Dead Past dffi-4

by Beverly Connor

  The squeaking sound of a cart brought her head up. Grover, Lynn Webber’s morgue assistant, was wheeling a body back from the portable x-ray set up in the trailer. He maneuvered between the light table and a frame hanging with x-rays he and Pilgrim’s assistant had taken so far. He bumped the light table where Allen Rankin was examining dental x-rays and muttered an apology. Diane wasn’t sure if he was talking to Rankin or the body. He referred to the charred and mutilated bodies as babies.

  “All them poor babies,” he had said on his first glance of the scene. “Them poor, poor babies.”

  Grover was probably in his forties, but it was hard to tell. His dark skin was unlined and his hair had no gray. He was a big guy with big hands and a face so solemn that he looked perpetually melancholy. He had absolute respect for human remains and a good knowledge of anatomy.

  “We have a match,” Rankin said from his seat at his field desk.

  The first match. The first “this is someone. Not just human features roughly carved in charcoal.” Not a John or Jane Doe. No longer anonymous.

  Rankin rose to give his report to the officer in charge of the records, a heavyset policeman with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a bloodhound face, and a body that looked both sturdy and agile-Archie Donahue, Diane believed his name was. As she recalled, he had been on the Rosewood police force for a long time and worked in the evidence locker. Well suited for this work, filing and cataloging the artifacts of lives that loved ones hoped would identify them in death.

  Archie sat at the long evidence table and looked up from the stack of antemortem records he’d just accepted from the intake desk in the coffee tent. He was about to enter them into the computer program that kept track of all the incoming details of missing students-anything that would help identify them. Archie seemed to hesitate reaching for Rankin’s report. Probably dreaded the thought that one of the dead would be a child or grandchild of someone he knew. Rosewood wasn’t that big a town. And if it were true that there are only six degrees of separation between everyone in the world, then in the town of Rosewood the number of degrees was probably one or two. Many local children stayed to attend the local university. Everyone in Rosewood would know someone touched by this.

  Diane saw his hands shake as he looked at the report.

  “Bobby Coleman… I know his daddy,” he whispered in a cigarette-and-whisky voice. “We go to the same church.”

  They all stopped, Pilgrim, Webber, Diane, even the assistants-a spontaneous moment of silence for his grief-for Bobby’s family’s grief.

  Brewster Pilgrim broke the silence. “I need your opinion here, Diane,” he said.

  Pilgrim was the coroner of the county to the north of Rosewood. He was inclined toward being heavy, and looked like everyone’s ideal grandfather with his white hair and white brush moustache.

  “I can’t tell the sex,” he said. “Looks too close to call to me.”

  Diane changed gloves, walked over to Brewster’s work area, and looked down in the open cavity of the charred cadaver.

  “We should have given this to you,” he said. “Hardly any flesh left. Must have been in the hottest part of the fire. And look at this. I believe a beam or something fell on him. Look at the crushed pelvis here.”

  The cadaver was charred black down to the bone. There was flesh, but it had been so consumed by fire that the hard bone underneath the flesh was exposed over the entire body. The head was gone, probably exploded in the heat. Pieces of skull lay in a shallow box near the remains with blackened flesh still clinging to them. Obviously found nearby and probably from the same body.

  “I believe you’re right about the break.” She examined the broken right ilium and left pubis. It looked like something heavy had fallen across the pelvic region and crushed the bones. “It is a rather androgynous pelvis, isn’t it,” agreed Diane.

  She carved flesh away from the pelvis to look at the various markers for gender. What she saw was a wide subpubic angle, wide sciatic notch, and the presence of the preauricular sulcus.

  “Female,” she said.

  “Thanks,” said Pilgrim. “I’d have probably called it male. Looked like a male pelvis to me.”

  As he spoke, Diane teased a bit of bone away from the pubis with a pair of tweezers and put it in the palm of her hand.

  “What’s that?” asked Pilgrim, leaning over her shoulder to look at the delicate piece.

  “Fetal bone,” said Diane. “She was pregnant.”

