All the Secret Places

by Anna Carlisle

  “I’ll wait for your findings,” Stillman said, obviously irritated to be excluded.

  “You’ll get them as soon as the captain does,” Rappaport said. When they were out of earshot, he added, “What an insufferable asshole. Good cop, though.”

  They arrived at the edge of the trench, which had been widened by the investigators to unearth as much of the body as possible without disturbing it further. The techs had moved out to the perimeter, where they were taking samples and measuring the depth using a variety of specialized tools; with their white hooded jumpsuits reminiscent of space suits, they gave the raw, scraped earth a surreal, lunar look.

  A quick glance revealed the skeletal remains, draped in ragged shreds of rotted clothing, with bits of dried skin tissue clinging to the bones here and there. The body was lying on its back, with its arms at its side; whether they’d been arranged there when the body was first placed in the hole, or whether they had originally been placed in another arrangement and shifted when the earth was shoveled on top, it was impossible to say.

  There was always a moment when Gin viewed the remains from a case where a body was discovered in a decomposed state in which she was transported back to the days she’d spent on the other half of the world, working to untangle the identities of the cruelly murdered and abandoned men and boys who’d died, sometimes hundreds at a time, in the most inhumane circumstances. The work she and her colleagues had done in Srebrenica was not something that they spoke of often once they returned home, and in fact, the work itself had been conducted in silence more often than not, conversation saved for later when they returned, exhausted and dirty, for a few hours of sleep before another dawn.

  But the images haunted all of them. Days, weeks, even months would go by when Gin gave barely a thought to the hundreds of bodies she had helped disinter and identify. But then a case would come across her table that would bring it all back again.

  A body buried in soil will give itself over to the earth at a rate determined by many factors: the minerals in the soil, its humidity and alkalinity or acidity, the average daily temperatures and rain- and snowfall levels, microorganism populations, insects and fungus, surface disturbances from human or animal interference, or even earthquakes and avalanches and floods. The daily dramas that disrupt the lives of humans when they are alive can also alter the course of the dead.

  In Srebrenica, Gin had worked in pits that were filled with bodies twisted together like scraps of yarn, like bits of sodden paper, like a junk drawer full of spare parts. No analogy could capture the terrible spectacle of so many dead in their peculiar embrace. Most of the victims had been tossed into their graves with no ceremony at all, dropped or pushed or thrown, then moved with earthmoving equipment. The human mind simply seemed incapable of accepting it, and in short order, it went from trying to slot the images into some—any—other pattern to giving up and treating it all as almost meaningless, no more structured than pebbles in a jar or paper balled up and tossed into a trash can.

  Somewhere in her third or fourth day in the mass graves, at a site where bodies had been moved months after their death in an effort to deflect attention from the atrocities by their perpetrators, Gin had been trying to make sense of the various partial skeletons, sorting them into likely matches, when she had the strange sense that she was performing a familiar exercise. And then it came to her: She and Lily had once owned a dog-eared set of cards that were a simple memory game for children. They laid all the cards facedown and then turned them over two at a time, looking for matches—two apples or two boots or two goats. Gin had liked the game because it was highly structured and gave her a sense of accomplishment when she succeeded; Lily had hated it because it forced her to sit still and focus. Many times the game ended when Lily gave up and pushed all the cards together into a messy pile, then ran away, leaving Gin to tidy up.

  In that pit, she had been playing a grislier version of that game, trying to match femur to femur, ulna to ulna. But reducing it to a logic puzzle had been her coping strategy. Seeing the bones painstakingly extracted from the earth as objects imbued with no more meaning than those cards had allowed her to do her work without breaking down.

  She’d never told her parents about the experience, nor had she told Jake. They didn’t ask: it was almost as if people were afraid to open the door to what she had seen and experienced. It was only among her colleagues that Gin could be frank; she answered their questions as honestly and completely as she was able, and in the answering was some sort of healing—at least, those were the moments that allowed her to let out enough of the horror of her mission that she could continue doing her work.

