Old Bones

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  Salt’s phone lit up. The caller ID, “Mother.” She held up the phone, indicating to Huff that she was taking a call.

  “Academy at eight tomorrow,” he said. “The rest of you jackasses are on twelve-hour shifts.”

  Walking to her desk, holding the phone to her ear, she answered. “Hi, Mom.” She got a pack of cigarettes from a drawer and headed for the unauthorized smoking area. “Just going to someplace quiet.” NO PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS DOOR read the sign on the double doors. “Yep, at work.” Salt lit the smoke as soon as she was through the doors. “Kinda. Probably just looks worse on TV than it is,” Salt said, getting a word in. It was as if her mother talked to avoid conversation. She responded. “The city’s not so bad. People are just upset right now . . .” “They have a right . . .” “I’m glad John and the family don’t have to worry, either . . .” “Tell Susan thank you for asking . . .” “I call but it’s never at a good time for you, Mom.” Salt sat down beneath an open lever window at an old upended wooden cable spool that served as a table. Drink cans used for ashtrays reeked of wet butts. The cavernous space was cold but Salt’s ear began to sweat. They’d never been close. Charlotte Alt was traditional and held certain ideals about propriety. Living one state away with Jake, her second husband, was probably good for everyone, and there she was closer to Salt’s brother, John, and his wife and children. “I won’t have the holidays off, Mom. Just Thanksgiving. One day. I’m still a rookie detective . . .” “One year is not long for detectives . . .”

  “You, too, Mom.” She hung up and stood to look out the window. The eighth-floor view was of construction, or more accurately, preliminary deconstruction around the old building: a crane with a wrecking ball, a high boom excavator, loaders, and bulldozers. The demolition had begun.

  She rubbed up under the curl on her forehead where the scar began. With her mother’s call the blurred images at the hospital yesterday now felt like a conjuring. She lit a second smoke. “Just a kid,” Salt said to the vast empty space. “She was just a kid.”

  REFRESHER

  Cops got out of their cars in the parking lot of the main academy building, once an elementary school. They carried to-go cups, their mumbled greetings to one another accompanied by puffs of condensation in the cold, bright air. Guys on midnights blinked like they’d never seen sunlight.

  Leaning against the east-facing brick wall of the building, Salt, eyes closed, warmed her face in the sun as she waited to go in for the eight a.m. classroom roll call.

  “More than twelve years now since I first saw you in that exact pose.”

  “Ah, the warmth of another sun.” She smiled, opening her eyes.

  The morning light reflected off Pepper’s dark forehead. “My hero,” he said, adopting the pose, hands clasped at his heart, batting his eyes down at her.

  “You’re smooth.” She rubbed her palm on her friend and former shift mate’s clean-shaven cheek, opposite the long scar that ran from his forehead to his chin.

  “Shit.” He felt both sides of his face. “Just when I had my beard perfect.” They’d been ordered to shave for the gas masks to fit. Many of the plainclothes resented having to cut long-cultivated hair and beards grown so they would blend into a scene. “What about you? I’m surprised they sent anyone from Homicide what with all you guys have going on.”

  “Apparently the brass sent word that all detective units are required to contribute bodies to the training. Most of the units have half their people assigned to attend. Their one concession to Homicide was that they only had to send one body. I’m not on the task force. I’ve got the least time in the unit. So here I am. Besides, it’s just training, half a day. I don’t mind.”

  In a flash his hands went from touching his face to tightly grabbing her upper left arm, an invitation for her to come back with a countermove or throw. They’d begun playing like this as rookies in the academy, practicing newly learned come-along holds and restraint techniques. They had worked adjacent beats for ten years and had both been promoted to detective at the same time last year, he to Narcotics and she to Homicide. Now he brought his boys to her house about once a week so the four of them could practice aikido in the space she’d converted into a small dojo. Pepper had achieved his black belt and continued his practice by studying with an esteemed local sensei and by passing on what he was learning to his boys and Salt. It was one arena of his life in which he limited his penchant for mischief.

