Dead Past

by Beverly Connor

  Diane sighed. It still surprised her that someone who is alive and vital one minute can, in a moment, be reduced to bones.

  “Then I’d better get back to work,” she said.

  The morgue tent looked just as it had when she left—blackened bodies on every table. Jin was at her table laying out bones. Archie was at his table sorting through boxes of objects and medical information collected from parents of missing children. It frightened Diane to think that with the slightest change of fate, he might have been filing Star’s identifying information. She shivered. All of them looked up when Diane walked in.

  “We were all so glad to hear that you found Star,” said Lynn Webber. “It was as if she belonged to all of us.”

  “I appreciate that, guys. I can’t tell you what a scary night it was until we found her. She was doing what she should have been, studying for finals with a friend.”

  She paused a moment as she took her place at her metal table. “Her friend, Jenny Baker, was asked to go to the party by Bobby Coleman. She decided to study instead.”

  “Bless her little heart,” said Lynn.

  “I know the Bakers, too,” said Archie. “I’m glad I won’t be going to her funeral as well as Bobby’s.”

  “You know,” said Rankin, “maybe they should have brought outside people in to identify the bodies. We’re going to know so many of these students. I know the parents of one of the kids in the hospital. They’re trying to save his arm.”

  “I know,” said Diane. “One of my museum staff is in the hospital in a coma.” Diane put on her lab coat and latex gloves. “But who could do a better and more careful job than we can? If it’s hard on us, just think of the parents and relatives who are our friends and colleagues.”

  “You’re right about that,” said Rankin. “I guess it’s what we do.”

  “Is there anything new here?” asked Diane.

  “They found another charred body in the basement rubble,” said Lynn. “That brings the total to thirty-three. Garnett assigned priority to all the basement bodies. He wants to know who was found in proximity to the lab. Brewster identified two more bodies of students from their dental charts.”

  Another body. Diane hoped that was the last one. She looked at the bones in front of her. Jin had laid them out on labeled trays.

  “I thought this might be the best way,” said Jin. “Each tray represents the grid they were found in. When you have examined them, I’ll pack them up and take them to the lab to extract DNA.”

  Diane nodded and picked up a charred triquetral—one of the carpal bones in the wrist—and began her measurements.

  “I understand you had a row at the hospital,” said Rankin after several minutes.

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Pilgrim.

  “Diane,” Rankin said. “Tell us about it.”

  “Not much to tell. I was visiting Darcy Kincaid, the museum staff member I told you about.” Diane described for them the events that transpired in the hospital.

  “What?” said Lynn. “You’re kidding. She just attacked you right there in the solarium?”

  “In the hallway. She hit me one good lick, but didn’t do any harm. The policeman guarding the son arrested her.”

  “Why did she attack you?” asked Jin, who seemed to find it funny, judging from the grin on his face.

  “They’re saying their son is the innocent victim and for some unknown reason, I’m trying to frame him or something. Anyway, their story is that I’m the culprit and they are going to have me fired and sue the police department.”

  “I think they are going to have to adopt another attitude,” said Brewster Pilgrim. “People aren’t in the mood right now for that kind of nonsense.”

  “Amen,” said Archie.

  Diane wanted to get off the topic of her misadventure, so she tried to make light of it. “It was a minor event. I’m sure when their lawyers see the evidence they’ll recommend abject contrition.”

  After seeing Blake Stanton’s parents, she felt oddly sorry for him; then she looked at the blackened bones in front of her and her sympathy evaporated. If he had anything at all to do with this . . . , she thought.

  She went back to work examining and measuring. There were several wrist bones found together, suggesting that they were from the same wrist. All were from the right side. She put the bones together like a three-dimensional puzzle and found that they fit as though they belonged, and they had complementary wear patterns in the articulated surfaces. She noted a healed fracture on the hook part of the hamate.

