Raw Bone (2 page)

The operation took several minutes and was not without its surprises. Riding the icy slab was difficult enough, but when Dodsworthy dug the blade of the chainsaw into the ice, he leaned on it for balance as much as cutting power, and the slab suddenly split in two, sending man and machine beneath the surface.

The body, however, was free of all but a two-foot chunk around the hand and it wasn’t long before Zanitch had brought her to the stern of the boat and the firefighters lifted her into a wire mesh Stokes basket. With the divers aboard, Commander Rivera reversed the police boat slowly toward shore.

MacNeice turned to Vertesi. “How much coffee do they have?”

“Two thermoses. We’ve put a dent in one of them.”

“Tell them to save the second thermos.”

“Okay, should I tell ’em what for?”

“De-icing.”

Vertesi looked over at the boat. “Understood.”

Dr. Mary Richardson, Dundurn’s chief pathologist, arrived as MacNeice was pouring hot coffee on the ice around the hand. It dissolved easily and the firefighters placed the hand gently on the tarpaulin.

“Have you any of that coffee left?” she asked.

“A little. Would you like some?”

She nodded and walked down to the water’s edge, wrapping her long, grey woollen coat around her and crossing her arms against the chill. Turning around, she registered that the cops, divers and firefighters all seemed to be standing about waiting for something to happen.

One of the retrieval men came forward with her coffee. “Double-double, doctor.”

“Exactly the way I take it.” She smiled warmly, accepted the steaming cup with both hands and came back to MacNeice. “With the retrieval van here, I shan’t need your men. Also, do you have a privacy screen?”

“Better than that, a tent.” MacNeice turned to Vertesi, who gave a thumbs up and disappeared behind the police van.

Sipping her coffee, Richardson gazed out across the bay to the distant city. “Just look at that view.”

MacNeice agreed that it was beautiful even on a grey day. He turned back to see Vertesi erecting the bright white tent. When it was up, he signalled that he was going up the hill to check with the cops that had been doing door-to-doors.

Rivera and Zanitch were about to slide the body in the basket into the tent when Richardson turned and said, “Please remove her from that contraption and place her on the groundsheet.”

MacNeice stood aside, glancing at the anchor and line. “Also, before you go, Sergeant Rivera, cut the anchor line on this ankle to the same length as the line that had broken free. And, if you can, please identify those knots for me.” He pointed to the elegant criss-crossing of figure-eight ties cinched tightly to both ankles.

After Rivera and Zanitch removed the basket, placed the body on the tent’s white plastic groundsheet and cut the line, Rivera studied the knots. He shook his head, stood up and held the tent flap open for Richardson. She put on her surgical mask and latex gloves and stepped inside, holding her case.

Rivera dropped the flap. “I have no idea what you call these knots,” he said to MacNeice. “And other than cutting ’em, I wouldn’t know how to undo ’em. They may be marine knots, but nothing you’d see locally.” He gestured toward the anchor. “Don’t know if it’s important, detective, but that anchor wouldn’t have been spec’d for any boat from around here. That’s gear they use for deep-sea oil rigs up in the Bering Sea.” Rivera turned the anchor over with his boot heel. “It’d be enough to secure a sixty-foot glass cruiser.”

He shook hands with MacNeice, Vertesi, and Aziz, who handed him the life jacket. With their pikes, the firefighters eased the boat away from shore. Rivera started the engine and powered out of the small bay, swinging east in a tight curve along the north shore of Dundurn Bay. A great plume of water gave some suggestion as to their speed.

“They’ve gone off joyriding,” Aziz said.

MacNeice smiled. “I would too if I were them.”

Richardson called from inside, “Mac, join me. Bring Detective Aziz with you.”

MacNeice held the flap open. “Are you ready for this?”

Aziz said, “I think so. You?”

“Never.”

They found the coroner kneeling in front of the body. She tapped the tarp, indicating that they should join her. “You won’t need a mask. For the moment, she’s too cold to offend.”

This was the first time Aziz allowed herself to really look. The woman’s flesh was waxy, with mottled colours varying from pale peach to grey, black to bone white, but in a perverse way, beautiful, like alabaster. She had the urge to reach out and touch the thigh but restrained herself, turning her attention to Richardson.

“Notice anything?” With her mask crumpled below her chin, Richardson was smiling at MacNeice.

“Bruising about the neck,” MacNeice said.

