Bone Canyon

by Goldberg, Lee

“You say that like you might shoot me if I say yes.”

  “I’d be tempted.”

  “You can save a bullet. I’m a forensic anthropologist. Dr. Daniel Brooks. I’m working as a consultant for the crime scene unit. Nan Baker sent me out to get started while she finishes up in Lancaster.”

  Nan was the head of the CSU. Eve felt the tension easing in her shoulders and gave him a closer look. He was in his early thirties, had curly brown hair, wore rimless glasses, and hadn’t shaved in a few days, not because he was trying to be stylish, she thought, but because he was too busy, forgetful, or just didn’t care.

  She clipped her badge back to her belt and gestured to the taped-off yard behind her. “The crime scene is over there.”

  “Actually, it’s fifty yards that way.” Daniel jerked his thumb behind him, like he was hitchhiking. “And fifty yards that way.” He nodded toward Mintner’s backyard. “And along that entire hillside.” He looked up at Latigo Canyon Road. “At least for now. It could expand another fifty or a hundred yards in any direction.”

  “Why such a large area?”

  “Because there are over two hundred bones in the human body and they have probably been broken and scattered by animals, firefighters, the water and fire-retardant drops from aircraft, and the runoff from the rains we’ve had since then,” Daniel said. She didn’t detect even the slightest bit of condescension in his voice, but rather a joyful eagerness to share his task with her. “Besides the bones, I’m also looking for loose teeth, surgical implants, jewelry, and any personal effects belonging to the decedent that might still be around.”

  It all seemed obvious to her now that she’d heard his explanation and she felt stupid for not already knowing it. Her inexperience was showing. Again.

  “We’re going to need a lot more crime scene tape.”

  “I’m all out of little wire marker flags,” Daniel said. “Do you have any?”

  “No I don’t. I’ve never had any. Why would I?”

  “You can never have too many flags. I buy ’em in packs of a hundred every time I step into a Walmart and I still always run out. Do you have a pen I could borrow?”

  “Sure.” Eve reached into the inside pocket of her blazer and handed him a disposable ballpoint.

  “Thank you.” He bent over and stuck the pen in the dirt beside his foot. It was a good thing she hadn’t loaned him a Montblanc, she thought.

  Eve looked down and saw something white and partially buried in the loose black soil. “What’s that?”

  “One distal phalange,” Daniel said and then added, before she could ask: “The tip of the little toe of the left foot.”

  “Where’s the rest of the foot?”

  “It could be anywhere. Or, rather, everywhere. When the soft tissues burn away, the tiny bones that make up the hands and feet are freed like the beads of a necklace after the string has been cut,” Daniel said.

  Now she knew why she needed little marker flags.

  “Can you please show me the skull fragment?”

  She lifted the crime scene tape and led him over to the area where the skull was. Daniel moved slowly and gingerly beside her, his eyes on the ground.

  “Watch where you step,” he said. “You never know if there might be a bone fragment underfoot. Think of it as walking on the beach and trying not to crush any shells.”

  Eve moved like she was in a minefield. Now that she was looking at her feet, she noticed to her annoyance that her new flat-heeled Oxfords were covered with soot. She hoped the shoes could be cleaned—otherwise she was out eighty bucks. It was a dumb mistake. She should have put disposable Tyvek shoe covers over her Oxfords or changed into the pair of boots that she kept in the trunk for slogging through mud.

  They reached the skull fragment. Daniel took a picture, then pulled a tiny brush from one of his cargo pockets, crouched beside the bone, and gently removed some of the dirt from the surface. He studied it for a second. “This was a white woman in her twenties and she was dead long before the fire.”

  Eve was astonished by his casual pronouncement. “How can you tell all of that from a charred skull fragment?”

  “The size of the skull, the rounded shape of the eye orbit, and the smooth, flat brow ridge are all indicators of the sex,” he said and used his brush as a pointer. “The narrow nasal aperture suggests that she was white. The fusion lines, which fade as we grow older, hint at her age. The coloration of the bone, and the type of charring at the edges, tells me she was a skeleton before the flames got to her.”