  Pep had been the first to call her “Salt,” during their rookie training, after they’d gotten their name tags and he’d read hers, “S. Alt.” His smile and sense of joy rivaled the morning’s brilliance. Instead of a throw, Salt pulled Pepper to walk arm in arm with her into the academy entrance.

  • • •

  Although the day was still crisp, layers of outerwear lay in clumps on the periphery of the training field. The cops, clustered in groups for drill formations and tactical maneuvers, were loaded, each of them with a helmet, a four-foot polycarbon riot shield, and a long baton. Gas masks dangled in pouches from their waists.

  Pepper had forged his name on her squad’s list so that the two of them could be on the same team of twelve. Now, just as the squad sergeant shouted them to attention and issued a command for a formation, Pepper flipped up the visor on his helmet, revealing the fake mustache he’d painted on his upper lip with shoeblack from the kit she’d seen him with earlier. The training was like play, especially for Salt, who enjoyed the physical workout. They’d all been through basic crowd-control training as rookies, and every third year or so they’d be retrained with new masks when the technology changed. Long-baton commands and techniques were second nature and similar enough to the collapsible batons they carried for daily use that most of them easily fell into the correct stances and positions for deployment. The veterans among them, some of whom had been in the last major disturbance a decade ago, rolled their eyes at the commands, their movements lethargic, expressions cynical.

  Two hundred cops in teams of twelve were spread across the grounds. Sergeants barked commands and practiced nonverbal signals for situations in which they might not be able to be heard over noise from crowds or explosions. Salt thought the preparations might be seen as excessive for an event whose participants would be mostly women students. The FBI had no further news from their informant with the supremacists. Of course there were always some, usually boys, teens, high on testosterone and sometimes other substances—those who could turn a peaceful event into something else. Still, Salt thought gearing up for the current unrest might appear extreme, unless the department revealed their concerns about the supremacist group.

  Pepper mugged at her. “Where we going for lunch?”

  OLD BONES

  Salt, back from the morning training, stuck her head into the sergeant’s closet-size office. “Caught,” she said.

  Sergeant Laurel Fellows raised her head from the desk and a stack of reports on which she’d been resting her forehead. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Sorry,” she said. Keeping her head lowered, she fumbled around in a desk drawer and tore off a piece of brown paper towel. The Special Victims Unit handled crimes against children, elder abuse, domestic cases, and juveniles who’d been reported missing. Fellows supervised the juvenile and children’s detectives.

  “Are you crying?” Salt came fully into the office and sat in the only chair.

  Fellows blew her nose. “I knew this was a mistake. I knew it. I should never have agreed to this assignment.” A small speck of paper towel stuck to her upper lip.

  “I couldn’t do it,” Salt said.

  On Fellows’ desk were files and stacks of reports, each describing in detail abuse or suspicions of abuse of a child, or reports of runaways and missing children. The files were neatly stacked in five piles, an investigator’s name scrawled in red in the top right corner. “Every day I read these. Forty or more waiting for me every fucking morning. Now I
’ve got to report to the academy this afternoon for training. And if we get assigned to the protest detail, who’s going to follow up on these?” Fellows flipped the corners of the reports in front of her. “Our first report forms, blue, the color blue. They got that right. I get the blues every morning reading them. You ever consider that the detectives that work in this unit are outcasts? Other cops avoid SVU detectives for fear they’ll hear something about these cases, these children.”

  “I’m sorry.” Salt tried to think of something else to say.

  “I do have a possible match for you.” The sergeant reached for a manila folder on the shelf behind her. “I almost didn’t consider this one.” She opened the file. “Reason was because she was reported as a runaway only a month ago. Your girl has been dead, what? Three months?” Fellows read from the top report in the file. “‘Mary Marie McCloud,’ beautiful name.” She handed the report to Salt, who was suddenly weak with the exertion it took to reach for the file.

