Entombed (5 page)

"You and Alex mind
holding hands with him for a minute?" Andy asked. "Gently, Mike. Not
like he's a suspect in a homicide."

We stood on either
side of the Thin Man, an arm under each elbow, as Andy directed us
while he worked below us to free the last foot of space to ease the
rest of the removal. I had handled bones before at the morgue, and I
had seen my share of human skeletons on late-night visits to the
medical school at the University of Virginia when I was engaged to a
student there. This was eerily different and discomforting, as I
wondered what brought our unfortunate soul to such a macabre resting
place, naturally or unnaturally.

"You see anything down
there?" Mike asked.

"Nothing from this
angle, but it's too dark to tell." He picked up his camera and took
more photographs, including close-ups from head to legs. "Okay, guys,
let's go."

The technicians who
were assisting Andy moved in next to him. They replaced Mike and me,
one of them taking hold of the arms and the other of the skull, while
Andy secured the lower torso. Together they moved the skeleton slowly
and painstakingly out of the brick niche and swiveled it onto the
sheet, laying it out flat. Leg bones fell away and clattered to the
bottom of the brick shaft, and Andy returned to reach in to retrieve
them. One by one, he kneeled and laid them out to complete his human
jigsaw puzzle, gently and deliberately.

"First thing we're
going to do, Mike, is give your pal a new name," Andy said, leaning
back on his heels.

"Because?"

"Because I think he's
a she."

"Ah-hah! Once some
more of the bricks came down I was beginning to wonder. But then I've
been told you need a magnifying glass to see
my
private parts,
too."

"The hips on this one
give her away."

"Why's that?"

"See where this flares
out over here?" Andy said, pointing his finger to the large bones
coming out of the lower vertebrae. "Nature's way of accommodating
childbirth. The sciatic notch spreads as a young woman matures, and the
pelvis gets wider to be able to hold a fetus. Look at the forehead,
too."

"What?"

"Vertical. Straight up
and down. Men's foreheads tend to slope more, form a brow ridge above
the eye sockets, while women's generally are like this." He turned to
one of the techs. "Want to pass the big torch?"

"What are you looking
for?" Mike asked.

"You want to know who
this is, right? We've got a start on gender. We need to figure out her
age, race, height-anything that will direct the scope of your
investigation."

"How about when she
went missing behind the wall?"

"That's what I'm about
to dig for." Andy turned on the light and moved it slowly over the
surface of the crude wooden floor behind the remaining few inches of
bricks.

He lifted out some
tiny sepia-colored chips, pieces of bone that seemed to have absorbed
color from the brown earth on which they had rested. He turned them
over and examined them, placing them next to the digitless hands.
"Fingers, probably. Toes are down there, too. Camera, please."

The tech passed the
equipment back to Andy, who took the shots himself. When he finished
that task, he bent down close to the wall and reached in again, sifting
through some of the remains and scooping a small sampling into a
glassine envelope, which he studied before passing it on to Mike.

"See those little
fragments?" Andy asked. "Like small caramelized bits?"

"Yeah."

"Good chance they're
her fingernails, broken off when the bones dropped to the ground years
ago. Submit them to the lab along with one of the older bricks. Betcha
fifty bucks you'll find some of that sealant stuck to them."

Mike looked up at
Andy. "You're telling me this lady was clawing at a brick wall to try
to get out from behind it?"

Andy nodded.

"So this isn't just a
coffin, right? You're saying she was probably still breathing when she
went in here, just from what you think is underneath her nail bed?"

Buried alive. I
shuddered at the terrifying thought of such a ghoulish demise, at the
hopelessness of her delicate fingernails scraping against the stones
that had been cemented in place. Nan and I exchanged glances.

Mike was pumping Andy
for his techniques, unfamiliar as we both were with skeletal remains.

"Last year's case in
midtown, some hard hats found the bones in a concrete slab when they
were digging a storage room for an Eighth Avenue pizza shop," Andy
said. "The girl still had the hair on her head and some ligature around
her wrists. Hey, can you get a shot of this?"

