The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  Now, six and a half decades after Hiroshima, the historic hotel was crumbling virtually before my eyes. Glancing up at the white-columned façade, I noticed that several letters of the hotel’s name had dropped off the building since I’d last seen it. ALEXANDER INN had now been reduced to ALE AND I. It was still possible to read the sign, because the blasted and blistered paint on the façade was less blasted and less blistered where it had been protected, until recently, by the missing letters. But the entire structure was one burning match away from irreversible destruction.

  Surprisingly, I didn’t see any ORPD vehicles parked in front of the hotel or beside the swimming pool. Then, glancing behind the dilapidated structure, I spotted several police cars, a crime-lab van, and an armored truck labeled SWAT TEAM parked near the back of the property. As I rumbled across fissured asphalt toward the vehicles, my eyes beheld a ghastly sight: the head of Detective Jim Emert rested, neck down, on a platter on the ground.

  That at least was how it looked for a moment. Drawing nearer, I saw that a slight rise in the ground had played a trick on my eyes: What appeared to be a platter was in fact the rim of a manhole, seen edge-on. As I parked and got out of the truck, Emert climbed from the opening and walked toward me.

  I reached out to shake the detective’s hand, but he shook his head instead. As he did, a yellow-and-black headlamp on his forehead swiveled back and forth. “You really don’t want to shake hands with me right now,” he said, holding up his palms for me to inspect. He was right, I didn’t: The purple gloves he wore were virtually black with sewer grime.

  Half a dozen SWAT-team officers, in black fatigues and Kevlar vests, clustered near the armored vehicle. On the ground to one side lay helmets and what I took to be night-vision goggles. The men looked relaxed, though several of them held automatic rifles dangling from one hand, as casually as I might hold a hip bone or a laser pointer. With their combat-grade weaponry and uniforms, they resembled soldiers more than police officers. “Looks like you came loaded for bear,” I said to Emert, “but it also looks like maybe you called off the hunt.”

  “We got a call from the guy who lives up there on the hill.” He pointed. “He saw a woman climbing into the sewer, and he wondered if it might be our gal Isabella. I called our friends here for backup, and at the very moment these guys were pointing M16s at the manhole, out popped this skinny twelve-year-old boy with long hair. The kid let out a scream, which could’ve gotten him blown away. Lucky for him the guys with the guns don’t have the hair-trigger problem that I have.” Emert shook his head as he contemplated the near tragedy. “The kid peed his pants, but all things considered, he got off mighty lucky.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “That’s when it started to get interesting. The kid was sure he was in big trouble — he didn’t know we were looking for someone else — and he started blubbering right away about how he wasn’t the one who did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Exactly. ‘Tell me what you didn’t do, kid,’ I said. ‘Didn’t put all that stuff down there,’ he said. ‘All what stuff?’ I asked him, so he took me down there and showed me. Just like I’m about to show you.” Emert sized up my khaki pants and button-down shirt. “You keep coveralls in the back of your truck, don’t you, Doc?”

  I nodded.

  “Why don’t you suit up, and let’s go take a look.”

  I wormed into a jumpsuit and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves — mine were green, not purple — and joined Emert beside the mouth of the manhole. I’d brought a flashlight from the truck, but Emert frowned at it. “Here, try this instead,” he said, offering me the headlamp. “So you can use both hands going down the ladder.” I tucked the flashlight in the hip pocket of my jumpsuit, then tugged the lamp’s elastic headband into place. Through my hair I could feel that the fabric was damp with sweat, or storm-sewer water, or both.

  “Thanks,” I said, wiggling the light to even out the tension in the headband. “How do I look?”

  He studied me. “Very natty,” he pronounced in a dreadful British accent. “The yellow and black of the strap complement the olive drab jumpsuit splendidly.” He paused and made a face. “But…”

  “But?”

  “Well, you might consider accessorizing with an M16.”

  “If I did, would I look as studly as those guys?”

  “Oh, more studly,” he said. “Ever so much more studly.” He dropped the accent. “You ready to climb down?”

