"Whaddya mean, no beer?" Rafe stood frozen in shock.

Henri Brown sighed loudly as he scanned the sky over Cascade. "I didn't say no beer; I said no beer until the job's finished."

Megan snickered as she pulled on a pair of heavy leather gloves. "Give it up, mate. He's locked up the amber till we've done our bit."

"It isn't even ten a.m., and you want beer?" Joel frowned. "Should we start to worry? What were those statistics about alcoholism and police, Blair?"

"That's Doctor Sandburg to you people." Simon beamed as if he'd written the dissertation himself.

"This from the man who almost booted me out the door when I mentioned the Thin Blue Line." Blair took a test swing of his sledgehammer. "It depends on whose research you consider most reliable, of course, but most studies put the incidence at around --"

"Hey, wait a minute before you sign me up for rehab!" Rafe glared at his co-workers as he carefully rolled up the sleeves of his designer work shirt. "I didn't mean right now, I meant later. This is going to be thirsty work."

"Which is why," Henri explained patiently, "there's plenty of bottled water in the fridge, and Gatorade."

"Still, he's got a point." Megan walked over to the corner of the yard and stared down at the stained and cracked patio. "This isn't exactly brain surgery. Breaking up this ugly wart might be easier with a bit of a buzz on. What's the harm?"

Henri folded his arms and stood resolute. "This is a nice neighborhood. They're not used to a bunch of cops with a buzz on."

"A bunch of cops and one anthropologist." Megan grinned at Blair. "I'm sure anthro types are too refined to get sloppy drunk. Prim as a bunch of librarians."

Blair grinned back. "Boy, you haven't met many librarians, have you? They drink like the American Legion."

"Are we going to work, or are we going to chat all day?" Jim swung his sledgehammer down with a force that sent concrete chips flying.

"Whoa, John Henry!" Blair laid a hand on Jim's arm. "The plan is to break it up, not pulverize it. Henri can recycle the pieces into stepping stones if we're careful."

Jim's testy remark had succeeded in guilting the group into a working mood, and they gathered around the cracked square of concrete. It was stained and pitted; vigorous weeds had colonized every possible opening. Simon shook his head. "It won't take much to break this up; it's half gone already. Whoever built this did a pretty poor job. Looks like the usual do-it-yourself project that wasn't done too well."

"H's new house was a rental for years and not too well maintained," Blair explained, "but the structure's sound."

Henri nodded. "If this place hadn't been a fixer-upper, I couldn't have bought it. I never thought I could afford something in this neighborhood."

"Which is why we must be on our best behavior, lads," Megan admonished in a plummy British accent. "Squire Henri is now a homeowner -- Lord of the Manor and all that." She sashayed across the yard to bring the wheelbarrow closer.

"Hey, you're not still pissed that you're not getting a sledgehammer, are you?" Henri asked. "It's not that I don't think you're strong enough --"

"It's that nobody trusts you with a blunt instrument," Jim and Blair chorused.

"Oh, shut up and pound."

The sound of the hammers and picks made conversation impossible as five of the men attacked the patio. After a while, they stopped for a water break and watched Megan and Joel lift chunks of concrete and transfer them to the wheelbarrow. Megan almost dropped one on her foot when Jim took off his shirt, revealing the snug and sleeveless undershirt beneath.

Jim, oblivious to the impact of his shirt-shucking, leaned over to examine the remains of the patio and glared at it like it was a lying perp. "No wonder this thing was in such crappy shape. There's no drainage. Some idiot built it right over the dirt."

Rafe looked confused. "As opposed to what?"

"He's a city boy," Henri apologized. "Never lived in anything but an apartment."

Simon took up the lesson. "There should be a bed of gravel and sand under it. Any concrete patio needs drainage, even in a lot drier place than Cascade. Somebody was lazy and thought he'd take a short cut."

"Or it was built by some bloke who thought reading directions wasn't manly," Megan suggested.

"Well, it makes our work easier." Jim hefted his sledgehammer again and went back to pounding.

The others soon followed, although Blair and Megan -- clearly distracted by the view -- were the last to resume their tasks. All worked steadily after that, and it didn't take long for the former patio to be reduced to a mosaic of ragged chunks. Hammers were eventually laid aside, and everyone pitched in to help Megan and Joel move the last pieces of concrete to the side yard. While they worked, Blair and Joel discussed the merits of various kinds of decorative concrete stains, while Rafe and H argued about the pros and cons of stepping stones versus planter beds as the eventual use of the recycled concrete.

By the time the last chunk had been moved, it was almost noon. Since the day was only partly cloudy, they decided to take advantage of what passed for picnic weather in Cascade. H had made a deli run the previous evening, so the work crew was amply rewarded for the morning's efforts. With the heavy work done and the beer no longer off limits, everyone got increasingly mellow, even Jim. He slouched down in one of H's mismatched outdoor chairs and stretched out his long legs. "So, what do you plan to do with the yard now? Put in another patio, the right way?"

"Nah, I was thinking about a deck. Maybe with some of that recycled fake wood stuff that Hairboy keeps talking about."

Blair pointed his beer bottle in Henri's direction. "That's Doctor Hairboy to you."

Megan made a face. "Fake wood? Sounds tacky."

"It's not." Blair sat up and began lecturing. "A lot of people use it now. It's a combination of waste wood and recycled plastic that doesn't warp or rot -- which is great in a place like Cascade. Low maintenance --"

"I like that," H interrupted.

"-- which is just the ticket for a busy officer of the law, and environmentally responsible to boot. Finding a market for recycled material is every bit as important as --"

"Whoa, Blair, take a breath." Rafe held up his hands. "What's your new career going to be, decking salesman?"

"Sure, Rafe. That would make excellent use of my education. I could do the definitive study on the influence of environmental awareness and income level on decking choices in the Pacific Northwest."

Joel looked around. "He is kidding, right?"

Jim rose abruptly, clutching his beer bottle, and walked over to the site of the now ex-patio. "Are you thinking of putting the deck here?"

