Dead Past (6 page)

Just a few more pieces of the skull puzzle and she too would go to the coffee tent and relax for fifteen minutes. It occurred to her that she wasn’t that far from her apartment. She could just go the short distance through the woods and sit down on her own sofa with a hot cup of her own coffee. The thought sounded heavenly. She placed two pieces of occipital together—the thick bone that made up the back of the head. From the prominent nuchal crest, the skull looked like a male.

The morgue tent was void of conversation for several minutes. Only the sounds of work—the clinking tools, shuffling of movement, creaking trolleys—filled the silent space where Rankin’s rant still hung in the air. Everyone was silent, thought Diane, because like her they realized that Rankin was right—there was nothing that any of them could do but pick up the pieces.

Archie, the policeman in charge of evidence, stood and said to no one in particular that he was also going to take a break. Diane watched him leave with two other policemen.
They must feel the weight of Rankin’s words most,
she thought. They were like the little Dutch boy trying to hold back the water with his finger in the hole in the dike. They were supposed to do something, but they too were powerless against so much money.

Lynn finally broke the ensuing silence in what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

“So, Jin,” she said, “what do you do in your spare time?”

“I scuba dive,” he said. “Diane’s been teaching me caving. I’m getting pretty good, aren’t I, boss?”

Both Jin and Webber’s voices were muffled by the nuisance masks they wore.

“You’re a real natural,” said Diane.

She looked among the fragments of skull scattered on her table for a triangular shaped piece that fit on the frontal just above the orbit. As she sorted through the remains, she noticed the absence of any part of the maxilla, the bone that holds the upper teeth. Identification would be easier if she had teeth to work with.

“Diving and caving sound dangerous,” said Lynn. “You don’t do them at the same time, do you?”

“I was advised not to do that,” said Jin, stealing a glance at Diane. “Too dangerous.”

“Do you do anything relaxing?” asked Lynn.

Diane wasn’t sure if she was really interested in Jin’s leisure activities, or just trying to fill empty airspace. Her voice sounded strained, even under the mask.

“Diving’s relaxing,” he said, his eyes above his mask reflecting a broad grin. “And I’ve found some nice, quiet moments hanging on to a rock wall.”

Lynn Webber gave a muffled laugh. “At least it gets you away from crime,” she said, watching him extract the sample of bone marrow.

“I like to solve mysteries as a hobby,” said Jin.

Diane looked up quickly from a broken zygomatic arch, expecting a joke, looking forward to a laugh, but it didn’t sound like the beginning of one of Jin’s jokes. He sounded serious. Solving mysteries as a hobby—she couldn’t wait to hear what this was about.

“A hobby,” Lynn exclaimed. “I’d think you would have enough of death in the crime lab.”

“Disappearances,” said Jin. “I’m kind of into strange disappearances.”

“Strange disappearances?” asked Lynn. “Like how? Hoffa, Judge Crater? Aren’t all disappearances strange until someone finds out what happened?”

Jin shrugged. “Some. Hoffa, that’s not strange, I mean not the kind of strange I like. It was probably just a mob thing. Same with Crater. Probably Tammany Hall stuff. What I find interesting are disappearances like the one that Sherlock Holmes couldn’t solve—you know, like James Phillimore.”

Jin took the pose of someone trying to remember a quote—chin up, hands suspended of movement. “ ‘Mr. James Phillimore who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.’ That’s the kind of missing person problem I like.”

“That is more intriguing than Hoffa, I agree,” said Lynn. She stopped working on the cadaver in front of her and listened to Jin.

Diane paused, too, sitting back on the stool. She had a large portion of the skull pieced together. The back, the side, the frontal down to the brow ridge, and one cheek. With the right x-ray she could probably identify the body. But it was a long shot that there would be the right x-ray.

The partial skull sat in a small tub of sand looking as if it had just been revealed by a sandstorm. The sand held the blackened pieces of bone together while the glue dried. Jonas Briggs, the archaeologist at her museum, said that in his profession they reconstruct clay pots the same way. “Makes nice little Zen gardens—thousand-year-old potsherds standing in clean bronze sand,” he’d said. This Zen garden looked macabre.

