All the Secret Places

by Anna Carlisle

  “You’ll find buyers. Jake, those homes are beautiful. Even if you can’t rebuild right away, once you clear the site, people won’t even care that a fire took place there.” She didn’t mention the body; people might well balk at its presence. She knew there were laws requiring disclosure of deaths occurring in homes being sold, and these disclosures often had the effect of significantly lowering the price buyers were willing to pay. A similar bias could well turn people off of Jake’s project—but that was a bridge to be crossed later.

  Gin had an idea. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before: What if I help? I could do marketing—talk to local agents—maybe make some contacts in the city.”

  “Gin, you don’t know the first thing about real estate. I mean, don’t take this as a criticism, but you’ve never even owned a house.”

  “I could learn,” Gin said stubbornly.

  Jake stopped and took her arm, turning her so she was staring up into his expressive eyes. “Woman, you’re the smartest person I know. And I have no doubt that if you set your mind to it, you could become a real estate tycoon. But these are my problems, and it’s my job to solve them. And besides, don’t you have other things you’d rather do?”

  Gin tried to ignore the sting. Jake didn’t want her help. She took a deep breath and forced a casual tone. “Speaking of that . . . they’ve asked me to consult on this case.”

  His grip on her arm loosened. Just like that, the atmosphere between them changed, and he stepped away. “I shouldn’t be surprised. Well, I guess I ought to be grateful; if you’re on the job, I know it’ll get done right, and maybe you can even speed things up a little. I guess you probably can’t tell me anything, right?”

  “You know I can’t talk about the case,” Gin said. “And besides, I won’t know anything for certain, really, until the autopsy.”

  “And when will that be?”

  Gin shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s not my decision to make. I’ll call Stephen when I get home and see if he can pull the case.”

  Stephen Harper, a staff forensic pathologist, had been the lead on Gin’s sister’s autopsy, the first case she’d sat in on at the county medical examiner’s office. It had been a highly unusual situation—family members were almost never present at autopsy, no matter their qualifications—and it was Harper’s kindness and willingness to speak on her behalf that had paved the way for her to participate. Since then, the two had worked together on various cases.

  The relationship was strictly a professional one—Harper was happily married, with small children—but Jake had chafed silently whenever Gin mentioned the man’s name. Now the set of his jaw became even fiercer, and he folded his arms and glared at the ground.

  “What’s that going to do, Gin?” he demanded. “Can Harper make this thing go away? Can he at least sign off on the paperwork so I can get back to work?”

  Gin stared at him, startled by the venom in his voice. “Jake . . . this ‘thing’ is a human being. He deserves our best efforts to discover how and why he died.”

  “Come on, Gin, he’s been in the ground for over a century, from what I pieced together up there. Anyone who cared about him is dead. I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I really doubt he’d mind.”

  “That’s nowhere near certain. There’s no solid evidence that dates his remains more than a few years old.”

  “Okay, but still. It’s not like his loved ones have beaten a path to Trumbull, wondering what happened to him.”

  “Jake . . . you have to know that I care very much about you and your work,” Gin said carefully. “But I can’t take shortcuts or rush our report just because it would be expedient.”

  “‘Expedient,’” Jake echoed hollowly, and Gin wished she could rephrase. When she felt unsure of herself emotionally, it was her habit to retreat into the safety of clinical language, to speak like an academic rather than acknowledge how vulnerable she was at the core.

  But to Jake—a man who worked with his hands, who preferred action to talk, who never minced a word when he could help it—she knew she sometimes came off as distant and even condescending.

  “Jake . . .”

  “Whatever, Gin,” he said stiffly. “Never mind what I’ve got riding on this. I feel for that poor guy, I really do. I’m sorry for whatever happened that ended with him in that hole. But he’s dead, and nothing you do’s gonna change that. Frankly, when I go, if someone sticks me in the ground up here, overlooking the valley, I’d count myself lucky—but you got to do what you got to do, I guess.”

  Gin was torn between wishing she could bridge the gulf between them and objecting to his words, just as he’d taken offense to her own. “I know very well that nothing I do will change the fact that he died,” she said. “But there’s value in discovering how it happened. Otherwise, what would you have us do? Just—just chuck him in a dumpster? Fill up the hole with concrete so you can build an outdoor barbecue over it?”

  “I know what I do isn’t as important as your work,” Jake shot back. “But it puts food on my table. Look, Gin, you made it clear when you moved in that you don’t want me taking care of you. Fine. I get it. But I still have to take care of myself. So while you and your pal Harper shut down my site so you can poke around a body that’s been lying there long enough to turn into dirt, I’ll be trying to figure out how to pay my bills when I don’t have any houses to sell or crew to build more.”

  He started down the trail without looking back, holding the ax handle in a tight fist. Gin desperately wanted to race after him, to try to make him understand.

  But the problem was that he did understand, maybe all too well. They were standing on opposite sides of a divide that neither could cross.

