Dead Past (5 page)

The other two medical examiners, Pilgrim and Rankin, were in a corner, sitting on a couple of folding chairs and drinking from steaming Styrofoam cups. She waved at them and headed in their direction. They had barricaded themselves in with folding chairs held in place by their booted feet. Their bodies looked relaxed, but their faces showed deep frowns. Rankin was on his cell phone. Lynn was a few feet away, drinking her coffee with an amused expression. She handed Diane a cup as she walked by.

“It’s good coffee,” Lynn said, grinning at Diane. “You were so nice. I’d have ripped her a new one.”

“She was only doing what she was told. It always amazes me how little influence I have.”

Lynn’s laugh was almost a giggle. The two of them pulled up chairs and sat across from Rankin and Pilgrim.

“I just got off the phone with Whit,” said Rankin, shifting his position and putting his cell phone back on his belt. “He’s thinking there may be as many as thirty bodies.”

 

Diane stood at a shiny stainless steel table in the cold morgue tent, looking down at a shock of blond hair held together by an iridescent blue clip. The hair and a small bit of scalp were attached to a piece of parietal bone from the right side of a skull.

Explosions and fires are odd. They consume or blacken most everything, but occasionally there are surprising anomalies, such as this beautiful lock of blond hair—almost untouched, somehow thrown free in the explosion, along with scalp and bone.

Diane measured the size and arc of the bone before Jin photographed it. Jin was a good assistant for this, not just because of his keen interest in DNA and his basic competence, but because, even in the worst of circumstances, he was nearly always happy. The tent would be somber without him if its only occupants were her, the MEs, the police, and burned bodies.

“Plenty of roots for DNA,” said Jin as he tweezed samples of rooted hair from the scalp. He had a green surgical cap covering his straight black hair and wore green scrubs and short sleeves despite the cool temperature of the tent. Diane envied his ability to withstand the cold. She was bundled up and freezing. “You know if we had our own DNA . . .”

“I know,” said Diane, interrupting Jin before he made another petition for a DNA lab. She liked the idea, but refrained from telling Jin or he would be ordering the equipment.

The problem was that Rosewood didn’t want to pay for a DNA lab. Diane guessed they were holding out for her to put one in on the museum’s budget. After all, the museum, which was officially not part of the crime lab, had its own DNA lab—what’s one more lab, she was sure they were thinking. True, depending on how she crunched the numbers, she might be able to make a DNA lab pay for itself. But she didn’t tell Jin that, either.

“You going to put in a DNA lab?” asked Lynn Webber. Diane looked up to see Lynn putting an organ—it looked like a heart—on the scales.

Diane looked sideways at Jin as he stared down at nothing in particular on the tent floor. Just as she thought, he’d put Lynn up to it.

“Jin wants to.” Diane evaded answering her directly, hoping Lynn would drop it.

“It’d probably pay for itself,” said Lynn, retrieving the organ from the hanging scales. Diane shot her a scowl. Lynn smiled back.

“Probably female,” said Diane of the remains on her table. “It’s a small skull.” She looked again at the wavy lock of hair, touching it with her gloved hand. “And this is a female hairstyle and clip.” She recorded the information on a form.

Jin packaged the small piece of someone who only yesterday had been alive, labeled it, and put it on a trolley to be taken and stored in the refrigerated area of the trailer. He filed the hair root sample, then selected another small box containing body parts to be examined. It was the severed hand.

“That’s odd,” said Jin. “It’s not even burned.”

As if on some kind of psychic cue, Rankin looked up from an x-ray he was examining on a light table. “Did I hear you were carjacked last night?” he said.

Diane cringed as everyone in hearing range stopped and stared at her. They had been working for three hours with little communication, other than task-oriented shoptalk—Lynn Webber commented that the victim she was working on died instantaneously, and Rankin said his might have died of smoke inhalation, he wasn’t sure. A little conversation was a welcome diversion and a rest.

“Boss, you didn’t tell us about that?” said Jin.

