Spider Bones

Impatient, I gestured for more.

“Luis Alvarez.”

It took a moment for the import to worm through my pain.

“The guy was Latino?”

“Presumably.”

I shot upright. “Let me see.”

Danny handed me a fax. “IDPF to follow shortly, I’m told.”

The information was meager but telling.

“Spec 2 Luis Alvarez, maintenance specialist. Date of birth February twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-eight,” I read.

“Alvarez was a month shy of twenty when the chopper went down.”

“Five-nine, a hundred sixty-five pounds. Home of record, Bakersfield, California.”

I looked up.

“Alvarez is listed KIA/BNR.” Killed in action, body not recovered.

Danny nodded. “Here’s my take. Lowery was just out of jail, so the mortuary staff at Tan Son Nhut assumed the victim wearing no uniform insignia was him. The profile fit, the location, it all made sense. But they blew it. The burned corpse was really Alvarez.”

“If Alvarez was still MIA, why do you suppose they ruled him out?”

“You and I agree that 2010-37’s racial architecture is a mixed bag. Given body condition, the guys at Tan Son Nhut probably missed what we saw. Or maybe someone with little knowledge of bone noted only the more Caucasoid craniofacial features. Either way, they concluded that the guy was white.”

“Thus Lowery.”

“I’ll bet the farm Alvarez’s records say Latino.”

I agreed.

“Dr. Brennan, I think we’ve done it.”

“Dr. Tandler, I think we have.”

“Oh, Cisco.” Danny raised a palm.

“Oh, Pancho.” I high-fived it.

We whooped. It hurt.

“Here’s what I don’t get.” Danny began swiveling his chair from side to side. “Alvarez ends up buried in North Carolina. Lowery ends up diddling himself in Quebec. How’s that roll?”

I had no explanation.

Seconds passed. Watching Danny loop back and forth started making me seasick.

I shifted my gaze to the desk. Remembered the gold whatsit locked in the drawer.

“Has Craig come up with any ideas on the duck-mushroom thing?”

“Not that he’s shared.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we await the Alvarez file.”

“And?”

“Reconstruct what’s left of the skull.”

That’s what we did. I did. Danny was busy with a case review meeting most of the morning.

As I maneuvered and glued fragments, a maelstrom of emotions swirled inside me. If we were right about the mix-up back in ’68, the Alvarez family would finally have closure. Plato would be forced to accept an altered reality.

So goes life. A positive for one, a negative for another.

Images elbowed for attention in my aching head. Plato leafing through photos in my car. Squinting in the sun at the Lumberton cemetery.

I wondered. I seemed to have his trust. Now, how to tell the old man that the grave at which he’d mourned all those years had never held his son?

I was squeezing Elmer’s on a hunk of frontal when a thought blindsided me.

My hands froze.

Spider Lowery was from Lumberton, North Carolina. Robeson County.

No way.

I pictured Plato.