  “How long before?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Daniel said as he stood up. “I’m an anthropologist, not a psychic.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “I’ll know a lot more once we find more of her bones. The good news is if fire, runoff, and animals are the only things that came into contact with the remains, the bones and other evidence should be on the surface, not buried. Even so, it’s going to be a slow, methodical search and recovery.”

  “Is there anything I can do to speed things up?”

  “How quickly this goes depends on how much manpower and resources are devoted to it,” Daniel said. “And a search for old bones isn’t going to get much of either. It’s only sexy and urgent to me.”

  “And me, too,” she said. “What can I do to help?”

  “You can tape off the wider scene and keep out anybody except crime scene techs and starving, underpaid forensic anthropologists who disappointed their parents by never having a bar mitzvah.”

  “In other words,” she said. “Keep out lead-footed detectives like me.”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m sure you have very nice feet,” he said, and then his cheeks reddened. “What I mean is, we just need to control the scene so nothing gets trampled.”

  “I can do that.” She thought his embarrassment was adorable. Was he flirting with her, she wondered, or was he just awkward around women?

  “I’ll bring the bones we recover back to the mobile lab at Lost Hills and reconstruct the skeleton there. That will save us both a schlep to Monterey Park.”

  That was where LASD headquarters and the crime lab were located, seven miles east of downtown Los Angeles and an hour away from Calabasas on a good day, which meant ninety minutes to two hours stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic most of the time.

  The mobile lab was a thirty-six-by-ten-foot portable office trailer that had been placed in the Lost Hills parking lot during the wildfire to identify the victims, a process that had unexpectedly dragged on in the aftermath as the long-lost casualties of gang warfare and unlocked Alzheimer’s units were discovered in the blackened ravines. And now there was one more body.

  “Thank you, Dr. Brooks,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Please, call me Daniel.”

  “If you’ll call me Eve.”

  “Short for Evelyn?”

  “Just Eve.”

  “Like Adam and Eve,” he said.

  “Just Eve, no Adam,” she said, surprising herself. Why the hell did she say that? “I’ll get things moving.”

  She went back to the house, pulled Duncan out of a screening of A Fistful of Dollars, and told him what she’d learned from Dr. Brooks.

  “Do you think we need to get a search warrant for the other properties?” she asked.

  “The fences are gone and so are most of the houses. The fire department and utility workers have been trooping through here for weeks. There’s no legitimate expectation of privacy and the bones are in plain view,” Duncan said. “It’s a free-for-all of exigent circumstances. We don’t need a warrant.”

  So Duncan called the station to get some uniformed deputies out to secure the expanded crime scene while Eve used up their roll of yellow tape defining the new boundaries outside. With that done, she had nothing to do but wait.

  She hated waiting.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Three hours later, Daniel Brooks and more than a dozen CSU techs in white Tyvek suits w
ere working the expanded crime scene. Four backyards and a hundred yards of hillside were cordoned off with yellow tape and, in some areas, were already sectioned off with string and tiny stakes into grids of ten-by-ten-foot quadrants. In each quadrant, techs were crouched on the ground, working with hand shovels, trowels, and sifters. Elsewhere, four techs were walking in a line, shoulder to shoulder, through the backyards along the hillside, looking for bones and personal effects, several of them scanning the ground with metal detectors.

  Daniel was one of three people up on the hillside, working thirty yards apart from each other and tethered by ropes to vehicles parked above them on Latigo Canyon Road. They were searching for bones and personal effects that hadn’t slid to the ground below.

  Eve and Duncan stood in Mintner’s gazebo, where the bones and other items that had been recovered so far were laid out on a white sheet on the floor. Nan Baker, the head of the unit, was suited up in Tyvek and gloves, and photographing everything on the sheet and making notations on a notepad. She was an African American woman in her forties who was built like a linebacker and, as Eve knew, was just as formidable.