"Hell, no," H replied. "Right off the back of the house, where it should have been in the first place. I can't imagine why someone would want a patio on the far side of the yard. Dumb idea."

Megan wandered casually over to stand near Jim, nudging the toe of her boot into the dirt. "Maybe they did a lot of cooking outdoors and didn't want to do it close to the house. Maybe they were afraid of fire."

Blair joined them. "Yeah, Cascade can be a real tinderbox, in the ten minutes or so between rainstorms."

Megan gave him the finger and continued to poke around, kicking clods of damp soil, picking up stray bits of concrete. "Maybe someone had a garden shed on top once, or a kid's swing set..."

Jim shook his head. "Not likely. No bolt holes in the concrete."

Blair nodded absently as he squatted down to move bits of dirt around with a stick. "Earthquake country. If you bothered to build a foundation for something, you'd bolt the structure to it."

Gradually the rest of the well-fed laborers wandered over to join their fellows. It was that or fall asleep. Joel walked all the way to the back fence and turned to look back at the house. "A deck would look good there, especially with some kind of awning or pergola on top. Like having another room."

Simon perked up. "Another place to host the annual Major Crime barbecue. I'm tired of hearing the people with houses bitch about how many of you live in places without backyards. They're beginning to feel put upon."

Henri grinned. "If they help me build the thing, I'll volunteer to host next year."

Rafe looked slowly around the spacious yard as he drank his beer. "Looks sort of ratty right now, but it has possibilities."

"Yeah, Doctor Hairboy recommended a landscape person. She's just graduated from the horticulture program at Cascade Community College, so she doesn't charge much."

"But she's good?"

"Blair says so. He used to date her sister." Henri watched Blair, intent on his excavation -- and Jim, intent on Blair.

"Those days are gone forever," Rafe commented.

"Yeah, that's for sure." H fixed his sometime partner with a penetrating stare. "You still have a problem with that?"

"No, I don't think so. Not any more." They watched the tableau in companionable silence for a few minutes. From the look on Jim's face, one would think that someone digging around in the dirt with a stick was the most fascinating sight on earth. Megan was still turning over rocks, and Simon was enjoying the rare semi-sunny afternoon in Henri's most comfortable lounge chair.

Joel came back to join the group after circumnavigating the yard. "So what are you going to do with that bare patch now that the patio's gone? Plant grass?"

"Maybe -- or maybe bushes, or flowers. Let's see what the lady from Deveraux Designs has to say."

While Rafe made lah-di-dah motions, Megan spoke up. "This would be a good spot for a perennial bed. Soil is nice and loose here." She held a clod of dirt in one hand, letting a fine rain of soil fall to the ground as she manipulated the friable mass between her fingers.

"Not all of it," Blair added. "Only toward the center. There's an obvious line of demarcation here, and here..."

"So you're an expert on dirt, too, Sandy?" Megan snickered. "No pun intended."

Blair flicked his stick at her. "I may have specialized in cultural anthropology, but I've been on a lot of digs in my time. I came darn close to specializing in archaeology. Until I decided live people were more interesting than dead ones."

"He's right," Jim said abruptly. "About the dirt. I noticed the hammer felt different when I hit different spots. The center had more give than the perimeter."

Blair smiled. "Megan may be right, H. Part of this soil has been dug already. Maybe there was a flower bed here before."

"Come on, Hairboy, that patio was here for years -- at least that's what the realtor said."

Blair rose to his feet, tossing his stick into the bushes. "Soil disturbances leave traces that are still discernible after millennia," he replied. "If this were a site of potential archaeological interest, I'd say that soil demarcation looked exactly like... Megan! What have you got?"

Megan started at Blair's peremptory tone. She looked at what remained between her fingers, the small core left after all the soil had been absently rubbed away. "Oh dear...it looks like we've disturbed Fluffy's last resting place -- or Fido's."

Blair held out his hand and she placed the object into it. "Would somebody get me some water?"

Since Joel had switched back to water after a single beer, he handed his bottle over. Blair washed the last clinging dirt away from what was clearly a bone -- a small, delicate bone. He sighed, and slowly shook his head.

"It's not a canine or feline bone, although it's often mistaken for one. It's a distal phalange, a finger bone." He raised his eyes to his friends, eyes that were sadder, older, than they had been a moment ago. "A human finger bone."

Seconds of dead silence were broken by a heartfelt moan from Henri Brown.

Blair turned to Jim, who seemed to be staring intently at the center of the square of bare soil -- except his eyes were closed, and his nostrils flared. Blair moved quickly to stand beside his partner, speaking softly and lightly stroking his back. After a few more seconds that seemed like hours, Jim raised his head, his eyes meeting Blair's. Then he turned to the group that had instinctively gathered closely together.

"I don't think it's the only one buried here."

Blair walked over to where Henri now sat on the grass, muttering curses under his breath. "Sorry, H." He rested a hand on the big man's shoulder. "At best, what we have here is a dig..."

"And at the worst..." All eyes turned to Jim.

"It's a crime scene."

"Simon, that sucks. We're right here, and the Chief says we have to bring in Lau to take charge of the scene? She's only been with us two weeks."

"That's the point, Rafe." Simon removed his well-chewed cigar from his mouth and gazed at it as if it held the secrets of the universe. "When a corpse is discovered in a detective's backyard, it does not look good if said detective's longtime colleagues and friends head up the investigation."

Rafe bristled. "But the whole thing has nothing to do with H; he's only been in the house a few months, and that patio was obviously there for years. How can anyone --"

"It's OK, Rafe." Henri turned from the dining room window, where he'd been dejectedly watching a forensics team taping off a section of his new backyard. "The Chief's right. Even if nobody in the PD thinks I had anything to do with this, it wouldn't look good... Think of what the press could make of it. Wish I knew what was going on out there, though."

Everyone made a point of not looking at Jim, who was intently watching the activity in the yard. "Lau's not happy, I can tell you that. In fact, she's headed this way looking like she wants to chew nails."

