by Jen J. Danna
I miss you, Dad.
She rubbed her thumb over the frame one more time as if to draw strength from the spirit of the man who had gone before her. Then, sitting back in her chair, she glanced at the time. She needed to get on the road if she hoped to meet Matt and his team at one P.M. Standing, she found the room deserted. Riley and Morrison had slipped out while she was lost in thought.
She squared her shoulders and picked up her messenger bag. She had a job to do. And even if she was on her own, she’d damn well get it done.
Head high, she strode from the bullpen.
CHAPTER THREE: ESTUARY
Estuary: a partially enclosed body of water where fresh river water mixes with salty ocean water in a coastal transition zone.
Monday, 12:50 P.M.
Boston University, School of Medicine
Boston, Massachusetts
Leigh paused in the open doorway to peer into the large lab, brightly lit by banks of overhead fluorescent lights. She scanned the lab—racks of chrome shelving holding trays of pale bones, a whiteboard splashed with anatomical sketches, desks strewn with personal items, and miles of countertops holding equipment and instruments—before finding Matt Lowell on the far side of the room.
Leigh allowed herself a moment to watch him interact with the three students grouped around him. They watched him with rapt attention, freely jumping in to comment or question. She sensed the comfort level and closeness between them; even to a stranger across the room, they felt like a unit.
She knocked quietly on the doorframe.
Matt’s head came up sharply and the corner of his lips curved in a welcoming smile. “Excuse me for a minute, guys.” He crossed the room toward her in long strides. “Come in.” He indicated the messenger bag tucked under her arm. “Is that it?”
“Yes. I also brought the maps you requested.”
“Great. Come meet my students.”
They turned to face the students across the room, who stared at them with undisguised curiosity. At a quick glance, Leigh placed each of the two men and one woman to be in their mid-twenties.
Matt took her arm, pulling her into the group. “Guys, I’d like you to meet Trooper Abbott. Leigh, these are my grad students. They’ll be working with us on this case.” He motioned first to the only female in the group, a tall, slender woman of Japanese descent with an athletic build. She wore her jet-black hair in a loose bun pierced with two artfully placed decorative sticks. “This is my senior grad student, Akiko Niigata. Kiko, this is Trooper Leigh Abbott.”
Kiko smiled and extended her hand. “Hi.” Her features were beautifully exotic, but her confident voice was born-and-bred American.
“And this is Paul Layne.” Matt indicated a tall, lanky young man with slightly spiky dark-blond hair wearing a red hoodie and worn jeans.
Paul’s clear blue eyes fixed on her with blatant interest, and there was a glint of humor in them as he abruptly stuck out his hand. “Hey.”
She smiled back at him as she shook his hand. “Hey.”
“And Juka Petrović;,” Matt continued.
Leigh turned to the last student who stood silently a half pace behind the others, a stocky young man with a swarthy complexion and dark eyes and hair.
“It’s very nice to meet you.” His soft-spoken, slightly formal greeting carried a hint of Eastern Europe.
“Let’s take a look at what we have here,” Matt suggested. “Paul, get the door, please. All of this has to stay confidential. And we’re going to be handling evidence, so lab coats and gloves on.” He glanced at Leigh. “I’ve already filled them in on the background details and the security requirements.”
They gathered around a stainless steel table that was large enough to hold a complete set of remains. Reaching inside her messenger bag, Leigh withdrew the evidence bag and handed it to Matt.
He pulled out the long, thin bone, cradling it carefully in both hands, turning it over as he examined it.
What remained of the small ball of nerves in Leigh’s stomach loosened as she noted the care he took with the evidence. “What can you tell me about our victim?”
“I can’t tell you race or sex, not from this particular skeletal component, but there are still details I can give you. How much do you remember from class?”
Leigh flushed. “You covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. And some of it’s kind of fuzzy for me three years later.”
“So not much, in other words. That’s okay; that’s why you’ve got us.” He turned to his students. “I want you to each examine the bone, then we’ll discuss it.” He handed the bone to Kiko.
Leigh shifted restlessly, wanting to jump in to speed the discussion along, but Matt caught her eye, something in his expression asking her to wait. She reluctantly swallowed her impatience, watching Kiko as she cradled the bone carefully in both hands, staring at it silently.
“Everything okay?” Matt asked his student when she remained silent and motionless.
“Yes. It’s just …” Kiko rotated the bone, examining the underside as she spoke. “This isn’t a research specimen from some old man who died in his sleep at ninety and donated his body to science. This isn’t from someone who lived centuries ago …” She paused and met Matt’s eyes. “Although you know seeing a child’s tiny bones gets me every time. This is someone who was alive within the past few years. Someone I could have met on the street.” Her gaze dropped to the bone and she turned it over in her hands again. “Someone who died young, maybe even the same age as me. It’s just …”
“A little freaky,” Paul finished for her. “Yeah, we feel it too.”
Leigh studied the students as they grouped together around the table. Her concern about involving Matt’s students started to diminish; these kids might work out fine after all.
