red around the edges, gradually moving to a cooler blue in the middle of the "body."

Reedy walked some distance away from the area and walked a little more. "I got nothing," he yelled.

"Nothing here," Swanburg agreed.

The geologist then returned to the first site and slowly began to pace back along the owl's path. On either end, he bent down and placed pin flags-stiff wires with small plastic squares on the top-along the edge of the perimeter of the "butterfly's wings."

When he finished, he trudged over to the main group and looked at Swanburg's computer. "I'll be damned," he said. "Judging by the length of the anomaly, I'd be willing to bet we just found a Cadillac."

A cheer went up from the group. But Swanburg cautioned. "It looks good. But let's remember, this is a gravel pit with lots of old machinery that could be lying about and even buried."

"Oh, Jack, you're such a wet blanket," Charlotte Gates teased. "This is as good a place to start as any. Let's get that air track over here and start digging."

As they waited for Brown to drive his clanking machine to the site, Lucy walked down and knelt where she'd found the feather. Reedy turned to Marlene. "So you didn't tell me that your daughter was psychic," he said with a quizzical smile.

Marlene smiled back. She was used to Lucy's insistence that her invisible friend St. Teresa was real, as well as the unsettling effects of her almost supernatural gift for languages and for "knowing things."

"I don't know what it is," she said. "I guess that someday science will have explanations for people who seem hyperintuitive or psychic. Maybe some people just pick up more from the environment-they see, hear, or even feel things differently than 'normal' people because their brains are wired differently. I mean, how do idiot savants instantly, and correctly, guess the number of matches that have fallen to the floor, or play a Mozart concerto after hearing it once, or memorize every number in the telephone book after one time through. Yet they can't function well enough to tie their shoes, and only a couple of centuries ago might have been burned at the stake as witches. All science can do is shrug and say that their brains are wired differently. I'm guessing that if there's anything to psychic abilities, we'll learn that there's a similar explanation. Maybe Lucy felt the electromagnetic field when we walked over the area earlier, just like Tom's bloodhounds catch a scent none of us even notices. And, well, there's always God."

"Hey, nothing wrong with any of those theories, even God," Gates said. "As a scientist, I believe that there is a scientific explanation for every phenomenon. But if the explanation for Lucy is that she's wired differently, who's to say that God wasn't the electrician."

"Amen," said Swanburg as Brown and his machine rattled up to the middle of the space between the pin flags.

Within minutes, the crusty little miner had the air track drill pounding away at the frozen ground. And while it might not have gone quite as smoothly as shit through a goose, the crew was astonished at how quickly it broke up the soil, which he stopped to remove from time to time.

"How will we know when he gets to the car?" Lucy asked after about an hour, when the air track was still hammering away two feet down.

"Oh, we'll know," Reedy said. "He has the drill set for the consistency of the soil. When the drill meets something else, like the metal of the car, the machine will behave differently than it does pounding through rock or frozen soil."

As if to demonstrate what Reedy was talking about, the air track suddenly started to buck like a horse at a rodeo, and a screech of metal striking metal filled the air as Brown rushed to shut down the machine.

"What do you think, R.P.?" Reedy yelled.

Brown peered into the hole, then looked up with a grin. "I think a little touching up around the edges to make your job easier, and I'm finished," he shouted. He looked at Marlene. "Better go get your piggy bank, missy, time to pay up."

A half hour later, the group was peering down at the roof of a big car. The walls of the pit had been cleared back to a foot on either side, which Gates now shored up with plastic planks through which she drove stakes to hold them in place.

Gates hopped out of the hole to let Jesse Adare climb in with what looked like a giant pair of tin snips. "Jaws of life," he said. "Cops use them to cut accident victims out of smashed-up cars. I had a feeling they'd come in handy, so I 'borrowed' them from my employers. Just have to get them back by tomorrow night before anyone notices."

It only took five minutes for Adare to peel back the roof of the car and remove it in pieces. There was a space of several inches below where the sand and gravel had not completely filled in or settled, but below that it was packed solid.

"Okay, my turn again," Gates said, and climbed back in the hole with a trowel and a bucket. Probing and scraping gently, she began to remove the material filling the area directly above the driver's seat.

Inch by meticulous inch she placed the material in the bucket, which from time to time she handed up for the others to pour through a screen, to make sure they didn't miss any evidence that remained in the car. After an hour, Gates stopped digging with the trowel and started to brush away at something with her hand.

Perched on the edge of the pit, Marlene glanced up and saw Katarain was standing on the opposite edge, peering in with tears streaming down his dark, suntanned cheeks. His comrade, Esteban, stood next to him with a consoling hand on his shoulder.