  Chapter 6

  Brewster Pilgrim looked for a long moment at the bone so tiny and fragile it could have come from a bird.

  “Them poor babies,” whispered Grover who stood behind them shaking his large head.

  Pilgrim snatched off his latex gloves, threw them in the trash. “I need a break,” he said, and headed out of the tent. “I don’t know why we can’t convince kids to keep out of drugs…” was the last thing Diane heard him say before he disappeared into the cold.

  Diane bagged and labeled the fetal bone and went back to her station. Lying before her on the table were assorted fragments of a skull that had burst from the heat of the fire that incinerated the body. She pulled up a stool, sat down, and began her next task-fitting together the pieces of the bone puzzle. Jin was helping Lynn Webber sample the marrow of a femur for DNA profiling.

  Rankin suddenly looked up from the charred and bloated remains of the corpse on his table. “We can’t stop kids from getting drugs because there is an army of dealers working against us,” he said. “And we’ll never stop them because it’s a trillion-dollar business. There’s just too much money-more money than any of us can wrap our brains around.” He paused for the briefest moment. “And no one can go up against that kind of money. Don’t kid yourselves that we can do anything but pick up the pieces from the carnage.” He stopped speaking just as suddenly as he had begun and continued his autopsy.

  They had all paused to watch Rankin as he ranted. Diane had a sick feeling that he was right. They couldn’t do anything. Her gaze met Lynn Webber’s briefly and she knew that Lynn had the same sick feeling. Grover was still shaking his head.

  Just a few more pieces of the skull puzzle and she too would go to the coffee tent and relax for fifteen minutes. It occurred to her that she wasn’t that far from her apartment. She could just go the short distance through the woods and sit down on her own sofa with a hot cup of her own coffee. The thought sounded heavenly. She placed two pieces of occipital together-the thick bone that made up the back of the head. From the prominent nuchal crest, the skull looked like a male.

  The morgue tent was void of conversation for several minutes. Only the sounds of work-the clinking tools, shuffling of movement, creaking trolleys-filled the silent space where Rankin’s rant still hung in the air. Everyone was silent, thought Diane, because like her they realized that Rankin was right-there was nothing that any of them could do but pick up the pieces.

  Archie, the policeman in charge of evidence, stood and said to no one in particular that he was also going to take a break. Diane watched him leave with two other policemen. They must feel the weight of Rankin’s words most, she thought. They were like the little Dutch boy trying to hold back the water with his finger in the hole in the dike. They were supposed to do something, but they too were powerless against so much money.

  Lynn finally broke the ensuing silence in what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

  “So, Jin,” she said, “what do you do in your spare time?”

  “I scuba dive,” he said. “Diane’s been teaching me caving. I’m getting pretty good, aren’t I, boss?”

  Both Jin and Webber’s voices were muffled by the nuisance masks they wore.

  “You’re a real natural,” said Diane.

  She looked among the fragments of skull scattered on her table for a triangular shaped piece that fit on the frontal just above the orbit. As she sorted through the remains, she noticed the absence of any part of the maxilla, the bone that holds the
upper teeth. Identification would be easier if she had teeth to work with.

  “Diving and caving sound dangerous,” said Lynn. “You don’t do them at the same time, do you?”

  “I was advised not to do that,” said Jin, stealing a glance at Diane. “Too dangerous.”

  “Do you do anything relaxing?” asked Lynn.

  Diane wasn’t sure if she was really interested in Jin’s leisure activities, or just trying to fill empty airspace. Her voice sounded strained, even under the mask.

  “Diving’s relaxing,” he said, his eyes above his mask reflecting a broad grin. “And I’ve found some nice, quiet moments hanging on to a rock wall.”

  Lynn Webber gave a muffled laugh. “At least it gets you away from crime,” she said, watching him extract the sample of bone marrow.

  “I like to solve mysteries as a hobby,” said Jin.