Kiko passed the bone to Paul. Juka then examined it before handing it back to Matt. “Okay, tell me what we’re looking at,” Matt said. “I know this is different from anything you’ve done before, but put emotion aside for a few minutes and simply look at the evidence. This is how we can do the most good.”
“It’s a radius,” Paul stated. “More specifically, a left radius.” He held out his left arm toward Leigh, running his index finger from his inner elbow to his wrist, ending at the base of his thumb.
“It’s from someone likely in their late teens or early twenties based on epiphyseal fusion,” Kiko added.
When Juka remained silent, Matt simply looked at him expectantly. “The bone shows signs of being buried,” Juka said. “Possibly for a prolonged period of time. It also shows signs of scavenging. Probably rats. Maybe opossums.”
“And that’s on top of the beaver.” Matt straightened and stepped back from the table, turning to Leigh. “That’s a very fast macroscopic examination. To be able to give you an opinion that you could use in court we’d need to do a microscopic examination, which takes a little more time.”
Leigh’s brows drew together as she studied the bone. “Why didn’t you comment on the cut mark on the bone?”
Matt’s face clouded briefly. “Cut mark?”
She pointed to one end of the bone—a wedge-shaped indentation was clearly visible where the flared end met the shaft. “That was made by a weapon, right? Possibly giving us cause of death?”
Matt shook his head. “No, there are no tool marks—or, as we call them, kerf marks—on this bone. If you look closely, you can see that there are no sharp margins in the defect. That mark is actually a remnant of normal maturation. It’s where cartilage once lay at the growth plate before being converted to bone.”
“Really?” Leigh leaned in to examine the defect more closely. Matt was right; the sides and margins of the notch were smooth and rounded, not sharply defined like a cut from a blade. “Damn. I thought we had something there.”
“We do, just not what you think.”
Straightening, Leigh pulled a small spiral-bound notepad and pen from her inside breast pocket. Flipping it open, she made a
few quick notes.
“You don’t have to write this down,” Matt said, tapping her notepad with an index finger. “I’m not expecting you to remember every detail or make notes to cover all of it. I’ll give you a full report.”
She glanced up. “Yes, you will.” She bent over her notepad again, but not before catching the expression of incredulity that flashed across Matt’s face, and Paul’s quick amused grin at her blunt expectation of a report. “But I’d like to get some of this information down now. My sergeant will want an update later today. So, that mark. You’re saying there was soft tissue there that decomposed after death, leaving that gap?”
“Exactly. It’s one way that we’re estimating the victim’s age. Now, we can be a lot more accurate when we’ve got the full remains and we can consider dentition, cranial suture fusion, and pubic symphysis modification.”
“Fair enough. Can you estimate how long it’s been buried to narrow down my missing persons search?”
“That’s a little harder to do from just this one piece of evidence. Buried bones tend to absorb minerals and take on the color of the soil around them, given full skeletonization and enough time. This bone has started this process so it’s been buried for at least a couple of years. Except that it didn’t stay buried. Somehow scavengers got to it.”
“Considering that this bone was removed from the burial site, is it safe to assume that we’re going to be missing other pieces of the remains?” Leigh asked.
“It’s doubtful that it was the only bone taken.”
Her lips a tight line, Leigh met Matt’s eyes. “So it doesn’t bode well for recovery or identification of this victim.”
“Maybe. We need to move fast on this because if the remains are only partially exposed, we might be able to recover the majority of the victim. Perhaps only one arm was exposed and removed.”
Leigh’s eyes narrowed. “Why were the remains exposed? That could be very important for locating the actual burial site.”
“It could,” Matt allowed. “Let’s get out the maps. I think this bone will be able to tell us enough to give you a good idea of where to start looking.”
Matt watched Leigh pull a well-used, highly detailed map from her messenger bag and lay it out on the table. “The beaver dam where the bone was found is here.” She indicated an area of the northern Essex coast, just west of Cape Ann, the small, easternmost peninsula in Essex County.
“Essex Bay,” Kiko murmured. “Was the dam right on the river?”
“No, it’s on one of the smaller branches west of the river, just north of the Essex Marina,” Leigh replied.
“So, north of Route 133.” When Leigh looked up in surprise, Kiko said, “Local girl. I grew up in Gloucester.”
“Good to know.”
Matt carefully studied the map, noting the network of channels that drained into Essex Bay. “That’s pretty close to both the town and the marina. I’m assuming you’ve already done a detailed search of the area?”
“We came up empty. We worked in conjunction with the Essex Police Force because it’s their jurisdiction. They’re only a fourteen-man force, but they were a huge help because they really know their district.” Leigh tapped the span of Essex Bay with her index finger. “Part of what makes the search for the rest of the remains difficult is the terrain.”
“Makes it tough when part of your search area is under water twice a day,” Kiko stated.
“Exactly.”
“Wait. You’re talking about the tide?” Matt asked.
“Yes. You said earlier that you haven’t been to Essex County since you first came to Massachusetts,” Leigh said. “How much time did you spend on the coast?”
He shrugged. “Almost none. I’ve been down to the wharves in town and to a beach or two, but most of my water time is on the Charles. I row.”