  More than two years had passed since Salt had last seen Mary Marie, when she’d been taken into the state juvenile system. She was twelve years old at the time. Shannell, her mother, a street whore and crack addict, had been known to Salt from Salt’s first days as a beat cop. Mary’s father was an old-school car thief. Mary’s brother, Lil D, had been a street dealer in The Homes gang, and Mary had been living with her grandmother. It seemed to Salt as if she’d been predestined to witness every one of Mary’s family’s traumas. Otherwise, what were the possibilities that she would now be investigating the girl’s murder? But in The Homes, Salt’s old beat and home to Mary’s family, Salt had stopped being surprised at the connections. Her instincts now told her the bones would be determined to be Mary’s. Salt had arrested her for murder. Twelve years old. Murder. Taken her from her punishing grandmother. Salt had testified for Mary at the hearing, advocating for her to receive treatment as a juvenile rather than be tried as an adult.

  “Do you think she might be your body?” Fellows sounded almost hopeful. Salt understood it meant one less case for SVU.

  “I knew her. Mary Marie.” Salt closed the file and smoothed her hand over the cover. “I thought she was safe, in custody. How could she have been released?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Fellows.

  • • •

  As Salt came into the Homicide entrance, Rosie looked up from the log she kept on a yellow legal tablet. “Sarge is at the academy for the afternoon training session,” she said. Rosie tracked all of the detectives’ comings and goings in hieroglyphics doodled beside their names on the tablet. “You’re dressed perfect in those fatigues to meet Hamm and Best. They caught some old bones out at the river on Marietta Boulevard. They went out thinking it would be an animal, but they’ve been out all morning and I heard them call for the GBI. So I guess it’s turning into a case. Anyway, they asked for an assist, first available evening-watch detective not on the task force, and that, my dear, appears to be you.”

  “Damn, Rosie.” Salt slumped into one of the upholstered waiting-room chairs along the wall. “I worked last night, got up this morning early for the training. I caught my own case a day ago that I need to work.”

  “Oh, and off days are cancelled.” With a flourish Rosie made a check mark on the tablet. The phone rang. “Homicide. Yep. Salt just walked in.” She silently mouthed to Salt, “Charissa,” and handed her the receiver.

  “I’m on my way.” Salt was tired from the exercises of the morning, but the call from Hamm meant her shift wouldn’t be over for another ten hours.

  • • •

  Salt made her way from the gravel parking area surrounded by woods and along a walkway. A bridge of wood planks that led partway around the lakes struck a pose on the tallest spear of a gray-weathered stump along the shore of the wetlands. Geese and crows took to the air across the shallow waters of the preserve. Turtles waddled between the trail and the mucky banks, plopping themselves into reedy water. Beyond reflections of trees at the water’s edge, out where the sky and clouds were mirrored, fish jumped, appearing to rise from heaven. Though copperhead and cottonmouth snakes were more likely to be dormant in the cold months, Salt was watchful as she left the end of the plank walkway and followed the dirt path.

  At a fork in the dirt path a three-foot-by-two-foot white eraser board was nailed to a tree and green Magic Marker arrows pointed the way to “Doll’s Head Trail.” On the trail, mobiles, found-object art made into wind chimes, and other curiosities began to appear on the lower limbs of trees. Close by the trail old bottles were held aloft by dolls’ arms sticking out of the ground. Broken terra-cotta tiles arrayed like puzzle pieces displayed the odd quote. Neil Young: “A greedy man never knows what he’s done.” Muhammad Ali: “I’m so bad I hospitalized a brick.” The lakes had formed when a brick factory had been abandoned in the early twentieth century, its clay pits then flooded by the nearby river. Just off the trail, coils from an old box spring hung in a leafless tree. Preserve rules were displayed along the path on hand-painted signs. “Only pieces found in the preserve may be used to make art.”

