LC 02 - Questionable Remains

by Beverly Connor

  Lindsay stared at him openmouthed. "You act like you are blaming me for getting thrown in the cave. None of this is my fault."

  "I'm only blaming you for agreeing to look for a murderer. Murderers will tend to act like murderers if you get in their way. Give me the keys and I'll drive." Lindsay threw him her keys and got in the passenger side. When Derrick got in, he looked over at her. "I didn't mean to come down so hard, at least not right now."

  Lindsay looked at him, into his eyes. He looked troubled and she felt guilty, and felt angry for feeling guilty. "I know I behaved very unprofessionally in Ballinger's office," she said.

  "He'll get over it. I'm concerned about you. You're a walking time bomb."

  "It's the anger. It's a thing, like the darkness was a thing that swallowed me in the cave when the light was off. I never knew dark could be so dark. There's no place in your house you could go in the middle of the night, turn out the light, and have it be as dark as it was in that cave, and it was pervasive. My anger is that pervasive, aimed at no one and everyone. I feel like the only way to get rid of it is to find the people who did this to me. If it has to do with Ferguson, then nothing I've done so far had anything to do with what happened to me. As for Ken Darnell and his death, I've only asked a few questions here and there. I've hardly done any investigating at all."

  "You think it is someone connected to the cave murderswere they murdered?"

  "It's possible that the skull fracture was caused by something other than falling rocks, but I'd have to look at the bones. And yes, I think what happened to me is connected to what happened in the cave to Grace Lambert's brother. I don't really think it is the Ferguson family who did this to me. It just seems too relentless for them to follow me all the way up here-and what about Gil Harris? His death is not related to the Fergusons, but he did know Grace's brother."

  "Okay. Where do you want to go now?"

  At that moment, Dr. Ballinger came hurrying out of his office and started down the street. Lindsay and Derrick watched him. He was heading toward the coroner's office.

  Chapter 16

  I WONDER WHAT they are going to talk about?" mused Lindsay.

  "Did you get any sense that Ballinger or Prescott could have been among the men who kidnapped you?" Derrick asked.

  "I couldn't tell. But why would they?" she asked.

  "To save their reputations?" asked Derrick.

  "No. They've got bureaucracies to do that for them. But something's up. I don't suppose we could listen in?"

  "No," said Derrick, starting the Rover. "We can't." He drove back to the motel.

  They pulled into the parking space near the stairs that led to Lindsay's room. She turned to Derrick before they got out. "Thanks for staying with me."

  Derrick leaned over and kissed her gently. "We'll get through this. If you want to talk about being in the cave, I'll listen."

  Lindsay said nothing until they were in the room with the door closed and locked. "Maybe it would help to face it," she said. "I don't ever remember being so constantly terrified. It's like being lost in some other dimension where there's no time and every step's a trap."

  Lindsay sat down at the small table in the corner of the room, and Derrick sat opposite her. As she told him the story he reached for her hands and held them, listening quietly.

  "We'll find out who did this," he whispered when she had finished.

  Lindsay shook her head. "I don't know how. I still can't think clearly. I'm not sure what to do next."

  "Since the bones of that Hillard fellow are comingled, and his wife seems to be so cooperative, you could get an exhumation order. Like the guy said, at least the body doesn't have to be dug up. If you see the bones themselves-"

  "That's a good idea. If I can just examine those bones, I can get a lot of answers, I-"

  Derrick's gaze fell upon the backpack Lindsay had in the cave. It was leaning against the nightstand, the yellow flashlight still dangling from it by her belt. "Why don't you send that to the FBI crime lab? There may be fingerprints on something in there."

  "Of course. I should've thought of that. I'll call Agent McKinley, the FBI agent in charge of the Gil Harris case. Maybe when I tell him what's been happening, he'll share some information with me."

  Derrick went to his truck to get one of the boxes used for packing artifacts, while Lindsay called Agent McKinley.

  "Dr. Chamberlain. How are you?"

  "Recovering," Lindsay replied.

  "I've done a little caving before. I can't imagine anything more frightening."

  "Neither can I," she said.

