Donnie Hawk took a step back. Skeeter Boy looked at his father with a particularly blank look.
Kel once again filled the tense silence that was growing. “I think we best take a look. If nothin’ else we can give the pathologist a heads-up as to what to expect.”
Levine agreed, and Donnie Hawk shrugged. At his nod, Skeeter Boy wheeled the cart into the section of the room that had been walled off as the new embalming room.
It was well lit and tiled, for easy cleanup. Levine and Kel stepped back while Donnie and his son began backing out the screws that fastened the lid. They had to pop the screws heads with their screwdriver handles to knock off the rust.
Kel photographed the process.
Even with the screws removed, forty years of accumulated corrosion didn’t want to give up easily. Donnie stepped out to the garage and quickly returned with a tire tool that he plied around the edges of the coffin, making it squeal and complain, but ultimately yield. Donnie Hawk stood back, not wanting to take the responsibility of opening what he fully equated to a Pandora’s coffin.
Kel examined the lid carefully, and when satisfied that there was nothing amiss, he motioned with a nod and a look for Levine to help him lift it off.
It was a plain casket, not a glass-sealer as Kel had guessed. Inside, the satin upholstery of the coffin had long ago tattered and the cellulose padding was now scattered over the interior like damp, loose hay straw. In the center of the coffin was a bundle of yellowed plastic, like a large amniotic sack, once clear but now fogged by groundwater and time. Kel could still make out the shape and form of human bones. There appeared to be little soft tissue present, a few small clumps dusted with a white powder, but nothing of substance.
“Bricks?” Levine asked.
“Naw,” Kel responded, watching a fleeting look of concern flicker across Donnie Hawk’s face. “Remains all right. Skeletal.”
“If you say so, Doc. Not much left, huh,” Levine said, peering over the edge of the coffin. He nodded at the white powder. “What’s that?”
“I’m afraid it looks like hardenin’ compound,” Kel said, looking up at Donnie for confirmation.
Donnie Hawk nodded.
“Supposed to be there? What is it?” Levine asked.
“I was hopin’ not. It’s bad stuff, that’s what it is,” Kel replied. “It’s a powder that morticians use on soft tissue that can’t be easily embalmed. It’s plaster and formaldehyde.”
“Sometimes sawdust,” Donnie said.
“And sometimes sawdust,” Kel repeated. “Y’all use it, right, Mr. Hawk?”
Donnie Hawk nodded. “Course. Daddy mostly used SeepTite. Mostly. I use 4-Sure.”
“There you go,” Kel said to Levine. “That’s what it is. Daddy used SeepTite.”
“But what does that mean?” asked Levine. “It won’t keep you from doing your study of the bones, will it?”
“Naw. It won’t keep us from doin’ an anthropological workup, but it may mess your DNA analysis all the hell up. The military liked the stuff a lot. Makes it easy to ship remains around the world. They used it liberally on some of the Korean War unknowns buried at the Punch-bowl National Cemetery in Hawaii. After we identified the Vietnam unknown in 1998, we decided to take a look at some of the eight-hundred-plus unknowns from Korea. Figured we could use DNA on them too. No luck. Best thing anyone can figure is that the hardenin’ compound is part of the problem—makes the DNA kinda sticky and it binds up on itself somehow. AFDIL’s workin’ on it, but…”
“But we’re screwed. Is that what you’re saying? All this and we’re screwed to the wall by some talcum powder.”
“No, not at all. May not be hardenin’ compound, though Mr. Hawk here seems to think it is, but even if it is, maybe all the groundwater has diluted it, who knows? I sure don’t. D’you?” Kel looked at Donnie Hawk.
Donnie’s eyes were wide, and he held his hands up defensively as if warding off an assault. “This here’s y’all’s tar baby, not mine.”
“The real question,” Kel looked again at Levine, “is what do you want now? I mean right now. You want me to go ahead and get started or wait on your pathologist?”
Levine took a deep breath and ran his hand through his hair several times. He looked at his shoes and then at Kel. “Better wait. We know there are remains—even if it looks like it’s nothing but bones. He gets in here tomorrow about noon. Better wait. Makes it cleaner if we go to court. Right?”
“Your call.”