One of the techs moved
closer and focused his camera on an object on the ground.

"What do you see in
there?" Mike asked.

"Looks like a sock.
Like a man's sock. I was hoping it would be something of hers."

Clothing would be a
big help in the identification process, Andy explained. If it had great
age or distinctive markings, it might lead the detectives to a specific
period in time. Modern pieces with logos, labels, and trademarks could
pinpoint a year and guide them directly to the place of purchase.

"Big enough to be a
restraint?"

"I'll let you see it
in a few minutes. Maybe a gag, stuffed in the mouth, but nothing long
enough to tie her up, I don't think," Andy said, as he painstakingly
covered every crevice of the small space with his light.

Mike was readying a
brown paper bag. "That'd be good. Get some saliva off it for DNA
evaluation."

"Don't be too excited
about that until we know how long she was in here. There are some holes
in the back wall of the building. Professor, you still here?" Andy
called over his shoulder.

"Yes."

"What abuts this
basement on the outside?"

"A small yard,
actually."

"That's why she's
picked clean, Mike. May not mean she's been here two hundred years."

"Maggots?"

"More likely mice have
gotten in and out. Field mice, squirrels, some kind of vermin could
have squeezed through these crevices. Picked the flesh clean, but the
ligaments would have been left just like they are. Kind of dried out,
almost mummified."

"How'd you date the
bones you found uptown?"

"One shiny dime," Andy
said. "A 1966 ten-cent piece in the cement coffin. We knew that wasn't
necessarily the year she was killed, but it couldn't have been any
earlier than that."

He lifted the dark
sock with a pair of tweezers and passed it out to be bagged.

"Any pocket change?"
Mike asked.

"Nope. But there's
something cylindrical standing on its edge." He reached in again and
removed what appeared to be a small ring. An assistant sealed and
labeled the package before passing it to me.

The gold-toned band
was now tarnished and caked on its surface with some sort of debris. At
its widest place, I could make out an engraving in cursive black lines.
"Could be initials. Maybe an
A
and a
T.
"

There was no date, no
hallmark. It looked like an inexpensive ring that a young woman would
wear.

"Come in close on
this, will you?" Andy said, lying prone and making room on the basement
floor for Mike as he passed the flashlight to him. "There's some
writing."

"Where?"

"It looks like a piece
of canvas that got caught in the cement on one of the bricks over to
the left. See it?"

Mike focused the beam
into the recessed brickwork and read aloud: "'Cappozelli's Rat Poison.
Manufactured in'-first three letters are all I can get-probably going
to be Detroit. I'm making out the
d-e-t.
"

"Does it show a date?"

"Patience is a virtue,
blondie." Mike had his nose pressed against the bottom edge of the
wall. "It's got one of those drawings of a skull and crossbones. 'Keep
out of reach of children.' Looks like Poe is exonerated. The poison was
packaged in 1978."

6

Dorfman's team
continued to work at dismantling the bricks above the scrap of canvas
so that it could be inventoried with the other items. "So I'm thinking
this lady went behind the wall no earlier than 1978."

"Gagged and naked?"

"Probably. Although
that kind of poison is so caustic it could have eaten away clothing or
paper, anything that might have been in there with her."

"You're convinced she
was alive when she was bricked in?" I asked. I couldn't shake the image
of this woman's final torture, a premature burial evoking a very primal
fear.

Mike and Andy looked
at each other before answering me. "Doesn't seem any point in gagging
someone already dead, does there, Mike?"

"Depends what kind of
games they were playing. What's next?"

"We close up shop for
the night," Andy said. "You get the PD to secure the building. I come
back tomorrow and start a head-to-toe workup on the skeleton. I don't
even want to turn her over now."

"Looking for what?"

"Signs of blunt force
trauma. Broken bones from old injuries. Anything that might help
determine cause of death, in the unlikely event it wasn't a shortage of
oxygen. The kinds of fractures or dental work that can be compared
against existing medical records for identification purposes."

