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Dr. Anna Winters sat on a folding chair before the excavation, sighing with relief as she took the pressure off her aching feet.

She mopped sweat from her brow with a napkin and looked out over the site.

The ground here was soft but thankfully not mucky.

That made it easy to dig up and, more importantly, easy to brush and clean any artifacts found gently.

In hard-packed dirt or stone, extracting artifacts without damaging them was a hair-splitting task and, frankly, a rarely successful one.

And she very much wanted everything here as preserved as possible. This was the biggest find of her career and would probably remain the biggest find of her career unless she happened to stumble across an actual Bigfoot skeleton.

She was so glad she'd come out here personally.

She had just crossed over to the wrong side of forty, and while she was in good shape for her age, her age was no longer twenty.

She had nearly chosen to retire from fieldwork, but Brad had convinced her to come out one more time.

She was grateful for that and also grateful for the team of junior researchers and grad students who could handle most of the heavy lifting for her.

She smiled as she anticipated the conversation she'd have with Travis later.

Her brother often teased her about not being a "real" archaeologist because she researched sites of already "well-known" people.

He meant the teasing to be good-natured, but it bothered her more than she let on.

It was bad enough that her parents viewed Travis as the "successful" child and Anna as the "other" one, but to have him rag on her for her career choices was just salt in the wounds.

She couldn't wait to rub him in this one.

This one was the site of a battle between a Mohawk tribe and a band of Lenape warriors.

Historians had never recorded anything more than the occasional skirmish between competing hunting parties in this region, but this was definitely not a squabble between hunting parties.

There were too many weapons and too many bones for this not to be a full-scale territorial battle.

Best of all, the site happened to be on the only thirty acres of federally owned land in the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River National Park Service Area.

That mouthful basically meant that this was the only spot of land where she wouldn't be bothered by greedy landowners wanting to extract every cent possible from her dig team.

Budgets were bad enough without her having to haggle over use permits, rent, other compensation, and the bullshit tax.

“Doctor?”

Anna turned to Bradley, one of the grad students helping her with the dig. She managed to keep her eyes from traveling over his athletic figure this time, another sign of just how excited she was with this find. “Yes, Brad?”

“I think you need to come see this.”

She lifted her eyes to his, reddening a little as she realized she hadn’t quite avoided staring at him after all. The blush and the smile vanished when she saw his expression. The normally bright and happy Brad was ashen, his eyes as big as dinner plates.

She got to her feet and asked, “Is everything okay?”

He shook his head, and a chill formed in the pit of her stomach as she asked, “Did someone get hurt?”

“None of us are hurt.”

His answer should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. None of them were hurt. But somebody was.

For the first time since earning her doctorate, Anna wished that she wasn’t the person in charge.

Bradley was clearly traumatized by whatever he’d seen, but his responsibility had ended the moment he said, “Doctor, I think you need to come see this.” Whatever she was going to see, it was now her job to make sure that the situation was handled correctly.

Despite her fear, she kept her outward demeanor calm. Like it or not, she was in charge, and she needed to be a steadying presence.

Will you relax? You're always catastrophizing. It could be a dead rabbit, and Brad is just squeamish.

She took a deep breath and smiled at Brad. “All right. Show me. And relax. Whatever it is, we’ll take care of it, okay?”

The tension in Brad’s shoulders diminished, and he gave her a soft smile. “Okay.”

He led her away from the excavation toward the upper edge of the site’s boundary. For a brief moment, Anna clung to the hope that whatever he’d seen had been outside of her jurisdiction.

That hope and every other hope died when he showed her the plat of freshly turned earth in a shallow, tree-lined depression that was only twelve goddamned yards away from being someone else’s problem. Anna planned to excavate that clearing a few weeks from now, but someone had done the job for her.

They’d done another job too, one Anna hadn’t asked for and definitely didn’t approve of.

Her first coherent thought was, Why didn’t they dig it deeper?

“Is that…” Brad began. He swallowed. “Is that…”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. Anna didn’t blame him. The thing buried under what had to be less than two feet of dirt was definitely dead but the hand sticking up from the dirt, fingers contracted into claws, definitely didn’t belong to a rabbit.

Some asshole had buried a dead body in the shallowest possible grave inside of her dig site, blatantly ignoring the posted signs and the orange tape that designated this area as off-limits. They had intentionally made this murder—and that had to be what it was—her problem.

But it didn’t have to be her problem for long. It didn’t bring her comfort, per se, that she could pass this along to someone else, but she would be all too happy to have this situation removed from her purview.

“Call the police,” she told Brad. “We have a dead body.”