The desk held a similar array of memorabilia. A Micronesian sculpture made of what looked like pig tusks. A painted coconut. A miniature skeleton with Danny’s face glued to the skull. A stuffed lizard whose species was a mystery to me.
Danny cleared files from a chair so that I could sit. Before my arrival, he’d laid out Spider Lowery’s file. Though familiar with the contents, we started there.
Working through the documents reminded me how much time I’d spent squinting at smeared carbon copies of forms, faded message traffic, and illegible script. Spider’s record review took an hour.
“You’ve been swabbed?”
Danny referred to the DNA sampling required of anyone entering the lab. No big deal, a Q-tip swipe of the inner cheek. Specimens are kept on file should contamination become an issue with an ID.
I nodded.
We crossed to the glass wall and Danny placed his badge over the sensor. The door clicked. We entered and wove through a maze of tables, some empty, some holding bones, toward a man in a red sweater seated at a desk at the back of the room.
The Lumberton remains had been accessioned as 2010-37. Danny presented his badge and requested the case by number.
Red Sweater rose and pressed a button. Floor-to-ceiling shelving opened and he disappeared down a row. Moments later he reappeared with a long, white cardboard box.
I knew the routine. The remains would be assigned a specific table where they would be allowed to remain for thirty days. The transaction would be entered into the computer tracking system, and the location of the bones would be diagrammed on a blackboard on one wall of the room.
Danny swiped his badge, collected the box, and moved to the designated table. I followed.
We both gloved, then Danny gestured me the honors.
I lifted the cover.
The remains were as I remembered, skull shattered, lower arms and hands and both feet missing, cortical surfaces darkly mottled and covered by pink-white mold and charred muck.
Working silently, Danny and I reassembled what was left of the man so long buried in North Carolina. Skull. Torso. Arms. Legs.
When the skeleton was arranged anatomically, we ran inventory, with Danny naming bones and me recording. Though I’d done a preliminary assessment at Sugarman’s, his would be the analysis of record.
Inventory finished, he went through the same steps I’d followed at the funeral home. With the same findings.
The remains were those of a male who died between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Race remained elusive.
“Nothing to exclude Spider Lowery,” Danny said.
“And nothing to positively ID him.”
“Teeth are out.”
“We might spot root fragments when we X-ray. Or we could compare alveolar configurations.” I referred to the shape of the tooth sockets.
Danny shook his head. “The Form 603 is strictly narrative.”
Danny meant Lowery’s military dental record, typically containing diagrams, called odontograms, X-rays, and information about the patient’s care, identity of dentist, when, where, et cetera.
“Why no X-rays?” I asked. “Wasn’t every soldier given a dental exam at induction?”
“Theoretically, yes. If not at his or her induction center, maybe in boot camp, maybe in-country, at Bien Hoa Air Base, for example. But it didn’t always happen.”
“You’re suggesting Lowery slipped through the cracks?”
“Maybe. Here’s another possibility. Troops reporting to a new duty station often carried their own records with them. It helped with in-processing if medical and dental information arrived at the same time as the soldier.”
I saw where Danny was going. “But that didn’t always happen either.”
“No. Sometimes paperwork caught up later. Maybe Lowery’s records arrived in Vietnam after he was killed and his body was shipped home.”
“Any way to tell from the file if X-rays ever existed?”
“Not really. Say a soldier had a periapical or a bitewing done. The X-rays might have been attached to the folder using a two-hole punch. Or they might have been placed into a small manila envelope and added to the file loose. Either way, the films could be lost or misplaced.”
Sudden ominous thought. “Or deliberately removed?”
Something flicked in Danny’s eyes, vanished before I could read it.
“Meaning?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I suppose.” Danny lifted and gently scraped at a skull fragment, much as I’d done at Sugarman’s. “Fire damage.”