A moment later the newest addition to Major Crime entered the room, distractedly running her fingers through short black hair that already looked like it been styled with a weed-whacker. "I have a problem, guys."

Simon smiled. "Only one?"

"I'm not counting the sheer embarrassment of the whole situation. This has got to be one of the worst ways to start a new job in the history of employment."

"Nobody holds it against you, Pat. We're lucky we had you around, or the whole thing might be in the hands of another division altogether."

Henri approached his new colleague. "It might be yet, or not a police matter at all, right? We don't even know that an actual crime has been committed, let alone a major one." He turned to Blair, hopefulness written all over his face. "Couldn't it just be archaeological? An old Indian burial or something?"

Jim watched his partner squirm, presumably trying to balance truth with tact. "Well, probably not that," Blair admitted. "There's no record of recent indigenous settlement anywhere around here. If it were as old as a Native American burial I'd expect a small bone like a phalange to exhibit a higher mineral content by now, if it survived at all..." As Henri's face fell, Blair looked stricken. "It could be historical, though -- not ancient, but too old to justify further investigation."

H perked up a bit at that. "Sure! Even if it is a murder, if it's a hundred-year-old murder there's nobody left to prosecute."

"It could just be unlawful disposal of a body," Megan added. "Like that old woman in Nevada who dumped her husband's body in the desert because she couldn't afford a funeral. Got the local cops in a bit of a tizzy, thought they had a murder on their hands."

"Sure," Joel agreed. "This area was pretty rural a hundred years ago. Burying someone on your own property wasn't that big a deal."

Lau held up her hand to cut short the rampant speculation. "The sooner we can get Henri's uninvited guest evicted, the sooner we'll know... and therein lies the problem. I really want to do this by the book, and the book says you excavate an unidentified burial as carefully as an archaeological dig."

"You do if you don't want a defense lawyer to trash your case later, anyway. So what's the problem?" Simon asked. "CPD contracts with forensic archaeologists to do that sort of thing."

"I know, I've got the list --"

"Is Warren giving you a hard time about the budget? I'll talk to him for you --"

"It's not the budget, sir. It's the fact that not a single one of those people is available right now."

"What? None of them? Where the hell are they?"

Lau flipped open her notebook. "Leary is recuperating from gall bladder surgery, Bell is having a baby any minute now, Gallegos is in South America with something called the Equipo Argentinio de Antropologia Forense, and the rest..."

"Are at a major symposium in Tennessee?" Blair interrupted.

Lau nodded. "You got it. A very big deal from what everybody's secretaries told me."

"A major deal," Blair agreed. "I heard about it at William Bass's presentation when Jim and I were in San Francisco last year... Gallegos? That's Elena Gallegos, right?"

"Yeah -- you know her? I've been trying to reach her in Argentina, so I can find out if she's due back any time soon... but so far no luck."

"I'm surprised she's not back already. She's got a summer class at Rainier scheduled in less than two weeks, and she's a stickler for prep. She doesn't usually cut it this close. Did you get her cell number?"

"Nobody even admitted she has a cell phone."

Blair pulled out his own. "The Archaeology Program secretary is a tad overprotective of the faculty. Let me see what I can do."

Looking out the window but ignoring the activity in the yard, Jim listened as Blair wandered into the living room, pushing numbers. As he began to talk, Jim paid more attention to the tone of voice than to the words. He made a bet with himself that his silver-tongued spousal equivalent would get the number within three minutes. He had thirty seconds to go when Blair bounced back into the dining room.

"Got it. You want to call?"

Lau shook her head. "Better someone she knows -- especially someone so good at persuading people. But use my PD cell; it's our dime."

While Blair again wandered off to a quieter part of the house to make his call, everyone but Jim got up and raided H's refrigerator, took bathroom breaks, or just prowled around. Being so close to an investigation without participating, especially when that investigation involved one of their own, was the very definition of frustration. Jim was no less frustrated, but that feeling receded as memories of the trip to San Francisco shoved it aside. Even though he and Blair hadn't been able to attend much of the conference, Jim still remembered how impressive Blair had been, asking questions after Dr. Bass's presentation. For some reason Jim had never told his partner what he'd overhead as the eminent professor left the auditorium. He'd looked back at Blair and remarked to another panelist, "If that young man isn't a forensic anthropologist, he should be." Pretty heady stuff coming from one of the founders of the field. Jim idly watched as forensics erected a tent over the -- grave, they'd all have to call it now. He really should tell Blair about that remark. One of these days.

Blair came back into the room, waving his cell. "OK, got her. She wants to talk to the officer in charge." Lau stopped pacing, breathed an audible sigh of relief, and grabbed the phone.

The other detectives drifted back as Lau talked, and H made a beeline for Blair. "So, will she do it?"

Blair grinned. "Yeah, she will. She's through down there, just had some travel delays -- heavy rain washed out some of the roads. She's flying back tomorrow and is willing to start the day after that."

"Two days before she can start? Oh geez, the neighbors are gonna love me."

"Sorry, H, it was the best --"

Henri clapped a hand on the smaller man's shoulder. "God, Blair, don't apologize! I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Without you, I'd be waiting a lot longer. It's just the waiting and the not knowing. Is my backyard somebody's old family plot or a murder scene?"

Lau approached, still on the phone. "Hold on, Henri. You might not have to wait that long." She turned to Blair. "Been holding out on me, Sandburg?"

"Huh?"

"Dr. Gallegos tells me you know your way around a dig well enough to supervise this until she gets here."

"Whoa! I'm not a forensic archaeologist... I'm not even an archaeologist."

"She told me you'd say that. She also told me I shouldn't listen to you." Lau handed Blair the phone. "Here, you academic types can duke it out."

Blair started talking as soon as the phone got near his face. "Elena, are you nuts? I can't... well yeah, but that was years ago... OK, maybe, but what about your grad students, there must be... nobody? Sure, I know my way around a crime scene by now but that's not the same as... yeah, I've been reading up on the forensic stuff, how did you know that...? Well, you can tell him he's got a big mouth."