  Eve watched Daniel photograph something on the hillside, then carefully place the item in a bag clipped to his belt. “I’ve never seen a forensic anthropologist at a crime scene before.”

  “You haven’t been to a lot of crime scenes,” Nan said.

  It wasn’t a criticism as much as it was a statement of fact, but it stung Eve anyway. She tried not to sound defensive when she spoke again. “Why did you bring him in?”

  Nan pointed to a bone fragment on the sheet in front of her. “Because he can say that’s a human bone and not a squirrel’s.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “I could,” Nan said. “But I need an anthropologist to make the definitive determination.”

  Duncan spoke up. “She means one that will stand up in court against some asshole defense attorney trying to cast doubt on the evidence.”

  “Couldn’t an anthropologist make that same determination in the lab rather than out here?” Eve asked.

  “Yes,” Nan said. “But human remains that are completely or partially destroyed by fire are particularly difficult to analyze . . . and that’s assuming you can find them. Fire breaks bones apart and a shard can easily be missed by an untrained eye.”

  Nan explained that the odds of identifying the victim, and determining what happened to him, improved dramatically if the anthropologist recovered the bones in situ at the scene. That way, he could see all the variables at play, including the relationship of the remains to everything else that burned, to determine the path, duration, and intensity of the fire.

  “The downside to having an anthropologist around is that he makes himself the center of everything,” Nan said.

  “You think Dr. Brooks is pushy?”

  “No, but he’s a showboat. Just look at him playing Indiana Jones up there.” Nan gestured to the hillside, where Daniel was rappelling to another position. “He’s having way too much fun.”

  He did look like he was enjoying himself, Eve thought, but she didn’t see what was wrong with that.

  Duncan crouched beside the sheet and glanced at the tiny screws, a zipper head, and two blackened, curved wires that had been collected. He pointed to one of the wires. “What’s that?”

  Nan looked over his shoulder. “The underwire from a bra.”

  Duncan stood, his knees cracking, and hiked up his pants. “How can you tell?”

  “The shape, size, and rigid curvature of the wires,” Nan said. “And the tiny bits of melted nylon that’s stuck to them. I’d say she was a C-cup.”

  “Like this?” Duncan held his hands way out in front of his chest like he was holding two heavy basketballs.

  “You’d need scaffolding, not a bra, to hold those up,” Nan said. “Your partner is a C.”

  Duncan lowered his hands and glanced at Eve’s chest. “Good to know.”

  “Why is that good to know?” Eve said.

  “Because every fact is important when you’re trying to ID a Jane Doe.”

  Fair enough, Eve thought, and turned to Nan again. “Have you found any other clothing or personal effects?”

  Nan shook her head. “The fire probably burned any clothing. But we might find jewelry, belt buckles, maybe some keys.”

  Duncan waved Eve away from the sheet of bones. “Let’s go eat. I’m hungry and we’re about as useful here as eye shadow on a mule.”

  “You’ve been watching too many westerns,” Eve said, but she agreed with him. She was starving. They started walking toward the house and that was when she noticed a TV news van and a couple of print reporters milling around in the street. “Before we go, one of us should have a word with them.”

  “You do it,” Duncan said. “You’re more photogenic.”

  “That’s sexist,” Eve said.

  “It’s a fact. Just look at me.”

  “Physical appearance is not a factor in this discussion.”

  “It is for me,” Duncan said. “The camera adds ten pounds. I’ll look like a beluga whale that shops at Men’s Wearhouse. Besides, you’re taking the lead on this investigation, whatever it turns out to be.”

  “I am? Why?”

  “Because I’m retiring in a few weeks. My job until then is to sit on my ass, push paper, and offer you pearls of wisdom,” he said. “And I don’t want to get myself killed like all the soon-to-retire cops in the movies just to add some tragic depth to your character. I’ve done enough for you already.”

  “That’s a cliché and this isn’t a movie.”

  “It still scares the crap out of me. I feel like I have a target on my back.”

  She knew the truth was that he was trying to give her the experience she’d need to stand on her own after he retired. And she knew that he thought she liked the media attention, but he was wrong. Eve hated it.

