by C. J. Lyons
Chapter Twenty-Four
As they skirted the town square on their way to the coroner’s office, TK took over pizza duty to free David’s hands so he could take photos of the protesters for the story he was writing. The police had cleared an eight-foot-wide alley, roughly down the center of the town square, lined with barricades to separate the two factions. They patrolled their narrow DMZ in full riot gear along with two K-9s.
It was an efficient use of their limited manpower, but TK couldn’t help but wonder exactly how long the flimsy wooden barricades—nothing more than prettily painted sawhorses—would hold if either side of the crowd grew violent. The officers would be caught in the middle with no place to shelter, forced to fight their way through. Seemed like a recipe for disaster.
Earlier in the day, the anti-police protesters had been the loudest, most angry. But now they had their backs turned on the opposition as a minister led them in prayer.
On the other side of the barricades, the white supremacists—TK hated to think of them as the pro-police side; she doubted the police actually wanted their support—had grown in numbers and were chanting militaristic slogans in an attempt to disrupt the prayers opposite them. Boot stomps and raised fists slashed through the night, promising no peace for anyone.
David’s photos and videos captured the contrasts and contradictions implicit in the scene: bulky police silhouettes with their weapons and dogs morphed into the elongated shadows of monsters surrounded by ghostly candlelight with outstretched, empty, questing arms on one side and a blur of angry motion threatening them from the other.
As she glanced over his shoulder to the screen, she realized he wasn’t favoring one side or the other—or the third, if you counted the law enforcement presence—but rather offering insights into the paradox of democratic protest where everyone had the right to express their opinion but that did not mean that anyone was actually in the right.
Freedom is the right to hate, her grandfather’s words sounded in her head as David became engulfed by the crowd, swallowed whole when a group of young skinheads surged toward the police barricades. For a moment she panicked until she saw him talking to a trio of middle-aged women on the edge of the fray: two white, one black, holding a Blue Lives Matter banner.
Leave it to David to calmly stroll past a bunch of hopped-up racists and find an island of sanity in the middle of this chaos, she thought as she joined him, still holding the pizzas. She offered some to the women, letting David do his work.
“I remember you from when you were on TV,” one of the women gushed. “Before—”
“The IED,” David finished for her. “You’re all wives of police officers?”
“Terri and me, our husbands are on the force in Philly,” one of the women gestured to herself and the woman beside her, “but Marianne, her husband was killed. Last year.”
“I’m so sorry,” David told the woman, his body language doing all the work of expressing his emotions. “What happened?”
“It was a lot like the case here. Foot chase, ended when there was nowhere left to run, and the kid—he was only fifteen—he shot my Tyrone. Tyrone had his weapon drawn, but never got a shot off. I think maybe he was hoping, I mean the kid was just a kid, all he’d done was stole a car, I’m not even sure Tyrone knew he had a gun until it was too late.” Her voice trailed off. David nodded his sympathy and waited, giving her space to collect her thoughts.
She jerked her head toward the raucous Neo-Nazis. “I want people to know that we’re not racist just because we want our husbands to come home safe at night. There’s big problems in this country and the answer isn’t to lock up the police for doing their jobs, just like it’s no good to have cops targeting black men unfairly. It starts with the kids. We need every child to have a fair chance from the beginning.”
“It all starts with the schools,” one of her friends put in. “You can’t fund them with real estate taxes—that’s true inherent bias, giving the rich kids an advantage and leaving everyone else trailing behind.”
The first woman took over. “Not to mention getting the kids off the street and the guns out of their hands. We’re a Second Amendment family, but there’s no reason for all those kids to be running around with guns.”
After they’d finished, David thanked them and they continued through the crowd. To TK’s surprise, the white supremacists paid her more attention than they did David, despite his obvious Hispanic heritage. The power of video? Or maybe they didn’t see him as either a threat or a challenge? He did radiate a calm certainty that made people drop their guard, want to tell him their side of things. TK watched, wishing she could learn how to do that herself.
As they wove through the crowd, David stopped to ask people from both sides of the barricades their reasons for being there. Their answers ranged as widely as their demographics. If someone had simply filmed the protesters from a distance, they would have seen only the obvious racial and political divides; David took the time to uncover the truth beneath the costumes and banners.
By the time they’d reached the other side of the town square, TK’s ears echoed from the sounds of the crowd with their dueling bullhorns. It was a relief to finally move into the alley where the tall courthouse and solid police station muffled the noise.
“Looks like they’re closed for the day,” she said as they passed the police warehouse. “Otherwise, I’d show you the car—it’s a beauty.”
“Mint condition 1949 Wayfarer,” he said in reverence. “I can only imagine. Amazing that it was preserved so well.”
“Dr. Madsen said it was a combination of the lack of oxygen and the constant cold temperatures at that depth. According to her, the bodies are also better preserved than she’d hoped for, given how long they were down there.”
“Thought you said they were just skeletons?”
“They are. But she said many times not even skeletons will remain because the bone will be dissolved over time by the water.” TK had listened closely as the professor answered her students’ questions. It felt good to have the answers for once. “She thinks we might even be able to still extract DNA.”