Jim knew Blair's goose was cooked as soon as he looked up to see the blatant entreaty on Brown's face.

"Dammit, Elena... all right, but your plane better not be delayed." With a huge sigh, he turned the phone off and handed it back to a beaming Detective Lau. Then he threw up his hands and announced, "Looks like I'm supervising a dig, folks."

Henri Brown drained his second cup of breakfast coffee and set it down on his kitchen table. "So if there's nobody left around Greater Cascade who knows anything about archaeology, who are all those other people digging up my yard?"

Jim winced as H suddenly spoke right next to his ear. He'd turned sight and hearing way up without realizing it, focused as he was on the activity outside. "All two of them? Beginning grad students. They've had experience on digs, but not enough to organize one, or supervise it."

"It's weird, isn't it..."

"What?"

Henri shook his head. "Blair's the one in charge this time, and we're the observers. Doesn't it give you a funny feeling?"

"I've seen him like this before... in front of a class. He's not pretentious about it, or heavy-handed, but he makes it clear who has the authority in that classroom."

Both men watched Blair direct the students as they used string and stakes to lay out a grid. Lau still kept a careful eye on the proceedings, and a forensics tech waited to process any evidence that eventually came to light.

"You gonna stick around?"

Jim shook his head. "Not much point. This thing is being excavated an inch at a time, and Blair doesn't expect to get close to anything significant until tomorrow. Even if he does, he doesn't want to expose the body until Gallegos gets here."

"Makes sense. She's the one with the expert-witness cred."

"I'm just the chauffeur today, and the gopher."

"How come Blair didn't bring his own car?"

"Mr. Ecological Consciousness, are you kidding? Besides, he thought you'd want as low a profile as possible to keep you out of trouble with neighbors. You've got enough cars in front already."

"God, yes. Tell him I owe him one. Another one."

"Besides, the little elves from Rainier have a van, they brought all the equipment on the list Blair emailed to them. If he forgot anything --"

"Not likely."

"They can run out for it." Jim rose from the table. "Now I need to go-fer some groceries, do laundry, clean -- the usual weekend domestic shit. And the loft still needs some minor repairs. Blair and I were going to do it together tomorrow, but it looks like he'll be busy. Thanks for the coffee."

Usually cleaning and fixing up something made him feel good, Jim mused as he spackled a set of gouges on the wall near the door. It didn't seem to be working today. He was restless, irritated. OK, he was entitled to be irritated, because some crook had messed up his home yet another goddam time. And he knew touch-up paint on these repairs wouldn't be enough. The difference in color between the repairs and the rest of the wall was going to be so obvious it would drive him nuts. They really should repaint the whole loft, but things were too busy right now...

Jim sank back on his heels. Who was he kidding? Doing stuff like this without Blair, that was the problem. It was all too reminiscent of the bad old days, when this space wasn't much more than an empty shell. The d飯r had been all too fitting for the man who lived there... if you could call that living. It was strange, and not a little painful, to face the James Ellison of five years ago, even as a mere memory. What a prick that guy was... acting as if his barren substitute for a life was so important, letting Blair believe it until he gave up his own future to preserve it. Jim Ellison was one lucky sonofabitch, God (or whatever) knew why. Blair's life was given back to him, and later his future. Dr. Sandburg at last... no accolades and prizes and book contracts this time, but a chance to do what he was meant to do, to use that magnificent brain for something other than keeping Detective Ellison's sorry ass out of trouble.

Speaking of miracles... this unnatural quiet, this enforced solitude, was all too reminiscent of more recent and more terrifying things; memories still raw. Life before Blair was uncomfortable to contemplate, like the universe before the Big Bang. Life without Blair, with Blair gone, stolen, taken who knows where, suffering who knows what... that was terror, and pain, and an emptiness so profound Jim could barely wrap his head around it. Adam looking back at the Garden. Damned souls in Hell, fire and brimstone mere irritations next to the real torment, eternal denial of the presence of God.

Jim rose, his knees protesting. He sat on one of the kitchen chairs, staring at the dark green wall, now mottled with patches of white spackle. Truth now... Blair was his life, that was the bottom line, the sine qua non, as his partner would say. What was the literal meaning of that... "without which, nothing." That about summed it up.

Whatever power looked out for Sentinels and Guides had been given a helluva workout by Sandburg & Ellison up to now, but maybe it had a limit. Maybe Guides were like cats, with a finite number of lives, but how many? Obviously a lot more than nine. Jim shuddered. What if their luck was due to run out? How long could they keep testing that particular limit? What if the next time was one time too many?

Jim leaned on the chair a moment, contemplating the wall. Then he straightened abruptly and headed out the door, grabbing his keys on the way. Fuck this. Fuck the wall. He had more important things to do at the station -- some important research. Research. That would amuse Sandburg, except Jim had no intention of telling him about it. Maybe the right offices would be closed today, but most of what he needed he could get off the computer. He could finish touching up the wall later. As for the painting problem... he'd convince himself it was a "wall treatment." Or he'd dial down sight while he was home, and not let himself notice it. Or... or before long it wouldn't be an issue after all.

Jim pulled up in front of H's new digs on Azalea Street for the second time that day. After his stint at the PD Jim had returned to the loft with renewed energy. The wall had been painted, damaged bricks replaced or re-pointed, the laundry done and put away, the place cleaned from stem to stern. His domestic fit was so intense that it wasn't until his stomach complained that he realized it was well past what normal people considered dinnertime. His first gut reaction had been a sharp stab of fear -- where was Blair? -- but he'd squelched that immediately. Summer days were long at this latitude, and Dr. Sandburg was probably just caught up in the pleasure of stretching his archaeological muscles after so long.