“I heard you locked him in your car,” continued Rankin. Allen Rankin was the ME for the city of Rosewood. He was younger than Pilgrim, more Webber’s age, and slim with brown hair, too even in color to be natural. He looked at Diane with interest, expecting the story.

“Well, for heaven sake,” said Lynn, shaking her head. “What happened and how in the world did you lock him in your car?”

“It happened when I was evacuating my apartment,” said Diane.

“That’s right, you live near here,” said Rankin.

“How did you find out about it?” asked Diane.

“I have ears in the police department,” he said.

They were all still staring at her, so Diane told the story about the kid with a gun and one hand.

“He lost a hand,” exclaimed Jin looking down at the one lying on the table in front of him. “This hand?”

“It would be my guess. He lost his right hand and this is the right hand of a male. I believe it was sheered off with a saw blade that came flying from the blast.” She retrieved a box from the long table containing unprocessed evidence that grew by the minute. She double-checked the label, initialed it, and opened the lid.

“Ouch,” said Jin when he saw the bloody circular blade.

“We’ll have to take a blood sample from it to be sure this is what did it. We can match the hand and blade with the blood in my car—and the kid.”

“You think he was involved with the meth lab?” said Pilgrim. He and his assistant were making noise moving a cadaver to his table. Diane strained to hear over the rustling of the body bag. At least the body bags had arrived. At first they didn’t have enough and they had covered the victims with a clear plastic. Even the dieners thought it was creepy.

“It seems likely,” she said. “If he was only a victim, what was he doing with a gun?”

“Exactly,” said Rankin. “Ironic thing is that he has the least injuries. All the other survivors have critical internal or brain injuries. He may be the only one who can shed light on this and I understand he’s lawyered up.”

Diane heard several grunts of disapproval from people in the tent. It sounded like too many people. A constant parade of personnel came and went—bringing in bodies and evidence from the site, or delivering antemortem information from relatives, or paperwork from the police department. Diane hoped one of them was a gatekeeper. She didn’t like the idea of a reporter listening in on their conversations, or worse. She watched for a moment—all present were MEs, technicians or police, all people she recognized, all doing a job. And there were guards at the door.

Diane focused her attention back on the hand lying on the table, palm up in a half-curled position. The thing she noticed first was that the nails were professionally manicured.

“Has his nails done,” said Jin. “Not your average student.”

“I wonder what the palm could tell us,” Diane said, attempting a smile.

“That he has no future.”

Jin responded so quickly that Diane looked over at him and raised an eyebrow. She was joking, but the authority in Jin’s voice surprised her.

“The future is in the right palm, his past in the left.”

“Oh?” Diane stared at him.

“I used to date a girl who was into reading palms. That’s what she said.” He grinned broadly.

She measured the hand and photographed it front and back, took samples from under the nails, swabbed the skin, and printed the fingers. Jin took a sample of tissue for DNA comparison. He handed her more remains.

The squeaking sound of a cart brought her head up. Grover, Lynn Webber’s morgue assistant, was wheeling a body back from the portable x-ray set up in the trailer. He maneuvered between the light table and a frame hanging with x-rays he and Pilgrim’s assistant had taken so far. He bumped the light table where Allen Rankin was examining dental x-rays and muttered an apology. Diane wasn’t sure if he was talking to Rankin or the body. He referred to the charred and mutilated bodies as babies.

“All them poor babies,” he had said on his first glance of the scene. “Them poor, poor babies.”

Grover was probably in his forties, but it was hard to tell. His dark skin was unlined and his hair had no gray. He was a big guy with big hands and a face so solemn that he looked perpetually melancholy. He had absolute respect for human remains and a good knowledge of anatomy.

“We have a match,” Rankin said from his seat at his field desk.

The first match. The first “this is someone. Not just human features roughly carved in charcoal.” Not a John or Jane Doe. No longer anonymous.

Rankin rose to give his report to the officer in charge of the records, a heavyset policeman with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a bloodhound face, and a body that looked both sturdy and agile—Archie Donahue, Diane believed his name was. As she recalled, he had been on the Rosewood police force for a long time and worked in the evidence locker. Well suited for this work, filing and cataloging the artifacts of lives that loved ones hoped would identify them in death.