  “The size of the bones falls within the male range,” she said to Jin as she recorded the information on the form. “That doesn’t exclude larger boned females, of course. I think he—or she—might have been a baseball, racquetball or tennis player.”

  “Why is that?” asked Jin.

  She showed him the healed fracture. “This kind of fracture is not uncommon among athletes in sports that involve the swinging of a club.”

  “Really?” said Jin. “You can take a handful of wrist bones and say this is a male baseball player? That’s so cool.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said it could be. It’s suggestive. And I don’t know what kind of club was swung. Could’ve been an ax and he cut firewood for a living.”

  “Anyway, it’s really neat what you do with bones.”

  Archie shuffled through one of the boxes. He brought her a large envelope. He was limping slightly; she recalled a policeman getting shot last year and she wondered if it was Archie.

  “I remember this,” he said, “because Marjie, the policewoman who brought this batch in, said he’s a neighbor, and the son of a Rosewood policeman. He’s on the university’s racquetball team. She told me this is an x-ray of his hand.”

  “You have a good memory. Thank you, Archie,” said Diane. “This is a big help.”

  “Any little thing I can do.” He went back to his seat just as Marjie brought him more packages containing information on more missing children.

  Diane took the x-ray from the envelope and put it on the light box. There it was, a small fracture line like the healed one in the bones in front of her. She took each of the wrist bones in turn and compared it to the x-ray. There were no more fractures, but the relative sizes and wear patterns matched. She was satisfied that these were the bones of—she looked at the name on the x-ray—Donald Wallace. Now, if she could just find the rest of him.

  Wallace? She looked back at the name. Then picked up the envelope and read the label. Just as she feared. His father was Izzy Wallace, a policeman, as Archie had said—and a friend of Frank’s. Damn.

  Diane dreaded telling Frank. He was so overjoyed at finding Star. Now his friend will have this dreadful news. Izzy Wallace wasn’t one of her favorite people and she certainly wasn’t one of his, but she would wish this on no one. She looked forlornly at the other bones in the trays and set about seeing if she could match them up.

  It looked as if most of the bones found along the adjacent grid squares belonged with these wrist bones. But Jin would have to take DNA samples anyway to confirm.

  As if reading her mind, Jin spoke. “We’ll have to use mitochondrial DNA on most of these remains. The nuclear DNA will have been too degraded by the fire.”

  Diane nodded. “I think for most we’ll have dental records and x-rays to go along with the DNA. There’ll just be a few that we’ll need to rely only on DNA.”

  “You know, boss,” began Jin.

  “I know, Jin. If we had our own DNA lab, you could have all these done tonight and we’d have everyone’s identity tomorrow.”

  “There’s that, but I was going to suggest that since I have to extract these samples when we get back to the lab, why don’t I go out and help Neva and David get all the remains collected. We’ll get done faster.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Jin pealed off his gloves and slipped off his green lab coat. Just as he started out the door, David entered carrying a box.

&nb
sp; “We found another body.”

  He brought the bones to Diane’s table. His dark eyes sparkled. Diane waited for the other shoe to drop. There was usually another shoe when David looked like that.

  “We found him among metal bed slats, and a partially consumed head and footboard,” he said, “so we think he may have been in bed at the time of the fire. And get this. He was shot in the head.”

  Chapter 13

  “Shot?” said Diane.

  Allen Rankin looked up from the cadaver he was examining. “Someone was shot? In the house? Before the fire?” he said. “That puts a different complexion on the whole thing.”

  David set the box on an unoccupied gurney near Diane’s table and handed her snapshots of the scene. “I’ll get the official pictures to you when I can,” he said.

  Diane took the small photographs of the bones in situ. “This is how you found them?” she asked.

  “Just like that. It looks like the bullet went in the left cheek and out the right side of the head,” said David.