  All these years later, however, the sight of a body that had been buried in the earth threw her right back into the detachment she had cultivated to survive. It was an assemblage of parts, their features merely clues to be prized apart.

  Later, in preparation for the autopsy, she would read all the case notes. There would be information about the discovery of the body, the damage that might have inadvertently been done by the firefighters and other responders. By the time she arrived, they had done what they could to secure the scene, and the investigators who arrived with their van full of equipment would have taken exquisite care to disturb as little as possible as they uncovered the rest of the body. Dirt would be whisked away with brushes finer than the ones Gin used to apply her makeup; every bit of decayed clothing would be marked, photographed, and bagged. What she saw had been curated as carefully as a museum exhibit, which further helped depersonalize it.

  As soon as her brain had processed that first glimpse, it began clicking through observations like an old-fashioned camera’s shutter clicking through its shots. The body was somewhere between five foot seven and five foot ten, by her estimation, a guess that had a large margin of error, as Gin had difficulty judging the height of a body laid out horizontally. It had been fully dressed, at the time of death, in a shirt or jacket and trousers; this observation was supported by the little fabric that had survived, which was draped and twined around the bones. There was no evidence of shoes or socks. There was no obvious damage to the body, though much would have to wait to be determined in the autopsy, but the skull had been shattered in front, the maxilla and mandible splintered, with bone fragments still protruding from the ramus of the mandible and underneath the anterior nasal spine.

  “He took one to the face,” Fred said cheerfully, if unnecessarily, pointing to the gap between skull and spine. “Hell of a blunt force to do that.”

  “He?” Gin echoed. She made a point of trying not to make assumptions, no matter how well supported they seemed to be by the circumstances of the death.

  “We’ll have to wait until we get him back to be sure, but I’ll bet you lunch on the Strip,” Fred said. He took a long, pointed plastic tool from his belt and carefully lifted the clothing shreds from the skeleton’s pelvis. Gin knelt down and examined the area and nodded.

  “I won’t take that bet,” she said. “I think you’re right.” The sex of a skeleton could be determined by the subpubic angle, which in this case was less than ninety degrees, based on her quick visual assessment. “But what makes you think the remains are so old?”

  “Well!” Fred knelt beside her, and they stared down the trench together. “Take a close look at the clothes and see if you can guess.”

  Calling them “clothes” was a stretch, as all that was left were a few patches of fabric clinging here and there to the bones. These shreds were the same dun color and dusty texture of the skeleton itself; everything in the trench, in fact, was the uniformly indistinguishable shade of the soil.

  “Obviously natural fiber,” Gin said. Synthetic fabric—which included fabric that was blended with nylon, polyester, or other fibers—would last as long as plastic, which was to say, thousands of years. “Given the weave and the texture, I’m guessing wool?”

  “Good guess,” Fred said smugly. It wasn’t the first time he’d invited her to guess at his c
onclusions, a game he seemingly never tired of.

  “Okay, I agree that suggests age,” Gin said. For the past fifty years, most Americans wore at least some synthetic elements daily, whether it was a polyblend T-shirt, the lining of a coat, the soles of shoes, or the elastic in a waistband. “But I’m not sure how you get past a few decades.”

  “Keep looking. Here, use this.”

  Fred handed her his flashlight, which Gin used to slowly and methodically view the body. Besides the damage to the skull, there was no obvious injury to the skeleton. The long bones of the arms and legs were intact, as were the broader scapula and sacrum. The exposed sternum and rib bones were visible on their bed of matted clothing fibers and soil.

  Gin shone the light slowly around the perimeter of the body, examining the soil. It was crumbly, with tiny roots, decayed plant matter, and worms and insects. Farther down, it formed clumps and clung to rocks. Whoever had dug the hole had been lucky not to run into any larger rocks—or else he or she had removed them.

