taken with Maybeck had proved worth it.
He noticed for the first time that the date alongside Sharon Shaffer's name was not a date in the past, but was for two days from now: Friday, February 10. 'Lou?' Did it show that easily? Or was it her? She always seemed to know his thoughts.
in less than forty-eight hours, Sharon Shaffer would be cut open, According to Dr. Light Horse, it was likely to be a major organ.
There would be no time to organize a task force, no time to sort through a list of three-hundred-seventy veterinarians. They would have to force every lead they had. Every suspect. Sharon Shaffer's life had a burning fuse attached to it now. Look for the good, he reminded himself-they were too tired to take a setback like this. 'Accentuate the Positive'-it was one of those songs occasionally requested in a piano bar. He missed The Big joke; he wondered how Bear was doing with the IRS. 'She's alive,' he said. 'Sharon Shaffer's alive.'
'Lou?' she asked again, sensing something wrong. He slid the printout over to her, pointing to the date. He watched as her eyes glassed up.
A confused Lamoia asked, 'But that's good, right?' Daphne slid the sheet to him, and he too fell silent. 'What did I miss?' Watson asked.
Boldt inquired, 'What do these four-digit numbers mean?'
'I can tell you what we ruled out,' Watson explained. 'We know it's not phone numbers. Not social security numbers. Not zip codes.'
'But what is it?' Boldt asked angrily. 'What are they?' Watson leaned away from him sheepishly.
The coffee room's phone rang. Boldt answered it. He listened.
He said to the receiver, 'Can't you just tell me?' He paused.
'I'm on my way.' He hung up. 'What's up?' Daphne asked.
'Dixie's got something.'
Boldt turned the car into the back of the Harbor View Medical Center and started hunting for a parking place. Five minutes later, two blocks away, he found one across from the Lucky Day Grocery.
He climbed out of the car. A student cycled past him on a mountain bike. The tires splashed street water onto Boldt's shoes and onto a section of newspaper that was stuck to the pavement. A display ad for an American Airlines special to Hawaii looked up at him. This meant something. He studied it more closely. It was the airplane in particular. And then it occurred to him. He unlocked the car, so nervous with the keys that he dropped them. When he finally got inside, he shoved the key into the ignition, turned it to battery power, and punched in the cellular's security code.
He dialed the downtown office and asked to speak to Daphne. She had to be paged. Boldt was losing patience when he finally heard her voice. He said immediately: 'They're flight numbers. The extra numbers in the database are flight numbers.'
There was a long pause as she processed this. A woman bought a newspaper outside the Lucky Day Grocery. He added, 'They had to connect these organs to specific flights in order to get them to their destination in the allowable time. It all had to be arranged in advance-the timing just right.'
'A courier!' she said. 'Track down those flight numbers. See if we're right. Move it to the top of your list.'
'Don't spend all day over there,' she cautioned. 'You know Dixie,' he said. 'When he makes a discovery, he tends to drag it out a little.'
'A little?' she did know Dixie. 'I'll try to hurry it along.'
The medical examiner's offices are in the basement of the Harbor View Medical Center. The ceilings are low, the windows rare-and then just half windows looking out at the sidewalk. The hum of computers, the active ventilation and fluorescent lights, the percussion of typewriters, and the electronic purring of telephones were the only sounds as Dixon led Boldt into a back room, where the excavated skeleton was now laid out on a stainless steel slab. 'It's a damn good set of remains,' Dixon announced. 'All but the teeth. We're missing the lower mandible. Several teeth in the upper jaw were chiseled out. He used a screwdriver, maybe. He didn't want us identifying her. I like that,' Dixon said. 'That means he had something to hide. That kind of effort always makes me all the more determined.' He pointed to what remained of the rib cage. 'He cut ribs six and seven,' he leaned closer, 'here and here, immediately above the abdominal cavity. We got a nice set of tool markings off the butt end of number six.' He handed Boldt a set of black-and-white lab photos just like those he had showed him at jazz Alley, only with today's date, February 8, photographed into the upper right corner. The upper set of magnified tool markings was labeled Peter Blumenthal. The bottom set, Jane Doe. The tool markings matched.
