Carcass Trade (3 page)

“The mandible,” I said.

“The magic mandible,” he said.

“Minus teeth.”

“It's got a few.”

“Find the upper, then we'll celebrate.”

“I can do that.”

“Hotshot. Here,” I said, and gave him a bag. “Mark it right.”

I heard him drop the bone in the bag. I wasn't looking when he said, “Guess again.”

“What?”

I looked up and found him standing in the same stupid way, with the same stupid, satisfied smile. He brought around to the front the maxilla, the upper jaw, had it hiding somewhere. “God, Doug.”

“I'm great, ain't I?”

“You are.”

“Hear that?” he said, looking around for witnesses. “She said it.”

Doug pointed to a canyon sycamore. “Found it in that wedge of roots.” He turned it admiringly. The front teeth were intact, but only two others remained on each side. Finally, he admitted a raven found it. He saw the bird poking its thick black crunchers into the leaves and snatching its head around like a shoplifter on the lookout.

I was jealous. But now ID would be that much easier, especially if I found more teeth. From dentition—the kind, number, and arrangement of teeth—an odontologist can read the patient's history like a kindergarten book, and the morgue people delight in keeping the rate of their unidentifieds way down.

The transport team brought the body out. They had used a sheet to extract the corpse, threading it under the remains in the tight interior. Then they tied the ends to make the bundle easier to lift up through the car door. The whole thing, sheet and all, would be put into the body bag, to make sure no evidence was lost.

The corner's investigator wore latex gloves as she stepped around, bent, and untied the flaps, throwing the sheet open. When she rose from bending over the body and blocking our view, we all stood silently looking at the thing that seemed no more than a charred humanoid wick, the limbs seared away and the head gone, the two charcoal knobs glued to the chest.

“It was a woman,” one of the men said.

The investigator flipped the sheet back over the corpse and said, “There's not much to examine here,” and began pulling off the gloves. “We'll get it to a safe environment.”

I needed shots of the car interior after the body was removed. Since I had coveralls and Doug didn't, I'd have to go into the car myself. I asked Doug to stand by in case I needed anything, took some shots from above, then lowered myself in. It was like standing in a dead fireplace. I cast a light around the whole interior, then reached over the frame of the front seat for something that lay like an ashy helmet in the curl of the backseat springs, and pincered it, bringing it forward. It looked like one half of the parietal. Lightly, I ran a finger over the piece of skull. The borders were smooth, flames having eaten away the serrations by which it would fit like a jigsaw piece with the other half.

“Find any money under the seat, it's mine,” Doug called.

“Very funny.”

I did retrieve a few coins, and dug off the door a melted blob of blue plastic with one comb-tooth protruding, and spied a metal barrel I thought at first was the front seat track until it moved with a touch of my glove. Lifting the object, I unstuck a small handgun buried like a corn dog in a crust of sheepskin-padded leather. The two halves of the cover came away, the side with the sinuous zipper falling down my thigh.

There was more scorch on the bottom side than the top, and I imagined liquid accelerant running underneath before the fire erupted. The plastic on the grip had melted the magazine shut, but I needed to check to see if there was a cartridge in the chamber because the whole thing would be in a volatile state. I could read the letters
BOA
between the head and tail outline of a snake on the slide. With the muzzle pointed down, and holding firm on the corrugated metal finger grips, I cracked open the slide, then let it go home when I saw no cartridge.

“Doug, toss me a firearm box,” I called. “This victim didn't know that if you're going to pack a gun under a seat, you don't tuck it into bed like a baby. She never had a chance.”

“Women and guns,” Doug said. “It's the in thing. I'm afraid to go out on a date anymore.”

“
You
should be,” I said. “Where's my box?”

I sat on the southern rise of the canyon and watched the transport wagon pull away with its pitiful cargo. In the splayed eucalyptus branches above me, a burly raven clucked. Joe was down by his car, putting away his equipment. Les was back talking to the woman fire fighter, whose truck, I'd learned, was out of Station No. 4, on the corner of Olinda Drive and Olinda Place in the tiny village of Olinda not a mile south, where the house numbers still run to three digits, so I guess that's why the pumper crew had time to sit around during our whole investigation. Doug had already gone.