  6

  Despite the fact that Gin had felt him toss and turn during the night, Jake was up and gone by the time she woke at seven. She drank the rest of the coffee that was left in the pot and forced down some toast, then dug up a presentable sweater and skirt and boots with enough of a heel to make it look like she was trying. She pulled her hair back into a large tortoiseshell clip, letting the curls cascade over her shoulders, and applied her makeup with care, using concealer to try to banish the dark circles under her eyes.

  When she was finished, she stepped back from the mirror and squinted at her reflection. She had changed since leaving Chicago, and it wasn’t just the fact that the pallor that resulted from spending so much time in the lab had given way to healthy color from the time she spent outside, going for hikes with Jake or running along the trails that crisscrossed the hills above town. She’d let her hair grow longer, mostly due to the fact that her regular hairdresser was hundreds of miles away, but also because her mother had offered to make her an appointment with her own stylist, and Gin had no intention of adopting her mother’s sprayed, every-hair-in-place style.

  But the biggest changes couldn’t be attributed to a haircut or a tan or a new cosmetic. Gin thought she looked . . . more like herself. Relaxed. Rested. And until the recent distance between her and Jake, mostly contented.

  She tossed a few things into her good handbag, the one she’d purchased because it was large enough to bring home case files in and sturdy enough for crowded L trains, and headed for Pittsburgh.

  The temperature had dropped overnight, and the road was made treacherous by patches of ice. Gin drove carefully, and by the time she arrived, it was two minutes before the appointed starting time of ten o’clock. She didn’t recognize the receptionist and had to dig for her identification and then wait for her to call to check that she was expected, so by the time she’d made her way down the hall to the morgue, everyone was already assembled for the autopsy.

  Stephen Harper and his boss, head medical examiner Harvey Chozick, had taken their positions on either side of the body. Stillman stood behind them, and as far away as he could get in the corner of the room, Witt stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, his complexion only faintly green. Two technicians joked quietly in the rear of the room, wher
e they would stay unless asked to assist, which in this case was unlikely: there were no organs to remove and weigh, and there was no point in sectioning the skull in order to access the brain, which had long ago liquefied and drained out. No brute strength would be required to crack the ribs, and no dexterity with a bone saw would help. Having set up the room in advance, their tasks were likely over until the autopsy was finished, when they would prepare the body for burial or cremation, but that task would be simplified as well: there were no tissues to be sewn shut, no cavity to be packed and prepared, and no once vital organs to carefully replace.

  Stephen Harper noticed Gin first and gave her a little wave. His face was partially covered by a mask, but his warm gray eyes managed to convey a smile anyway.

  “Hello, Gin, so pleased you could come,” Harvey Chozick said. Like Stephen, he was generous with his praise for her contributions, even when they amounted to little. Gin suspected there might also be some posturing taking place for the benefit of the detectives, whose presence was generally tolerated with a measure of distaste in high-profile cases, where the integrity of the pathologist’s findings was constantly under scrutiny.

  “Hello, everyone,” Gin said brightly, taking her place a couple of feet from the end of the table, where she could observe but would not be in the way. She had to resist apologizing for her tardiness; it only amounted to a few moments, and she knew her presence was already viewed as unnecessary and even potentially disruptive, at least by Stillman.

  She washed and gloved as quickly as she could, but when she was finished, Stephen was already going through the preliminary observations. He recorded these into a small digital recorder, which would be transcribed and formatted into documentation to be included in the case files.

  There was a unique rhythm to the opening notes of the autopsy, the stanzas of which varied little from one department to another, and Gin allowed herself to be lulled by the familiar language, concentrating not on the overall description, which she herself could have supplied from her initial view of the body, but on Stephen’s small tics and gestures in the belief that she could divine what else he was thinking by reading between the lines. In theory, autopsy was a place where participants would merely catalog the evidence in front of them. But Gin knew that intuition played a far greater part in a skilled pathologist’s toolbox than he or she would ever admit.

  Stephen, in her estimation, seemed slightly tentative as he worked through the initial analysis, reading the data in a sober, quiet voice as he measured the various bones and described the matter clinging to them. The shreds of clothing were removed, bagged, and labeled with information about where they were found in relation to the rest of the remains, giving the techs something to do, and the growing pile of evidence on their cart began to look like a clearance bin at Filene’s Basement.

  Stephen made his way up the body, leaving the skull for last, reading off the measurements of various bones. When he arrived at the pelvis, he pointed to the pelvic inlet, an opening in the center of the bone. “I’m satisfied this was a male.”

  “I concur,” Gin said.

  “Wait,” Stillman said. “How do you know?”

  “The pelvic inlet—this hole here—is narrower in a male. Also, the sciatic notch is narrower. And finally, do you see the angle where the two pubic bones meet in front? It would be a lot wider in a female.”

  “There’s nothing else that tells you it was a man?” Stillman asked, sounding almost affronted. Gin braced herself for a tasteless joke, but Stephen cut him off; he’d endured Stillman’s presence in other autopsies and, as he had confided in Gin over coffee, decided that the best way to handle him was to ignore his goading.

  “Minor skull differences,” he said mildly, “but this is all we need for a conclusive determination. Now, let’s move on to the condition of the bone surface. I notice faint lateral grooves along the diaphysis,” he said, peering closely at a humerus. “One to two millimeters deep—none reaching the medullary cavity.”