  Diane opened the box and began setting the bones out on the gurney in anatomical position. Up to this point, the bones recovered from the site had been various shades of gray to black in color, depending on how burned they were. This set of bones were charred and blackened, but they didn’t have any of the lighter shades of gray or white; they were mostly a dark rich brown. Nor did they have any bits of charred flesh attached to them.

  Grover came to help Diane lay out the bones. The MEs left their tables to take a look at the murder victim. Like Grover, they wanted to see something that could add a whole new dimension to the investigation. She could see they were as curious as she.

  Diane picked up the skull and examined the bullet wound. It apparently hit dead center in the left infra-orbital foramen—a hole under the left orbit for nerves and vessels—and exited through the right side on the lambdoidal suture where the parietal and occipital meet. The bullet’s exit took huge fragments of skull with it.

  Diane took off her glove and touched a femur with her fingers.

  “This ain’t right, is it?” said Grover.

  “Grover, you know your bones, don’t you?” said Diane. She remembered when he cleaned the bones of a murder victim for her how he had packaged the bones with all the correct sides together, even the ribs.

  “What?” asked Pilgrim. “What is it that you are seeing?”

  “For one thing,” said Diane, “look at the photograph. Look how the bones are arranged.”

  “He looks to have been in a super flexed position when he died,” said David. “You think he was tied up and executed?”

  “No,” said Diane. She smiled at Grover. “What do you notice about the bones, Grover?”

  “They’re mighty brown, Dr. Fallon. Mighty brown.”

  “Um huh,” murmured Diane. She picked up several bones and studied each. She examined the skull again and the teeth and surfaces inside the skull.

  “The bones are awfully clean,” said Jin.

  “Aren’t they, though?” said Diane.

  “A dental chart isn’t going to help much on him,” said Rankin. “He has no fillings, and the poor fellow had more than a few bad dental caries in his molars. That one in his incisor looks like it might have been ready to abscess.”

  “How old is he—or she?” asked Jin.

  “He. The pelvis is clearly male. He was probably in his early twenties.” She showed them the rugged surface of his pubis symphysis—where the two hip bones come together in front. “The older you get, the more worn down it is—among other things. And he’s just getting in his third molars.”

  “So, Grover,” said Lynn Webber, “what’s with the brown bones?”

  “I believe he’s worn down to his bones in a coffin. Don’t you, Dr. Fallon?” he said.

  “I do indeed,” said Diane.

  “In a coffin?” said David. “What are you saying?”

  “Bones in a coffin often get that very brown color to them. Look,” she handed David back the photograph. “This fellow is far too flexed to have been put that way while he was still fleshed out—even if he were bound tight. Look at how the long bones are all parallel and the smaller bones are all in a pile. I believe the skeleton was in a box under one of the students’ bed. I’ll have to run some tests, but these bones are very old, perhaps a hundred years or more.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Rankin. “I guess his killer’s beyond the likes of us now. But that begs the question, just where did a student get the skeleton of a person who appears to have had a proper burial when he died?”

  “Good question. If any of the house’s residents are among the survivors, we can ask if they know,” said Diane. “In the meantime, pack this fellow back up. I’ll take him to the osteology lab and work on him later.”

  “All that’s real interesting,” said Archie. He was standing behind Jin, looking over his shoulder. “Never knew you could tell so much from just bones.”

  “Oh, she can tell you more than that when she gets to really analyzing him,” said Jin.

  “You trying to butter me up, Jin?” asked Diane.

  “Every chance I get, Boss.” He grinned at her.

  Grover began repacking the bones in his careful way—as if the deceased could feel what was happening to them and he wanted to make sure they were comfortable throughout their journey to the afterlife. Everyone else gravitated back to their respective workstations, except Lynn Webber. She hung back. Jin went with David back to the burned-out house site.

  “OK, Grover,” Lynn asked her diener, “how did you know about the bones turning brown in a coffin?”

  “Like Raymond was always saying,” he replied, referring to his cousin who had been Lynn’s assistant before him, “there are some questions it’s just best not to ask.” He gave her a rare smile, and Lynn laughed out loud.