  “Sure.” But as I swung a leg down into the opening and groped with my right foot for the first rung, I suddenly felt anything but sure. “You know, the last time I was in this position, things didn’t turn out so well for me.” The night I’d lost Isabella in the sewer system, I’d attempted to climb out of a manhole at a dead end in a tunnel, but when I reached the top rung of the ladder — a series of steel brackets set into the mortar of the sewer’s brickwork — it had snapped off in my hand. I’d fallen six or eight feet into icy water, cracking my head on the bottom of the pipe. “I hope this ladder’s stronger. Or the concrete’s softer than last time.”

  From the darkness below me came a familiar voice. “Plenty of padding down here if you fall,” said Art Bohanan. Art’s fingerprint expertise had been requested in the Novak murder, so it wasn’t surprising he’d been called back to Oak Ridge to help collect whatever new forensic evidence Emert was about to show me.

  Gripping the metal rim of the opening, I tested the rung with my weight — it felt solid enough — and then eased my left foot onto the second rung. Ten rungs later I was standing beside Art Bohanan at the bottom of a small, conical room, roughly six feet across. “Fancy seeing you here,” I said to Art. “Good of KPD to let you spend so much quality time in another jurisdiction.”

  Art shrugged, his headlamp bobbing slightly as he did. “They agreed to let me help with the Novak case. This is still the Novak case. And who could pass up a chance to spend a day in such a beautiful setting?” He played his light over the bricks and tendrils of cobwebs, drawing a laugh from me.

  “Coming down,” Emert called from above. Art and I backed away from the base of the ladder to give him room, and my shoulders brushed against the grime of the arched vault. Once Emert was down, the room felt crowded. He turned to me. “How’s your back?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Not for long.” He chuckled. “Walk this way,” he added, bending over and half crouching. Two pipes, each just big enough for me to wriggle into and get stuck inside, fed into the sewer junction on the uphill side; a larger pipe led out the downhill side, and Emert duck-walked into this one and disappeared.

  “Age before beauty,” said Art, motioning me ahead. Copying Emert’s awkward posture, I hunched forward and ducked into the tunnel. With my face angled down, the headlamp illuminated only a small oval of pipe just in front of my feet, and I couldn’t tell how much clearance I had between my head and the top of the pipe. Fumbling in the hip pocket of my jumpsuit, I wrestled the flashlight free and switched it on. I didn’t much like what I saw. The pipe, roughly four feet in diameter, was corrugated steel — a series of concentric rings sloping downward. In the distance the pipe appeared to narrow and constrict. I realized that was just an illusion, since I saw Emert waddling onward, but the effect was disconcerting, as if we were voluntarily entering the descending colon of some immense metallic organism. Strings of dirty cobwebs dangled from the top and sides of the tunnel, though most of the ones hanging from above had been sheared off, doubtless by Emert and Art. Here and there, stray brackets and bolts projected from the roof, and I wished for a hard hat. Structurally, the pipe seemed to be in remarkably good condition, considering it had been laid in the early 1940s, when the U.S. Army had hastily built the top-secret atomic-bomb complex in Oak Ridge. As I took my first steps forward, though, I realized that it was only the upper parts of the pipe that remained strong; the metal underfoot felt thin and spongy, and I’d gone only a few feet before the metal gave way and my boot p
lunged downward several inches, scraping through a jagged fringe of rust.

  “Duck!” Art called. I dropped my head just in time to avoid whacking it on an angle bracket jutting from the top of the pipe. “So is this the size pipe you chased Isabella into that night?”

  “Lord, no,” I said. “That one was twice this big. I could stand up straight in that one — hell, I could have jumped up and down. I probably wouldn’t have followed her into something like this. Over by the library, where she went in, it’s newer, concrete pipe, probably only ten or twenty years old. This stuff here ought to be on the National Register of Historic Sewers. I wouldn’t be surprised to find shards of Roman pottery somewhere along here.” My ear snagged a cobweb that Art and Emert had somehow missed.

