CHAPTER 1   He'd rather be at Starbucks. Or Hava Java. Or Luci's.   He'd rather be spending Saturday morning in a grubby sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, staring into the sleepy eyes of his beautiful wife, Kelly, while sipping steamy cups of espresso among whiskery hipsters who wear wool hats year-round. In the desert.   Yes, on a lazy Saturday morning, he'd rather be judging millennials.   He'd rather be reading. Or rereading. For his birthday, Kelly bought him a handsomely bound special edition of To Kill a Mockingbird that he's been wanting to devour, as if for the first time.   He'd rather be tossing a ball with his son, Trevor.   Or hiking at Squaw Peak.   Detective Alex Mills of the Phoenix Police Department would rather be undergoing electrolysis of the gonads on this otherwise lazy Saturday morning than being here, doing this.   Instead of staring into Kelly's sleepy eyes, Mills is staring into a hole in the ground. Not a very deep hole, maybe a foot and a half, a gash really, a pit. In this hole, staring back at him, is a dead John Doe, his arms and legs akimbo like an acrobat who fell to earth and missed the net. It's eight thirty, about sixty-five cool degrees, typical for an early- March morning in the valley. The smell of death is starting to rise. Mills guesses the body has been here overnight, that John Doe was murdered shortly before midnight--but time of death is not his job; that task belongs to the Office of the Medical Examiner. Judging by the dried blood around the eyes, the black-and-purple bruises that seep from the forehead down, the corpse's dented head, and the crater in the crown, Mills concludes that John Doe is the victim of a rather unfriendly head bashing. But cause of death is not his job either. Again, the OME. Sorry to bother the medical examiner, but the fact is Alex Mills has not been denied the piety of a lazy Saturday with his wife to perform an autopsy. He's here for two reasons: to figure out who killed John Doe and to figure out why. Of course, that won't happen right now, right here, at the crime scene. Mills doesn't even know at this point if the crime scene is the place of death. Though this crime scene, it could be strongly argued, is the ultimate place of death.   Mills lifts his head from the hole in the ground. He scans the horizon. There is death everywhere. Lovely, landscaped, manicured death. Marked by statuaries of imported marble, exquisitely sculpted. Like something you'd see outside an Italian palazzo, not here at Valley Vista Memorial Gardens in Phoenix, Arizona.   A gathering of marbleized angels, birds, saints, human hands clasped in prayer, you name it--they're all frozen in time here at Valley Vista. Samuel Shine was a golfer, apparently. Mary Harrison Delahunt was a fan of roses. Gordon D. Hancock loved dogs. With such a swanky neighborhood, the property values at Valley Vista Memorial Gardens are said to be double the value of your average Phoenix home. This is where the privileged go to rest. The same luxury had not been afforded John Doe, however. His grave is marked not by marble statuary but by a cardboard sign roughly excised from a carton that was once the home of a Whirlpool refrigerator. Add a thick tree branch and some hearty duct tape, and you have a grave marker staked into the ground that reads the following:   I'm Sorry That I fucked over everybody I got what I deserved And I picked the place myself   Alex Mills is shaking his head, bewildered by the fucking crazy world that produces crazy people who do crazy things when, really, people should just go to Starbucks, or their favorite coffeehouse, and fucking relax.   "We recovered the Sharpie, Alex," a crime scene tech tells him from above.   He looks up. "What?" he barks. "You think the murder weapon was a Sharpie?"   "No, Alex. I don't," the tech replies, then points to the cardboard sign. "We believe the Sharpie was the writing instrument."   Mills nods. "Right. That. Of  course. Where'd you find the marker?"   "About thirty feet down that slope," the tech says. "It was resting in the grass."   "Interesting," Mills says. "Prints?"   "Hopefully."   Mills rises to his feet, gives his legs a shake to loosen his aging knees, and says, "Nice work."   He takes in the view. It is, indeed, a vista of the valley. From this acreage of death you can look across Phoenix to the raging peaks of the Sierra Estrella mountain range and, to the left, the slightly less excited South Mountain. You can think yourself a poet, for a moment, sent here by God to interpret the erosion of time and find yourself completely inadequate, if not a fool, for presuming you can interpret anything this ancient.   What you can interpret, what Alex Mills is paid to interpret, is the erosion of life.   He looks at this crude grave below him once more. It was dug with irregular scoops; at least that's what the skid marks from the shovel suggest. No one tried to be tidy. The dirt was tossed everywhere, the work of an amateur. Pebbles litter the grass. One of them snuck inside Mills's tennis shoe and is rolling around in there like a pinball.   Befitting the clientele of Valley Vista, John Doe is wearing a suit jacket, dress shirt, no tie, as if he came from work. Or a cocktail party.   When she first inspected the victim, homicide detective Jan Powell, a former patrol officer who recently joined the Violent Crimes Bureau, had pointed to the dead man's shoes and whispered, "Ferragamo."   If only the body had been as easy to identify as the shoes.   No wallet. No ID. No business card. Nothing. The prints came back with no match to anything in the database.   But Alex Mills has a hunch. A good hunch. You don't get to die in style and stay anonymous for long. John Doe is a VIP corpse. A member of the dead elite.   He has to laugh. And he does. Audibly. He drifts away, hoping his foolishness goes unnoticed. He has suddenly amused himself with the inevitable headline of the valley's latest murder:   DEAD BODY FOUND AT CEMETERY   For once, the media will get it right. Excerpted from Dig Your Grave by Steven Cooper All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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