  “Fine. I’ll meet you in the car.” Eve took a deep breath and approached the reporters. They saw her coming and headed for her, Kate Darrow at the front, her cameraman in tow. Darrow was a local celebrity, a sharp crime reporter who also looked like a top fashion model. But she was no fool.

  “Nice to see you back in action,” Darrow said.

  “There isn’t any action here,” Eve said, choosing her words carefully and keeping her gaze on the reporter, not the camera. “Just some old bones.”

  “How old?” asked Pete Sanchez, a Los Angeles Times reporter who got his best stories by hanging out in bars with off-duty cops. He always smelled like a stale beer. Eve was tempted to give him a Breathalyzer test every time she saw him.

  “Too soon to tell,” Eve said.

  But Pete wasn’t ready to let go. “Do you know if it’s a man or a woman, an adult or a child? How about the cause of death? Is it an accident or murder?”

  “I can’t discuss any details at this point.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” Darrow asked.

  Eve smiled. “Both.”

  “Is it another executed gang member?” Darrow prodded anyway.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Since the fire, it seems like burned bodies are being found every few days,” Darrow said. “How many more do you think you’ll find?”

  “I hope this is the last.”

  “Unless the ravines of the Santa Monica Mountains are where the street gangs have been dumping their dead for decades,” Darrow said, more for the camera than Eve. “Then this could just be the beginning.”

  “That’s all I’ve got for now. Have a good day,” Eve said and headed for her Ford Explorer.

  Darrow was obviously struggling to create a story where there wasn’t one yet. Eve didn’t blame her for that. If Eve had her way, Darrow wouldn’t have to wait long. Every corpse, even one that was just scattered bones for now, had a story. It was Eve’s job to find it.

  Duncan and Eve grabbed lunch at a spicy fried chicken place tucked between an Italian deli and a pet store in one of the vast, aging shoppi
ng centers on Kanan Dume north of the Ventura Freeway. He managed to dribble hot sauce on his tie despite tucking a napkin into his collar. Eve escaped spotless.

  Afterward, they drove six miles east on the freeway to the Lost Hills exit, where the new six-lane, $37 million overpass did double duty as the official gateway to Calabasas. The city’s logo, a red-tailed hawk flying over the hills, was sculpted onto white pillars in the center of the bridge and CITY OF CALABASAS was etched on the broad footing at the off-ramp. The words, however, were obstructed by a huge electronic traffic sign posted directly in front of the footing. Today the sign warned motorists to keep their eyes on the road.

  She made a right onto Agoura Road, and then a left into the Lost Hills sheriff’s station parking lot, driving past the handful of cars belonging to the paparazzi on constant stakeout to photograph a celebrity brought in for booking. Lost Hills deputies covered Malibu, Calabasas, and Hidden Hills, collectively known as the “New Beverly Hills,” so she knew it was one of the best places in Los Angeles County to spot the drunks, shoplifters, wife beaters, drug addicts, rapists, and murderers with verified Twitter accounts.

  The gates opened automatically to let her Explorer into the restricted lot, which was reserved for official LASD vehicles, the personal cars of employees, a helicopter, and, for the time being, the mobile crime lab. She pulled into a parking spot behind the one-story station and saw Detective Stan Garvey leading a heavily tattooed young black man, dressed head to toe in Gucci, to an idling Hyundai Sonata.

  “Look who’s getting the star treatment from Tubbs,” Duncan said, referring to Garvey, a black man who enthusiastically embraced his Miami Vice–inspired nickname. His white partner, Wally Biddle, was known as Crockett and wasn’t amused by it at all. “Isn’t that Raisin Bran, the rapper?”

  “Coco Crispy,” Eve said, recognizing the painfully thin rapper now that she got a closer look at him. His clothes seemed too large for his frail body.

  “That’s who I meant,” Duncan said. “Do you know him?”

  “Just his face.” She watched Garvey open the back door of the Sonata for the rapper, who leaned inside to get something.