There were two hundred and six of them. That’s what Joe had told him. Two hundred and six bones in the human body.
Louis looked down. The brownish-yellow bones were laid on a stainless-steel table, forming a disconnected but perfect skeleton. There was no quick way to count, but Louis guessed that all — or almost all — of Jean Brandt’s bones were here.
They were waiting for the ME to join them, and Louis took the time to look for signs of a fracture on one arm bone. Shockey had told him Jean had endured two broken arms. He finally turned away and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to capture a minute of lost sleep.
The double doors bumped opened, and the ME came in. His name was P. Ward, according to the sign on the wall. He was fiftyish and slim, with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair matching a Van Dyke beard. He wore green scrub pants over an old T-shirt that said WET WILLIE ’74 TOUR: “KEEP ON SMILIN’ THROUGH THE RAIN, LAUGHIN’ AT THE PAIN.”
“Detective Bloom,” Ward said. “Nice to see you again.”
“Ditto, Phil.”
“Phillip.”
Bloom stared at him. “What?”
“Phillip. My name is Phillip.”
Bloom tried hard not to roll his eyes. “Yeah, right. So what’s the word here, Doc?”
Ward looked down at the bones. “Exquisite, aren’t they?”
“They’re bones,” Bloom said.
“Yes, but it’s not often we find every one. The techs did an exceptional excavation. Please give them my praises.”
Louis heard something of the South in Ward’s melodious voice. Maybe it was the cadence or the choice of words, but Louis’s stay in Mississippi had been long enough and he had spent enough time at his old boss Sam Dodie’s home for him to develop an ear for the Delta’s special music.
“So, is it our victim or not?” Bloom asked.
Ward turned and flipped the switch on a wall-mounted light box. He shoved the copies of Jean Brandt’s dental X-rays into the clip. Then, next to it, a larger X-ray of the skull.
Louis stepped closer.
They didn’t match. It was so obvious even he could see it. The skull from the barn had a wider jaw and large teeth — a perfect full set. Jean’s teeth were small and uneven, with several missing in the back.
“Talk to us, Doc,” Bloom said.
“The victim is a woman, probably between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But these bones do not belong to the owner of this dental X-ray,” Ward said, pointing to the screen.
Louis looked at Shockey. He had turned away and was staring at the bones on the steel table.
Ward carefully picked up a long, slender bone. “I was told the Brandt woman had two arm fractures,” he said. “There are no breaks in this humerus or in any of the arm bones.”
Shockey’s eyes closed. “You must be wrong.”
“I am never wrong, Detective,” Ward said. “Not about things like this. Oh, and by the way, the woman you found in the barn was most certainly African-American.”
Louis’s gaze snapped back to the X-ray of the skull.
“A marked alveolar prognathism,” Ward said, pointing to the X-ray. “Flat nasal region, broad nasal aperture, retreating zygoma, somewhat truncated nasal spine and a retreating forehead.”
“All right,” Bloom said. “We get the picture. This is not Jean Brandt.”
“Precisely.”
Louis heard footsteps, and he turned to see Shockey leaving through the double doors. He turned back to Ward. “Can you tell how she died?” he asked.
“As I said, there were no fractures in the arms,” Ward said. “I found one old leg fracture that was well- healed. But I did find six other breaks in the legs and ribs that were all perimortem fractures, meaning they were inflicted minutes or hours before death.”
Ward picked up a plastic container. “Plus there is this. Your techs brought back a dirt sample from the gravesite. It was saturated with blood.”
“The woman was still bleeding when she was put in the grave?” Louis said. “Buried alive?”
“How alive, I can’t be sure,” Ward said. “But dead people don’t bleed.”
Louis closed his eyes.
“So I’m pretty certain this was a homicide,” Ward said.
Bloom let out a grunt. “Well, ain’t this a kick in the nuts,” he said. “We got a missing woman and no body. Got bones and no victim. And on top of all that, she’s a black woman in an area that don’t have but a handful of black folks in it.”
“Maybe it won’t be too hard to find someone who’s been missing, then,” Louis said.
“It may be harder than you think,” Ward said. “You might be looking for a woman who’s been missing for quite some time.”
“What do you mean?” Bloom asked. “How long have these bones been in the ground?”
“Well, there’s no way to know for sure without carbon dating,” Ward said. He picked up the arm bone. “But see how brittle and chalky this is? As bones age, they lose the proteins that make up the matrix that holds the calcium.”
Ward gently pressed a fingernail on the bone. Louis was surprised to see it leave an indentation. “If I were to try to break this humerus in two, instead of splitting like a green twig, it would break and crumble,” Ward said. “So I’m guessing they are quite old.”
Ward set the bone down and picked up a plastic bag, holding it out. “Then there’s this, which-”
Bloom grabbed the bag. “What’s this?”
“A piece of shoe leather with some buttons that the techs found with the bones. The style seems to date back to the mid-eighteen-hundreds.”
Bloom stared at the black clump in the plastic.
“Do you want me to send the bones out for dating?” Ward asked.
Bloom tossed the plastic bag onto the table. “The state’s not paying for that,” he said. “This isn’t a homicide case anymore, as far as I’m concerned.”
“But the shoe doesn’t prove anything for sure,” Louis said. “Don’t we want-”
Bloom cut him off with a raised palm. “I don’t care about a hundred-year-old homicide. And if what Phil here says is true, she was probably just a servant anyway, maybe even a slave.”
“What did you say?” Louis said.
Bloom’s ruddy face colored a deeper red. “Sorry, Kincaid. Didn’t mean it like that. I just meant there wouldn’t even be any records for a woman like that. That’s all.”
“Right.”
“And who the hell has the time to work a case like this, anyway?” Bloom asked. “Where you going to find any damn witnesses?”
Louis looked back at the X-ray, trying to imagine a woman’s face on the skull.
“Well, I’m out of here,” Bloom said. “Kincaid, you tell Sheriff Frye I’d like a word with her before she goes home. I got a bone to pick with her boss, too. If you’ll pardon the pun.”
Bloom left.
“Asshole,” Ward said under his breath.
Louis rubbed his brow, looking down again at the bones. He was concerned about Joe’s job, but he was even more worried about Shockey. He had put everything on the line to get into that barn, and it had been for nothing. Brandt was going to remain free, and they had only eight more days to find a way to keep him away from Amy.
“What kind of cop wouldn’t be interested in something like this?” Ward said.
Louis looked up at him. Ward was holding a second plastic bag. Inside was something that looked like jewelry.
