by J. F. Margos
“So, why dig her up and try to get rid of her after all this time?”
“That’s the twenty-five-thousand-dollar question. Something changed in the killer, or something else happened that caused him to dig her up and move her like that. He may have just wanted to be rid of the memory of it, or it could have been a combination of things that happened at once. When we figure that out, we’ll have all the answers.”
“What about the way she was killed? You said you thought she might have meant something to the killer, but it looks to me like he just executed her.”
“I think he did, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t mean something to him. In fact, he had more of a reason to kill her if she meant something to him. He may have even planned it out in his mind before.”
“Elaborate.”
“Maybe the killer believed she did something to him for which she deserved to be ‘executed’—and it’s possible that the deceased may not have even actually committed the offense for which she was killed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if the killer was paranoid, which is totally possible, and thought she did something to deserve being killed, then he probably thought about killing her for a while. It satisfied the paranoid feelings he had. In fact, it may all be in his mind anyway, and we may find in the end that this victim didn’t even do what the killer thought she did. This kind of killer would kill for some offense with or without any real proof, based solely on what he believed, because he convinced himself in his mind that it’s absolutely true, that someone is to blame, and he believed that the person deserved to pay.”
“That’s interesting. What gives you the impression the killer might be this kind of killer?”
“The way she was killed seems calculated and organized and I don’t see any passion in it. The lack of passion leads me to believe that he thought she deserved this in some way. In other words, it wasn’t done spur of the moment—thought went into it. Hence the execution style to the shooting. But this burial and reburial and what I see in that isn’t organized or thought out at all in my opinion—and he reburied her in a way that he wouldn’t be responsible for discarding her remains. It’s completely irrational. Plus, in my gut I feel that his attempt to discard her is part of his denial of guilt and that goes hand in hand with this kind of personality—‘Someone else is to blame in all this, not me. She deserves all of this.’”
“So, in a nutshell, he thinks she’s done something to him and he kills her. He plans the killing, but then later his actions—the reburial—are committed in response to some other event?”
“Right.”
“This helps a lot.”
“It’s all just my impression—a gut feeling at this point—based on an execution-style bullet hole and bones dumped and carelessly reburied in a shallow grave. I just let it run through my head and try to see the event the way it might have happened. Then I try to imagine why the person would have done the murder that way. What was his motive in carrying out these actions?”
I smiled. It was the way I worked a crime scene—letting it run through my mind, but I didn’t have the knowledge of behavior that Leo had, just an eye for detail.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Nope. Just keep me in the loop, because now I’m tantalized.” She smiled broadly.
“Oh, one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“We both have been referring to the killer as ‘he.’ Any chance the killer is a woman?”
“Sure. I was just using the ‘he’ in a more general sense, but a woman could have all the same issues and could be the killer. I’ll tell you, though, the statistics say it’s more likely to be a guy.”
“I hope my work sheds more light on it all.”
“Your work usually does, Toni.”
“I’ve already started the bust.”
“Good. So, got any root beer in this place?” Leo grinned.
“Brat. Come on inside and we’ll drink the best root beer anywhere.”
We went into my kitchen and I pulled two ice-cold IBC root beers out of the fridge. IBC is bottled in Plano, and it’s genuine old-fashioned Texas root beer. I grabbed two frosted mugs from the freezer and poured the soda down the sides of each mug for minimum suds.
“Let’s drink these on the patio. What do you say?”
“You’re twisting my arm, Toni.”
We sat down in the Adirondack chairs I had outside and got into a relaxed mode. I took a long, slow swallow of the bubbly stuff.
“Ahh, this is the best.”
“You know how to serve root beer, Toni.”
“Well, I’ve had a little experience.”
“So, what’s up with grumpiness and carburetor overhauls and Vietnam?”
I sighed and told her about Ted and the phone call from Irini.
“You know, I forget that you were in ’Nam,” she said. “You almost never talk about that. I even forget that you were a registered nurse.”
“When I came back from Vietnam I wanted to forget I was a registered nurse, too.”
“So, you got into forensics?”
“Well, it didn’t happen like that. I went back to school and got my art degree, then my master’s and Ph.D. It was a fluke that I got into this line of work. It used to not exist, you know.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
“I got into it because of Jack’s work as a detective, and my love of and involvement in art, particularly in sculpture.”
“That makes sense.”
We both took another long swallow of root beer and sat in silence for a few minutes.
“So, Toni, what was ’Nam like?”
“Blood and bombs and horrible smells—gasoline and jet-fuel smell in everything—and death, lots of death.”
“I guess you saw some terrible stuff.”
“Yes, I did, but I was a triage nurse for flying wounded boys to other hospitals or home, so I didn’t see the worst of it. The army nurses out in the field saw things I think would have driven me mad.”
