A Wicked Snow

The exhumation at Green Lawn Rest Memorial Park in nearby Landon was delayed from two to three that afternoon because another family was burying their grandfather six plots down from two-year-old Enrique Garcia’s grave. Hannah arrived ten minutes late and parked by the chapel. The memorial park was a ten-acre emerald patch in the middle of an industrial compound adjacent to a ticky-tacky apartment complex that had sprung up around it. It was an old-fashioned cemetery with headstones that rose from the ground, instead of being flush mounted in that style the penny-pinching owners of such places prefer for easy mowing. A gentle breeze blew through the rows of granite markers. Crows called from the phone lines strung from the road to the apartments abutting the west side of the patch of green.

By the time Hannah joined the others gathered around the backhoe, Joanne Garcia had arrived. She bolted from her VW bug and ran toward the group of police officers, lawyers, and cemetery personnel. She didn’t even take the keys from the ignition or shut the car door.

“You’ll rot in hell for this,” she yelled at a cop blocking her from the grave site. Her veins popped as expletives convulsed into tears.

“Why would she want to be here?” muttered Ripperton. “Why would any mother want to see her kid after he’d been planted for a couple of years?”

“Ripp, you’ve got to be kidding. Haven’t you done this job long enough to know?” Hannah shot him a chilly look. “Because she’s his mother.”

Ripperton said nothing more. He smoked and kept his hand on his pager, as if holding it would make someone call and he could leave. There were a lot of things that could be said about Ted Ripperton. Strong-stomached, however, was not among them.

A yellow backhoe gently scooted a headstone affixed with Enrique Garcia’s name and a faded photograph of a sweet, but somewhat sullen, little boy. Hannah stood close to the wound in the lawn as the wheelbarrow-sized claw peeled off the sod. A few feet down, the big machine backed away, and a couple of cops felt the top of the cement liner with their shovels. A half hour later, the tiny casket was chained and strapped in preparation for its removal from the hole.

“I want video,” Hannah said, “every step of the way.” An officer with an overly eager-to-please manner framed the scene with the camera lens as he ambled closer to the slash of soil.

“As long as I have juice in the battery, you’ll have your video,” he said.

The casket had been flocked with a pattern of daisies, but groundwater or runoff from the sprinklers had weakened the glue. Sheets of fabric hung like a little curtain around the grimy edges. The box dripped fluid as it hung in the air for ten minutes. The county arranged for a hearse to take Enrique Garcia’s remains to the coroner’s office in Santa Louisa, but it never showed. In- stead, after scrambling about, a cemetery pickup truck was loaded with the box holding the boy’s body. Hannah nodded to Ripp and walked to her car. A police escort blared sirens and flashed blue lights, and two hours after they arrived at the cemetery, they were gone.

Joanne Garcia yelled from the other side of the parking lot as Hannah got into her car. Her blue eyes flashed hatred and her mouth spewed vulgarities that had been absent from her exceedingly coarse vocabulary when they met at her mobile home. Joanne also looked older; her blond hair seemed white, almost gray.

“You have no fuckin’ right to do this!” Joanne yelled. “You have no idea what you are doing!”

Hannah felt a jolt of adrenaline and looked over at the red-faced woman with the battered daughter in foster care and the dead son just plucked from the earth like a turnip.

“We have every right to do so. The judge’s order says so. You’re making this more difficult than it has to be— and it’s damn difficult.”

“How would you like to have your baby pulled from his rest with God? You don’t know how this feels!”

Hannah shook her head. “But I do,” she said quietly, more to herself than to Joanne as she clicked the shoulder harness of her seat belt. In a few moments, she turned to look, maybe even to say something, but the woman with the dead baby was out of view.

“I really do,” she said once more inside her head.

An exhumation and the scientific, the clinical, procedures that follow it are nothing short of ghoulish. No one with a heart could say otherwise. The very idea of waking the dead with the scrape of a shovel is a revolting affair. No matter if it is part of one’s job. No matter whether it is clinical. Ripperton made an excuse, and Hannah stood alone with medical examiner Lina Kent as she and her assistant, an Asian man with the singsong name of Ron Fong, went about the business that was Enrique Garcia. Halogen lights blasted the boy’s little figure, a mummified body with sunken eyes and reptilian lips, drawn tightly in a peculiar smile. Body fluids had stained the shiny polyester fabric that had cushioned his lifeless frame. While M.E. Kent recorded each observation into a shoulder microphone, Fong, chomping on a mouthful of peppermints, snapped photographs with a Polaroid camera. Images spat out of the camera.

“Looking at the original autopsy report I see no mention of the crescent-shaped contusion on the subject’s right forearm…. Ron, take a close-up, please.”

The M.E., a sixty-ish woman with snowy hair and dimestore bifocals on a chain around her corrugated neck, stepped aside while Fong reloaded the camera and took three shots in rapid succession. Dr. Kent was so nonchalant about her request for the close-up that Hannah nearly missed its importance. She looked through the report. Nothing had been written about a crescent-shaped mark.

“What is it?” Hannah asked.

“Hard to say for sure,” the M.E. said slowly. “But I’d be willing to bet a cup of coffee that it’s a bite mark.”

“There’s no mention of any bite trauma,” Hannah said, flipping through reports and stepping closer to the little body stretched and pinned out like a butterfly on a corkboard.

Dr. Kent looked at the clock with the red sweep second hand. They’d been picking apart Enrique’s remains for two hours—longer than they thought they’d need, given the fact that he’d been autopsied before.

“So there’s no mention of bite trauma,” she said, repeating Hannah’s remarks. “That’s not really surprising. Dean Wallen was about the worst pathologist that ever made a Y incision on a cadaver.” She tossed her latex gloves into an empty stainless-steel drum marked for hazardous waste. “Cases like this make me wonder how many more we’ll have to dig up and review. Whenever something like this happens it invites more prisoners with half- good lawyers to call the evidence into question. I’ve done seven of these and I don’t want to do any more.”

“Retirement is next year,” Fong reminded her.

“Six months,” she said, pausing and adding with a smile, “and twelve days. Give me a calculator and I’ll give you the hours and minutes.”

While the M.E. and her young assistant refocused on the work at hand, Hannah stared at the body. She hadn’t noticed it before in the blinding light of late summer’s day, but the child’s skin was covered with the milky white of mold spores that resembled baby powder, or a light dusting of snow. She felt a chill deep inside. The eyes had sunken into their sockets, but other than that he was remarkably preserved. Though the image was oddly sweet in its own peculiarly horrific way, Hannah felt her stomach churn. The baby was a beautiful boy, she thought. Beautiful, and stiff, like some waxy doll no one wanted anymore. Beads of sweat collected at her temples, though the room was kept on the cool side. Rather than touch her hands to her face, she turned her head to her shoulders and wiped the perspiration. And though the stench of death hung in the air, it wasn’t the smell but the sight before her that gave her pause. It was familiar in its own cruel way.

Back in her office later that day, Dr. Kent phoned Hannah. Enrique Garcia had not only been bitten and bruised, but evidence found in his lung tissue indicated he had most likely drowned.

“Drowned?” Hannah asked.

“Yes. A wetting agent, some kind of soap residue, was present in the tox report.”

“Soap?”

Dr. Kent paused a moment. “I’d say Mr. Bubble, if I had to guess without a full analysis. I’ve seen it before.”