  Diane looked up quickly from a broken zygomatic arch, expecting a joke, looking forward to a laugh, but it didn’t sound like the beginning of one of Jin’s jokes. He sounded serious. Solving mysteries as a hobby-she couldn’t wait to hear what this was about.

  “A hobby,” Lynn exclaimed. “I’d think you would have enough of death in the crime lab.”

  “Disappearances,” said Jin. “I’m kind of into strange disappearances.”

  “Strange disappearances?” asked Lynn. “Like how? Hoffa, Judge Crater? Aren’t all disappearances strange until someone finds out what happened?”

  Jin shrugged. “Some. Hoffa, that’s not strange, I mean not the kind of strange I like. It was probably just a mob thing. Same with Crater. Probably Tammany Hall stuff. What I find interesting are disappearances like the one that Sherlock Holmes couldn’t solve-you know, like James Phillimore.”

  Jin took the pose of someone trying to remember a quote-chin up, hands suspended of movement. “ ‘Mr. James Phillimore who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.’ That’s the kind of missing person problem I like.”

  “That is more intriguing than Hoffa, I agree,” said Lynn. She stopped working on the cadaver in front of her and listened to Jin.

  Diane paused, too, sitting back on the stool. She had a large portion of the skull pieced together. The back, the side, the frontal down to the brow ridge, and one cheek. With the right x-ray she could probably identify the body. But it was a long shot that there would be the right x-ray.

  The partial skull sat in a small tub of sand looking as if it had just been revealed by a sandstorm. The sand held the blackened pieces of bone together while the glue dried. Jonas Briggs, the archaeologist at her museum, said that in his profession they reconstruct clay pots the same way. “Makes nice little Zen gardens-thousand-year-old potsherds standing in clean bronze sand,” he’d said. This Zen garden looked macabre.

  There was still an array of pieces to put together. She looked at them, mentally identifying the part of the skull each piece was from. Hard to believe that only yesterday this person was alive-just yesterday.

  “They had a special on Court TV two nights ago about missing persons-double feature, two hours’ worth,” said Jin. “Great stuff. Turns out there are several missing persons who meet my criteria of interesting. A teenage girl and her family were leaving church when she went back in for her purse and was never seen again. Doesn’t that sound like Sherlock Holmes? And a whole family just fell off the face of the earth. No one knew they were gone; they just weren’t home anymore-but all their belongings were still in the house, their car in the driveway. And then there was the man who was last seen in the waiting room of his doctor’s office. The receptionist didn’t see him leave and no one knows what happened to him. All these people were normal people with no secret lives or anything-that anyone found out about,” he added. “I’d like to investigate them.”

  “No clues at all in any of the cases?” asked Lynn.

  Diane picked up a piece of nasal bone and turned it over in her hand. Even blackened as it was, a healed crack was evident. Something distinctive about this individual, she thought as she looked for surrounding pieces.

  “No clues,” said Jin. “But I tell you, my favorite is Colonel Percy Fawcett.”

  “Never heard of him,” said Lynn.

  “He’s the coolest missing person. He disappeared with his son and his son’s friend in the Amazon while looking for an ancient city inhabited by a mysterious tribe. His story is really strange, full of subterranean cities, alien tribes, psychics, with the lost city of Atlantis thrown in. Great stuff,” he repeated.

  “Do you ever try to solve any of the cases?” asked Diane. Jin turned to her, looking almost startled that she had been listening.

  “I’ve helped with a couple of cold cases that detective friends of mine were working on. I’m afraid I didn’t offer much in the way of a solution. Mostly I just read up on them and try to solve them-you know, like an armchair detective. I’ve gotten a few good hypotheses. You know, there’s been quite a few missing persons north of here in the Smoky Mountains. People disappear and nothing is ever found of them,” he said. “Nothing. I mean, like what’s in the Smokys?”

  “Wild pigs,” said Diane without looking up from the piece of skull she was gluing together. “They eat everything with blood on it-bones, sticks, you name it.”

  “Yes, pigs,” agreed Lynn. “Once you’re dead, the wild boars scarf you up.”

