by Kathy Reichs
“Like Cold Case,” Bea said. “I love that show.”
“You know people at the city morgue?” I recognized Cukura Kundze’s tone. And look.
“I do.” Wary.
“Do I ever ask favors, Tempe?”
The last request had been for an NYPD Crime Scene cap. Before that it was over-the-counter aspirin with codeine from Canada. I said nothing.
“Will you do something to make an old woman happy? Before I die?”
Vecamamma’s snort fluttered the perm-crimped curls on her forehead.
“I really—”
“It’s not for me, no, no. I wouldn’t ask for myself. It’s for poor Mr. Tot.”
At an observatory high up on Haleakala, an intergalactic monitoring device beeped softly, alerted by a black hole of silence that suddenly popped into being in a midwestern suburb.
“Mr. Tot?” Total stillness. I could feel twenty-four eyes fixed on my face.
“His grandson is missing and the navy says the kid’s gone AWOL. It’s horseshit. Lassie would never have abandoned his duties.”
“Lassie?” Klara’s volume level told me she was not wearing her hearing aid. “Did she say Lassie?”
“Mr. Tot says the kid’s gotta be dead.”
“He might have amnesia,” Allie said. “You know, be in some strange city and not know who he is. I saw that on TV.”
“Lassie’s a dog.” Klara was loud enough to be heard in Topeka. “Like Oskars. Where is Oskars?”
The collie had died in 1984.
“Cukura Kundze,” I said gently. “There’s really nothing I can do.”
“You could ask Richie Cunningham to check a few toe tags.” Ryan’s eyes had a jolly bad-bordeaux look.
“Wasn’t Richie Cunningham that dork on Happy Days?” Ted said.
“Before that he played Opie,” Connie said.
“Ron Howard,” Susan said. “He’s a filmmaker now.”
“There’s a guy at the morgue named Richie Cunningham?” Ludis.
“That’s not his real name,” I said, squint-staring at Ryan.
“Why’d he call him that?”
“Dr. Corcoran has red hair.”
“And freckles.” Ryan grinned a goofy grin.
Perfect. Detective Drinky Pants would not be driving tonight.
“Could this Richie friend look around, maybe see if the coroner’s got Lassie on ice?”
You had to hand it to her. The old gal was persistent as herpes.
“Did Mr. Tot file a missing persons report?” I asked unenthusiastically.
“Right away. And went out looking himself. Course he didn’t really know where to go. His bowling buddy, Mr. Azigian, went with him.”
“What makes Mr. Tot think his grandson is dead?” I asked.
“They had tickets to see the Sox play the Cubs. At Wrigley Field. You think Lassie would pass that up?”
I had no idea what Lassie would do. What I did know was that every year a lot of folks simply walked out on their lives. I didn’t share that knowledge.
“Can’t hurt to give Corcoran a call,” Ryan said.
A chorus of voices agreed.
“Fine.” I forced a smile. “I’ll phone tomorrow.”
Over cake, Cukura Kundze revealed the following.
Almost four years earlier, during the week of his twenty-first birthday, Laszlo Tot left his barracks at the Great Lakes Naval Station, approximately thirty-five miles up the Lake Michigan shore from Chicago, on a weekend pass. Seaman Apprentice Tot failed to report for duty the next Monday or on any subsequent day. Following protocol, a military inquiry was launched and the civil authorities were notified.
Search efforts ensued, came up empty, and, in time, were discontinued. The navy reclassified Seaman Apprentice Tot as UA. Unauthorized absence.
Two months after the close of the investigation, a 1992 Ford Focus was found in the parking lot of the northeast suburban Northbrook mall. Records indicated the car was registered to one Laszlo Tot. The lead went nowhere.
When I headed upstairs, Ryan, Ludis, and Gordie were uncorking their fourth bottle. Debate was focused on gun control.
Sayonara.
* * *
Normally I have coffee for breakfast, maybe yogurt or a bagel. If feeling really jiggy, I might throw in cream cheese or jam.
Not Vecamamma’s style.