“I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff in fires. I can’t imagine going to war like that. So, you and Jack just hung out with Ted most of the time?”
“When we were all off duty we did. There was this place there—just a dump where we ate and hung out. We’d spend hours there yucking it up and talking about how great it would be when we all got back home.”
“Wow. I’m sorry, Toni.”
“Yeah, it makes me sick sometimes. Ted never made it, and now Jack’s gone. It’d be a lot easier to handle Ted being found if Jack was still here with me. It really stinks.”
“I’m in touch with that emotion in a big way.”
Now I felt really bad. Here I was talking about all this to Leo, and her parents and brother were all dead, and her only living relative was her cousin, Pete. Her parents had been killed by a drunk driver on 2222, and her brother, formerly Tommy Lucero’s partner, had been shot to death in the line of duty just over a year ago.
“I’m sorry, kid, I wasn’t thinking.”
“Aw, don’t start walking on eggshells around me. I don’t own grief, you know. Vietnam was horrible. I’m sure Ted wasn’t the only person you knew there who didn’t make it. You have a right to feel what you feel about that.”
“Unfortunately, Ted wasn’t the only friend we had there who didn’t make it. He was the friend we knew and loved the most, I guess, but there were so many others. Oh man, marines there on the base who went off on patrol and they’d come back with a third of the guys gone, and two or three of those were friends of ours. Pilots that flew off and never came back—it was an endless stream.”
“So now Ted may have been found, and you have to help figure that out.”
“Yes.”
“And that takes you right back into the endless stream again.”
“Yeah.”
“I totally understand. Toni?”
“Yes.”
“You can talk to me about it anyt
ime. Sometimes it’s better to talk about these things with someone who gets it. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah, kid, I do.”
Chapter Four
Sergeant Major Tomlinson called me back from the CILHI labs in Hawaii. CILHI’s staff includes thirty anthropologists, four forensic odontologists (dentists) and numerous other forensic scientists. They also employ other experts on an as-needed basis, which can include any legitimate expert requested by the family of a missing service person. I had been used twice previously to reconstruct the faces of two servicemen recovered from Laos and Cambodia.
The Sergeant Major remembered me. With his typical military courtesy, he continually addressed me as “Dr. Sullivan” because of my Ph.D. in art. It made me uncomfortable. I had worked hard to complete my formal education, but I considered the informal education of my life’s experiences to be more important, and that education had been completed by “Toni,” not Dr. Sullivan.
We spoke about my phone conversation with Irini. He was familiar with the case and gave me all the details from his perspective.
It had been a long road to find remains that might actually belong to Teddy. Three times before, CILHI had thought they would bring Ted home. The first time, they dug at a site they thought was near his supposed crash site, but they found nothing. They conducted more interviews with the locals and continued searching for the right site.
The second time they were supposed to go in and search a site, there were political problems and they weren’t allowed in. The third time, with political problems resolved, they went in to search the second site and labored again with no results.
More interviews with locals and more research had pointed them to this new site. Here they had found fragments of bones, pieces of the airplane—some parts of it had been cannibalized by the locals for use in homemade farming equipment—and they also found other personal items that had definitely belonged to a U.S. serviceman. They sifted the soil in that location for months and collected everything they could find. Now they just needed a way to prove that what they had found were the remains of Captain Theodore P. Nikolaides.
As Irini had said, few teeth were recovered and the ones they found were only Ted’s good teeth and not the ones they needed to make a positive match to his dental work. The nuclear DNA had deteriorated, but that was expected. The mitochondrial DNA was totally usable, but there was no one with whom they could compare it. They had used that DNA, however, to match the bone pieces and the skull—that was a match. Knowing that all those parts belonged to the same person meant that once the ID had been made through my facial reconstruction, all the matching pieces could be said to belong to someone—he would have a face, a name, a history and a family and friends.
If these were Ted’s remains, he would get a posthumous Purple Heart and qualify for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. His family would have closure and his fellow American citizens would lay him to rest with full military honors. It seemed a cheap price for the life of such a man and it was long overdue, but it was more than a man like Ted Nikolaides would have ever expected or asked for his service. But then, that is the hero’s way and my friend Ted had been a hero long before he ever gave his life for his country.
Sergeant Major Tomlinson and I agreed that I would arrive in Honolulu at Hickham Air Force Base next week to begin my work. I would make my own travel arrangements.
It was three in the morning. I sat on the patio behind my house, barefoot, wearing my jeans and a pullover sweatshirt, with a mug of root beer in my hand. I was slumped down in an Adirondack chair gazing up at the stars and the elliptical track above me. I had picked out a couple of planets, but couldn’t remember which one was Mars and which one Venus. My brain was otherwise occupied and all other data had slipped off-line.