  Diane got the idea that this was the first joke Grover had ever made.

  Diane packaged and labeled the bones, which she had tentatively identified as those of Donald Wallace, pending DNA confirmation. How awful for the parents to have raised a son or daughter to adulthood with all their hopes and dreams for that child, and in just one moment of disaster to have nothing left but a few bones—no face to look upon, nothing to see or hold. She did not envy the people whose job it was to inform the parents that their child’s remains had been identified.

  By the end of the day all the bodies had been autopsied, and all but eight were identified. Of those remaining eight, the forensics team felt they would be able to ID most of them when everyone had been reported missing. It was, after all, still soon after the tragedy and it might be a week or more before some people were confirmed missing and forensic evidence could be collected for comparison.

  Diane had yet to determine how many individuals the disarticulated bones represented. Those would be the hardest to identify. Now that the recovered bodies had been processed, she was going to take the remaining bones back to her lab, which was a more efficient operation than this tent city and had much less distraction.

  Toward the end of the day when one of the last bodies was being wheeled in by Pilgrim’s diener, a reporter managed to get inside the tent by waiting until one of the rear entrances was unguarded. He crept in with his camera before anyone noticed him but froze when he saw a charred body in the characteristic pugilistic pose roll past him on a gurney. When the stronger flexor muscles shrink and contract from the fire, the arms and hands strike the pose of a boxer. It is a disturbing sight. The burned flesh is bad enough, but the posed appearance of the cadaver looks all the more horrifying. The reporter stared transfixed with his camera in his hand until one of the policemen led him away.

  Diane guessed him to be new to this type of story—apparently he’d never seen firsthand a fiery accident or the aftermath of a house fire. She felt sorry for him. These were images no one wants in their head.

  “I guess he’ll never do that again,” said Rankin, the ME the body was headed for.
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  “But his description of what we’re doing in here is going to be worse,” said Lynn.

  “How could he possibly describe anything worse than this has been,” said Brewster Pilgrim.

  “You have me there,” said Lynn. She took off her lab coat and gloves. “I’m going to sit down by Archie here and do some paperwork, go home, and soak in a hot bath for several days,” she announced. “Or until we get some more dental charts and x-rays to look at.”

  “You know what we haven’t seen?” said Rankin.

  “What’s that?” asked Pilgrim.

  “Meth mouth. Even if most of the students at the party didn’t know what was going on in the basement, which I think may be true, and were not methamphetamine users, what about the cooks in the basement or some of the residents? Or surely there were some buyers at the party. I haven’t seen anybody with the diseased mouth of a serious crystal meth addict.”

  “Neither did I,” agreed Pilgrim.

  Lynn looked up from her paperwork. “What are you saying that means, exactly?” she asked.

  Rankin shrugged his thin shoulders. “I guess maybe if this was just someone cooking for themselves and a few addicted friends, I’d expect to find some of those friends at the party. All I’ve seen is some pretty good dentition. The worst teeth I’ve seen are in our hundred-year-old fellow. If it was a large-scale operation and the meth was going to a distributor, then there might not be many addicts at the party. That’s all. I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “It’s a good thought,” said Diane. “The teeth I’ve seen have only been damaged by fire—no signs of methamphetamine use.”

  “It’s an idea,” said Pilgrim. “I’m not sure I like the implications. It speaks of a much greater problem.”

  “It’s a big problem any way you look at it,” said Archie. “We’re just over an hour from Atlanta. What makes anybody think that Rosewood’s immune to drugs? Let me tell you, we’re just like every other place in the country. I wish we weren’t.”

  Diane didn’t like that thought. But he was probably right. Right now, however, her problem was identifying bodies, not finding evildoers. She happily left that to Garnett and others. She took off her lab coat and checked out for the evening, leaving orders for all the bones to be delivered to the crime lab.