“Tell me, Doc, now that you’ve seen what we have here, how much will the pathologist be able to do? I mean, where does pathology end and what you do begin?”
Kel looked back at the bundle of plastic before answering. “Case like this one, honestly it’s likely all anthropology. Pathologist probably can’t tell much, ’cept maybe for trauma. Really won’t know until we open it up the rest of the way.”
“So we don’t really need a pathologist?”
“Didn’t say that. If this is a murder victim, you better have a pathologist here just in case. That’s my recommendation anyhow. I don’t want to be blamed for screwin’ up an FBI case.”
“You mean, another one.”
“Don’t go there. Do not start.”
“Joking.”
“Yeah. For the record, I’m sayin’ get a pathologist.”
“In that case, let’s wait another day. Now that we’ve found Mr. Doe, he isn’t going anywhere.” He then turned so as to face Donnie Hawk. “Right, Mr. Hawk? This is evidence in an open homicide case. Can you see to it that this room is secured overnight?”
Donnie Hawk bristled. “I am the coroner of Locust County, Mr. Levine. I know my job.”
“Yeah. Glad to hear it. Problem is that while you may know it, you sometimes seem to get a little forgetful.”
Chapter 37
Split Tree, Arkansas
TUESDAY, AUGUST23, 2005
As was becoming the pattern, Levine was up first, knocking on Kel’s door at six-fifteen. Though unspoken this time, his expression conveyed a sense of disapproving wonder that Kel was still asleep. For his part, Kel noticed with some amusement that while they stood in the doorway talking, Levine was vigorously scratching his ankles and underarms and groin.
Both men had retired early the night before, but not before locking their doors. Kel had also taken advantage of Levine’s cell phone to call the CILHI. It was by far the last thing that he’d wanted to do, but it was unavoidable. He’d spoken to Les Neep and told him that he was going to be away from the office a day or two longer—but no more. He’d also taken the opportunity to warn Les that if the commander’s intent was to mend fences with the FBI, this might not be the case to do that with, given that his Bureau counterpart seemed to be something that had crawled under the fence in the first place, and nobody in that organization seemed in too much of a hurry to get him back into their own yard. Before he’d gotten off the phone, he’d asked Les to have D.S. check the deserters list for Ray Elmore. Check all the lists. Les promised that one of them would get back to him with the information. Then he’d called his wife and spoken to his boys.
As Kel blinked at the early morning light, Levine told him that he was heading off for the Memphis airport and would be back with the pathologist around ten-thirty—at the latest.
Kel went back to bed.
At nine o’clock there was another knock at the door. Kel looked at his watch.Too early for Levine to be back, he thought. “Who is it?” he called out.
“It’s Sam, sir,” came the voice. “I have with me a telephone for you, sir.”
Kel yawned and blinked a couple of times. “Do I need a telephone, Sam?” he called out.
“Yes. Most certainly you do, sir. You have a gentleman who must speak with you, sir.”
Too early in the morning for D.S. or Les—it was four in the morning in Hawaii. “Just a second,” he finally acknowledged.
He opened the door to find Sam amid the midmorning glare, dressed in white pants a
nd a white, short-sleeved shirt, holding his cordless phone. The motel owner smiled and half-bowed as he handed the phone to Kel, saying, “Take as long as you please, sir, I only will be waiting here.”
Kel thanked his host and stepped back into his room with the phone. The reception was predictably poor, the handpiece being a good two hundred feet and a dozen walls from its base. “Hello,” he said. “This is McKelvey.”
“Doc,” it was Levine’s voice. “Hit a snag. Pathologist missed his friggin’ plane. They may be able to get him on a later flight, but no guarantee. I’m going to sit tight here until I know what’s going on, but my thinking is that you don’t wait any longer on this guy—go ahead back to the funeral home and do what you need to do. If you can hold off cutting DNA samples till Dr. Rip Van Winkle gets there, great, otherwise…”
“Sure, not a problem,” Kel replied. He yawned again.
“You still in bed? What’s with you docs and sleeping so much?”
Kel yawned again. “Talk to you later, Levine.” He opened the door as he was hanging up. He blinked painfully at the sunlight. Sam bowed slightly again and took the phone, assuring his guest that he was welcome to use the phone any time.