Archie sat at the long evidence table and looked up from the stack of antemortem records he’d just accepted from the intake desk in the coffee tent. He was about to enter them into the computer program that kept track of all the incoming details of missing students—anything that would help identify them. Archie seemed to hesitate reaching for Rankin’s report. Probably dreaded the thought that one of the dead would be a child or grandchild of someone he knew. Rosewood wasn’t that big a town. And if it were true that there are only six degrees of separation between everyone in the world, then in the town of Rosewood the number of degrees was probably one or two. Many local children stayed to attend the local university. Everyone in Rosewood would know someone touched by this.

Diane saw his hands shake as he looked at the report.

“Bobby Coleman . . . I know his daddy,” he whispered in a cigarette-and-whisky voice. “We go to the same church.”

They all stopped, Pilgrim, Webber, Diane, even the assistants—a spontaneous moment of silence for his grief—for Bobby’s family’s grief.

Brewster Pilgrim broke the silence. “I need your opinion here, Diane,” he said.

Pilgrim was the coroner of the county to the north of Rosewood. He was inclined toward being heavy, and looked like everyone’s ideal grandfather with his white hair and white brush moustache.

“I can’t tell the sex,” he said. “Looks too close to call to me.”

Diane changed gloves, walked over to Brewster’s work area, and looked down in the open cavity of the charred cadaver.

“We should have given this to you,” he said. “Hardly any flesh left. Must have been in the hottest part of the fire. And look at this. I believe a beam or something fell on him. Look at the crushed pelvis here.”

The cadaver was charred black down to the bone. There was flesh, but it had been so consumed by fire that the hard bone underneath the flesh was exposed over the entire body. The head was gone, probably exploded in the heat. Pieces of skull lay in a shallow box near the remains with blackened flesh still clinging to them. Obviously found nearby and probably from the same body.

“I believe you’re right about the break.” She examined the broken right ilium and left pubis. It looked like something heavy had fallen across the pelvic region and crushed the bones. “It is a rather androgynous pelvis, isn’t it,” agreed Diane.

She carved flesh away from the pelvis to look at the various markers for gender. What she saw was a wide subpubic angle, wide sciatic notch, and the presence of the preauricular sulcus.

“Female,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Pilgrim. “I’d have probably called it male. Looked like a male pelvis to me.”

As he spoke, Diane teased a bit of bone away from the pubis with a pair of tweezers and put it in the palm of her hand.

“What’s that?” asked Pilgrim, leaning over her shoulder to look at the delicate piece.

“Fetal bone,” said Diane. “She was pregnant.”

 

Brewster Pilgrim looked for a long moment at the bone so tiny and fragile it could have come from a bird.

“Them poor babies,” whispered Grover who stood behind them shaking his large head.

Pilgrim snatched off his latex gloves, threw them in the trash. “I need a break,” he said, and headed out of the tent. “I don’t know why we can’t convince kids to keep out of drugs . . .” was the last thing Diane heard him say before he disappeared into the cold.

Diane bagged and labeled the fetal bone and went back to her station. Lying before her on the table were assorted fragments of a skull that had burst from the heat of the fire that incinerated the body. She pulled up a stool, sat down, and began her next task—fitting together the pieces of the bone puzzle. Jin was helping Lynn Webber sample the marrow of a femur for DNA profiling.

Rankin suddenly looked up from the charred and bloated remains of the corpse on his table. “We can’t stop kids from getting drugs because there is an army of dealers working against us,” he said. “And we’ll never stop them because it’s a trillion-dollar business. There’s just too much money—more money than any of us can wrap our brains around.” He paused for the briefest moment. “And no one can go up against that kind of money. Don’t kid yourselves that we can do anything but pick up the pieces from the carnage.” He stopped speaking just as suddenly as he had begun and continued his autopsy.

They had all paused to watch Rankin as he ranted. Diane had a sick feeling that he was right. They couldn’t do anything. Her gaze met Lynn Webber’s briefly and she knew that Lynn had the same sick feeling. Grover was still shaking his head.