  He looked up at Gin and raised his eyebrows, questioning. She cleared her throat and leaned in at the unspoken invitation, careful not to touch anything, even the steel table; her consulting agreement specified that she was to observe the autopsy being conducted by staff, and it prohibited her from handling the remains, unless a formal request was made and approved by the chief medical examiner.

  “Rodents, I’m nearly sure,” she said. The grooves—really little more than scratches—had probably been made in the early months that the body had lain in its earthen grave, when there were still remnants of tissue for scavengers to feed on. She’d seen the damage that gnawing could do; entire sections of bone could be consumed if small animals were determined—and hungry—enough. But the depth at which the body had been buried had probably kept the damage to a minimum.

  After the bone dimensions had been recorded, Stephen made an estimate of height. “Five nine, perhaps five nine and a half,” he noted, within Gin’s preliminary estimate.

  “What about size?” Stillman asked. “Was he a heavy guy?”

  Again, Stephen looked to Gin, but this time, she gave him a slight nod to encourage him to answer the question himself, as the data was fairly standard.

  “It’s generally difficult to assess weight from skeletal remains,” he said. “Other than a slightly wider femur, resulting from carrying a significant load, we expect to see little difference.”

  “So for all you know, he could have died of starvation?” Witt asked. “There’s no way to tell?”

  “Yeah, well, there’s the tiny little fact that he had his head caved in,” Stillman quipped, causing Witt to blush.

  Gin felt sorry for the junior detective, who had impressed her as earnest and dedicated in their interactions. “It’s a good question,” she reassured him. “And yes, bones are affected by malnutrition. When we get samples under the microscope, we’d expect to see poor mineral density. The skeleton of a malnourished person will also have poor cortical strength, so we’d expect to see a greater incidence of fracture.”

  “What about this guy?” Stillman said. “Any fractures? Could you see them if they were healed?”

  “The answer to that question is a little vague,” Gin said. “Bones do heal, just like other tissues in the body, and over time, evidence of injury becomes less pronounced. A major break could leave evidence of the break line, or the bone could even heal crookedly. One thing I noticed”—she stepped forward and indicated a very faint line extending at an angle at the upper portion of the right wrist—“here, along the right distal radius, this may be evidence of a break that occurred years before death, given how the tissue has healed.”

  “Colles fracture?” Stephen suggested, obviously embarrassed that he hadn’t noticed it.

  “Yes, I’d say so,” she said, “but don’t worry, it would be easy to miss, given the fact that it healed so cleanly.”

  “But it didn’t have anything to do with what killed him,” Stillman pointed out. “So he broke his wrist—that didn’t put him underground.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Gin allowed. The transcriptionist would record only the key details of their recorded conversation, but she was still irritated at Stillman’s comments. When law enforcement officers attended autopsies, they were trained to ask only clarifying questions about the evidence, not to draw conclusions of their own. She had made herself available after dozens of autopsies to go over evidence and, in many more cases, had appeared in court to testify in civil and criminal cases, where her opinions as an expert witness were admissible.

  “Okay, let’s move on to the skull.” It was resting at the head of the table but had become fully detached during transport and so had to be supported with a white, Teflon-like plastic stand. The injuries the jaw had sustained somehow looked even more pronounced without the context of the spine and the rest of the skeleton, giving the appearance of a fright mask made to cover only the eyes and nose. Some of the bone shards Gin had noticed during her examination of th
e remains before they had been moved were missing, but she assumed they were in the evidence bags on the counter.

  “We see extensive fragmentation of facial bones due to impact trauma to the face. Cranial bone fragments are missing, including teeth and segments of tooth-bearing bone. The majority of the mandible was not recovered.”

  “The mandible—that’s the chin, right?” Witt asked. “And the lower teeth.”

  “That is correct.”

  “So if it was somehow smashed clean off—”

  “That would be difficult to do,” Stephen said, “if I understand your meaning. No matter how hard the blow, the tissues connecting the bone would probably keep it in place, albeit being quite damaged.”

  “You’re saying if someone hits me hard enough, even if it pulverized my jaw, the skin and gums and what have you will keep it attached,” Stillman said. Briefly, Gin indulged that image; she could tell from Stephen’s effort to suppress a smirk that he was doing the same.

  “Well yes, more or less. If these remains weren’t buried, I’d be unsurprised that the mandible is missing, because a scavenger could easily detach it and carry it elsewhere to feed on, especially if tissues had already begun to decompose. But since the body was buried, that is unlikely.”

  “Could it have been buried, then dug up and moved?” Witt asked. “And maybe the jaw became detached then, and the teeth fell out?”

  “I’ll defer to my colleague on that one,” Stephen said. “She has more experience with that scenario.”

  “In short, no,” Gin said, hoping she wouldn’t have to go into detail describing what happened to bodies that had been buried twice. Due to their decomposition, in her experience, they came apart and became mixed up in their second grave, which led to exhausting analysis to try to sort out individual sets of remains. “The state and position of the body as discovered indicated it was placed there after death and before decomposition.”

  “So what happened to the teeth?” Stillman demanded.