“After all this time?”
“She has a case where they were successful in finding DNA in a skeleton over two thousand years old that had been preserved in similar conditions.” The door to the city offices was locked, but there was a buzzer labeled: Coroner After Hours. She pressed it and was rewarded with a click.
David held the door for her as she carried the pizza inside. The only lights came from the coroner’s office. The building felt empty, their footsteps echoing with a hollow thud.
She nodded to the office door, and David pushed it open for her. They stepped into the area that had once been the former lunch counter. All of the lights were on, but the stools and microscopes had been abandoned except for one at the end manned by Madsen herself. She looked up as the door clicked behind them.
“We brought dinner,” TK announced. “Where is everyone?”
“Sent them home. The mayor was just here, asked that everyone leave since they can’t spare any officers to provide security until the state police arrive in the morning.” She shrugged. “As if anyone would target the morgue. It’s the cops pulling duty out there in the square that I feel sorry for.”
“We just walked past and things were fairly quiet.” TK set the pizza, now cold, on a clean section of the counter. “Dr. Marcia Madsen, this is my friend, David Ruiz. He’s a reporter. I thought he could help if we need to go public with our story.”
Madsen was no dummy; she knew that with TK and the Beacon Group bound by their non-disclosure agreement, she was the only public official who could break the story. After all, the coroner’s office was a county position, not bound by any agreements with the town’s mayor. She eyed David with suspicion.
“You can trust David,” TK assured her.
“No photos of any remains,” Madsen said. “It’s disrespectful. Everything you see and hear here is off the record
until I give you permission to use it. I get to fact-check any story before publication.”
David considered her offer and nodded, extending his hand. “Deal.” They shook on it. He perched on a stool and took a slice of pizza, not even grimacing at the meat slathered on top, a sign of how interested he was. “Tell me about what you’re doing here.”
Madsen led him through their work for the day, explaining first about the examination of the car at the quarry and then giving him the facts of what they’d found so far. She didn’t downplay the gruesome details, but neither did she sensationalize them.
“There are many possibilities,” she concluded. “All I can comment on now are the facts. What the true story behind them is has yet to be determined.”
“That’s an anthropologist’s view,” David challenged her. “But you’re also coroner, charged with determining manner of death as well as cause. Can you give me any insights there?”
Madsen hesitated, obviously uncomfortable with making a decision without all the facts. But there was no way to get any more facts until they learned their victims’ identities. Only then could TK retrace their steps, try to find out what exactly happened to them and why.
“Based on preliminary findings, I think we can rule out suicide as manner of death,” Madsen told David.
“What about accidental? Hard to believe any of this, a police officer handcuffed away from the wheel of the car, three bodies with evidence of violent injuries in the trunk, could be accidental.”
“The disposal of the bodies was not accidental. Nor was Officer Thomson’s death. I need to finish my examination of the other bodies in order to better establish the cause of their injuries. But,” she added before David could interject, “I am leaning toward homicide as the manner of death.”
TK jumped into the fray. “You said, ‘Officer Thomson.’ Does that mean you’ve definitively established his identity? Did you find family? It’s much too quick to compare DNA.”
“Your partner Wash couldn’t find any living relatives, so we don’t have any DNA to compare. But, the computer facial recognition software finished its analysis right before you got here. Want to see?”
“Yes, please.” They followed her into a small office area constructed between the lunch counter and the old kitchen. Probably an old storage pantry, TK thought. There, a large computer monitor showed one of the photos TK and Grayson had found of Officer Thomson. Beside it was a computerized version of a man’s face—even without the fine detail of a real-life photograph, it appeared virtually identical to Thomson’s image.
“This computer recreation comes directly from the skull we found. Watch what happens when I overlap it with Thomson’s photo, using fixed physiologic reference points.” Madsen leaned over the keyboard and the two images merged, matching perfectly. Then she dissolved the computer re-creation so that it was the actual skull on the screen, still matching with Thomson’s photo.
“It is him,” TK breathed.
“Without dental records or DNA, it’s the closest I can come to a definitive identification.”
“How did he die?” David asked.
“My current working hypothesis is that he was still alive when placed into the car and secured.”
“He was alive? When the car went off the cliff and into the water?” TK closed her eyes for a moment, unable to block her imagination as she visualized Thomson’s death.
“Unfortunately, all my findings indicate that. I was hoping for his sake to be proven wrong.”
“And the others?” TK asked. “Do you still think they might have been victims of a lynching?”
“I never used that term,” Madsen corrected in a prim tone. “There have been only two documented cases of extrajudicial mob violence in Pennsylvania history. The last was in 1911 in Coatesville.”
David snorted at her academic recitation. “Excuse me, doctor, but I’m from Texas. Hate to say it, but lynch mobs have been alive and well throughout American history. I don’t think it’s safe to assume Pennsylvania is above the rest of the nation.”
“What happened in 1911?” TK asked, surprised that there had been a lynching north of the Mason-Dixon line so recently.
