American Academy of Forensic Sciences. We’d even enjoyed a brief carnal romp way back at the misty dawn of creation. Good fun, bad timing. Enter Pete Petersons. I married, attended grad school at Northwestern, then joined the faculty first at Northern Illinois University, then at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Danny stuck with the University of Tennessee straight through, and upon completion of his doctorate, beelined to Hawaii.
The one that got away? Maybe. But, alas, too bad. Danny Tandler is now married and out of play.
Over the years Danny and I have provided mutual support through dissertation defenses, board exams, job interviews, and promotion reviews. When the CIL needed a new external consultant, Danny proposed my name. That was back in the early nineties. I served in that capacity for almost ten years.
The wait for Tandler was a wee bit longer than the one for the initial switchboard pickup.
“Tempe, me lass. How’s it hanging?” A voice hinting of country and wide-open spaces.
“Good.”
“Tell me you’ve reconsidered and are coming back on board.”
“Not yet.”
“It’s eighty degrees right now. Wait, wait.” Dramatic rustling. “OK. Got my shades on. The sun off the water was blinding my vision.”
“You’re inside a building on a military base.”
“Palm fronds are gently kissing my window.”
“Save it for winter. It’s beautiful here now.”
“To what do I owe this unexpected surprise?”
I told him about the pond, the plastic, and the fingerprint identification of the victim as Lowery.
“Why the packaging?”
“No idea.”
“Bizarre. Let me see if I can pull Lowery’s file.”
It took a full ten minutes.
“Sorry. We’ve got an arrival ceremony starting in less than an hour. Most folks have already headed over to the hangar. For now I can give you the basics. Details will have to wait.”
“I understand.”
I did. An arrival ceremony is a solemn occasion honoring an unknown soldier, sailor, airman, or marine fallen far from home in the line of duty. Following recovery and transfer to U.S. soil, it is step one in the complicated path to repatriation.
I’d attended several arrival ceremonies during my tenure with JPAC. I envisioned the scene about to play out. The newly arrived aircraft. The servicemen and women standing at attention. The flag-draped transfer container. The solemn cross-base drive to the CIL lab.
“Private John Charles Lowery was an eighteen-year-old white male. Went in-country on June twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-seven.” Danny’s tone suggested he was skimming, picking out relevant facts. “Lowery went down in a Huey near Long Binh on January twenty-third, nineteen sixty-eight.” Pause. “Body was recovered several days later, ID’ed, returned to family for burial.”
“Burial where?”
“Your neck o’ the woods. Lumberton, North Carolina.”
“You’re kidding.”
I heard a voice in the background. Danny said something. The voice responded.
“Sorry, Tempe. I’ve got to go.”
“No problem. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I should know more once I’ve examined our guy.”
That’s not how it went.
THE NEXT DAY I ROSE AT SEVEN. THIRTY MINUTES LATER I WAS worming my Mazda through the Ville-Marie Tunnel. Again, the weather was splendid.
The Edifice Wilfrid-Derome is a looming T-shaped thirteen-story structure in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district east of
Yesiree. Ryan and I work just eight floors apart.
Though the morning staff meeting held no unpleasant surprise for the anthropologist, it had been an unusually busy Thursday. A workplace electrocution and a stabbing went to one pathologist. A suspicious crib death and a fire victim went to another. Pierre LaManche, director of the LSJML’s medico-legal section, assigned himself an apparent suicide involving a teenage boy.
LaManche also assumed responsibility for LSJML-49744, the case number assigned to John Lowery, but asked that I get the ball rolling. Since ID had been established via prints, once preliminaries were done, depending on body condition, either LaManche would perform a normal autopsy, or I would clean the bones and do a skeletal analysis.
By nine thirty I was downstairs in