  The beam of her flashlight glinted off a stone near the skeletal arm. Gin peered closer.

  “Warmer . . . warmer . . .” Fred said.

  “What is that—a button?” The object was covered in grime and dirt, but protruding from the back was what might have been a shank. The exposed metal shone dully.

  “Bingo! Here, look at this one.” Fred took the flashlight from her and shone it on another, which had lodged between a rib bone and a fold of fabric. The outline of an eagle was faintly visible on its surface. “Tell you what, any history buff worth her salt would recognize it—every Union enlisted man’s uniform had buttons just like that.”

  “You’re saying . . . you think this is a Civil War soldier?”

  “Well, it’s his uniform, anyway. Tell you what, let’s double down—if I’m right, you buy a six pack of Leineys.”

  Gin laughed; Fred’s fondness for Leinenkugel beer was matched only by his enthusiasm for professional hockey. During the season, he’d been known to wear a Penguins jersey to work on Fridays.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Fred, but I’m not much of a gambler. Good catch, though—I’ll be interested to see if you’re right.”

  “Oh, I’m right,” Fred said confidently. “See this here?”

  He pointed to a narrow metal scrap in the dirt next to the skull. It was about an inch and a half long with holes in the ends.

  “What is it?”

  “Can’t be completely sure, of course, but I think it’s the tab for attaching the shoulder scales to the uniform.”

  “Shoulder scales?”

  “They were a brass plate you’d wear over your shoulder—the idea was if someone came at you there with a sword or whatever, it would give you a little protection from the blow.”

  “Wow, you really know your stuff,” Gin said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s a hobby of mine. I’ve got my great-great-grandfather’s uniform up in the attic. I did some research on it a while back—turns out the family legends about him being a war hero were a little exaggerated, unfortunately. He didn’t even make it through a single winter before dying from an infection he got from cutting his finger on a sardine tin.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened to this fellow,” Gin said lightly, straightening up. She’d seen all she could for the moment; any further investigating would have to wait until the crime scene unit had finished photographing and processing the scene and the remains were transported back to the morgue.

  “Maybe so, but getting clobbered in the face didn’t help.”

  They both stared at the ruined lower jaw for a moment. Without the typical leering grin that gave skulls a characteristic appearance of—depending how one interpreted it—mischief or amusement, it looked jarringly incomplete.

  “Where are the teeth?” Gin asked after a moment.

  “What? They’re . . . well, what do you know,” Fred said. He prodded gently at the earth under the skull, where the spine was still partly covered in soil. “I suppose they might be buried still, along with the rest of the mandible . . .”

  “Maybe,” Gin said. “Although look along the edge of the maxilla there.” She pointed to the left, less-damaged side of the skull, where the roots of a few teeth were still lodged in the bone. “Judging just from what I can see from here, it almost seems like the teeth were all knocked out. Which would take more than a single blow, or even half a dozen.” Something, she didn’t add, that might be undertaken by a killer who didn’t want a dental identification made.

  “I noticed that too,” said a hesitant female voice. Gin turned to see a female technician standing behind them, her hood pushed back from her long, glossy, dark ponytail. “I was thinking maybe we’ll find them in the soil below.”

  “At least a few of them, anyway,” Gin concurred. Teeth were even more durable than bone, often the last of the remains to disintegrate—but they could also easily become dislodged and lost during the excavation process. “I’m Gin Sullivan, by the way. I hope we’re not getting in your way.”

  “I know who you are,” the young woman said solemnly. “I’ve seen you around the county offices. My name’s Katie Kennedy. I’m so sorry about your sister . . .”

  “Thank you,” Gin said, more brusquely than she intended. It was still difficult to talk about that loss, even with a stranger who was trained in working with victims.

  “You’re consulting on this case, then? They called you in fast.”