Leigh’s gaze suddenly skimmed downwards, over his chest and arms, and he felt a small spurt of heat when her eyebrow unconsciously cocked in appreciation. Then Kiko spoke, drawing them both back into the conversation.
“Spending time on the wharves here in town would only count in this discussion if you did it two hundred years ago,” she said. “Back when Boston was a tiny peninsula surrounded by swampland before they filled in those areas to allow the town to grow. But that’s the kind of area you still find along the Essex coast. It’s a huge, complex ecosystem.”
“And this here—” Paul tapped the section of coast Leigh had indicated was the site of the discovery of the bone. “It’s a swamp?”
“Salt marsh, actually.” Leigh indicated a shaded portion on the map. “Basically, it’s a large area of low-lying wetland, with no roads or houses inside the actual marsh.”
“You obviously didn’t find a full set of remains when you did the search,” Matt stated. “Where did you look?”
Leigh used the end of her pen as a pointer, circling a large area of coast. “We covered west of the Essex River and north of Route 133. We even checked the Spring Street Cemetery because someone suggested the bone might have been removed from a grave there.”
“Worth checking out considering the proximity,” Matt agreed. “It didn’t pan out though, obviously.”
“No, there was no disturbance in the cemetery and there was no sign of other human remains anywhere. We also dragged the river.”
“It’s not in the river,” Juka reminded her. “The color of the bone tells us that it was buried.”
“I know that now. But at the time, considering the bone was found in the beaver dam, checking the river was a logical next step.”
“What’s the soil like there?” Paul asked.
“Assuming it’s the same as Gloucester, the soil is very loamy with a high sand component so it usually has good drainage,” said Kiko.
Matt glanced back at the radius. “That would explain the brown tinge to the bone. Clearly it’s been buried in well-drained, dry soil.”
“What makes you think that?” Leigh interrupted.
“It’s a guess,” Matt explained, “based mostly off the minimal scavenging marks on the bone, but I think these remains went through putrefaction and full decomposition while still buried.”
“The lack of adipocere substantiates your assessment,” Kiko said, then looked at Leigh. “You probably know adipocere as ‘grave wax.’ ”
“I’ve heard that term,” Leigh said. “But I don’t know much about it.”
“Adipocere is a thick, waxy substance that’s sometimes found on bodies when fatty tissue decomposes in the presence of moisture and bacteria and without oxygen,” Matt explained. “It’s significant because it slows the normal process of putrefaction to a crawl.”
“But you know this didn’t happen because the bone was found without flesh, right?” Leigh asked. “So that gives you more information about where the body was buried.”
Matt was pleasantly surprised; she’d been paying attention. “That’s right. And we know from the types of scavenger tooth marks on the bone that decomposition had already gone to completion before they had access to it.”
Leigh straightened. “So what does all of this really tell us?”
“It means we won’t find the remains in the intertidal zone,” Kiko said. “There’s simply too much moisture. The area within the intertidal zone is flooded with seawater at high tide. Even if it’s only a couple of inches deep, the ground is still saturated twice a day. A body buried in that area would almost certainly have adipocere.” She whistled. “That’s a huge area to take out of the search.”
“It’s going to make our job much easier.” Matt bent over the map and drew a large circle with his index finger around the marsh that surrounded the Essex River. “You can cut this area way down. Any area that’s in the intertidal zone is very unlikely to hold the missing remains.”
Leigh’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “Cut it all out? Are you sure?”
“That’s what you wanted us for,” Matt pointed out. “To locate your remains and determine what ha
ppened to your victim. This is just the first step.”
Leigh gave a surprised half-laugh. “Well, yes, I knew from your class that you’d be good, but I didn’t think when I brought you one bone that you’d be able to tell me this much this fast.”
“It’s simply a matter of reading the evidence you’ve given us. The next thing to think about is why was this bone recovered? We know the body was buried, but why was it just found by scavengers after all this time?”
“So you mean something like reports of digging that uncovered something unusual or a sand dune that collapsed revealing something beneath it?” Kiko asked.
“Exactly. What else?”
“Heavy rains?” Paul asked.
“What about high coastal winds?” Leigh suggested.
The missing puzzle piece suddenly clicked into place in Matt’s head and he snapped fully upright. “Idiot!”
Leigh straightened abruptly in surprise. “Excuse me?” she asked icily.
Matt shook his head at her distractedly. “No, no. Not you. Me. I should have thought of it sooner. I know exactly why your body has just surfaced. You just said it—heavy rains and high coastal winds.”
Kiko gave a small jerk. “Of course!” She leaned forward over the table. “Let me see that map.”
Matt pulled the map toward them and they bent over it together.
“Hold on, hold on …” Leigh slapped both palms down on the map. “You lost me. What just happened?”
Matt looked up to meet her eyes. “Hurricane Claire.”
Leigh gave a small gasp as she suddenly understood the implications of his theory.
Hurricane Claire, a Category 2 storm that struck Massachusetts two weeks earlier, had first devastated Nantucket and then made landfall on Cape Cod. The eye of the storm transected the Cape before thundering across Cape Cod Bay and Boston Harbor. After making landfall one last time at Manchester, it had moved up the Essex coast and into New Hampshire.