  "You think all these events are connected?" He spoke her thoughts.

  "They might be. From the photographic evidence I've seen, I think there's a definite possibility that Ken Darnell and the other cavers were murdered. I'm going to try to get a look at the bones. Is there anything you can tell me about the crime scene at the Rock Shelter Site?"

  There was a moment of silence on the phone, and Lindsay thought he was hesitating, then she heard paper shuffling in the background.

  "Not much. We interviewed some hikers passing through the area just before dark, hurrying to find a camping spot. They remembered the cars in the parking area used by the site crew. We did discover there was an extra white van parked there at that time. We almost missed that. According to the description, it wasn't unlike the university vans. The hikers were sure there were two of them. There should've been only one. But so far we haven't been able to trace it. None of them got a look at the license plate."

  Lindsay was quiet a moment. "My kidnappers used a van."

  "Hmmm. Can you send me a description of everything you remember?"

  "Yes. I'll do that immediately. Give me your fax number." Lindsay found some stationery supplied by the motel on her nightstand and wrote down the number. "Anything else?" she asked.

  "The top of the cliff was rocky. The only things we found were some beer bottle caps and a piece of chewed gum that the lab says was fresh. The chewer was a nonsecretor, so not much there. There was one thing interesting, though I'm not sure it'll help. The lab guys said there was a good impression of a molar that had an extra cusp."

  Lindsay was silent for a long moment.

  "Lindsay, does that mean something?"

  "I don't know ... something in the back of my mind. Anyway, there's some things I noticed in the photographs." She told McKinley about the possible fracture with a tire iron and the different rates of decay she believed she saw in the photographs.

  "I can call the authorities in Ellis County and encourage that the case be reopened," he said. "That's all I can do, encourage them. Do you think you might find anything else on the bones if you had them to examine directly?"

  "I can't promise. But we'll never know unless we try."

  Lindsay asked him where she could send her backpack, and he dictated the information to put on the label and where to send it.

  "The lab'll be able to come up with something in a backpack full of stuff. Don't worry. I think we'll find who dumped you in that cave."

  Derrick had packed and taped the box when Lindsay got off the phone. "From this end it sounded like a productive conversation," he told her.

  "McKinley's going to try to reopen the Darnell case."

  "That'll be good. With the authorities working on it, no one will have a reason to want you out of the way." He grabbed her around the waist and kissed her neck, nuzzling her ear. "In the meantime," he whispered, gently easing her toward the bed, "we can take our vacation together here." A loud knocking interrupted their intentions, and they both glared at the door.

  "What now?" Lindsay said as Derrick released her and answered the knock.

  A slim man dressed in khaki brown entered, held out his hand, and introduced himself as Sheriff Struen Prescott of Ellis County.

  "Are you related to ... ?" began Lindsay.

  "Yes, the son of a bitch is my cousin and a pain in my ass. If you can show me where he has been derelict i
n his duty as coroner, I'll see he gets his butt kicked in the next election." Both Lindsay and Derrick were speechless. The sheriff smiled. "I like to be direct. Now, I got an interesting call from an FBI agent. He suggested that if I reopened the case, there might be a big arrest and publicity in it for me, not to mention getting some criminals off the street. I told him I kind of like that idea. Tell me about this caving accident you think might be murder."

  Lindsay invited him into her motel room and showed him the pictures. "It's suggestive, but I can't know for sure unless I see the bones."

  "I'm working on it right now. Already called the Hillards. Talked to a fella named Clay Boshay. You'd of thought Christmas and Halloween fell on the same day. Getting a court order for the other two shouldn't be any problem."

  "Sheriff, I have to say, you are about the quickest official I have ever seen."

  "Yes, I am. Do what needs to be done and don't fiddlefart around, that's my motto. I got a clean county to prove my methods. Would be cleaner if Tucker weren't screwing up so much. Don't know exactly how many homicides he's messed up. He's both stupid and slippery at the same time-bad combination. Knows how to shift blame. Always did, even as a kid. I got more whippings for things that bastard did. But it sounds like you can give me what I want."

  "Where can I look at the bones?"