As he got out of the car he noted that the van was still there, which supported his more rational theory. Lau's car was gone, which was hardly surprising. She had more pressing cases than one that might not even be a crime, or at least not a prosecutable one. Strangely, the evidence tech's car was also gone, but Jim recognized another as belonging to the police photographer who'd arrived this morning as Jim was leaving. He knocked on the front door. At this rate, H's new house was going to be almost as familiar as his own.

"Jim, hi! Did Blair call you, or were you just getting paranoid?"

"No, he didn't call me, and it's only paranoia if they're not out to get you."

Henri opened the door wide and waved Jim in. "Point taken." H led the way to the familiar dining room. "He's still working."

Jim walked to the back door and looked out through the screen. "Has he had anything to eat?"

"Not what you'd call a real meal," H admitted, "and only when I threatened to sit on him and force-feed him."

"Those helpers of his look like they're ready to pass out."

"Amazing, isn't it? Those kids are close to a decade younger and he's got 'em worn out. I swear, if Blair could bottle whatever it is that keeps him going, he wouldn't have to worry about making a living. He'll end up richer than Bill Gates."

Jim pushed the door open. "I guess it's time we took pity on the younger generation."

They strolled into the yard. An exhausted-looking young man and woman were sifting dirt onto the ground, using a box with wooden sides and a screened bottom. As they sifted, they peered into the box with glazed eyes. An even younger man lounged in a chair, cameras slung around his neck. Jim recognized him as one of the PD's photographers. With the red hair, freckles, and cameras, he'd always made Jim think of Jimmy Olsen. He was watching Blair with obvious fascination. Jim frowned.

The newly minted Dr. Sandburg was crouched over a barely grave-sized hole over a foot deep, using a small pointed trowel to remove soil from one square of the grid and convey it to a bucket. His clothes and gloved hands were covered in dirt, and there were streaks of it on his face. At some point he'd tied his hair back, but some of it had escaped, and the strands surrounding his face looked like they'd had repeated encounters with the soil of Henri's back yard. When he sat up, Jim could hear the bones and cartilage protest. He looked totally at home and happy as a clam.

"Sandburg, are you planning to take root?"

"Jim!" Blair scrambled to his feet, grinning like an idiot. "Is it almost time for dinner?"

"Maybe somewhere in Hawaii. What happened to your watch?"

"I took it off so it wouldn't get dirty. What time is it?" He looked at the wrist Jim stuck in front of his face, took off his glasses, cleaned them on the inside of his shirt, put them back on and looked again. "Oh, shit."

He turned to the grad students, who had stopped sifting, a glimmer of hope in their eyes. "Geez, guys, I'm sorry. I had no idea it was so late."

The female answered weakly. "It's OK, Dr. Sandburg."

Uh-oh. Jim risked a quick glance at Blair's crotch. Jeans tighter all of a sudden -- hard to tell with all the dirt -- but nowhere near as blatant a reaction as before. Maybe he was getting a handle on his little problem. Good thing, or his career possibilities might be severely curtailed.

"We know this could be important," the male student added, "but we are getting kinda hungry."

"Kinda? More like starving I'll bet. Knock it off for now, and go get yourselves a pizza, on me. Jim, have you got a twenty?"

Jim handed it over, ignoring the students' insincere protests and pondering Blair's creative definition of 'on me'.

"But what about that bucket? It's the last from this layer."

"Jim and I can do it. Go pig out, and I'll see you at eight tomorrow morning." He picked up the screened box. "Jim, grab the other end of this, will you? H, can you bring that bucket? Hey, Rick, we're ready for your last photo of the day."

Everybody hopped to without question, Jim noticed, including himself. Too bad Blair's personality was incompatible with a career in the military -- he'd be a general by now. He had quite a gift for making people do what he wanted before they knew what was happening. Even people who weren't crazy in love with him. The world was damn lucky he'd chosen to use his powers for good.

Jim picked up his end of the screen, squinting as H dropped the bucket of dirt into it. They moved it back and forth as Rick moved around the yard, taking pictures from various angles. Jim watched his progress from marker to marker, frowning.

"It's not me he's interested in, you know. He has a real jones for archaeology."

"You sure?"

"Trust me... hold it." Jim stopped sifting while Blair poked at something in the dirt. "Never mind... just a pebble."

"What happened to Jenny? I thought you needed an evidence tech around."

"She lives close by, I told her to go home to her kids and I'd call her if I needed her. We haven't turned up anything since right after we started, so I doubted I would."

"You found something else?"

Blair glanced over to where H was helping Rick pack up his equipment. "Another bone," he said softly. "A middle phalange. Or, more accurately, half of one."

"Seems odd that you'd find two bones in the beginning, then nothing."

"Well, I have a theory about that."

"Two bones -- excuse me, one and a half bones -- and you have a theory?"

"I can't really tell without examining it under magnification, and maybe not even then. I'm no forensic anthropologist..."

"Just like you're not an archaeologist?"

"Can it. It looked to me like the second bone was cut. Why do you think bones representing approximately one-half of somebody's finger might be found in a different place from the rest of a body?"

Jim thought a moment, watching the dirt sift through the mesh to the ground below. "If the victim is attacked with a knife, the hands usually have defensive wounds. Maybe a finger was cut most of the way through. And if somebody was dumping a body in the dark..."

"They might not notice if the end of the finger came off during the process. It could have landed on the pile of fill, and ended up in a much different layer from the rest of the body." All the dirt had sifted out, and nothing interesting remained. "You see anything?"

Jim shook his head. "Plain old pebbles. Can we eat now?"

Blair seemed to notice his grubby condition at last. "Uh... I don't think I can go anywhere civilized without a shower."

"We can pick up something on the way and take it home. Come on, I'll scrub your back."

"I think you're going to have scrub more than that. This dirt gets everywhere."

Jim reached around to dust off the seat of Blair's jeans. "Oh, that can definitely be arranged. When it comes to cleaning I'm very thorough."