After grapefruit, bacon, and pancakes with syrup and butter, I phoned the CCME. Corcoran picked up almost immediately.
He started out by apologizing for the previous day’s debacle. I assured him there were no hard feelings. Then I provided a condensed version of Lassie Come Home.
Corcoran said he’d run a computer check for unknowns fitting Laszlo Tot’s description. He promised to call back shortly.
I was disconnecting when Ryan entered the kitchen via the mudroom. His face was flushed and he was wearing Reeboks, gloves, a neck scarf, and sweats.
“My kind of town, Chicago is”—Ryan uncoiled and removed the muffler and finished with modified lyrics—“melting fast.”
“You’ve been running?”
“Just five kilometers.”
Given the tanker of wine consumed the previous evening, and I don’t mean tankard, Ryan appeared to be in reasonably good shape.
Vecamamma turned from the stove, spatula held high.
“Labrt. Ka tev iet?” Good morning. How are you?
“Labi, Paldies. Et vous, Vecamamma?”
“Très bien, monsieur. Merci.”
My eyeballs were rolling skyward when my mobile sounded.
Corcoran. I clicked on.
“The computer’s down. Listen, why don’t you stop by here? We’ll visit. Then, when the system’s back up, if there are remains that interest you, we’ll pull them.”
I’d planned to spend the day helping Vecamamma arrange snapshots in albums and bake Christmas cookies. But I knew my mother-in-law. She’d want me to help Cukura Kundze.
“Where’s Walczak?” I asked.
“Milwaukee.”
I glanced at Ryan, wondering if he’d need transport to O’Hare. Screw it. His best buddy Gordie could play chauffeur.
“I’ll be there around ten.”
8
CORCORAN AND I FOUND TWO POSSIBILITIES.
One was a heroin overdose victim, a white male with an estimated age of twenty to twenty-five. The naked body had been found sixteen months earlier on the city’s South Side, near Forty-fifth and Stewart, between the Chicago & Western Indiana Railroad tracks and the edge of Fuller Park. No friend or family member had come forward. A records search had led nowhere. Ditto for dentals and prints. The man was still in the freezer.
The other was a skeleton. Descriptors had been entered as: white; male; eighteen to twenty-four years of age. The bones had been in storage for thirty-eight months.
We bombed on both fronts.
Though the information had yet to be entered into the system, Corcoran learned that Freezer Man had finally been IDed two days earlier. Turned out the body was that of a nineteen-year-old student from Ohio State, a schizophrenic who’d dropped out to hit the big city without calling home. What had happened on the mean streets was anyone’s guess. Mom and Dad were awaiting delivery of the body.
By phoning Cukura Kundze, I learned that Lassie stood six-two and weighed roughly 190. Long bone measurements put Skeleton Man’s height at five-six, tops.
I pulled the case to double-check the stature estimate. Right on.
“Not your boy,” Corcoran said.
“No,” I agreed.
We were standing beside a worktable in the CCME storage room. Corcoran was watching as I replaced Skeleton Man’s bones in their box.
“Who does your anthropology?” I asked, snugging the lid into place.
“For years we used a guy out of Oklahoma. Now that he’s retired, it’s pretty haphazard. Sometimes a graduate student. Sometimes a resident doing a rotation here. Sometimes a staff pathologist.”
“People
who’ll work for free,” I guessed.
“Walczak claims there’s no money in the budget.”
“One day that approach will bite him in the ass.”
“Hey, don’t jump on me. I agree we should use only board-certified specialists. Would make my job easier.”
“Who analyzed this fellow?” I laid a palm on Skeleton Man’s box.
Corcoran checked the case file.
“AP. That would be Tony Papatados, a doctoral candidate at UIC. Excavates bones in Peru. Or maybe it’s Bolivia. I don’t remember.”
“An archaeologist.”
“Weren’t you an archaeologist?”
“Yes. Don’t get me wrong. Many bio-archaeologists and physical anthropologists are excellent researchers. Many know a lot of osteology, how to estimate age, sex, how to measure bones properly. But they’re not trained in the full range of forensic issues. Most have little experience with modern populations.”