A second raven flew above me and sat by the first in the leafy veil. The common raven, called common for a reason. The heavy boldness of their size pleases me, their iron shape taking big bites out of the sky. Once I saw a pair of ravens fighting their own reflections in a bank window, making guttural noises in their hackle-covered throats. The lower window was shaded black, drawing their own images sharply in the reflected sidewalk light. The two flapped and hopped and spit at themselves the whole time I was at the ATM, miniature gangsters in each other's faces.

To the bird on the lower branch, I said, “Hello, big guy,” because if you put your face up and talk to a raven, he will talk back, maybe not the first time you come across him, but by the second. Big Guy gave a metallic
tok-tok-tok
, then a prolonged
grauk
, as he tipped his head my way.

Creosote resins released by rain the night before scented the air. I concentrated, trying to imagine who the person in the car could be. A woman, coming down the hill in the early
A
.
M
. But coming down to what? Three kids waiting at home, the father ready for his day shift? And she, the mother, returning from nine hours of tending bedpans, the only job she could get in these hard times? Or maybe a woman who'd run away from her husband, receiving a call, tears on both sides; then the grateful agreement, yes, I'll come home.

Or something darker? The pistol would say so. It looked to me like a .25, not a power gun, a gun an amateur might select for defense. And how did it add up that we had a stolen car from Beverly Hills, a city populated by movie stars, Arab sheikhs, and rich plastic surgeons, yet the car was old, its carapace lying sixty miles south, in northern Orange County?

Orange County is in its adolescence, its face and figure changing. Eight hundred square miles and forty-odd cities surround a shrinking island of peaceful bean and strawberry fields. Stark white finance centers and design-free hotels loom next to freeways. In the last decade, builders bolstered by a flood of Pacific Islanders, Filipinos, Guamanians, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Hispanics hiked housing prices to sucker levels, then fled to Colorado when the market dropped. Yet while red-tile cloned homes invade forsaken farmland, cul-de-sac drug dealers and arts center supporters eat at the same pizza bars. Most of us go to work, to fairs and games and stores and movies without event. The golden weather, the knowledge that the endless, rhythmic ocean lies mere miles away, makes us complacent. Cows still graze on hillsides. The air is mostly clear, and there are places where horses lope on fragrant bark trails, and protected pockets where wildlife can be seen. Yet beneath this docile surface, the bottom currents churn.

When Joe's shadow came shooting over the white morning glory vine, the sun an hour past its apex, I was talking to my ravens again.

He said, “Keep that up and somebody'll pin you down and pull a tox on you,” meaning I must be on some behavior-altering drug and should have a toxicology test for drug use. He sat on his heels, handing me a can of soda.

“You want to be the one to do it?”

“Can I? What's this lonesome business you tell me? You're the one wanted some time off.”

I said, “It doesn't mean I don't miss you.” I stood up and walked to the edge of the hill, avoiding the morning glories. He followed. I looked at the soft skin by his eyes with a yearning. Both of us had said the L word, then qualified it in special ways, casually, over salad or while philosophizing about life, using those sidelong glances to see how the other person took it. Twice he'd mentioned the difference in our ages. I told him it was not a problem.

He said, “Do you care what people in the office think? Office affairs are never a secret, not really.”

“People think what they think. If we weren't seeing each other, they'd think we were. Who knows what they think? Who cares? Besides, you can't call it an affair if it's two single people, can you? A friendship. A very friendly friendship. What are we talking about this for? That's not the issue, and you know it.”

“What is the issue?”

“If I knew that, I guess I wouldn't be asking for a time-out,” I said. “What'd you find with your sniffer?”

“It dinged when it should. They used an accelerant. We'll find out which one when I can get to my rate sheets.” The CCD pumps vapors over a coil, measuring heat resistance. Joe would match the resulting numbers with retention rates to identify the particular fuel.