Dixie continued, 'A liver procurement, a liver harvest is one of the most difficult surgeries there is. Extremely technical. It's not uncommon for the procuring surgeon to do what's called a radical harvest.' He demonstrated using the skeleton. 'You take far more tissue than you need, leaving all the connecting vessels intact. The transplant surgeon then does the actual harvest.'
'Dead or alive?' Boldt asked in a whisper. 'Would the victim have been dead or alive?'
'Prior to surgery, I can't say.' Dixon looked at the gaping hole in the rib cage. 'But after this technique,' he said, 'definitely dead.'
Dixon crossed the room, returning with several jars that he placed under the harsh light. He talked quickly. 'The next piece of the puzzle we went after was timing. In order to identify her we need to know as precisely as possible when she died-when she was buried,' he corrected himself, 'in order to match her with missing persons for the same period.' He asked Boldt, 'How are you with bugs? Larvae? Maggots? That sort of thing?' Before Boldt answered, Dixon said, 'I hate it when people toss their cookies in these little rooms.'
'I've never been a real fan of maggots. And I hate things with lots of legs. Can we speed this up?'
'You'll live.' Dixon frowned and pointed to the jars. 'These are courtesy of our entomologist who helped out.' Each was labeled, but Boldt wasn't wearing his reading glasses. 'Forensic entomology is an exploratory field,' he warned. 'The courts have not made it clear exactly where they stand, but thankfully that's Bob Proctor's problem. Tissue decomposition is the first thing you look for when trying to date remains. Lacking any tissue, as in this case, we turn to bugs-insects living and dead. Graves within graves.'
Dixie drummed on the lid of the first jar. 'We found a breeding colony of woodlice on the bones. They feed off a fungus that grows only on bone. It takes woodlice two years to establish a breeding colony.' 'Two years?' Boldt asked, thinking he had a date. Pushing.
Dixon raised a finger. He tapped the second jar. 'We also-discovered a past infestation of phorid fly maggots, a close relative of the coffin fly. The phorid fly consumes decaying flesh. We're estimating the weight of the deceased, judging by skeletal size, at between one-hundred-ten and one-hundred-forty pounds. At that weight, it would take the phorid flies no less than two years, no more than three, to consume her.' Boldt felt himself blanch. 'Woodlice will not coexist with phorid flies, so we add the times together: two plus two-four to five years, minimum. To further substantiate this estimate, we have evidence of a beetle that would not attack the body for at least three to four years after burial.'
'So we can safely say that she was in the ground at least four years, maybe as long as five?'
'Correct.'
Dixie hoisted the third jar to eye level and said, 'Meet the blue bottle fly. The blue bottle lives above ground and lays eggs in decaying flesh. These eggs form larval cases that house pupae that grow to adult blue bottles. I discovered ten such cases blowfly puparia-in the soil samples. No colony of blue bottle, just ten such larval cases. Lack of a colony is important. The body was exposed to air long enough for the blue bottle to deposit its eggs, but not long enough to form a colony. That means her body remained above ground for three to four days prior to burial. Whoever buried her has a strong stomach that's consistent with a veterinarian-and he had to have someplace to keep a decaying body for at least four days that didn't raise suspicion.' He added, 'And that's not easy; she wasn't pretty by the time she went in the ground.' Dixon asked, 'You okay?' Boldt said, 'A four-year-old homicide with an unidentified victim? It's interesting stuff, Dixie, don't get me wrong, but it's an investigator's nightmare, and like I said, I'm pressed for time.'
Dixon encouraged, 'Would I drag you over here for bad news? I can give you bad news over the phone. Would I waste your time?'
He waved Boldt out of the room and led him through the offices to a distant storeroom that had recently been converted into an office.
A video camera atop a tripod was aimed at a skeletal skull that sat on a pedestal in front of a backdrop of white oaktag. To the left, within range of the camera, photographs of women had been tacked to the wall. Boldt