  "My office be all right?" he asked.

  "Sure."

  Lindsay could not see the bones until the next day. The sheriff, true to his nature, got the exhumation orders in a hurry and had them executed before anyone was the wiser. The bones of Ken Darnell were at his office before Jennifer Darnell's lawyer arrived to protest.

  Clay Boshay and Lorinda Hillard came to the sheriff's office to await the findings. They were dressed as if coming to a funeral: Clay in a suit, Loriiida in her Sunday best, a dark lavender cotton dress with lace trim. They rose to greet Lindsay when she came in.

  "Look, we really appreciate what you did," said Clay. "This means a lot to Lorinda here. I'm sorry about all that's happened to you." He grimaced as his eyes darted over Lindsay's bruised and bandaged face.

  "I don't know what I'll find," Lindsay told them.

  "At least we can rest easy knowing that somebody who knew what they were doing looked at the bones." Lorinda looked past Lindsay. Lindsay turned and saw Olin Ballinger and Tucker Prescott come into the office.

  "Boy," said Clay, "if looks could kill, you'd be a dead woman."

  Not for the first time, she wondered if they might have been the ones who kidnapped her. Lindsay left them and went into the next room, where Derrick was laying out the bones. She had asked for his help because she wanted it done quickly. The bones were lying on sheets on three tables-three skeletons. She went to Blaine Hillard first and to the misplaced rib. Derrick had already found it and set it aside.

  Olin Ballinger and Tucker Prescott, the coroner, followed her in and didn't look happy about it. There was another man there also. He had a pad of paper and a pencil. "Dr. Ballinger wanted to observe," said the sheriff. "And, of course, we always have the coroner in when we deal with dead bodies." If he had any sarcasm in his voice, Lindsay didn't notice. "This here is Darrell Mannville. He owns the newspaper here in town. We believe in freedom of the press here, don't we, Darrell?"

  "Yes, sir, sheriff."

  Lindsay decided she didn't want to ever be on the wrong side of Sheriff Struen Prescott.

  She put on latex gloves and picked up the switched rib and examined it closely. She walked to the other skeletons and picked up a rib from the remains identified as Roy Pitt. "This is the rib that goes to Blaine Hillard." She gave Ballinger a brief glance. He stood with his mouth turned down in a sour expression.

  She asked Derrick to start looking at the bones of Roy Pitt for any cuts or anomalies. She picked up Blaine Hillard's cracked skull and examined the injuries. Looking at the skull close up, it was obvious that he was murdered.

  "Sheriff," she said. He came over to look at the skull. "These fractures here and here were probably made by the falling rocks. See how the depressions are rounder and the cracks radiate around each. Now look at this wound. See how it is slightly L-shaped. The bottom of the depression is overlapped by this fracture." She looked up at him.

  "Go on," he said. "I'm following."

  "When anything like glass or bone is hit, fracture lines radiate out. A fracture line will terminate at another fracture line."

  "Yes. That's how we determine the sequence order of bullet holes through glass and such. Go on."

  "This L-shaped injury has fractures that radiate out until they just run their course. However, the fracture lines for this injury over here-" she pointed to a depression on the upper occipital, "the ones we think were done by rocksterminate at the fracture lines for the L-shaped cut."

  "The L-shaped wound was first; the others happened later," Sheriff Prescott said. "Hell, I should have done the bones myself, and we wouldn't be here now."

  Lindsay smiled. Ballinger and Tucker Prescott looked ill at ease.

  "Yes," she said. "That's right. Look at the L-shaped injury. It was probably made with a tire iron or-"

  "Crowbar," said the sheriff. "Seen that kind of wound before."

  "Yes," said Lindsay. "That's a possibility."

  "I've found something here," said Derrick.

  Lindsay came over to the table where Derrick was looking at the bones of Roy Pitt. She knew he didn't particularly relish the work. Derrick was not a "bone person," but she knew he could competently lay them out and look them over for signs of trauma. He hated looking at bones that had anything left of the flesh, and the two skeletons of Roy Pitt and Blaine Hillard, though basically skeletonized, were still articulated to a great degree and had quite a bit of gristle on them.