Sudden thought. If Walczak had underqualified people working his anthropology cases, it was possible some remains had been improperly evaluated.
“Mind if I spend a little time in here?”
“Fine with me. Why?”
“Laszlo Tot was military. And reported missing. If he came here, even as a decomp, the ID would have been a snap with dentals and prints. But suppose his body wasn’t found for a while. What if he was skeletonized and the bones were examined by someone with, shall we say, limited skills?”
“We could be overlooking him because the report is misleading.”
“Or flat-ass wrong.”
“I guess it’s possible.” Corcoran sounded dubious.
“Can you search your database for unidentified decomps and skeletons arriving during the past four years?”
Corcoran tapped the computer keyboard, peered at the monitor, tapped some more, then hit a single key.
“Hold on. There’s a printer in my office.”
He returned moments later with a list containing fourteen CCME numbers. He’d also pulled the police incident, morgue intake, and anthropology reports for each case.
Seven corpses had arrived badly decomposed. For those, the flesh had been stripped, then the skeletons cleaned by boiling. One individual had been burned, one mummified. For those, the remains had been left untouched. Five folks had rolled in as nothing but bone.
“They’re all over there.” Corcoran indicated the shelving to which I’d returned Skeleton Man in his absence. “But you’re on your own. A battered toddler just showed up. I caught the autopsy.”
“No problem.”
Corcoran showed me where the necessary equipment was stored, and jotted a number should I have need of a tech. Then he was gone.
Starting with those who’d arrived as skeletons, I constructed a biological profile for each: age, sex, race, and height. When finished, I checked my findings against the case files.
At one fifteen Corcoran came to see if I wanted to break for lunch. Over a machine sandwich of very questionable-looking chicken salad, a six-pack of Oreos, and a Diet Coke, we discussed my intentions with regard to Jurmain. I told him I’d be phoning Edward Allen first thing in the morning, maybe even driving to Winnetka to pay a surprise call.
Corcoran apologized again. As before, I assured him he was not the target of my ire.
At one forty-five I returned to the storeroom.
By four I’d finished the skeletons. One Mongoloid female had been classified as Negroid. One elderly white male had a surgically pinned right “humerus” that was actually a femur from a very large dog.
No Lassie candidate.
Knowing I’d need X-rays, I skipped the mummified and burned individuals and moved on to the cleaned-up decomps. On the third set of bones I hit pay dirt.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Cook County was one of the leading producers of limestone and dolomite in the U.S. The bulk of the stone came from quarries situated in suburbs to the west and south of Chicago: Elmhurst, Riverside, La Grange, Bellwood, McCook, Hodgkins, Thornton. Most was shipped on the Illinois & Michigan Canal, later on the Sanitary and Ship Canal.
Though the golden age of quarrying has long since passed, the scarred landscapes remain. I’m not talking little dents in the ground. These pits are whoppers.
And great places to off-load bodies.
According to Police Officer Cyril Powers, on July 28, 2005, a decomposed corpse was spotted floating facedown just south of a bridge carrying the Tri-State Tollway over the Thornton Quarry. Powers contacted personnel at the Material Service Corporation, owners and operators of the quarry, then called for grappling hooks and a morgue van.
The remains were logged in as 287JUL05. A staff pathologist named Bandhura Jayamaran was assigned to the case. Jayamaran estimated PMI at two to three weeks.
Due to advanced putrefaction and severe cranial damage, including absence of most of the left side of the face and all of the lower jaw, only three teeth remained, the upper-right premolars and the first molar. None had a unique characteristic or dental restoration.
Fingerprinting was not an option. Concluding that little could be done with the body, Jayamaran ordered it cleaned and the bones stored pending anthropological analysis.
One month later, 287JUL05 was examined by someone identified only by the initials ML, who determined that the individual was a white male, approximately thirty-five years of age, with a height of five foot eight, plus or minus one inch. Age was based on the condition of the pubic symphyses, the small surfaces where the pelvic halves meet in front. Stature was calculated using the length of the femur.
