Julesburg Mysteries: Sheriff Mercer Series

The first thing I saw that morning was the dirt.

Not the kind you kick off your boots and forget. This was fresh-cut earth, wet in dark ribbons where the ditcher’s bucket had bitten down beside the South Platte and hauled up a smell that went straight through leather and bone. Clay, river silt, old roots torn loose. Men stood along the trench in their hard hats with their hands on their hips, staring down like the ground had offended them.

It had, in a way.

My truck was parked crooked on the two-track along the irrigation project, dust on the windshield, coffee gone cold in the cup holder. I could hear the machine idling low and mean, that diesel throb you feel in your teeth. Beyond it stretched the flat country Sedgwick County likes to show off when it’s feeling generous: rows of corn, a strip of cottonwoods, a bent wire fence, and the river sliding along its own business a quarter mile off, brown and patient.

Deputy Rachel Flores met me halfway to the trench, her hard hat tucked under one arm. “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

“That’s why I came.”

She gave me a look. Rachel was twenty-eight, maybe, with a face that could still be mistaken for certainty. “The backhoe caught something about six feet down. Thought it was a stump. Then we found a femur. Or what’s left of one.”

“Human?”

“Looks like it.” She nodded toward the cut bank. “And not recent.”

A county road grader rumbled past on the county lane, throwing grit. One of the irrigation contractors had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, unlit, because no one had the nerve to strike it with me standing there. Good. I like being inconvenient when it matters.

I climbed down the slope carefully, boots sliding in the damp clay. At the bottom, the dirt had been scraped clean in a wide crescent. There, half exposed, was a bone the color of old ivory, pocked and brittle. Beside it lay a rusted button the size of a dime and a strip of leather gone stiff as bark. Not a modern grave. Not by a long shot.

“Hold the work,” I said.

The foreman started to protest. I cut him off with a look and a hand. He knew better than to argue with the sheriff on a day like this, especially the first woman to wear the badge in this county. People still said that part out loud, like it was a weather report.

Tom Whitaker arrived ten minutes later in his department truck, broad shoulders filling the cab, his face set in that rancher’s way of going blank when he was thinking hard. He took one look into the trench and spat dust to the side. “Well,” he said, “that’s not good.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not.”

I stepped closer to the exposed remains. There was more than bone. A smear of blackened wood. A brass buckle tongue. Something folded in the clay that might once have been cloth. The air down there held a metallic tang, a buried smell, like rainwater running over old nails.

Tom crouched, careful not to touch. “Could be burial ground from the fort days.”

“Could be,” I said.

But my eyes had snagged on that button. Not military issue, not at first glance. Too plain. Too local. I thought of the old stories my grandmother Maggie used to tell when the wind pushed against the house and the coffee kettle started ticking on the stove. Stories about Julesburg burning, about men shot on the river road, about payrolls that vanished in the smoke and never turned up again. She told them like family history, not legend. Like she’d heard them from someone who had been there and had no reason to lie.

“Call Cross,” I told Rachel.

She was already reaching for her phone. Professor Benjamin Cross knew more about the county’s dead than most people knew about the living, and he’d be in my office within the hour if I let him near this. Which I probably shouldn’t have. Which I was going to do anyway.

Tom stood and brushed clay from his knees. “You think it’s one of ours?”

I looked at the trench, at the river beyond it, at the cut of land where the shovel had bitten into a past that had stayed hidden for a hundred and sixty years.

“I think,” I said, “somebody’s going to hate this.”

Rachel’s phone buzzed before she could make the call. She glanced at the screen, then up at me, the color draining from her face.

“What?” I asked.

She swallowed. “Professor Cross.”

A beat.

“He’s on the line,” she said, “and he says he found the name on something in the county archives.”

Her voice dropped.

“He says it’s tied to a military payroll that went missing in 1865.”

Before I could answer, another truck rolled up hard beside the ditch, tires throwing gravel. A man I didn’t know climbed out, pale under his sun-bleached hat, and started straight toward us with an envelope in one hand.

He shouted my name once, like he’d practiced it.

Then I saw the blood on the front of his shirt.