body. But it was a long shot that there would be the right x-ray.
The partial skull sat in a small tub of sand looking as if it had just been revealed by a sandstorm. The sand held the blackened pieces of bone together while the glue dried. Jonas Briggs, the archaeologist at her museum, said that in his profession they reconstruct clay pots the same way. “Makes nice little Zen gardens-thousand-year- old potsherds standing in clean bronze sand,” he’d said. This Zen garden looked macabre.
There was still an array of pieces to put together. She looked at them, mentally identifying the part of the skull each piece was from. Hard to believe that only yesterday this person was alive-just yesterday.
“They had a special on Court TV two nights ago about missing persons-double feature, two hours’ worth,” said Jin. “Great stuff. Turns out there are several missing persons who meet my criteria of interesting. A teenage girl and her family were leaving church when she went back in for her purse and was never seen again. Doesn’t that sound like Sherlock Holmes? And a whole family just fell off the face of the earth. No one knew they were gone; they just weren’t home anymore-but all their belongings were still in the house, their car in the driveway. And then there was the man who was last seen in the waiting room of his doctor’s office. The receptionist didn’t see him leave and no one knows what happened to him. All these people were normal people with no secret lives or anything-that anyone found out about,” he added. “I’d like to investigate them.”
“No clues at all in any of the cases?” asked Lynn.
Diane picked up a piece of nasal bone and turned it over in her hand. Even blackened as it was, a healed crack was evident. Something distinctive about this individual, she thought as she looked for surrounding pieces.
“No clues,” said Jin. “But I tell you, my favorite is Colonel Percy Fawcett.”
“Never heard of him,” said Lynn.
“He’s the coolest missing person. He disappeared with his son and his son’s friend in the Amazon while looking for an ancient city inhabited by a mysterious tribe. His story is really strange, full of subterranean cities, alien tribes, psychics, with the lost city of Atlantis thrown in. Great stuff,” he repeated.
“Do you ever try to solve any of the cases?” asked Diane. Jin turned to her, looking almost startled that she had been listening.
“I’ve helped with a couple of cold cases that detective friends of mine were working on. I’m afraid I didn’t offer much in the way of a solution. Mostly I just read up on them and try to solve them-you know, like an armchair detective. I’ve gotten a few good hypotheses. You know, there’s been quite a few missing persons north of here in the Smoky Mountains. People disappear and nothing is ever found of them,” he said. “Nothing. I mean, like what’s in the Smokys?”
“Wild pigs,” said Diane without looking up from the piece of skull she was gluing together. “They eat everything with blood on it-bones, sticks, you name it.”
“Yes, pigs,” agreed Lynn. “Once you’re dead, the wild boars scarf you up.”
Jin looked from Diane to Lynn. “Well, thanks for ruining a perfectly good mystery for me.”
Lynn and Diane both laughed.
Diane had finished gluing all the pieces of the skull she had and they sat drying in the sandbox. It looked like the pieced-together ancient skulls that she had in the museum-but this person was recently alive.
“I’m going to take a break,” she said. “When I come back, I’ll see if we have any x-rays of faces with broken noses. I believe I can ID this skull.”
“I think I’ll finish up this cadaver,” said Lynn. She sneaked a peek at the table where Brewster Pilgrim left his.
Jin slipped off his gloves and put on a new pair, walked over to Pilgrim’s table, and began preparations to cut the femur and take a DNA sample. Back to business.
Diane left the tent and gulped in the outside air. The cold bit her lungs. It felt good to be out of the morgue tent.
Chapter 7
Sleet was falling again. The drops felt like cold pin-pricks on Diane’s face. The argon streetlights shining bright against the backdrop of the twilight sky flooded over the tent city and gave the place an eerie glow. There were searchlights and strange machines in one direction along the street, and a quiet crowd of people standing in the other. In a David Lynch movie it could have been the midway of some macabre traveling circus.
Diane looked wistfully in the direction of her apartment but did not yield to the temptation to escape to its peace and solitude. She would take fifteen minutes of relief in the coffee tent. But first she stopped at the crime scene.
The blackened rubble of the house was now crisscrossed by planks and grid strings and illuminated by a ring of large spotlights shining into it from all sides. Neva and David were stretched out on boards, sifting carefully through a grid square near the front of the site. A mobile crane parked to one side of the yard was lifting a basket of something out of the gaping hole of the burned-out basement.
Diane looked over the edge into the pit. Wisps of smoke or steam rose here and there from the dark mass into the cold night air. The bright white light of the spotlights seemed to be absorbed into the charred rubble and not reflected back. A gust of wind carried up from the basement an acrid stench that smelled like a combination of wood smoke, wet, burned garbage, melted plastic, and scorched flesh, with an assortment of chemicals thrown into the mix. Diane stepped backward for a breath of air to clear her lungs.
The house that was there only yesterday had been a yellow Victorian with an octagonal tower, high-peaked roof, fireplaces, wraparound porches, and white gingerbread trim. A long line of students had lived many of their university years in its apartments. Diane remembered scenes of them laying down a large tarp and pouring sand over it to make themselves a beach volleyball court on game weekends, or some student relaxing on the porch swing reading a book, or several sitting on the steps shouting at their friends passing in cars. And now… nothing but black ashes covered with the spiderweb of crime scene string and scaffolding.
Was one of those students from the porch swing in happier times now lying on her autopsy table? The thought made her profoundly sad.
Diane walked toward the front of the burned-out house through the safe path that her team had created. All the snow had melted from the path, leaving a muddy walkway covered by planks. David saw her approaching, rose, and walked on the planking toward her, readjusting his baseball cap on his balding head. Neva looked up and waved, but kept working.
The drops of sleet were getting heavier, and Diane could feel her hair getting wet. She pulled a knit cap from her coat pocket and put it on, pushing her hair underneath it.
“How’s it going?” asked Diane. She could tell by the look on David’s face he wasn’t happy.
“Frustrating,” said David. He took off his cap, smoothed down the nonexistent hair on the top of his head, and put his cap back on. “It’s going fine if we can keep McNair away.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Mostly meddling.”
“Meddling?” Diane raised her eyebrows. “He
“Then he should act like one.” David glanced over his shoulder as if someone might be listening. “He looks through all our evidence bags-breaks the seal and paws through the contents. Says he needs to see what we’re finding. I told him that the lab is the place to examine the evidence, and he told me to just tend to my job, that he’s in charge. I don’t know how this guy thought he would be even remotely qualified to be the director of the crime lab. He’s not qualified to be an arson investigator. Any good defense attorney can challenge every piece of evidence we’ve collected, because of him.”
“I’ll speak to him.” Diane felt a sudden flush.
“It won’t work, unless you intend to watch him, too.” David lifted his chin slightly, which was a signal to Diane that McNair was approaching.
“OK. You go back to work and I’ll try and talk some sense into him.”
Diane whirled around and walked to meet McNair as he approached. She watched a scowl form on his face.