  “Yo, guys,” Emert called from somewhere ahead. He’d disappeared around a bend or a drop in the tunnel — that, or he’d been digested by the beast we were inside. “We’re burning daylight. Are y’all sightseeing back there?” Rather than echoing, as I’d have expected, the detective’s voice sounded muffled, as if smothered by the weight of the earth above us.

  “Coming!” yelled Art. “We just stopped to check out some dinosaur bones.”

  The slope of the tunnel increased sharply, and I wondered how difficult it would be to retrace our steps back uphill. Art and Emert had already done it, so clearly it was possible, but if the pipe had been wet and slippery rather than dry, the footing would have been perilous. After thirty or forty steep yards, the gradient flattened out, and not far beyond that the tunnel seemed to dead-end at a brick wall. Emert was nowhere to be seen. As I neared the brick wall, I saw why: The tunnel fed into a vertical shaft, easily twice the height of the manhole we’d entered. “Crap,” I called down to Emert, who awaited us at the bottom. “You didn’t tell me we were going spelunking.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come if I did. Art said the two of you got trapped in a cave once.”

  “We did.” The memory still sent me to the edge of panic. “A guy set off a stick of dynamite to cause the tunnel to collapse. Art and I found a side tunnel, but it necked down so tightly I got stuck — couldn’t move, couldn’t even breathe. Art finally shoved me through the bottleneck just as I was running out of air. My ribs and back were sore for weeks. I still have nightmares about that sometimes.”

  “I’m guessing my back and butt will be sore for weeks from walking in this bent-over crouch,” Emert groused. “But we’re almost there.” He stooped and ducked into the tunnel that continued downhill from the base of the shaft. I followed, and after a short distance I saw him straighten up. Moments later I emerged from the tunnel into a square chamber. “Damn,” I said as I took in my surroundings. Unlike the sounds in the tunnels, the word reverberated and hung in the musty air.

  I was standing in a space nearly the size of the living room in my house, where half a dozen four-foot pipes converged and a pair of larger pipes, each five or six feet in diameter, exited on the far side. The ceiling must have been six feet high, for it allowed the three of us to stand upright, though I noticed that Emert — the tallest of us — had to spread his feet widely in order to keep from bumping his head. The room was lit by portable, battery-powered work lights, whose clusters of LED bulbs cast a cool, bluish-white light on the grimy concrete surfaces. The floor of the room was covered with layers of sand and mud, laid down and then scoured out and laid down again, sculpted and channeled by sediment-laden storm water.

  The room’s size was what initially startled me, but its contents were what truly astonished me. A folding camp cot was nestled against one wall of the room; a puffy down sleeping bag lay crumpled on top, the bag’s red vivid against the blue of the cot’s taut nylon mesh. At the head of the cot, on a plastic milk crate, stood a kerosene lamp and a box of matches; at the foot was a wire-mesh wastebasket, half filled with empty cans and bottles and food wrappers. “My God,” I said, “someone’s been living here.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.” Emert chuckled, obviously pleased that he’d managed to surprise and impress me.

  “Isabella?”

  “Don’t know,” said Art. “Looks like plenty of prints on bottles and cans in the trash — the lamp, too, thanks to the kerosene and the soot — but it’s better to bag everything and take it back to the lab, instead of trying to fume it here.”

  Emert caught my eye and pointed to the opposite wall — the one where we’d entered. Midway along the wall, between our pipe and another, a pair of plastic milk crates supported an unfinished pine plank, and on this plank stood an elaborately carved wooden artifact. “Get a load of the pagoda,” he said.

  “It’s not exactly a pagoda,” I corrected, “but close. I saw a presentation about these a few years ago by a cultural anthropologist from Asia. It’s called a kamidana, if I remember right, and it’s a Shinto shrine to the gods of the ancestors. You find them in a lot of Japanese homes.”

  Arranged on the plank in front of the shrine was a cluster of small glass bottles. I knelt and shone my flashlight into them and saw that they contained rice, salt, wheat, and what I guessed to be dried tea berries — traditional Shinto offerings to the gods. Emert played the beam of his light on the wall above the kamidana, where a Japanese symbol reached nearly to the ceiling. The black paint was fresh and bold; the concrete had obviously been cleaned shortly before the paint had been brushed on.

