Bare Bones

“Where?”

Larabee misunderstood my question.

“Backseat.”

“Was the body sent to Chapel Hill?”

Larabee shook his head.

“They’ve got two pathologists on vacation and one out sick. Chief asked if I’d mind doing the post here.”

I nodded absently, my mind on bones that were not Brian Aiker’s. Larabee picked up on my mood.

“Guess that leaves you sucking wind with the privy skull and the Lancaster bones.”

“Yeah.”

“Ever get that report you were waiting for?”

“No.”

Larabee waited while I sorted through my thoughts. He was still waiting when his phone rang. After hesitating a moment, he reached for it.

I withdrew to my office for more sorting. The process did not go well. I tried adding coffee. No improvement.

Opening my laptop, I tried organizing in cyber bytes what I’d learned in the last eleven days.

Category: Places. Foote farm. Airplane crash site. Lancaster County, South Carolina. Columbia, South Carolina. Crowder’s Mountain State Park.

Weren’t the Lancaster remains also found in a state park? I made a note.

Category: People. Tamela Banks. Harvey Pearce. Jason Jack Wyatt.

Ricky Don Dorton. Darryl Tyree. Sonny Pounder. Wally Cagle. Lawrence Looper. Murray Snow. James Park. Brian Aiker.

Too broad. I tried subdividing.

Bad Guys. Harvey Pearce (dead). Jason Jack Wyatt (dead). Ricky Don Dorton (dead). Darryl Tyree (under arrest). Sonny Pounder (under arrest).

Victims.

That didn’t work. I was placing too many question marks after names. I bifurcated.

Definite Victims. Tamela Banks’s baby. The owner of the privy skull and hand bones. The headless skeleton from Lancaster County.

Possible Victims. Tamela Banks and her family. Wally Cagle. Murray Snow. Brian Aiker.

Did Tamela Banks and her family belong in this category? Had they really come to harm, or had they simply been spooked into going underground?

Did Tamela Banks’s baby belong out of this category? Was it possible the baby had died of natural causes? I knew from the bones that the baby had been full-term, but it could have been stillborn.

Was Cagle’s collapse real, or had his coma been induced in some way? Was Cagle’s unknown visitor at the university the same man with whom Looper had seen him at the coffee shop? Why hadn’t Looper taken his partner to the nearest hospital? Where was Cagle’s report on the Lancaster remains?

Had Murray Snow died of natural causes? Had the Lancaster County coroner been reopening the investigation of the headless, handless remains when he died? Why?

Did Dorton belong in this category? Dorton died of an overdose. Had it been self-administered? Had he been helped?

I was getting nowhere.

Grabbing pen and paper, I tried diagramming links. I drew a line from Dorton to Wyatt and wrote Melungeon over it. Then I extended the line to Pearce, and printed the word Cessna over all three names.

I connected Tyree to Pounder, marked the line Foote farm, extended the line to the words “privy skull,” then to the name Tamela Banks.

Connecting Tyree to the Dorton-Pearce-Wyatt line, I jotted cocaine.

I made a triangle linking Cagle, Snow, and the Lancaster remains, then hooked that to the Foote farm privy skull. Shooting an extender from that, I added nodes for the bear bones and bird feathers, shot a line up to J. J. Wyatt, added another, and wrote the names Brian Aiker and Charlotte Grant Cobb at its terminus.

I stared at my handiwork, a spiderweb of names and intersecting lines.

Was I trying to link unrelated events? Disparate people and places? The more I thought, the more frustrated I became with how little I knew.

Back to the laptop.

Possible Victims. Brian Aiker.

Neither the privy skull nor the Lancaster skeletal remains could be assigned to the missing FWS agent. Aiker