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filled them in on my interviews.
    “A baby crying? Are you shitting me?” Coop was never at a loss for comments.
    “Nope. I’m chalking it up to adrenaline. If the dirt samples show that Nate wasn’t the only one outside the car, I’m going to polygraph them all. Anybody know the last time we had a call down in that area?”
    “There was that robbery about eight years ago,” Coop offered.
    “I forgot about that. I think I was still in uniform when that happened.” I tried to remember. Sometimes I felt like a senior citizen on the cusp of the century mark, rather than a young woman in her midthirties.
    Eight years earlier, a carload of twenty-somethings went down to Mary Jane’s Grave. Unfortunately, they had passed two carloads of thugs that were leaving the spot, having finished two cases of beer out there. When they saw the newcomers, the bad guys turned around and blocked the car in at the grave. Then, grabbing their handy ski masks, they pulled open the victims’ car doors, robbed them and pulverized the car with a baseball bat. We caught them, of course, but the case had been a high profile one in the rolling hills of southern Richland County. Had this happened in the city, it wouldn’t have even made the front page.
    Which brought me to my next thought. “Damn, the media’s going to have a field day with this, it being Mary Jane’s Grave and Halloween.” I knew that media attention could be a disaster in any investigation. Information in the public record could open the door to false confessions by local quacks and add long hours interviewing the wrong people. I’d found that it didn’t even pay to ask the media not to print unsubstantiated theories. Some journalists had ethics that mirrored those of the criminals themselves.
    “Well,” Coop added, “at least no one’s been going up into that house.”
    “What house?” I hadn’t remembered seeing one.
    “There’s an old abandoned house up on the hill right above the cemetery. It’s all boarded up and falling apart. A couple of uniforms and I checked it out, but it didn’t look like anyone had messed with it.”
    I knew a local children’s camp, Hidden Hollow, sat on the highest ridge away from the cemetery. In fact, I’d gone there as a child, but right now I couldn’t even visualize where the house was. I made a mental note to go back to the cemetery in daylight to take a closer look.
    “So,” Naomi asked, “now what?”
    “We do what we always do,” I answered. “We wait.”

C HAPTER T HREE
    “Wait? For what?” Naomi asked, wondering what I had up my sleeve.
    “Nothing out of the ordinary. I’m still trying to sort this one out. Meanwhile, we wait for lab reports, final and preliminary. We wait for officer reports and for someone to start talking or bragging. We also wait for any anonymous tips. You know this, Naomi. We’re in a holding zone right now.”
    “I guess you’re right,” she sighed. “Has someone run record checks on those teens?”
    “Of course,” I said, mildly annoyed. “I had Jerry run them.”
    Coop, sensing my mood, started talking about his own high school experiences at Mary Jane’s Grave. They sounded the same as the rest of ours, mildly scary but ultimately uneventful. It was when he spoke of another incident that he got my undivided attention.
    “I remember about fifteen years ago that a carload of kids from Madison High School got killed after leaving there.”
    “I don’t remember that,” I said, perking up.
    “It was a highway patrol case, all over the news. Weren’t you here in town?”
    “Just get to the point and tell me what happened,” I snapped.
    “Grrrr!” he said with a grin. “I guess someone needs her beauty sleep. Well, supposedly four teenage boys were down at the grave drinking, smokin’ dope, you know, what we all used to do. Anyway, according to the only survivor, they all pissed on the grave. On their way back, they hadn’t gone a mile when they wrapped their car