  Salt trekked past a round thigh-high, four-foot-diameter abandoned well, the north side of the brick and mortar soft with green moss, its original depth slowly rising, filling with discarded debris both from man and nature. It was a remnant of the home of a black family that had been burned out by whites in the 1960s. The family had run a fishing camp and now old lures hung in the trees like ossified insects. A marker next to the trail identified an enormous willow oak, taller than any of its neighbors, as a heritage tree, verified as the second largest willow oak in the Atlanta area.

  Salt breathed a sigh of pleasure. The preserve and wetlands were only a few miles from the absolute business center of the city: pieces of porcelain, bits of machinery, toy parts, and broken brick tiles, all of which had been employed in the creation of an evocative jungle that hinted at some essence of the past.

  A hawk flew above the dense canopy of trees and into a reddening sky in the west. Salt increased her vigilance of the roots and ruts, mindful that snakes were more likely to be active at dusk. Lights began to flicker among the foliage, bushes, and wagging tree limbs.

  A vaporous mist rose between the banks of a sandy creek bed. On the other side an expanse of hill rose, slashed to its red clay core by two dozers now sitting quietly on the slant. Beneath a high train trestle made of hundreds of grayed-wood crossbeams that held the tracks seventy feet above a tributary of the river, the beams of a front loader illuminated Hamm, a cluster of detectives, and a construction crew.

  • • •

  Salt and Charissa stood fifteen feet from a wall of red clay and a five-foot mosaic of streaked beige—long bones near two partially unearthed brown-white skulls. “I just caught a case. I need to work it, Charissa. I was at the academy all morning.” Mary’s file was locked in the trunk of Salt’s Taurus back in the parking lot.

  “Girl, every other evening-watch detective is either on the task force or on something else. You’re it until midnight. I’ll get a uniform to bring you something to eat. You don’t have to do nothin’ but be here. See those femurs?” She pointed at the bones. “We count at least a dozen or more pairs that were uncovered by the construction workers. No telling how many more we’ll find. All we know now is that the bones are old; all the clothes have rotted away.”

  “Cemetery?”

  “No caskets or space for caskets. Could have been paupers, but we’ll know more tomorrow when the ME’s anthropologist gets here.”

  • • •

  “Seems like I’m always saying how much I appreciate your help, Mr. Gooden. You, too. Bye now. See you in the morning.” She pushed the end-call button. Her neighbor, a field of several acres between them, had agreed with what sounded like genuine elation to let Wonder out to gather the sheep, as well as promising to keep company with the dog until bedtime. Mr. Gooden had helped build her new fence. He regularly
shared produce from his garden and fresh eggs. In his eighties now, he’d known three generations of her family.

  She called Wills. “Wills, I’m afraid we have a match on the girl’s bones,” she told him.

  “That should be a good thing.”

  “I think it is probably Mary Marie.”

  “What? She was in for murder.”

  “I called the Hampton Youth Center. She was released four months ago. She’d been released to the grandmother, who she was living with when we took her into custody. She had reported Mary missing a month ago,” Salt told him. “I knew as soon as I saw the missing-runaway report. You know how Mary always wore pink when she wasn’t in her school clothes?”

  “But the body was there what? Three months?”

  “I called the grandmother. She didn’t report her missing for two months, she said because she didn’t want Mary to go back into custody.”

  A staging area was being assembled there in the deep woods. Salt and an investigator from the ME’s office were the only personnel remaining on the scene. Techs had brought in a generator and klieg lights on the back of an ATV.

  Wills was silent, then sighed. “Salt, please don’t let this get to you. You testified for her at the hearing. You’ve been advocating for her, first to get her into the treatment program at Hampton and then to get her into a community program.”

  “The worst possible outcome was for her to go back to that grandmother, one of the most judgmental, punitive people I’ve ever met. It’s no wonder her daughter, Mary’s mother, was an addict.”

  “How long are you going to be at the river?”

  “At least until one a.m. when morning watch can relieve me. I’ll call you, Wills. Don’t worry,” Salt said.

  There was a long pause from Wills, then he said, “I miss you,” and hung up.