There was still an array of pieces to put together. She looked at them, mentally identifying the part of the skull each piece was from. Hard to believe that only yesterday this person was alive—just yesterday.

“They had a special on Court TV two nights ago about missing persons—double feature, two hours’ worth,” said Jin. “Great stuff. Turns out there are several missing persons who meet my criteria of interesting. A teenage girl and her family were leaving church when she went back in for her purse and was never seen again. Doesn’t that sound like Sherlock Holmes? And a whole family just fell off the face of the earth. No one knew they were gone; they just weren’t home anymore—but all their belongings were still in the house, their car in the driveway. And then there was the man who was last seen in the waiting room of his doctor’s office. The receptionist didn’t see him leave and no one knows what happened to him. All these people were normal people with no secret lives or anything—that anyone found out about,” he added. “I’d like to investigate them.”

“No clues at all in any of the cases?” asked Lynn.

Diane picked up a piece of nasal bone and turned it over in her hand. Even blackened as it was, a healed crack was evident. Something distinctive about this individual, she thought as she looked for surrounding pieces.

“No clues,” said Jin. “But I tell you, my favorite is Colonel Percy Fawcett.”

“Never heard of him,” said Lynn.

“He’s the coolest missing person. He disappeared with his son and his son’s friend in the Amazon while looking for an ancient city inhabited by a mysterious tribe. His story is really strange, full of subterranean cities, alien tribes, psychics, with the lost city of Atlantis thrown in. Great stuff,” he repeated.

“Do you ever try to solve any of the cases?” asked Diane. Jin turned to her, looking almost startled that she had been listening.

“I’ve helped with a couple of cold cases that detective friends of mine were working on. I’m afraid I didn’t offer much in the way of a solution. Mostly I just read up on them and try to solve them—you know, like an armchair detective. I’ve gotten a few good hypotheses. You know, there’s been quite a few missing persons north of here in the Smoky Mountains. People disappear and nothing is ever found of them,” he said. “Nothing. I mean, like what’s in the Smokys?”

“Wild pigs,” said Diane without looking up from the piece of skull she was gluing together. “They eat everything with blood on it—bones, sticks, you name it.”

“Yes, pigs,” agreed Lynn. “Once you’re dead, the wild boars scarf you up.”

Jin looked from Diane to Lynn. “Well, thanks for ruining a perfectly good mystery for me.”

Lynn and Diane both laughed.

Diane had finished gluing all the pieces of the skull she had and they sat drying in the sandbox. It looked like the pieced-together ancient skulls that she had in the museum—but this person was recently alive.

“I’m going to take a break,” she said. “When I come back, I’ll see if we have any x-rays of faces with broken noses. I believe I can ID this skull.”

“I think I’ll finish up this cadaver,” said Lynn. She sneaked a peek at the table where Brewster Pilgrim left his.

Jin slipped off his gloves and put on a new pair, walked over to Pilgrim’s table, and began preparations to cut the femur and take a DNA sample. Back to business.

Diane left the tent and gulped in the outside air. The cold bit her lungs. It felt good to be out of the morgue tent.

 

Sleet was falling again. The drops felt like cold pin-pricks on Diane’s face. The argon streetlights shining bright against the backdrop of the twilight sky flooded over the tent city and gave the place an eerie glow. There were searchlights and strange machines in one direction along the street, and a quiet crowd of people standing in the other. In a David Lynch movie it could have been the midway of some macabre traveling circus.

Diane looked wistfully in the direction of her apartment but did not yield to the temptation to escape to its peace and solitude. She would take fifteen minutes of relief in the coffee tent. But first she stopped at the crime scene.

The blackened rubble of the house was now crisscrossed by planks and grid strings and illuminated by a ring of large spotlights shining into it from all sides. Neva and David were stretched out on boards, sifting carefully through a grid square near the front of the site. A mobile crane parked to one side of the yard was lifting a basket of something out of the gaping hole of the burned-out basement.