“Yes. It was broken from behind, by the looks of it. Someone with exceptionally strong hands crushed the windpipe back to the vertebrae and snapped it. Relatively painless and swift. Anything else?”

“Her eyes and mouth are closed,” MacNeice said. “Wouldn’t they be open if she was strangled?”

“Yes, and they likely were when it happened. Someone closed them, and I’m curious to know why. What are your thoughts, Aziz?”

“We were just talking about the knots on her ankles—they look so … distinct.”

“They are. And?”

“The one that was tied to her right leg looks like it was chewed through, ten inches or so from the ankle.”

“Likely a muskrat, though why it took a notion to attack the rope, I couldn’t tell you.”

MacNeice was attempting to look beyond the discoloration and small wounds on the body to see her the way she was before she was murdered. Five foot six or so, slim, with breasts in proportion to her body. She had no tattoos or piercings. Her hair, a dirty blond or light brown, was shoulder length and, while matted, looked natural. There were no rings on the fingers of either hand. Her big toe had been bitten, but otherwise her feet were well formed and undamaged.

“What can you tell me about her, MacNeice?” Richardson asked.

“She wasn’t a prostitute or destitute.”

“Why do you believe that?”

“She has no tattoos, no rings, ankle bracelets, no signs of piercing other than her ears, and those holes appear overgrown. Her pubic hair is natural—untouched, I mean.”

Richardson was smiling at him again, resting one gloved hand on the corpse’s forehead as if she was checking for a fever. “What else?”

He pointed to the pale hand. “Her fingernails …”

“They look cared for,” Aziz offered.

“Exactly,” MacNeice said. “And the feet look as if they’d never known stiletto heels or poorly fitted shoes—no bunions or calluses … No nail polish on her toenails.”

“Let’s turn her over,” Richardson said. “Do you have gloves?”

MacNeice pulled the latex gloves out of his jacket pocket. “I do.”

“Oh come now,” Richardson said, knowing that MacNeice did not like to touch the dead. “Disassociate, detective. She won’t mind.”

As the coroner held the head and shoulders, MacNeice took the lower back and buttocks. “On two,” Richardson said, and they moved her onto her side. There was an ominous squishing sound that made Aziz gulp.

“Yes, a bit wodgy that,” Richardson said. “It’s her internal organs. Her lungs have liquefied, and everything else has turned to aspic—that’s “jelly” to you, Mac. It’s all being held together by this rather lovely skin.”

MacNeice leaned closer, surveying her from her armpit to her calves.

“What do you see?”

“It looks like there’s a very faint spiralling.”

“She may have been wrapped up in that nylon rope.” Richardson moved her hands like she was winding it around her. “I’ll know more when I get her on the table.”

“Have you looked at her teeth?” MacNeice asked.

“I have and they’re like the rest of her, undamaged, unaltered.” On her own, Richardson eased the body down onto its back. “If you’ll give me three days, I’ll complete the post-mortem—but don’t get your hopes up. What time hasn’t done, the water has.” She laid a hand gently on the cold shoulder.

“How old do you think she was, and do you have any idea how long she was down there?” Aziz asked.

Richardson stared at the face. “Mid- to late-twenties. And I’m guessing three months.” She closed her bag and stood up.

Aziz turned to MacNeice, taking out her camera. “I’ll shoot those knots around her
ankles, the bruising on her neck, and the anchor—anything else?”

“Her hands and face.”

MacNeice followed Richardson outside. “Thank you for coming, Mary. Call me if you discover anything new.”

“Of course.” Richardson glanced once at the bay, then walked off to her car.

The Winston’s men rolled the stainless steel gurney across the gravel and stopped next to the tent. Several minutes later they emerged, the body inside a black plastic bag that was strapped down and covered neatly with a deep burgundy blanket. Her exit from Cootes Paradise was much more dignified than her entrance.

As MacNeice and Aziz walked toward the Chevy, Vertesi came running down the hill, the sides of his unbuttoned overcoat flapping behind him. MacNeice said, “Here’s a question for you, Aziz: What’s
wodgy
?”

“I knew you’d ask. It’s ancient English slang … I’m not sure, but I think it means ‘bulgy’ or ‘lumpy.’ ”

“Here’s another one for you … ”

“Remember, Mac, I’m not really a Brit. I only lived there a while.”