"So sometime about
twenty-five, twenty-six years ago, MissA.T. disappeared, and all we
have to do is figure out who she is and why somebody put her here,"
Mike said.

Now I was looking for
the identities of both Jane Doe and the rapist we were calling John
Doe, even though they bore no relation to each other. I'd like to be
able to put names and faces to both of them.

"The working
conditions are far from ideal here," Andy said. "We'll get a team in
and then transfer her back to the morgue in the morning."

Mike called his
lieutenant to get the local precinct commander to send patrol cops to
safeguard the site. Waiting for them, we walked outside to put Nan Toth
in a taxi for the ride home to her husband and kids.

"You got your car?"
Mike asked.

I shook my head.

"Put your mittens on.
I'm parked around the corner. Aren't you hungry?"

It was after eleven
and the audible rumbling from my stomach reminded me that the dinner
hour had long since passed.

"Borborygmi."

"What's that, the
Jeopardy!
final question?" I
asked. "I'll give you twenty bucks without even guessing. Just feed me
as fast as you can."

For as long as I could
remember, Mike and Mercer had bet against me on
Jeopardy!
's
final question
every evening that we were together. Whether in a bar or at a crime
scene, Mike found a way to interrupt the proceedings to step to the
television. He had studied military history in college and could detail
more battles, biographies of generals, and the colors of the horses
they rode in on than anyone I had ever met.

"Double or nothing.
Borborygmi."

He had seated himself
in the driver's seat and wasn't about to let me in from the cold unless
I gave in to him.

I banged on the car
window. "I'll buy dinner. I don't have a clue. Open up, okay?"

He unlocked the door
and tossed several case folders onto the backseat. The half-eaten
bologna sandwich at my feet had some other cop's bootmarks all over it.

"The muscular
contractions and expansions of peristalsis that move the contents of
your intestines up and down."

"That was tonight's
question?"

"Nope. That's what my
doctor told me that rumbling noise is I can hear your flat little belly
making. When your stomach's full of food, it mutes the noise. But that
disgusting sound you're making now? It's deafening. Can you hold out
until we get to Primola?"

"Sure. And there I
was, ready to concede that the Battle of Borborygmi was the turning
point in the Crimean War."

Mike drove east and
headed uptown to my favorite Italian restaurant, on Second Avenue at
Sixty-fourth Street. The sidewalks were empty as predictions for frigid
temperatures the next few nights seemed to have driven people inside
earlier than usual.

"Ciao, Signorina
Cooper."
The
owner, Giuliano, called to Adolfo, the headwaiter, "Set up that table
in the corner for Mr. Chapman.
Subito.
I'll have Fenton send
your drinks right over."

The restaurant had
long been my favorite, not just for the good food, but because we were
treated like family. It was always pleasant, at the end of a long day,
to be greeted warmly by Giuliano, whose hard work and great kitchen
made his restaurant a well-known watering hole for New Yorkers with
fussy palates.

"Kitchen still open?"

"For you, Mr. Mike?
Even if I had to boil the water myself."

"Skip the usual
cocktail, Giuliano. I don't want anything with ice cubes in it. Give us
a nice bottle of red wine," Mike said.

No matter how cold the
weather, Mike never wore an overcoat. His navy blazer was a trademark,
along with his thick head of dark hair and an infectious grin that only
the most depraved crime scenes could suppress.

"You know what you'd
like to eat or you want to see a menu?" Adolfo asked.

"Anything but ribs,"
Mike said. "I've had enough of them tonight."

"I'll take the hottest
bowl of soup you can cook up. Stracciatelle? And then some risotto with
sausage and mushrooms."

"A veal chop for me.
Biggest one you've got back there. String beans, potatoes, throw
everything in the kitchen on the side, okay? And tell Giuliano to come
back and join us."

The owner was as tall
as Mercer-six feet six-with an expansive personality, at once charming
and tough. He had come to the States from a small town in northern
Italy and worked his way up from a position as a waiter in a well-known
restaurant to running his own chic eatery.