Once Blair had been dragged out of his archaeological fog and reminded of how little he'd had to eat, he was suddenly ravenous. Their stop at a Chinese take-out had included an extra large order of egg rolls. Blair usually frowned on those -- too greasy -- but now he was apparently too hungry to wait until they got home. Trying to keep his eyes on the road most of the time, Jim risked an occasional sidelong glance as his partner dipped egg rolls into the Styrofoam cup between his knees. Once dipped, they were twirled and then conveyed to the Sandburg mouth at breakneck speed -- presumably to keep drips from escaping. If so, the technique wasn't always successful. Several blobs, of a color not found in nature, had joined the contents of Henri's yard on Blair's shirt front.

"Any of that crap gets on the inside of this truck, you're dead meat." A lengthy traffic light gave Jim the chance for a long look. Unfortunately, he managed that look just as the sexiest lips in the known universe, now shiny with peanut oil, had wrapped themselves around an egg roll. Blair looked almost obscenely satisfied, and way too suggestive of plenty of other times when those lips were wrapped around something a lot more substantial than an egg roll.

"Light's green, Jim," Blair noted unnecessarily as the idiot behind them leaned on his horn. Jim briefly considered getting out of the truck and hauling the driver in for disturbing the peace, but quickly dismissed the idea. He wanted -- he needed to get back to the loft now, while there was still enough blood in his head for his brain to function.

The obscene apparition sitting next to him licked its lips. "I figure once we get home you won't want to eat right away. At least not the broccoli beef."

Jim stepped on the gas.

Cartons of food sat cooling on the kitchen counter while one James Ellison applied his gift for obsessive cleaning to the person of one grubby pseudo-archaeologist. He was careful to thoroughly wash every last fold and orifice, pointedly ignoring the increasingly obvious evidence of the cleanee's desire for more than personal hygiene. Jim had washed and rinsed the riot of hair twice and was now working conditioner through it. The look on his face suggested that Nirvana was just possibly attainable via hair care. Blair's voice brought him out of a near-zone.

"Do you remember what I did with my fishing hat?"

"Your what?"

"Earth to Jim... my fishing hat? The one I wore when you first taught me how to cast?"

"Uh... it's in the closet of your old room, I think. Why, are you planning to go fishing?"

"No, doofus, at least not anytime soon." Blair stopped talking briefly when Jim lowered the shower spray to his curls, chasing out every molecule of conditioner, testing the strands with his fingers. "Mmmm... no, I need something to help keep my hair from contaminating the dig site."

Jim turned off the water and started toweling his partner's soaked mass of curls, thinking that he must have developed strong neck muscles just to hold his head upright in the shower. "Aren't you locking the barn door after the horse has shed over everything?"

Blair grabbed another towel and started drying Jim off, very slowly. "No, I was really careful. I borrowed a bandanna from H for awhile, but it got uncomfortable near the end. Besides, I wasn't really expecting to expose much besides dirt today. Tomorrow we might get close enough to the body to find hair and fibers, so I need to be really careful."

"You're enjoying yourself, aren't you?"

Blair smiled, that light-up-the-room smile that turned tough dicks into horny guys who forgot they had any body part but a dick. "Yeah, I am. It is kinda fun to do this again, especially as 'Dr. Sandburg'. I kept wanting to look over my shoulder and see who those kids were talking to, though."

Jim carefully draped the damp towels over the racks, spreading them out to dry. He turned around. "Well, do you think Dr. Sandburg could be persuaded to do any more excavating tonight?"

Blair stepped up to his taller lover, stretching to wrap one arm around the muscular neck and caress the fine, damp hair with his fingers. He traced a finger around Jim's lips, pressing gently at the center until his probing finger was sucked inside. "Hm, I don't know. Do you know of any mysterious places that need exploring? Some deep, dark cavity, maybe?"

Jim slipped his arms around the young man who now smelled more of herb and musk than dirt, sweat and sweet-sour sauce. He reluctantly released the finger. "I might. How skilled an excavator are you?"

Blair withdrew his finger and covered Jim's half-open lips with his own, slipping his tongue between as smoothly as cream. Jim's hands slid down to press the smaller body against his own, hungry for more contact as that knowing tongue tasted and caressed every inch of his mouth. Literal hunger was forgotten as a deeper hunger took over, one that only one thing, one person, could satisfy.

"Well, does my excavation technique pass muster?"

Jim slipped his hands under his partner's delectable ass, lifting him upwards as Blair wrapped strong arms around his neck and even stronger legs around his hips. "Come on, Indiana. Let's go search for treasure."

Jim was sleeping the sleep of the well-fed and well-fucked when the earthquake jolted him awake. It took him a second or two to realize that the source wasn't the Cascadia subduction zone acting up again; it was lying beside him. Blair was mumbling and twitching in his sleep. He didn't seem to be in the throes of some nightmare. He seemed not afraid but distressed, disturbed. Jim was trying to decide whether or not to wake his bedmate when Blair's eyes slowly opened. As they met Jim's, he gave a little shake of his head and punched up the pillows to lie back against them, half sitting.

"Shit, that was weird. Sorry I woke you, man."

Jim leaned over to slide a reassuring hand over Blair's chest and plant a light kiss on the forehead now wrinkled in thought. "What was weird? You didn't seem to be having a nightmare or anything. You looked more pissed off than scared."

"Yeah -- confused, pissed off... I was dreaming about archaeology. Imagine that. Wonder where that came from?"

"Sarcasm doesn't become you, Chief. So you dreamed about the dig today... hardly surprising."

Blair began fiddling with the sheet, pleating it into little folds between his fingers. "Well, no, I didn't, actually. That was the odd thing... I dreamed about one I was on years ago as an undergrad. Rainier had a major Inca site in Ecuador they'd been working on for years. I got to spend Spring Break there one year, doing stuff even more lowly than those kids I was supervising today."

"Well, you said you were really interested in archaeology once. Maybe being on a dig again brought it back -- even though it was in H's backyard, not Ecuador."

"Maybe. Except at first I was seeing the site as it must have been originally. It was full of people, and color, and life. Then it changed to some bleak, empty place. It was, I dunno... forbidding, I guess. I didn't feel welcome there any longer."

