“What did you want to show me?” Danny asked.
“It may be nothing.” I scooped up the occipital fragment. “Look at the suture.” I pointed to the squiggly line.
“Complex, with lots of accessories.” Danny meant tiny islands of bone trapped within the suture.
I passed him the chunk of maxilla that had produced the mushroom-duck thing.
“Broad palate. Straight transverse suture, not bulging up over the midline.” He viewed the bone face-on. “The zygomaxillary suture is angled, not S-shaped.” He rotated it so the missing nose would have pointed skyward. “Cheekbones probably had some flare.”
Danny’s eyes rolled up to mine.
“You’re thinking this guy might be Vietnamese?”
I shook my head. “You’re right those traits say Mongoloid ancestry. But others suggest Caucasoid. The high nasal bridge, the narrow nasal aperture, the moderately shaped skull, neither long and narrow nor short and broad.”
“So, mixed race?”
“European-Asian or European–Native American.”
“We had troops who would fit that bill. American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Filipinos. Not many, but they were over there fighting for us.”
“What about the missing crew member? Did you learn if the fourth body was ever found?”
“Not yet.”
“What was the man’s name?”
“I’m still waiting for a response to my inquiry.”
For the rest of that day we teased charred tissue and moldy fabric from bone.
By five a fully cleaned skeleton lay on the table.
The exposed bone produced no breakthrough moment.
Honolulu’s medical examiner operates out of a curvilinear white structure on Iwilei Road just a short walk from Chinatown. Next door is the largest Salvation Army facility I have ever seen.
At precisely five thirty I pulled under an arch and into a small lot beside the building. Hadley Perry answered my buzz in person. The pictures I’d seen in the
Perry was a slim woman with disproportionately large breasts and a penchant for what Katy called “haute hooker” makeup. Her short black hair was gelled into spikes, several of which were fire engine red.
“Hadley Perry.” She shot out a hand.
I offered mine.
Perry’s grip could have molded forged steel.
“Thanks so much for coming.”
“I’m not sure I can help.” Wiggling my fingers to check for fractures.
“But you’ll give it the old one-two, eh?” Perry launched a punch to my biceps that really hurt. “Let’s have at it.”
Good Lord. Who was this woman?
I followed Perry through double doors down a polished tile corridor, resisting the urge to massage my throbbing muscle. Bypassing a large, five-table autopsy room, we entered a small chamber not unlike
The stainless steel gurney held a plastic-covered mound. Small and lumpy, the shape looked wrong for a human being.
Wordlessly, we both donned aprons and gloves.
Like a waiter presenting the table d’hote, Perry whipped off the sheeting.
I SWALLOWED HARD.
The remains consisted of five amorphous lumps and an eighteen-inch segment of human lower limb. The skin was puckered and celery green, the underlying tissue gray and textured like pot roast.
Stepping to the table, I bent for a closer look.
The severed leg was sparsely populated with short, dark hairs. Bones were visible deep in the flesh, a partial femur up, a partial tibia and fibula below. All three shafts terminated in jagged spikes. Bones, skin, and muscle were scored by gouges, cuts, and parallel slashes.
“It’s a knee, right?” Perry asked.
“Left. This came from the ocean?”
“Yeah. Check out the X-rays.”
