Freezing

This set the man off but now his tone was aggrieved. ‘Listen, I know I should have reported it but I don’t have the money to pay the damages and it isn’t even my van. It’s not like I hurt anyone for Chrissakes!’

Eric spoke. ‘Should have reported what?’

‘The accident.’ The man tried to twist to see Eric’s face. ‘That’s why you’re here, right? Did the City call you?’

‘Tell us what happened.’

‘I backed into the traffic light, OK?’ He looked at Scott. ‘It was a tight turn and I was in a hurry. I didn’t even realize the thing was there until I hit it and the light came down with a God-awful crash. I almost swore it moved while I was turning!’ He tried to twist again.

The agents locked eyes, then Scott spoke. ‘Mr Horton, we’re going to need you to accompany us to our office for questioning.’

‘I’m owning up to it, man! I’ll pay the City! Can we work something out?’

‘Right now,’ replied Eric, ‘you’re looking at a charge of assaulting an identified Federal Agent and that’s just for starters. We’ll cover the rest of this at our office once we’ve examined the van. Move forward.’

SEVEN

Tony Lee had brought out the torso and Jayne was finding it more frustrating than the leg. Whoever had made the cuts had aimed just below the ribcage but just above the pelvis, avoiding cutting through bone even on the spine, where the cuts had been squeezed in between vertebrae. The flesh didn’t yield any clues; no scars, no tattoos, no perimortem bruising. When Tony turned it over, there were some moles and beauty marks on the back, along with some hair towards the base, but not enough secondary sex characteristics to even start a sex determination. Tony photographed everything before turning on the fluoroscope.

On X-ray, the epiphyses of the vertebrae were clearly fused.

‘OK, fusion puts this one easily over seventeen and more likely over twenty-five,’ said Steelie. ‘So we’re still at an MNI of one.’

‘MNI,’ Tony repeated. ‘Minimum number of individuals?’

‘Yeah,’ Jayne answered. ‘So far, you can’t say you have more than one person here but I suspect that the leg’s a youngster, while the torso’s over twenty-five. But let’s move on to the next bag before we make grand pronouncements.’

Jayne caught Steelie’s look and knew what it meant: there wasn’t enough information yet for them to reliably compare these body parts with any 32/1 profiles.

Tony was switching over the gurneys and unzipping the third body bag. It was the left arm and hand. Here, the cut was above the humeral head, allowing a careful disarticulation of the shoulder joint.

‘If the person who cut this nicked anything, it would have been the scapula. The humerus itself looks unscathed,’ commented Steelie.

Jayne asked, ‘You notice how much cleaner these cuts are than the other parts we’ve seen so far?’

‘Want a photo of that?’ asked Tony.

‘You read my mind.’ Jayne stepped back to give him room at the gurney’s edge.

Next was the fluoroscopy. The humeral head looked small on the screen, female. But Steelie and Jayne wanted a better estimate and asked Tony for a shot of it so they could measure it with calipers.

In pulling the fluoroscope down the length of the arm, they had to stop twice to take shots of old, healed fractures. One mid-shaft on the humerus, the other close to the wrist on the ulna.

‘Defense wounds?’ asked Tony, as he typed in a label for the second shot.

‘Looks like it,’ replied Jayne.

‘The ulna’s got a classic parry fracture.’ Steelie demonstrated the defensive pose by holding one arm out diagonally in front of her chest, and then her face, trying to imitate the position the ulna would have been in when hit. ‘Nasty.’

‘Badly healed, too,’ said Jayne.

Tony looked at the hand with its chipped burgundy nail polish. ‘Are you thinking this is a different person to the leg and torso?’

‘Well, all the epiphyses of the arm bones are fully united, so we’re looking at someone older than their mid- twenties,’ began Steelie. ‘Plus, those sunspots on the forearm suggest an older person. We might be able to narrow it down by looking at the structure of the bone on the X-ray prints you give us.’

‘Which isn’t something we do all that often,’ added Jayne. ‘Usually, we deal with X-rays taken at a known age and don’t need to examine internal structures.’

‘But since we don’t have much to go on with this material, we’ll try everything we can,’ Steelie rounded out.

‘OK. Want to move on to the other arm?’ He looked at her expectantly, one hand on the gurney.

‘Sure.’

As Tony switched the gurneys for the last time, Jayne felt deflated. They weren’t getting very far. All the parts appeared to be female, all had pale skin, all were post-pubescent and therefore it was more difficult to discriminate between them, especially within the parameters of their non-invasive examination. Body parts that might give a clear indication of age, like the pelvis or the teeth, were not in this batch. Jayne felt her hopes for an identification of any of the victims fading. She suddenly felt weighed down by her lead vest. She shifted it and stretched her back uncomfortably.

Tony was moving as though he wasn’t wearing a lead vest, exposing the right arm in the body bag with efficient movements. The arm lay slightly sideways in the bag so he moved it parallel to the edges of the gurney. His gloved hand momentarily supported the fingers with their polished nails and Jayne had a sudden, violent image of a dead woman being led in a waltz. She looked at the ceiling to banish the image from her mind, causing her mask to pull on the skin under her cheeks. This brought her back to reality. She was mildly tired from this kind of concentration and the standing, and the cold was getting to her. Gruesome images fed on her fatigue, she knew that already. Just one more body part, she told herself.

She looked down when she thought Tony had photographed the arm from every angle. It was a right arm and appeared, superficially, to be the match for the left arm they had just examined. Tony drew the fluoroscope down along the severed limb, pausing briefly to take a shot of the small humeral head. Then the fluoroscope’s lens resumed its journey, Tony carefully keeping it in line with the arm, and Jayne’s mind began to drift on to where they’d get the reference material to improve the age estimate for both humerii.

‘Jesus Christ!’

Steelie’s exclamation made Tony freeze and Jayne jump. She looked at Steelie, who was staring at the fluoroscope screen. Jayne immediately followed her lead. And there it was, the thing the killer couldn’t have known about – unless he had an X-ray machine.

The surgical plate was screwed into the humerus at about midshaft. It would have been applied by a surgeon, could have an identifying number, and might just lead an investigator to that surgeon’s patient records. Surgical plate as homing pigeon, Jayne thought, and then immediately realized they wouldn’t find this woman’s identity in the Agency’s files. They didn’t have a single client who had reported a missing woman with a plate in an arm, nor had they received any X-rays that showed plates on examination. But it was the first real lead on the identity of this woman and thus the first real lead on her killer.

Tony was looking at the screen. ‘I guess this is a good thing?’

Steelie’s voice sounded excited. ‘You just got yourself a lead, Tony.’

Eric walked into his office and sat down heavily at his desk. Scott looked at him, eyebrows raised.

Eric shook his head.

‘Everything checked out?’ Scott asked.

‘Yeah. The City confirms that well after our van got hit on the freeway yesterday morning, someone put a traffic light out of commission at Winnetka and Hatteras. They had traces of white paint on the light post and had just started searching for the vehicle that did the damage. The Critters have examined the Redding woman’s van. No suspect biological traces, no work on the van besides the body work on the back doors.’ He looked at Scott. ‘What did you get from Redding on interview?’