"Your career took a different path; you said so yourself. Maybe you were thinking about the decision you made to go for live people and not dead ones."

"Maybe."

Jim sat up, matching Blair's angle, and slipped an arm behind his twitchy partner's head. "Do you regret taking on the job? H could have waited... or forensics could have done it. Do we really need an archaeologist?"

"Well, in the words of Clyde Snow -- who, I remind you, is one of the giants in the field -- 'Having police exhume a skeleton is like having a chimpanzee do a heart transplant.'"

"Christ, why don't you tell Serena that sometime? Make sure your insurance is paid up first."

Jim was glad to hear Blair chuckle as he relaxed into the embrace. "Do I look suicidal to you? Hey, I didn't create it, I only quoted it. But you know what a good defense attorney could do if we don't do this the right way."

"You don't think this is just an unrecorded historical burial."

Jim could feel the sigh ebb and flow where Blair's skin met his own. "No. You've been around enough excavations like this to know what a burial cut is, right?"

"It's the line of demarcation between disturbed and undisturbed soil. That's what you were about to say to Megan this morning, weren't you? It looked like a burial to you even before she found that bone."

"It certainly looked like a hole that had been dug and filled in. That doesn't always mean a body, of course. People bury valuables, they bury time capsules... but I've now excavated a few layers of the contents of that hole, right to the cut. You noticed the shape, didn't you?"

"Irregular."

"Exactly. If you bury Grandpa in the yard, you dig a nice, rectangular grave, with straight sides. But if you've just whacked Grandpa over the head because you found out that he cut you out of the will..."

"You're in a hurry, afraid of getting caught. You don't care about neatness; you dig a hole just as big as you need as fast as you can."

"And you dig a shallower one. My guess is I'll get to the level of the skeleton by noon or so tomorrow. Then I'll have to stop and wait for the real archaeologist. Henri is gonna crawl the walls."

Jim nodded. He should go back to sleep, but there was a subtle tension in the air that was familiar and welcome. Blair seemed wide-awake. In fact, he seemed downright lively, Jim amended, as he found himself blanketed by one semi-aroused partner. Some tiny, logical part of his brain tried to point out they both might feel the lack of sleep tomorrow, but all his other parts were jumping to attention like privates hearing the drill sergeant's bellow. Truth was, Blair Sandburg was like an addictive drug, and Jim Ellison was not about to turn down another hit. He'd had too many episodes of enforced withdrawal recently, and he never wanted to feel that way again.

Blair's lips were right suddenly next to his ear, his throaty voice caressing. "Come on, stud. Your turn to explore Where No Man Has Gone Before."

"Excuse me?"

"OK, no other man. Now, do you want to argue with me or fuck me senseless?"

"Fuck Sir, yes Sir!"

Before Jim knew what hit him, the Sandburg hands and mouth were all over him, seemingly defying the laws of physics to drive him crazy in way too many places at once. He gave himself up to the almost painfully exquisite feelings, opening every sense to the rush that was Blair. Their earlier lovemaking had been slow and tender; but Jim knew this would be fast and intense. Hard to believe his lover had been new to this not that long ago. He was definitely a quick study (at everything but rollerblading) and in this particular case the student was soon going to surpass the teacher. Jim watched as his now-rigid cock was expertly swathed in a condom and coated with lube. Beautiful, capable hands... beautiful, capable man...

"Come on, Jim -- need you in me, now!"

Blair was now beneath him, knees pulled up, totally open, face tense with need.

"Anything you want, babe... anything..." Jim slid Blair's legs over his shoulders, positioned himself, and slowly leaned forward. There was a gasp as the head of his cock pushed in, but he wasn't sure which of them had made the sound. He waited, feeling Blair's fingers dig into the flesh of his back, waiting for that inner ring of muscle to unclench and welcome him inside. When it did he pushed forward quickly, urged by eager words and touches. When he was inside as far as mere flesh allowed, he stopped briefly, savoring the sensation. He arched his back, kissing his way down the beloved face underneath him. When he reached Blair's mouth he pulled back and thrust in again quickly, swallowing his lover's cry.

Blair wanted it hard and fast, and Jim gave it to him. While he could still think a little he found himself wishing it could last longer, but then it might well kill him if it did. Blair was milking him, urging him with words, then just "Jim!" repeated over and over. Words stopped making sense altogether just before an animal sound tore out of Blair's throat, and Jim felt a slick, creamy wetness explode into the space between their bodies. The sight, sound and smell of Blair's coming was like a detonator to his own explosion, one that shattered him into a million pieces, and then drew them back to coalesce into a sated mass of bone and muscle. He barely managed to avoid collapsing on top of his partner, rolling sideways to land at least partly on the mattress.

Jim got his breath back under control by force of will, then forced his reluctant body to move, dispose of the condom, and clean them both up. "Think you can sleep now?"

Blair rewarded Jim with a sleepy, sated grin. "Oh, yeah. Best sleep aid known to man... and no prescription needed."

Jim settled in, spooning up behind him. "Don't expect to see it advertised on TV anytime soon."

Blair chuckled as he tugged Jim's arm closer against his chest. "Have I mentioned lately how much I love you?"

"Once or twice." Jim bent his head to kiss Blair's shoulder. "Have I mentioned what a lucky sonofabitch I am?"

"Mmmm... s'familiar."

Jim felt the muscles beneath his hand relax into sleep, the breathing slow. Soon he slept too and dreamed of Eden.

Blair sighed. "H is gonna be very unhappy."

Elena Gallegos rose slowly from the ground where she'd been peering closely at the skeleton, now almost totally exposed. "God, this is harder in my forties than it was in my twenties." It didn't take a Sentinel to hear joints protest as she stretched. "I can't be officially sure until I get these bones back to the lab, but if those aren't cut marks I'll eat my board certification. There are too many for it to be suicide. So I'm guessing cause of death -- stabbing; manner of death -- homicide."