The draped room was still dark, and Kel was tempted to crawl back into bed. Instead he took a shower, dabbed fresh calamine lotion on his chigger bites—thirty-seven as of last night’s tally—and dressed, then crossed the street to the diner. He sat near a window where he could watch the sparse traffic passing by on Magnolia while he roadmapped his plans for the analysis of the remains. He nursed a couple of glasses of tea and smiled politely at Jo, who fortunately was well occupied by other customers.
At ten-thirty he paid his bill, walked back to the Sleep-Mor and picked up some materials that he would need from his room, and got into his car. Ten minutes later he pulled up in front of the Pacific Funeral Home. Donnie Hawk met him at the car and together they unlocked the door to the embalming room.
“Mr. Levine gonna come?” Donnie Hawk asked, seemingly a little unsure of the propriety of Kel being here by himself.
“Afraid he’s hung up in Memphis waitin’ on his New York pathologist. He missed his flight.” He shrugged. “Agent Levine called to tell me to go on ahead with my analysis…if that’s okay by you…but if you want to wait, that’s okay too. Your call. This is your case.”
“No, no, mercy no,” Donnie Hawk replied quickly. He clearly was eager to not get any more crossways with Levine than he already was. “What do you need to get started here?”
“Just some table space, maybe a toothbrush and some tap water…roll of paper towels would be nice. And some help removin’ the lid.”
Together they lifted the lid off the coffin and removed the bundled remains, placing them on the white porcelain embalming table. The head end of the table had a drainage hole that was centered over a large commode. Donnie Hawk lingered long enough to determine that he was no longer needed before excusing himself to another part of his building. Kel watched him leave and took advantage of being alone to vigorously scratch the chiggers that couldn’t be dealt with politely in public. He took a couple of quick photographs to document the condition of the bundle. Then he took a deep breath, stretched his back, and bent over the bundle, slowly unwrapping it. The plastic was brittle and tore easily. Immediately his eyes began to tear up and his nose burned as if he’d snorted battery acid. The white powder on the bones was hardening compound, all right. The formaldehyde was as strong now as it must have been forty years ago. It didn’t look good for getting any DNA. Kel backed away from the table, blinking the water from his eyes, and looked around for a pair of rubber gloves. He was thinking latex medical exam gloves, but this was an embalming room, and instead, he located a pair of thick, blue, industrial-grade neoprene gloves. He put them on and started removing the remains from the plastic.
It took Kel almost forty-five minutes to get the skeleton laid out in approximate anatomical order. The main elements were sided and in place within a few minutes; it was the little pieces, the hands and feet and ribs, that took most of the time to side and number. His osteology skills were more than rusty, and he hadn’t brought a reference text with him. Fortunately, most of the hands and feet were still lashed together by dried tendons and muscle, so Kel didn’t have to identify and side every bone.
Once the remains were arrayed on the table in an order that even a layman would recognize, Kel stripped off the gloves, pulled a stool over to the foot of the table, and climbed up so that he could capture the entire layout in another photograph. Then he photographed each quadrant in detail. That done, he picked up a blue folder he’d brought from Hawaii. Inside it were blank skeletal diagrams and forms used by the Lab for analysis of remains. He looked again at the table, assessing what was present and what wasn’t, and selected the appropriate sheets. One of the pages was a skeletal diagram depicting an articulated skeleton in both front and back views. With a red pen he colored in the few bones that were missing. There weren’t many. A couple of fingers, couple of toes, the left kneecap; probably all overlooked and left out in the muck and mud forty years ago. Otherwise all of the skeletal elements were there.