“Can you recall any missing persons reports from three or four months ago that fit this woman’s description?”

“Nothing remotely close … only a couple of teens, I think.”

Vertesi came to a stop in front of them, his olive skin flushed almost rosy. “Man, I should’ve been doing that earlier when I was freezing—it feels good to run.” He told them he’d spoken to the residents of several houses; no one remembered anything. But he’d found out there were often boat parties in the small bay, which got loud and out of hand. “I don’t understand why
someone would dump her here—why not in the middle of the bay, or a mile or two out in the lake?”

“Good question.”

They stood together, looking out at the water. The largest of the ice slabs was nudging the west shore; the others drifted aimlessly out in the bay. On the gravel, the pieces that had encased the dead woman’s hand now looked like dirty Styrofoam.

A quiet rain began to fall, and within a minute or so the city disappeared as the surface of the bay came alive, dancing in the downpour.

“I’ll finish up here,” Vertesi said, buttoning up his overcoat. “No sense all of us getting soaked. I’ll see you at Division.”

Beside him in the passenger seat, Aziz reviewed the images on her point-and-shoot as he drove. When she was done, she said, “I’ve got some shots of her face that Ryan can retouch. Once he fixes the discoloration and replaces her hair with something like its original colour, we’ll be able to circulate them to see if we can get an ID. Maybe he can help with the knots too. I’ve got several good shots of those.” She glanced at MacNeice, then back at the images on the screen. “Is your intuition speaking to you?”

“No, though I’m certain those knots are whispering something. When firefighters and marine unit cops can’t recognize them, that’s interesting. Thugs tie thuggish knots—this was craftsmanship. I think the person who tied them didn’t think about it either: that knot came as naturally to him as tying his shoes.”

When they got back, Ryan was alone in the cubicle where he had become a permanent fixture, serving the computer research needs of every homicide detective in the city. Though currently assigned to Swetsky and Williams on the double murder of an elderly couple in their home on Mud Street, he had a reputation for saying yes to every request. On the fabric wall above his computer was a little sign that looked like a ’60s Jefferson Airplane poster in hot pink, electric blue, and black, with psychedelic lettering that hadn’t been seen in his lifetime: “TAKE ON MORE.”

“Ryan, find out everything you can about the knots Aziz has shots of. What they’re called and especially who uses them. And we need multiple prints of a decent portrait of the deceased woman as quick as you can manage,” MacNeice said, taking off his coat.

He walked over to the empty whiteboard. “Someone from somewhere else tied those knots. Just to get things going, let’s imagine he arrived on a lake freighter; he has time to kill, he rents a boat and takes a woman for a ride in late November or early December. He comes back, she doesn’t.”

Tap, tap, tap
—Ryan’s fast fingers hammered out a bebop rhythm that continued for a minute and then paused. “Constrictor knots,” he said, “once common in the UK, not often used today because they’re very difficult to untie. Oystermen used constrictor knots for binding sacks of oysters and cockles, either to keep them from falling out of the sack or being stolen.” Ryan printed photos of the knots from the camera and his online source and compared them, then nodded—a dead match.

The images of the woman and anchor followed; he passed the lot to MacNeice, who taped them to the whiteboard. He always found this first posting difficult. The young woman was beyond shame now, but she was exposed—naked and taped to a whiteboard—next to the exotic
knots and the anchor that had held her on the bottom of a brown-water bay for months.

“We can begin by checking boat rentals from the local marinas,” Aziz said.

MacNeice nodded. “Let’s also check out the Royal Dundurn Yacht Club. Aziz, does she look like she’s from Dundurn?”

“Do I?” Aziz asked, smiling up at him.

“Not what I meant,” said MacNeice. “She just looks to me slightly out of place, or maybe time.”

“Meaning, anyone her age from around here would probably have a tattoo of a butterfly, a bluebird or a dolphin, painted fingernails and toenails, piercings and a bikini wax job.”

“Exactly. Maybe she’s from somewhere tattoos and piercings aren’t the fashion.”

“You mean Mennonite or Mormon communities?”

MacNeice shrugged and continued to study the face.

By day’s end MacNeice and Aziz had shown Ryan’s retouched photographs of the woman, the anchor and a foot-long piece of the nylon line at every marina in the area. Only one person, the owner of Dockyards Marine Supply, could recall an anchor being sold in late November. The sale was notable because most pleasure craft were out of the water for the winter.