"Damn."

"You did a great job with the excavation, Blair. Sure I can't convince you to go into my field?"

"Too many newer bodies in more disgusting shape than this one. And you never should have quoted Mary Manhein at me."

"My old teacher? What did she say that impressed you so much?"

"If you don't mind low pay, night and weekend work, treacherous recovery sites, snakes, mosquitos, and poison ivy, then a career in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology could give you amazing satisfaction."

"Oh. That quote. Remind me to keep my mouth shut next time I try to recruit." Brushing off dirt, she wandered off to find the cooler that held bottled water.

Jim stood next to Blair as they all looked at the excavated grave. The soil that had been removed and sifted lay in a large pile by the back fence. The hole was about five feet by less than three, more or less rectangular but with ragged edges. In the center was a hunched mound of bones, still held in roughly human shape by the remaining dirt and a few dried shreds of cartilage. It looked some macabre bas-relief; a memento mori from a medieval cathedral. "Can you tell anything else, Chief? Sex? Age? How long in the ground?"

"Pelvis definitely looks female, that's pretty obvious. Age -- based on what we can see of suture closure and epiphyseal fusion -- twenty to forty almost certain; twenty-five to thirty-five more likely. When was she buried? That's tougher without some lab time. At least five years anyway."

"What tells you that?"

"Smell. Or, more precisely, lack of a smell. When Megan first discovered that bone, you said there were more. How did you know that?"

"Between the Army and the PD I've encountered enough bones to know what they smell like, Sandburg. Kind of musty. It's not easy to filter them out from the earth smells when they're buried, but I can do it with a little concentration."

"But bones don't all smell the same, do they?"

"No..." Suddenly Jim had a vivid flashback of that day in the Peruvian jungle, when a Ranger unit exhumed seven bodies. A grieving Army Captain had buried his men eighteen months ago; now a Sentinel watched as seven sets of bones were taken from those makeshift graves.

"Candle wax. I remember when I watched the Ranger unit recover my crew... I could swear that I was smelling candle wax. I've smelled it lots of times since, when I had to deal with skeletonized bodies. But I don't smell it now."

Blair reached out to rest his hand lightly on Jim's arm. "It's the smell of the fat in the marrow. It takes about five years to disappear." Blair began a subtle, soothing motion with his fingers. "I'm sorry, Jim, I should have thought..."

Jim shook his head. "Forget it. It was over ten years ago. I'm surprised I still remember that. Most of the bodies I've run into since are a lot fresher than that and smell a lot worse. I wouldn't be likely to pay attention to something as innocuous as candle wax."

Elena returned, dribbling water over her face and neck. "Blair, are you committing speculation over there?"

"A little, based on pretty good data."

Elena scrubbed her face with the tail of her shirt. "Well, as long as we're speculating... I think this is an old murder, but not necessarily beyond prosecuting. Those bones have started to coarsen and crack, and leach out some calcium phosphate. That suggests at least twenty to thirty years in this type of soil. But there's no sign of mineralization. If these bones were as old as your Detective Brown wishes they were, I'd expect to see some of that. I've dug up way too many bones in my time, and my instincts are pretty good."

Blair squatted beside the grave for a closer look. "So... at least twenty, less than fifty?"

"In a nutshell. Time to call back the Crime Scene Unit."

Simon leaned back in his office chair and took a long drink of Columbian Mocha Cinnamon. "The Chief says the case is still Lau's." He let the babble of protest go on for a bit -- Lau was protesting as energetically as anyone -- then held up his hand for silence.

"However, since Dr. Gallegos's final report makes it clear that Detective Brown was way too young to murder anyone when our victim was buried, there's no reason to move the case to another division. Lau is encouraged to call on the rest of you for assistance as she sees fit. She has a fresh eye; you have a knowledge of Cascade that she doesn't."

"Yet." Lau sighed. "I may know a lot more about the recent history of Cascade after this is over."

"So when did this murder take place?" Megan asked.

Simon flipped through the report. "Late 1960s. Probably 1969."

"What?" Rafe squawked. "How can Gallegos pin it down like that? Blair said nothing was discovered with the body except a few cotton fibers -- no intact clothes, coins -- nothing to suggest a precise date."

Everyone turned to Blair, including Simon. "It's in the report, Captain..."

"I'm tired of flipping pages, Sandburg. Explain."

"Elena ran a bunch of biochemical tests on the bones, but the clincher was her test on radioactive isotopes."

Joel frowned. "I didn't think radioactive dating was accurate on anything recent."

"It's not that kind of dating. It's a fairly new technique --"

"Nuclear testing! Of course!" Lau jumped out of her chair and began pacing.

Blair nodded. "Nuclear testing caused the level of various radioactive substances in the atmosphere to rise pretty dramatically in a relatively short time. Remember the flap years ago about strontium 90 in milk? Well, it gets deposited in bone very easily, and it sticks around. The level in the atmosphere peaked around the early sixties, and in bone about 1969. Our skeleton had a pretty high percentage, so victim was almost certainly killed near that year."

"Son of a gun," Joel exclaimed. "Guess there's a silver lining to even a mushroom cloud. It makes it a lot easier to figure out who our victim might be if we can narrow the time down that much."

"We got lucky," Simon agreed. "About time. Rafe and Joel are going to canvass Henri's new neighbors, they're the least likely to piss them off."

"Why not me?" Blair asked. "That sounds like the sort of thing I usually get to do."

"But you do research even better," Simon replied. "You and Lau are going to go digging, not literally this time. She gets to begin familiarizing herself with our fine City bureaucracy by tracking down who owned and lived in H's house at the appropriate time. And you, Dr. Sandburg -- you get to look at old Missing Persons reports for a potential victim."

"Aw, Simon, those old reports aren't even digitized yet. Some of them are on microfilm! That stuff gives me a headache."

"I'll give you worse than that, Sandburg. Megan and Jim need to be in court for the next couple of days, so you're elected. Should be like old times."