“This is the way I figure it,” he said, pointing across the canyon. “The car didn't go off the road in this direction, where we're sitting. I walked up there on the bank. There's chunks out of the edge there. I think the car was pushed over. Not rolled. It goes down, wheels in, wheels out, wheels in, bang.” He broke a dried grass stem into bits and chewed on the last length while he looked into the far landscape. “The door panel's caved in on the up side.”

“So?”

“Like it was rammed over.”

“You read a lot into a scene.”

“It makes up for a dull life.”

We headed down the hill toward the road, the ravens uttering rude sounds as they took a couple of hops and flew to another tree along our path. Their pebble eyes stayed on us in case they got lucky and we both keeled over from poison oak rash or something. Out of the scrub a gray mockingbird swooped near us, spreading its black-and-white tail fan and squawking about our infringement of territory. “Mockers have more guts than sense,” I said.

“Like some people I know,” Joe said.

Overhead, the bigger birds just gave an empty stare and flew to the ground for something, hopping like prisoners in foot chains with too short a lead.

When we reached the far side of the canyon where Joe felt the car had gone over, the ravens had flown away to the north, and I thought they were gone to better hunting, but they came flapping back and settled in another tree. Glancing up at them, I said, “You know what they call a collection of ravens? An unkindness.”

Looking over the side at the gray hulk below, noting the flattened weed on the road edge and the open wound of dirt where the car had bit off the edge, Joe said, “An unkindness? That's an unkindness.”

“No argument from me.”

He pointed: “We have lemon and white splash on the metal inside the car. That means a fire of around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, even in the rain.”

I looked around my own feet where we stood, wondering if Doug had got pictures here, wondering if we were trampling on tire and shoe impressions, and saw nothing and mentioned it to Joe.

“It's pretty sandy here, and I think it rained after the event. It'd blur easy.”

“Could it have been a pipe bomb?” I asked.

“Pipe bombs don't usually do the kind of damage their malicious little engineers hope. Juveniles and amateurs settling a grudge. No, we'd see wide searing on the undercarriage, and we don't. The salvage guys'll look for toolmarks on fuel lines, melted motor mounts, that sort of thing, just to be sure I'm reading this right. If some guy was just pissed at a car company, he'd probably set fire to the engine compartment. The radiator lead would liquefy, the fan belt would be burned. But I think the fire started from accelerant poured in through the window. One thing's for certain: Somebody was sure pissed at somebody.”

He hiked his pants as he sat on his heels, one finger on the ground for balance as he looked down at the scene once more. A cop's eyes. A scientist's eyes. Not so different one from another.

The harsh racket of motorcycles preceded two monster bikes around the bend. The riders were without helmets. Two more bikers came roaring by, one a woman, her long brown hair whipping in the wind. As she passed, the sun struck her just right and I could see on her bare thigh below her torn stone-washed jeans a blue skull with a rose in its teeth.

My pal from the California Highway Patrol, Ray Vega, told me about a rider he personally cited over twenty times for no headgear. The guy said he'd pay as many fines as it took till the legislature came to its senses. The
very
next day Ray found him with brain seepage out his ears and nostrils, his head a hockey puck that had connected with a bent fence pole near a newly razed gas station.

But now as I caught the black leathery gleam off the backs of the last riders, the smallish one with his arms cocked out on the handlebars and a full head of snowy hair free in the wind, I had no ill thoughts about them. God help them, if they want to dare death, let them. Death, like life, has its own illogic.

I looked at Joe squatting there, another weed in his mouth, and felt a sudden sadness. He must have felt me looking, and turned with a question in his eyes.

I said, “How about taking me to the Cowboy Boogie Company tonight? Honey.”

He said, “You're absolutely on. Baby.”

Every butt was synchronized. The band was on break, but the canned music didn't stop anyone. A couple of grannies in cowboy boots were dancing with the rest of them while Clint Black's voice dipped to a passionate growl and you just knew he was singin' straight to you.