‘Absolutely,’ Steelie replied quickly. ‘All communications between our agency and coroners are confidential.’
‘Fine. So the odont gave us the dental chart on the Doe and we submitted it to the police misper unit for them to put it on NCIC. Like most coroners, I don’t have direct access to NCIC. Been trying to get a terminal in my office for, what, seven years? Ten? Anyway, I gave the dental to Missings. Didn’t go anywhere, I’ve now discovered.’
‘Well, you definitely can’t blame the odont for that.’
‘No but I’m still tryin’. Seems that, on request, my autopsy tech sawed out John Doe’s max and mandible and couriered it to the odont for the dental report before starting the craniotomy. When I got round to doing the autopsy, I got the bullet no problem but I didn’t have the mouth and I assumed the bullet was fresh. Figured the palate would show perimortem trauma, as the rest of the body didn’t show signs of cause of death and the tissue was too decomposed for toxicology. So the main result of the post was that bullet. Case closed.’
‘You’ve obviously got the mouth back now, though?’
‘Oh, we’ve had the mouth back this whole time. It’s been sitting in the fridge. Just no one looked at it when it came back from the odontologist to see if the trauma to the palate was peri or antemortem, or healed or what. And it
‘Well,’ Steelie said, wanting to ameliorate the impact of this sorry but not unusual laundry list. ‘Even without you ageing the bullet correctly, NCIC would have made this ID if only your postmortem dental info had been uploaded into the system. So I don’t think you have too much to beat yourself up about.’
‘You think getting cause of death wrong is nothing to beat myself up about? Huh.’
‘I meant, this was situational; it’s not like you need to go back to med school. But speaking of COD, do you have anything there?’
‘Now that the bullet’s ruled out? No. I mean, there wasn’t much left of this guy for me to work with. No marks on the bones. It’ll probably go down as undetermined, for both cause and manner.’
‘And contact with the Cullen family?’
‘I’m going to be calling them myself. I’ve got someone at a funeral home up here that can handle shipping the body back across state lines.’
Steelie looked down at the notes she’d been making. ‘Well, Chuck, I guess I don’t have any more questions.’
He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been asked to reassure you that we are making some procedural changes up here so we’d prefer if you didn’t go public with how this ID came about.’
Steelie’s cheeks burned. ‘We don’t do that. We’re just trying to facilitate identifications, and quietly.’
‘Sure. But you never know what you might set off.’
‘What do you mean?’ Steelie asked warily.
‘Ever picture what it would look like if every parent of a missing person found out that thirteen-thousand-odd coroners and MEs, between them, have tens of thousands of Jane and John Does sittin’ on ice in this country? Just do the math. You’ve got a hundred thousand missing persons, at least. They’ve got one parent each, maybe two, and a couple of siblings. That makes for a heck of a march on Washington.’
Steelie had indeed pictured this but she wasn’t prepared to admit it in this context. ‘And that’s a heck of an imagination you’ve got there, Chuck. But we’re not a lobby group. We’re not allowed—’
‘But,’ the coroner cut her off. ‘What I’m also saying, Ms Lander, is that I’m not sure that would be a bad thing.’
He signed off and Steelie was left looking at the phone in her hand, wondering how many other coroners shared Dr Talbot’s take on that kind of pressure from families. If she were still in graduate school, she’d do a survey. Maybe she could get someone else to do a survey. She walked to the front of the building, summoning Jayne from her office as she went.
Steelie stood at Carol’s counter, knowing that their receptionist already had an idea of what she was about to say, since she’d put Chuck Talbot’s call through and she could read Steelie’s smile. But Jayne had no idea. She raised her eyebrows at Steelie, who announced, ‘Thomas Cullen has been positively identified in Anchorage.’
Jayne just stood still, returning Steelie’s grin, so it was Carol who started clapping first. A slow clap that skipped two beats in between, then gradually sped up to one beat in between. Jayne joined in, then Steelie, until they were clapping as fast as they could, like a team psyching itself up after a mid-season win.
Two men from A-1 Electrics delivered the generator to Agency 32/1 just after 4 p.m. As it turned out, they didn’t need to spend much time inside the building, as the generator was installed just behind the building, in its own security cage. Just before 5 p.m., Jayne heard Carol announce that Scott was holding on Line 1 for her. She located her copy of the examination report on the freeway body parts, expecting him to ask why there wasn’t more to it. Leaving aside the surgical plate in the right arm, they’d only been able to conclude:
It hadn’t looked like much because there was a limit to what a purely external examination could deliver. But then there was that surgical plate in the upper arm.
Scott sounded buoyant. ‘I’ve got good news.’
Jayne sat up straighter in her chair. ‘Let me have it.’
‘We’ve got an ID on the arm. Or I should say, arms plural, though that’ll have to be confirmed by DNA later.’
‘Was it the plate?’
‘Yes. That was a great find.’
‘It was just sitting there waiting for us! The hard part was not reflecting back the flesh to expose the humerus right there and then.’
‘You kind of scare me when you talk like that, Jayne.’
‘Sorry. So is she one of your missing women from Georgia?’
‘Unconnected. She’s a Mrs Patterson from Carlisle, Oregon.’
‘Carlisle?’
‘Outside Portland.’
‘Was she in NCIC?’
‘That’s the interesting part. She was but not listed as suspicious missing. And get this: she went missing two months ago. Eric’s been trying to get details from Oregon. We’ll be sending the arms to the coroner up there after we’ve got the results on whether the left arm goes with the right.’
Jayne looked at the report in front of her. ‘And maybe you can run DNA on the torso? That’s the other BP that could have been hers.’
‘We’re all over that.’
‘I take it you won’t be running DNA from the younger person’s leg through CODIS, given that we couldn’t even tell you what sex it was?’ She was referring to the FBI Laboratory’s Combined DNA Index System.
‘Even if the Bureau would let me, it won’t be worth it – not enough information. And the leg’s not one of your cases?’
‘Not enough information.’
‘Tell me about it.’
She recalled Scott’s desire to get around the backlog at the coroner’s office when he’d asked 32/1 to do the preliminary investigation. ‘So you’re OK with the leg and maybe the torso going to the LA coroner’s office after all?’
‘ID’ing Patterson makes up for a lot.’
‘Yeah.’ Jayne smiled. She had said almost those exact words to Gene when he was looking at the 32/1 filing
