Freezing

exchanged a look.

Steelie cleared her throat, watching the floor numbers go higher. ‘Uh, where are we going, Weiss?’

‘I’m afraid that’s classified, ma’am.’ He smiled at her as the elevator doors opened. It was the tenth floor.

He ushered them into a foyer with four doors marked ‘Restricted Access’. A wall-mounted keypad flanked each one. Weiss punched a code on the one directly ahead. A buzzer sounded and he opened the door for them. ‘Welcome to Critter Central.’

Jayne went first into the large, windowless room whose rows of fluorescent tube lights gave it the feel of a clinical space. The foreground was a workspace; metal desks, filing cabinets, and bookshelves filled with forensic science reference texts. The back of the room was set up as a wet lab with fume hoods and countertop.

Steelie sounded impressed: ‘So this is where you guys hang out?’

Weiss nodded. ‘Tony Lee, who did the photography out by the freeway, is just through that door, in the cool room.’

‘What goes on here, exactly?’ asked Jayne.

‘We do collection of trace evidence, some analysis.’

Agent Lee emerged from the door at the end of the room. He was wearing blue scrubs and had two reddish stripes across his cheeks where the elastic straps on a filter mask must have pulled tight. There was another stripe across his forehead and his dark hair looked flattened. He raised a hand in greeting.

‘Hey, Thirty-two One. Been expecting you.’

Weiss said, ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ and departed.

Steelie and Jayne followed Lee into an anteroom that was divided by a bench and had lockers on one side. At one end, there was a sink with a mirror above it next to a door marked ‘Restroom’. Adjacent to that were two swinging doors, each with a porthole.

Tony explained, ‘We’ll do the examination in the cool room itself because we’re trying to keep the material as cold as possible on account of the coroner needing it next. Here’s the protective gear. I’d suit up over your own clothes – you’ll need them for warmth. The shoe covers are here.’ He gestured to a container by the entrance to the cool room.

‘And the glasses are inside this box.’ He put his hand on a wall-mounted cabinet holding Plexiglas safety glasses on a series of hooks, all illuminated by a soft ultraviolet glow.

‘I’m here to run the fluoroscope for you, capture whatever images you want, take photos, and move the material if necessary.’

‘Basically cater to our every need,’ joked Steelie.

‘Exactly.’

Jayne was glad Steelie had made the joke. She was beginning to feel tense about seeing the body parts out of the natural environment by the freeway where the leaves and detritus had masked the brutality of the cuts. The clinical setting would make the body parts look more like a dismembered body – one body in particular, one person in particular: Benni – no, don’t think of him, don’t even conjure up his name. Jayne felt Steelie nudge her and she took the mask Steelie was holding out, shaking her head in response to the question in her friend’s eyes.

She pulled up her hood and followed the others into the cool room, another windowless space whose chill was a shock. Most of the overhead lights were switched off but a panel illuminated the center of the room above the fluoroscope. The fluoroscope’s neck was cantilevered parallel to the floor, making the portable X-ray machine resemble an out-of-commission oil derrick. The body parts were in black body bags, each bag on its own gurney, and lined up next to the fluoroscope.

‘Sorry for the “CSI” effect with the lights,’ Tony said, only slightly muffled through his mask, ‘just trying to keep radiant heat to a minimum but let me know if you need more light.’

He pulled the nearest gurney towards the fluoroscope and unzipped the body bag. It held the severed leg.

The pale flesh was damp and had defrosted. Blood pooled darkly in the recesses of the body bag. Jayne was relieved that her first instinct was to move closer to get a better look. She and Steelie positioned themselves on either side of the gurney, while Tony stayed by the fluoroscope.

‘The cut goes through the femoral shaft,’ commented Steelie. ‘Looks like midway up the thigh.’

‘And the other cut’s just under the patella,’ Jayne murmured.

‘Trying to avoid sawing through bone again?’

‘Maybe. Can’t tell which cut he tried first.’

‘How much of the patella have we got?’

‘I don’t think he even nicked it. Take a look.’ Jayne moved to the right to examine the proximal cut, while Steelie bent down to look at the patella, its tip just visible amongst the ligaments and fat of the knee.

‘We don’t have much to go on for sex,’ said Steelie.

‘Not when we can’t expose the femur to do a mid-shaft circumference.’

‘Even that’s just an indication.’

There was silence as the anthropologists looked at the leg, tilting their heads this way and that.

Tony cleared his throat. ‘The thigh’s not shaved. Would that indicate male?’

‘Possible, but not reliable,’ replied Jayne, her eyes still on the leg. ‘Not all women shave their thighs and plenty of men do, like swimmers and cyclists. If you can take photos of each cut and from above, we can move on to the fluoro.’

‘No problem.’ He went into action, the recharge of the camera’s flash whining as he took two shots from each vantage point, the latter requiring a stepladder that he wheeled over from the corner. Before turning on the fluoroscope, Tony brought over three lead vests and they all slipped the heavy material over their heads, adjusting them by the shoulder sections until the vests could rest there without too much discomfort.

Tony turned two switches on the fluoroscope and began pushing and pulling the lens head over the severed leg on the gurney. An X-ray image of everything in the lens’ path beamed out of a monitor on an adjoining trolley.

Jayne asked, ‘Can you bring it in a slow sweep from one end to the other?’

The anthropologists’ eyes flicked between the partial leg and the fluoroscope screen, trying to orient the gradations of grey that represented bone and tissue.

They all noticed that the cut at the top of the femur didn’t reveal any shards of metal or metallic fragments, as might have been expected from forceful cutting action. Steelie asked Tony about the apparent absence of trace evidence.

‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘There are indications that the perp washed the body parts after he’d done the cutting.’

As the fluoroscope traveled down the thigh, faint, lighter marks were visible at the distal end of the femur.

‘Hold it there, just above the knee,’ said Steelie. ‘Lines of fusion?’ She looked questioningly at Jayne, who was staring at the screen.

‘Looks like it. Move it down a fraction, Tony . . . and back up?’

He pushed the lens to where it had been a moment before.

Steelie said, ‘Lines of fusion.’

‘I’ll be damned,’ breathed Jayne.

‘Talk to me, Thirty-two One,’ said Tony, glancing back and forth at each woman.

Steelie pointed at the monitor. ‘See those lines at the top of the knee? That’s where the epiphysis, or growth plate, is in the process of fusing to the shaft of the femur. Fusion happens at standard ages across populations and sexes. So, because we can see that line, we know you’ve got a teenager or someone in their early twenties, regardless of sex.’

He made a low whistle.

‘Make a print of what you’ve got on the screen now,’ Jayne said. ‘Then can you flip the leg over so we can see the same region from the posterior?’

‘What label do you want?’

‘Distal left femoral epiphysis.’