Diane looked over the edge into the pit. Wisps of smoke or steam rose here and there from the dark mass into the cold night air. The bright white light of the spotlights seemed to be absorbed into the charred rubble and not reflected back. A gust of wind carried up from the basement an acrid stench that smelled like a combination of wood smoke, wet, burned garbage, melted plastic, and scorched flesh, with an assortment of chemicals thrown into the mix. Diane stepped backward for a breath of air to clear her lungs.

The house that was there only yesterday had been a yellow Victorian with an octagonal tower, high-peaked roof, fireplaces, wraparound porches, and white gingerbread trim. A long line of students had lived many of their university years in its apartments. Diane remembered scenes of them laying down a large tarp and pouring sand over it to make themselves a beach volleyball court on game weekends, or some student relaxing on the porch swing reading a book, or several sitting on the steps shouting at their friends passing in cars. And now . . . nothing but black ashes covered with the spiderweb of crime scene string and scaffolding.

Was one of those students from the porch swing in happier times now lying on her autopsy table? The thought made her profoundly sad.

Diane walked toward the front of the burned-out house through the safe path that her team had created. All the snow had melted from the path, leaving a muddy walkway covered by planks. David saw her approaching, rose, and walked on the planking toward her, readjusting his baseball cap on his balding head. Neva looked up and waved, but kept working.

The drops of sleet were getting heavier, and Diane could feel her hair getting wet. She pulled a knit cap from her coat pocket and put it on, pushing her hair underneath it.

“How’s it going?” asked Diane. She could tell by the look on David’s face he wasn’t happy.

“Frustrating,” said David. He took off his cap, smoothed down the nonexistent hair on the top of his head, and put his cap back on. “It’s going fine if we can keep McNair away.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Mostly meddling.”

“Meddling?” Diane raised her eyebrows. “He
is
the arson investigator.”

“Then he should act like one.” David glanced over his shoulder as if someone might be listening. “He looks through all our evidence bags—breaks the seal and paws through the contents. Says he needs to see what we’re finding. I told him that the lab is the place to examine the evidence, and he told me to just tend to my job, that he’s in charge. I don’t know how this guy thought he would be even remotely qualified to be the director of the crime lab. He’s not qualified to be an arson investigator. Any good defense attorney can challenge every piece of evidence we’ve collected, because of him.”

“I’ll speak to him.” Diane felt a sudden flush.

“It won’t work, unless you intend to watch him, too.” David lifted his chin slightly, which was a signal to Diane that McNair was approaching.

“OK. You go back to work and I’ll try and talk some sense into him.”

Diane whirled around and walked to meet McNair as he approached. She watched a scowl form on his face.
Unbecoming,
she thought.

“We need to talk,” said Diane. Not a good opening, but she wasn’t feeling diplomatic.

“
We
need to talk?” he said, emphasizing the word
we
.

“Don’t break the seal on the evidence bags. . . .”

“Listen, you can’t tell me how to run my investigation. I need to see what they’re finding.”

Diane’s flush was now a full-fledged burn. “They’re recovering what’s left of the human victims of this fire, and they’re doing it by strict protocol. We have serious chain of custody and contamination concerns here. This is not the time or place to examine sensitive evidence.”

“People want answers fast. The slow way you and your people work won’t do.”

“Forensic analysis and identification of human remains is an exacting process with the most profound legal and personal consequences. It takes the time that it takes. And my people are the best in the business.”

McNair gave her a dismissive snort and a snide smirk. Diane had an almost irresistible urge to hit him right in the middle of his smirky mouth.

“What do you propose we do?” she said. “Give a hasty identification of someone’s child on the basis of a nose ring or a belly piercing?”

McNair glared at her. She fully expected him to yell at her or say something like, “You’re not my boss,” but he was silent for several beats.

“Why don’t we compromise on this?” she said. “Why don’t you set up an examination table inside the morgue tent where chain of custody can be maintained and the dangers of evidence contamination can be controlled?”