ML noted trauma to the vertebrae, ribs, and skull, caused by the victim’s fall into the quarry, and healed antemortem fractures of the right distal radius and ulna. ML ventured no opinion as to manner of death.
ML’s descriptors were entered into a database at the Chicago PD missing persons unit, one week later into NCIC, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Neither submission resulted in a positive ID.
287JUL05 went onto a shelf in the CCME storage room on September 4, 2005. He’d been there ever since.
OK, ML. Let’s see how you did.
First, I arranged the cranial fragments into what resembled an exploded skull. Then I aligned the postcranial bones anatomically.
I began my assessment with gender, viewing first the skull, then the pelvis.
The right frontal bone bulged into a large, rounded ridge at the bottom of the forehead, above the orbit. The occipital had a prominent muscle attachment site dead center at the skull’s back. The right mastoid, a hunk of bone projecting downward behind the ear opening, was impressive.
When articulated, the pelvis had a chunky pubic area, with an acute angle below the point where the two halves meet in front. Laterally, each side curved upward into a deep, narrow notch inferior to the hip blade.
OK. Agreed. 287JUL05 was male.
I made notes, then turned to ancestry.
This was tougher, since little facial architecture remained, and the skull was too damaged to yield meaningful measurements. Nevertheless, I could see that the cranium had been moderate with regard to shape, not particularly long and narrow or short and globular. The cheekbones had been tight to the maxilla, the nasal bridge high, the nasal opening quite narrow.
Agreed again. 287JUL05 was white.
I made notes, then turned to age.
On the left innominate, or hip bone, the pubic symphyseal face was badly eroded. Damage was less extensive on the right, and detail, though abraded, was observable. Taking the bone to a dissecting scope, I examined the surface under magnification.
And felt a tingle at the back of my neck.
Returning to the skeleton, I selected the fourth and fifth ribs and took them to the scope. At the sternal, or chest end, each rib terminated in a shallow indentation bordered by a smooth, wavy-rimmed wall.
Another tingle.
I made notes, then turned to stature.
After locating an o
steometric board, I measured the right femur, tibia, and fibula. I was considering the estimates generated on my laptop with FORDISC 3.0 when Corcoran pushed through the door.
“Lord in heaven, girl. You’re still here?”
“I may have found him.”
“You’re kidding.”
I tipped my head at 287JUL05. “Someone with the initials ML examined this skeleton.”
Corcoran looked thoughtful, then shook his head. “Don’t recall an ML. I remember July of 2005, though. I was working a strange one, actually wrote it up for the JFS.”
“I think . . .”
“Listen to this. A sixty-eight-year-old female is last seen alive at a family picnic on the Fourth of July. No one hears from her for two weeks. The daughter finally checks, finds a corpse on the living room floor. Needless to say, by this time Mama’s not looking too good.
“I do the autopsy, find nothing to suggest cause of death, so I sign her out as undetermined. Next thing I know, there’s a cop telling me one of the grandkids has admitted to shooting the old lady. Apparently the little creep needed drug money and Grandma wasn’t coughing up. I’m skeptical, because I’ve found no perforated organs, no nicked bones, no bullets or bullet fragments, no metallic trace on X-ray. Nothing.”
“Uh. Huh.” I didn’t want to appear rude, but the case held no interest for me.
“But old Sherlock here goes back in. And guess what?”
I prepared my “I’m impressed” face.
“She must have been moving when the kid pulled the trigger. I find a bullet track shooting straight down the muscles paralleling the spine. Even though no vital organ was hit, the vic probably bled out.” Corcoran beamed.
“You’re a genius.” I waited a respectful half second. “ML blew it.”
“What? Oh.”
I led Corcoran to the scope.
“Take a look at the pubic symphysis.” I spoke as Corcoran adjusted focus. “That surface undergoes change throughout adulthood. Part of that change involves the formation of a rim circling the perimeter. See that gap on the upper edge?”
“On the belly side?”
“Yes.”
“I see it.”
“In young adults a hiatus like that is normal. The ventral, or belly, side of the rim is still forming. As adults age, the ends of the circle connect and the rim is complete. Then the rim begins to deteriorate. That’s normal, too.”