When he’d finished, he dated and initialed the diagram. At the top he wrote,Locust County, Arkansas —John Doe/FBI Homicide.He’d get a local coroner’s case number from Donnie later. Then he set that form aside and put the gloves back on. He stood, looking up and down the table, trying to decide where to start. He picked up the next form. He needed to know the sex, but that was easy. Very robust skeleton, the mastoids—the bumps behind the ears where the big neck muscles attach—were large and well developed. Similarly, the nuchal crest on the back of the skull where the muscles in the back of the neck are anchored was also quite well defined. The jaw was square and robust. The brow ridge well buttressed. The hips were slender but well muscled and the ear-shaped platform where the sacrum joined the pelvis was flat. Likewise, the angle below the symphysis, where the right and left halves join, was narrow—all in all, not the hips of someone adapted for childbirth. Both legs were well developed. The linea aspera running lengthwise down the posterior side of the femoral shaft was large and rugged, suggesting a well-muscled individual. The ball-shaped femoral heads were equally large—over forty-eight millimeters in diameter. Even allowing for some error with the cheap calipers he’d bought at the hardware store, they were large. Usually any measurement over forty-six indicates a male. All the other indicators were consistent with a large, robust, well-developed individual.
He filled in the blanks on his forms and then in the blank labeledSEX he wrote:Male .
Next was race. Almost as easy as sex in this case. The skull was narrow and round, with a large prominent nose exhibiting a sharp bony spine at the base. Big anchors for the big nose of a Caucasoid. The nasal opening was narrow and tall. The jaws featured a pronounced underbite.
He wrote on the form:Caucasoid .
Age would be a little more difficult, but not much given so many bones to work with. He examined the ends of each long bone—arms and legs—starting with the shoulder, then elbow, wrist, hip, knee, and ending with the ankle. The ends were fused, suggesting the person was over about twenty years of age, but the growth plates still appeared youthful. There were still remnants of the epiphyseal fusion lines showing on several of the elements. Not much over twenty. Next he looked at the pubic symphysis again. The margin where the two pubic bones joined, right behind the pants zipper, displayed the youthful pattern of furrows and billows. It would smooth out and lip-over with age, but now it suggested twenty to twenty-five years of age.
There were a few other indicators that Kel made a note to check more thoroughly later, and he wanted to get an X-ray of the teeth to look at their age-related development, but for now he wrote down: 20–25 yoa (tentative).
Stature was the most straightforward determination of all. Kel had decided he’d do a more complete examination after the pathologist arrived, but for now he stretched out a measuring t
ape against the right femur. For an accurate measurement he’d need an osteometric board, but for an estimate, a tape measure would work. He adjusted the tape until the maximum length could be measured and double-checked the figures twice. He compared them to the stature table in his folder.
He entered:180.3 cm +/-3.8 cm (71 inches +/-1.5 inches) —tentative.
Kel arched his back again. It hurt from leaning over for—how long had he been at it? He looked at his watch; it was almost one o’clock. He stretched and popped some joints and took several deep breaths. His nose had adjusted, or had gone numb, and he wasn’t aware of the formaldehyde smell any longer. “Now for the fun part,” he said out loud. “Let’s see what happened.”
He started with the skull. It was hard not to notice the oblong hole on the forehead. It was shaped like a fat exclamation point. He examined the margins of the hole carefully, and then turned the skull upside down so that he could peer through the foramen magnum, the large hole at the base that the spinal cord enters through, in order to examine the inner surface of the defect. He reached for his backpack and removed a small penlight that he used to illuminate the inside of the skull. Gunshot wound, that much was clear. It had been at an acute angle rather than straight on and had partially glanced off—hence the elongated hole. There were radiating fractures from the hole, but they were short, suggesting relatively low energy.
He set the skull down and wrote:GSW to left frontal near temporal line. Keyhole defect. 3.5 cm long x 1.0 cm wide.
He also drew the location of the wound onto a diagram of a skull, carefully tracing the tiny cracks that spidered off in all directions. But there was more. He gingerly picked the cranium and lower jaw up and articulated them, working them back and forth assessing the correct alignment. The left side of the mouth displayed an old, healed injury. Teeth 14, 15, 16—the three upper left molars were missing. The bone was well-healed, but in a jagged manner that suggested that the teeth had been traumatically avulsed—forcibly removed—some time well before death. Similarly, tooth 13, the left upper second premolar, had been chipped and then reshaped and contoured with a dental bur so as to be smooth rather than jagged.That must have been some big-time painful, Kel thought. The lower jaw wasn’t much better. Tooth 18, the left second molar, had also been avulsed and tooth 19, the left first molar, had been broken and reshaped like the premolar above it. “Goddamn,” Kel found himself saying. “What in the hell happened to you?”
One Drop of Blood Page 29