Teddy Nikolaides had great teeth and a brilliant smile to show them off. His smile was broad, engaging and completely sincere—consequently, it was absolutely mesmerizing. It was painful at this point to remember the joy of that smile.
The last day I saw Ted was supposed to be his last day in Vietnam, not his last day on this side of life. The weather had been incredible that day. Ted had orders to go home. He was supposed to leave for Saigon and then go on to Hawaii, where he would change planes and continue back to the mainland—to Chicago. There he would be with his beautiful Irini and their two children, Eleni and Gregory. Eleni was four and Gregory was almost two.
From the moment he got up that day, Ted had been more energetic than usual. He had been jubilant. He had to fly one more mission and it was supposed to be a short one, and then he was leaving. Before he boarded the plane, he had come to say goodbye to Jack and me. He wasn’t sure there would be time when he got back before he headed off for Saigon. The three of us talked of Ted’s trip home, of how Jack and I would get together with Ted and Irini in the States, and of all the incredibly good times we knew the four of us would have together. Ted was talking of moving his family from Chicago to Texas. He and Irini had already discussed it. Irini and I had talked on the phone and began to write one another. She wanted to move, to live in a place that was more like her home country.
As the three of us finished our conversation, there was a moment where sorrow almost overcame us, but Ted wouldn’t allow it.
“No tears,” he had said. “There will be such good times for all of us, and it will be soon.”
We all hugged and laughed as Ted made jokes. He walked out to his plane and climbed on board, pulled on his helmet and raised his hand high in one final greeting, beaming his beautiful joyous smile.
I tilted the mug over my lip and let the carbonated beverage flow in a long swallow. It was my second glass. In spite of the hour, I was seriously considering a third. After the two reconstructs I had done for CILHI, I knew what to expect in terms of remains. The skulls I had worked on previously had been put together from pieces—lots of pieces. The one on which I would do the reconstruct this time was only in five pieces. The forensic anthropologist had put them back together already. Apparently, the only reason there were pieces of the skull to reconstruct was due to some fluke of protection that had been offered by the pilot’s helmet, and the nature of the crash.
All that was left were just pieces of bones, bones of those long dead—dry bones.
I laid my head back against the chair and whispered, “Dry bones…”
I thought about death and life, about dry bones and prophecies of resurrection and the words of the prophet Ezekiel flowed into my mind: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry…”
They were very dry—a symbol for those long dead.
The prophet continues, “Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.. and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army…behold they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts…Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves…and shall put my spirit in you and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land…”
Place you in your own land…
The dead lie on the jungle floor for thirty years or more and what’s left by the time they are discovered and brought home is a pretty disheartening sight. The recovery teams mark off the supposed “burial” sites like archaeological digs. They trowel slowly and carefully within the dig and “exhume” each and every little piece of anything that looks as if it might have belonged to a human or one’s body. They tag everything, bag everything and ultimately bring it back to American soil. They bring it all back to the U.S. Army CILHI labs at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii. There, forensic anthropologists, forensic odontologists, DNA lab technicians and, sometimes, forensic artists come t
ogether to help identify the remains of the missing. We are all the new undertakers of the post-Vietnam era. You don’t need a real undertaker just to put “rocks” in a box. Sadly, that’s what most of the remains look like.
That was what was eating at me now—rocks in a box. Now they might be someone I knew. It’s one thing to put your hands on the skull and bones of a stranger and try to ID them and bring them some level of peace, and their families some level of closure, but it is something else altogether to contemplate placing your hands on a skull that may have housed the thinking brain of a friend—a skull that held his eyes, ears, mouth and the nose through which he breathed the breath of life itself.
Teddy Nikolaides used to tilt his head back and laugh out loud with absolute joy. Did the skull I would cast in Hawaii once reverberate with that laughter? The burden of determining that answer now lay solely with me. If I determined the remains belonged to someone else, it would be a huge blow to me and to Teddy’s family. If I determined the remains belonged to Teddy, we would all have to deal with the reality of his death. Since that fateful day in Vietnam, his death had not been confirmed in any tangible way. There had been no real closure. He just flew off one day and never came back. I sighed and polished off the rest of the root beer that was in the bottom of my mug. I had another frosted mug in the freezer and it was time for a third.
It was early morning, when I was startled awake by the word “Mom!”
I looked up to see the sun filtering through the lowhanging branches of my backyard. Initially, I couldn’t remember where I was or what I was doing there. The first thing I realized was that my feet were cold. Then I realized there was a tall, strawberry-blond man standing over me, but I couldn’t see his face due to all the backlighting from the sun. He was wearing a gun in a holster that hung on his belt and the sunlight glinted off of a gold detective’s badge. I recognized my son’s voice, and then I remembered where I was and what I was doing there.