  He showed her a rib and pointed to a cut. Lindsay made a motion with her hand as if stabbing someone underhanded with a knife. Derrick nodded.

  "It looks like we have some stab cuts here," she said. "The knife hit the rib and the vertebrae. It looks like someone came up behind him and stuck the knife in his kidney, nicking the eighth rib."

  The sheriff came over to look. "Yes. See that, too. It looks like we've had a murderer running around with two years of undeserved freedom after committing a crime in my county. I don't like that."

  "Interesting that you have two types of murder weapons," said Lindsay.

  "Yes. It is," said the sheriff. "I'm going to have to ponder over that one."

  Lindsay moved to the skeleton of Ken Darnell and picked up the skull. Most of the bones were disarticulated with only a few telltale ligaments here and there. She held the base of the skull in her hand and looked at the face. Just then Jennifer Darnell's lawyer burst into the room to protest. He had a piece of paper in his hand, shaking it.

  "I don't know how you did this, Struen Prescott, but you've gone too far. He wasn't even from your county-"

  "Didn't have to be from this county. Just had to be killed here."

  "Jennifer Darnell protests most strenuously, and I have a court-"

  "You can tell Jennifer Darnell she can relax," said Lindsay, interrupting the lawyer. "These aren't the bones of her husband." Everyone in the room looked at her in amazement. For the first time, the sheriff didn't see how she arrived at her conclusion. Nor did Derrick, who knew her methods well. The reporter furiously scribbled on his pad.

  Lindsay had seen these teeth before. She was looking at the defleshed skull of Denny Ferguson.

  Chapter 17

  THE REPORTER WROTE furiously on his pad, taking down the rush of ensuing accusations that Lindsay's announcement provoked. When Sheriff Prescott decided that the ruckus had had its effect, he cleared the room so Lindsay could analyze the skeletons in relative peace, though she could hear the ranting outside the doorthreats of lawsuits by Clay and Lorinda, angry excuses from Dr. Ballinger, insults hurled at her. The noise didn't last long. The sheriff let the reporter get his fill and sent everyone home.

  It was late when Lin
dsay finished. She found no more points of trauma on the bones that she could distinguish from damage caused by the rocks. She did find evidence that rodents had gnawed Roy Pitt's and Blaine Hillard's remains extensively. She found none on Denny Ferguson's remains. She examined the x-rays that were labeled Ken Darnell but really belonged to Denny Ferguson and noted the name of the dentist: Terence Wilson, D.D.S. She made a mental note to contact him, though perhaps she should leave that to the police.

  As she was about to lay the x-ray down, she saw another anomaly. In the upper left corner, along the edge, was a fingerprint. Nothing unusual about that-this x-ray had been handled by a half-dozen people. What was unusual about this print was that it was part of the x-ray image. It had been left on the film at the time the x-ray was made by whoever developed it. Unusual for a dentist's office, Lindsay thought, but interesting. She placed the x-ray back in its envelope and attached a note to the sheriff to have it delivered to Agent McKinley to be matched.

  The last thing she and Derrick did was to take samples of detritus from the auditory meatus, the eye orbits, the skull vault, and the pelvis, and bag and label them. An examination of the detritus would probably reveal soil differences and insect casings that would verify the differences in decomposition rates and places. But, of course, with the skeleton identified as Denny Ferguson, it was a given that his body decayed at a different time. He was alive when the others were reported missing and already dead.

  "That was a circus," said Derrick, driving back to the motel.

  "Wasn't it though? Denny Ferguson . . . " Lindsay frowned.

  "I'm not sure I understand this," Derrick said half to himself as he pulled into the motel parking lot.

  Lindsay was quiet. She got out of the car and walked to her room and leaned against the wall as Derrick opened the door, a frown still creasing her forehead. She slipped off her shoes and sat down cross-legged on the bed.

  "That's why all this happened to me. I had the feeling all along-the attacks on my reputation, the calls and trespassers at my house-that someone was trying to get me to go home. Trying to kill me in the cave was the last desperate act," said Lindsay.