  Jin looked from Diane to Lynn. “Well, thanks for ruining a perfectly good mystery for me.”

  Lynn and Diane both laughed.

  Diane had finished gluing all the pieces of the skull she had and they sat drying in the sandbox. It looked like the pieced-together ancient skulls that she had in the museum-but this person was recently alive.

  “I’m going to take a break,” she said. “When I come back, I’ll see if we have any x-rays of faces with broken noses. I believe I can ID this skull.”

  “I think I’ll finish up this cadaver,” said Lynn. She sneaked a peek at the table where Brewster Pilgrim left his.

  Jin slipped off his gloves and put on a new pair, walked over to Pilgrim’s table, and began preparations to cut the femur and take a DNA sample. Back to business.

  Diane left the tent and gulped in the outside air. The cold bit her lungs. It felt good to be out of the morgue tent.

  Chapter 7

  Sleet was falling again. The drops felt like cold pin-pricks on Diane’s face. The argon streetlights shining bright against the backdrop of the twilight sky flooded over the tent city and gave the place an eerie glow. There were searchlights and strange machines in one direction along the street, and a quiet crowd of people standing in the other. In a David Lynch movie it could have been the midway of some macabre traveling circus.

  Diane looked wistfully in the direction of her apartment but did not yield to the temptation to escape to its peace and solitude. She would take fifteen minutes of relief in the coffee tent. But first she stopped at the crime scene.

  The blackened rubble of the house was now crisscrossed by planks and grid strings and illuminated by a ring of large spotlights shining into it from all sides. Neva and David were stretched out on boards, sifting carefully through a grid square near the front of the site. A mobile crane parked to one side of the yard was lifting a basket of something out of the gaping hole of the burned-out basement.

  Diane looked over the edge into the pit. Wisps of smoke or steam rose here and there from the dark mass into the cold night air. The bright white light of the spotlights seemed to be absorbed into the charred rubble and not reflected back. A gust of wind carried up from the basement an acrid stench that smelled like a combination of wood smoke, wet, burned garbage, melted plastic, and scorched flesh, with an assortment of chemicals thrown into the mix. Diane stepped backward for a breath of air to clear her lungs.

  The house that was there only yesterday had been a yellow Victorian with an octagonal tower, high-peaked roof, fireplaces, wraparound porches, and white gingerbread trim. A long
line of students had lived many of their university years in its apartments. Diane remembered scenes of them laying down a large tarp and pouring sand over it to make themselves a beach volleyball court on game weekends, or some student relaxing on the porch swing reading a book, or several sitting on the steps shouting at their friends passing in cars. And now… nothing but black ashes covered with the spiderweb of crime scene string and scaffolding.

  Was one of those students from the porch swing in happier times now lying on her autopsy table? The thought made her profoundly sad.

  Diane walked toward the front of the burned-out house through the safe path that her team had created. All the snow had melted from the path, leaving a muddy walkway covered by planks. David saw her approaching, rose, and walked on the planking toward her, readjusting his baseball cap on his balding head. Neva looked up and waved, but kept working.

  The drops of sleet were getting heavier, and Diane could feel her hair getting wet. She pulled a knit cap from her coat pocket and put it on, pushing her hair underneath it.

  “How’s it going?” asked Diane. She could tell by the look on David’s face he wasn’t happy.

  “Frustrating,” said David. He took off his cap, smoothed down the nonexistent hair on the top of his head, and put his cap back on. “It’s going fine if we can keep McNair away.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Mostly meddling.”

  “Meddling?” Diane raised her eyebrows. “He is the arson investigator.”

  “Then he should act like one.” David glanced over his shoulder as if someone might be listening. “He looks through all our evidence bags-breaks the seal and paws through the contents. Says he needs to see what we’re finding. I told him that the lab is the place to examine the evidence, and he told me to just tend to my job, that he’s in charge. I don’t know how this guy thought he would be even remotely qualified to be the director of the crime lab. He’s not qualified to be an arson investigator. Any good defense attorney can challenge every piece of evidence we’ve collected, because of him.”