  The room suddenly exploded with light. “Jesus H.,” snapped Emert in the general direction of Art, whom I could no longer see. “Couldn’t you have warned us before using the flash?”

  “Sorry,” said Art. “I didn’t mean to take the picture yet. I was just trying to check the focus, but I guess I pushed the shutter all the way down.”

  “Man,” grumped Emert. “I thought for a second there that Oak Ridge had just been vaporized.”

  “Really sorry,” Art repeated. “But now that you’re already blinded, let me take a couple more, just to be sure. We can send it to a translator and find out what it means.”

  “I know what it means,” I said as I covered my eyes to shield them from the flash. “I’ve seen that symbol once before, on a pendant, and the woman wearing it told me what it meant. It’s the Japanese symbol for ‘remembrance.’ Isabella wore it around her neck.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I stopped by KPD the next morning to see Art Bohanan. A trash can appeared to have exploded there in the forensic lab. Empty cans and scraps of food wrappers covered every table and countertop in the room. The lab room smelled like an untidy teenager’s room, one where pizza crusts and apple cores have accumulated under the bed for a week or two.

  Art was bent over the red sleeping bag we’d hauled from the underground room. The bag was spread flat on a large piece of white paper, and Art was methodically coating the bag’s entire surface with overlapping strips of clear evidence tape. He laid the last strip in place just as I entered, then began peeling the tape off the bag as a single patchwork sheet. Holding a section of the tape up to a lamp on the table, he studied the fuzz and fibers stuck to the adhesive. “Looks like some black hairs,” he said. “We’ll compare them to the ones we found in her house, but I’m betting they match. If we’ve got follicles on any of these and any of those, we can do a DNA comparison.” Loosely wadding the tape, he dropped it into a plastic five-gallon bucket filled with water. The water-soluble tape quickly softened; once it had dissolved entirely, Art would strain the water to collect all the hairs and fibers.

  On one corner of a table, clumped on a tray, I noticed several wads of dirty cotton gauze. Beneath the grime were crusted, reddish brown stains. “That looks like blood to me,” I said.

  “Looks like blood to the black light, too,” Art observed. “Take a gander — the light’s on the counter there.” I held the portable ultraviolet lamp over the gauze, and the stains darkened; if not for the ambient light in the room, I knew, they’d appear completely black. I couldn’t help wincing as I thought of Isabella’s fingers, seared into open wounds — not as bad as Gar
cia’s, but still serious — by the radiation source she’d handled before feeding it to Novak.

  I surveyed the assortment of empty bottles, cans, and food wrappers. “Anything that indicates when she bought any of these items or when she consumed them?”

  “Not that I’ve found so far,” he said. “None of this stuff was perishable — bottled water, canned tuna fish, dried fruit — so there’s no pull date, the way there’d be on a jug of milk or a pound of ground beef. Some of this stuff has a shelf life that’s measured in decades. Look at this unopened pack of trail mix—‘Best when consumed by July 2017.’ California might have slid into the ocean by then, but these nuts and raisins will still be lip-smacking good.” He laughed. “The most interesting thing is that, though.” He pointed to a small, wandlike object of white plastic, half hidden beneath a Hershey bar wrapper.

  At first glance I thought it was a digital fever thermometer, but looking closer I realized the shape wasn’t quite right; it was about as long and wide as a tongue depressor, but considerably thicker. “What is it?”

  “Look but don’t touch,” he said. “Here’s some tweezers.”

  With the tip of the tweezers, I slid the candy-bar wrapper aside for an unobstructed look, but I still couldn’t tell what I was seeing. “Accu-Clear,” read a word in small blue letters. To the left of the word was an oval-shaped indentation in the plastic, and within the indentation were two small cutout windows. One of the windows, an oval, was bisected by a crisp magenta line on a white background. The other opening, a small rectangle, also showed a line, a fuzzier, paler pink. “I still don’t know what it is.”