Madsen’s mouth twisted in distaste. “An intoxicated black man was in a brawl that an off-duty policeman attempted to disrupt. He shot the policeman during the scuffle. A mob of some three thousand people, including many who were led by their ministers directly from church services, gathered to drag him through the streets and burn him alive. They turned the scene into a spectacle, men, women, and children watching, waiting for his remains to cool enough for them to take fragments of bones as souvenirs.”
They were all silent for a moment. TK’s mind went to the scenes of religious violence she’d witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She’d felt so superior, so civilized, as if being American protected her from that kind of mob mentality—how wrong she was. Could the people in the Dodge have been victims of similar mindless violence?
“But to conceal a crime like this for over sixty years?” she argued. “How could they keep it quiet for so long? If it was a mob who killed them, wouldn’t someone have talked?”
“Maybe their conscience weighed on them,” Madsen answered, for once speaking in human terms rather than scientific facts. “Especially with a police officer, someone charged with protecting the town, involved?” She shrugged. “We may never know.”
TK couldn’t accept that. “No. We’ll know. Give me time. I’m not going to let those people be erased from history. The truth is coming out whether the town of Greer likes it or not.”
Madsen appeared doubtful, while David flashed TK a smile. Then he turned back to the doctor. “Can I see the car and take photos of it? Not to be released until you decide to go public, of course.”
She considered that. “Wait here while I cover the remains in the back room. Then I’ll take you through to the car.”
Madsen left and TK turned to David. “Knew you two would hit it off.”
“I like her, but she’s a bit naive, thinking there are no lynchings happening anymore.”
“I thought reporters are supposed to be objective.”
“Objective doesn’t mean blind.” He gestured to himself. “Hispanic male growing up in Texas, the things I’ve—”
The building shuddered as the roar of an explosion threw them both to the ground, devouring his words.
Chapter Twenty-Five
More explosions followed, booms and bangs and strange cracks splitting the air—and the walls. Projectiles splintered through the glass and plaster, dust and smoke filling the room.
Missiles? RPGs? TK’s mind tried to catalogue the strange sounds and shapes even as she did the only thing she could: throw herself on top of David and roll them both beneath the desk, the only cover available.
The lights flickered and died, leaving them in darkness. She took solace in David’s hand finding hers, squeezing tight as they cowered under the onslaught of the barrage.
Projectiles shrieked through the air above them, piercing walls, streaming smoke and in some cases strangely colored sparks. Her vision ghosted with scenes from the war, but this was nothing like that. There, she’d always felt some semblance of control, a sense that she had the power to take action, protect herself and her team. Here, she felt helpless.
TK had never taken fire from ordnance like this. The initial blast quieted, but now multiple explosions sounded all around—some large thunderclaps of sound, others whizzes and cracks. It was only after one spun through the partially demolished wall and hurled itself onto the floor, spinning like a top with a violent splash of color that she realized: they weren’t under attack. It was the damn fireworks. Somehow they’d caught fire and exploded.
Bad news, because fireworks were just as deadly as any ordnance but also extremely unpredictable.
She dared to inch out from beyond the desk’s shelter, David trying to pull her back to safety. Shaking free of his grasp, she crouched, straining to see if t
here was any sign of Madsen. The wall that separated the autopsy area where the doctor had gone and the office where she and David sheltered was mostly gone, a pile of sheetrock and splintered wood all that remained.
“Wait here,” she shouted at David even though only inches separated them. She wasn’t sure if he could hear—her own words didn’t make it past the roaring that filled her ears. The barrage had slowed, but she didn’t count on it stopping. Probably merely a short respite while the fire burned through the wood of the next crate. Should she try to get David out? It would mean abandoning Madsen.
Small blazes dotted the otherwise dark space of the morgue. No signs of movement, no sounds of life.
A thick lab manual had fallen to the ground, its pages rippling with flames but the binding was still intact. TK carefully grabbed the makeshift torch and tossed it over the remnants of the wall to illuminate the space beyond. “Madsen!”
Coughing and squinting through the smoke, she made out stark, splintered remains of bone mixed with steel. Burnt building materials, a puddle of chemicals that blazed with a blue flame, and a woman’s body, twisted, one leg splayed out at an impossible angle, her back to TK.
“Madsen,” she shouted again, but there was no response, not even when the flammable liquid licked at the coroner’s sleeve, giving her white lab coat a ghostly sheen.
TK braced the unstable debris, ready to climb over it when the flames illuminated a woman’s face. Impaled by a length of rebar from the outer wall that had taken the brunt of the blast, and nowhere near the rest of Madsen’s body.
TK choked on tears and smoke, letting herself slide back down the debris to the floor. As she crawled back to David, the world splintered with another barrage of explosions, collapsing part of the ceiling.
David grabbed her, rolling her back under the desk. She cursed him for leaving shelter to come after her, but then he cried out in pain, collapsing short of the cover the metal desk provided. Fighting through the sheetrock and ceiling tiles, she lunged for him. His leg had taken a direct hit from a piece of shelving falling through the ceiling.