  “Well . . .” Gin was reluctant to explain the personal connection. “We’ll see—for now, I’m just taking a look.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here, anyway. There’s not going to be a whole lot to work with. I mean, we’ll do what we can, but between the damage the firefighters did and the age of the remains, it’s going to be tough. Of course, I guess you’re used to that. I mean, with the, uh, mass graves.”

  The girl was blushing, and it took Gin a moment to realize that her discomfort came from admiration as much as shyness.

  “Every case is different,” she said warmly. “And the work you’re doing is invaluable. I’ll see you up in the city, okay?”

  “Okay, sure.” Katie brightened. “Bye, Dr. Sullivan.”

  “Call me Gin.”

  “You’ve got a fan,” Detective Witt observed when she made her way back out of the taped-off area.

  “Well, given your partner’s opinion of me, I could use one.”

  Witt chuckled. “Ah, don’t let Bruce get you down. He just doesn’t like outsiders coming into our cases.”

  “Is that what you see me as? An outsider?”

  Witt shrugged. “I mean, you nailed the Dempsey thing . . . I guess it comes down to whether you can keep delivering.”

  “Okay, noted,” Gin said, allowing a smile.

  The Dempsey case was the only time she and Witt had worked together since she began consulting. Several years earlier, a dog that got loose from a backyard had made a grisly discovery in a culvert near a field owned by a farmer named Raoul Dempsey: fragments of a human tibia bone. An investigation had led to the discovery of additional bone fragments—but had stalled because there wasn’t enough to identify the victim.

  Gin was invited to review the evidence by an investigator assigned to cold cases. After spending an afternoon in the lab with the bone fragments under a microscope, she’d noticed what the medical examiner had missed: the diaphyseal cortical bone was too thick to be human in origin. Further testing revealed it to have come from a pig—and follow-up investigation of the original case notes revealed that one of the sons had buried the pig bones as a prank.

  “That was an easy one,” Gin said, smiling.

  “Yeah, no kidding. Liquids and smells—that’s what gets to me,” Witt admitted. “First time I ever attended an autopsy—you’ve probably heard about it—I almost passed out. I came home and called my mom and told her I was never going back.”

  “That’s not the hard part,” Katie said. She’d joined them, leaving the protected area to
the forensic photographer. “I mean, not for me, anyway.”

  “No?” Gin noticed the keen attention Witt focused on Katie and wondered if the pair were interested in each other. Romance bloomed in the strangest circumstances, in her experience; even during the devastating work in Bosnia, or maybe because of it, some of her colleagues had found comfort in each other’s company.

  “You don’t mind the, uh, blood and guts?” Witt said admiringly.

  “No, not really. I saw a lot during my training, you know. If I was going to be put off by that sort of thing, it would have already happened before my first day on the job.”

  Gin understood the distinction the girl was making. During medical school, she’d seen plenty of people quit when confronted with the realities—decomposition, decay, malodorousness—of the job. Some people, herself among them, were able to make their peace; others were not.

  “So what does bother you, then?” Witt asked.

  Katie hesitated before answering. “Well, to be honest, it was the idea that we might never find answers. My very first case was this little baby someone left in a public restroom in a park. The restroom was supposed to be closed for the winter, but people broke in and used it to get high . . . anyway, the baby had been dead for a few hours by the time we were called in. It was probably born premature because the mother was using. My supervisor, the detectives, everyone worked all night long, and then once we were sure we’d gotten everything we could from the scene, we were all standing around the van, trying to warm up. It was a cold, cold night, and they’d brought in a portable heater that they were running off a generator. It was loud, and you almost had to yell to be heard. My boss looks back where they’ve got the baby loaded up in the ambulance, and I don’t think anyone else heard her, but she said, It’ll be like she was never even born. And it just seemed so . . . sad.”

  “I get that,” Gin said. “It can be really difficult.”

  “But this guy?” Witt said. “If he’s really been lying there for a hundred and fifty years, it’s not like there’s anyone left alive who would care.”