Bone Hunter (16 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Bone Hunter
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“The hell you say,” I seethed, snatching the envelope from his hands. “That’s child abuse, keeping her glasses from her,” I added, wondering how old Nina truly was. “You should be ashamed, mister.”
Hands trembling, I opened the envelope and put the enormous glasses on her tiny face. Her eyes appeared to pop larger behind their magnification.
I helped Nina to her feet and guided her through the door and down the hall after him. Officer Raymond fell into step behind us and the two men took us down elevators, outside, and into a car, and through the gathering evening traffic to another public building. There, they took us downstairs into an atmosphere thick with the scent of disinfectant. The medical examiner, a woman in her fifties, presented us with forms to sign and asked for identification. “Here’s mine,” I said, presenting my driver’s license. Just to hear what she’d say, I said, “Nina, you don’t have anything, do you?”
Nina shook her head.
“It is irregular to show the remains to anyone who can’t identify themselves as next of kin,” said the medical examiner.
The detective spoke. “I’ll vouch for them,” he said. He turned to Nina. “A signature will do it,” he said casually. I heard a note of seduction in his voice; he was luring her, leading her along the path to giving up just this one little clue about herself. I could see him running to a handwriting expert with the results.
Hands trembling, Nina picked up the pen and wrote her name, Nina Dishey, in minuscule schoolgirl cursive. I signed my name, too, and we were taken through to a room with a television monitor. On it appeared George Dishey’s face, profile view, reclining, eyes closed. His nose was banged up and his skin was mottled with lividity. It was a dead face, a dull face. George, for all his unpleasant quirks, had been a man of considerable charm, charisma, even; a man whose face had been alert and engaging when he was alive. My stomach tightened.
“Can you identify this man?” asked the medical examiner.
I turned and looked at Nina, stifling an urge to retch. Her
eyes had grown enormous. with alarm. She approached the monitor and touched it, then quickly withdrew her hand, which then flew to her lips, to her throat. She darted around to one side of the monitor, trying to find another way into it. To me, she whimpered, “Do they have George’s head in there?”
My God,
I thought.
She doesn’t know
—“It’s just a picture, Nina, don’t worry. George is in another room.” As her agitation continued to grow, I said, “Ray, we have to take her to the real thing or she’s going to blow.”
Ray stared at Nina incredulously.
“She doesn’t know what a television is,” I said, enunciating the words sharply to cut through Ray’s confusion. “She’s from Mars, Ray. Get these people to take her into the room where the body is!”
Ray’s eyes widened but he snapped to and made things happen. The medical examiner groused for a few moments but then led us through into a very cold room in which there was a gurney holding an opaque long plastic bag. Inside the bag rested the form of a man. The first half foot of the bag had been carefully laid back, exposing George Dishey’s inanimate face. I had to push a video camera out of the way so that Nina could approach the corpse.
As she neared the body, Nina’s hands rose up like tiny wings, fluttering, hovering now to either side of George’s uninhabited cheeks. Silent tears flowed down her face and dropped like pearls into the sunken spaces that held his lidded eyes. “Darling,” she whispered. “I’ll be with you soon. Tell Heavenly Father I’m coming.”
I told myself I was watching the onset of madness. It frightened me to hear another human speak of death as just a doorway to be walked through. But another part of me knew that Nina was entirely sane. Sane, but naive. Sane, but … more than sane; the Nina who stood before me was joyously sane, vibrantly alive, and in a state of grace, a thing that I could
recognize but about which I knew pathetically little. I felt scared and confused. My ignorance, I could accept, but I did not share the corner of the reality from which she spoke. To me, alive was alive and dead was dead; I was in this life and wanted to stay here as long as I could, and above all, I did not want to be dispatched from it even a minute ahead of schedule, especially by violence.
Nina’s hands came gently to rest on George’s silent cheeks. She stroked his hair, which still lay stretched across his temples, pulled back no doubt into the ponytail he had habitually drawn it into. She flicked a bit of broken leaf from his beard and reached to unzip the bag.
“Stop there,” the detective said, lunging toward her.
Nina ignored him and gave the zipper a mighty tug. As the cover came back from the corpse’s chest, I felt my stomach sink past my knees.
“OH, GOD!” I HEARD SOMEONE GASPING. “OH GOD, OH God, oh—” As I bent over from the hip, my head cleared, the ringing in my ears lessened, and I realized that I had been the one who had been making all the noise. Nina had simply fainted.
The corpse was naked, undressed for postmortem examination. George had been neatly sliced in places by the medical examiner, but that was not the problem. No, the problem was that his torso had been mutilated. Slashed hideously from side to side, peppered with lines of puncture wounds and ripped hideously by some coarse-toothed sawlike instrument. Bone was visible where the blows had crossed his ribs, but his abdomen was the worst. His abdomen was a mess of spewed guts.
Waves of nausea swept over me. Nina moaned at my feet as the medical examiner cracked a tiny vial beneath her nostrils. The reek of ammonium carbonate reached my nose as well and I snapped further back to my senses. I felt Ray’s strong hands grasping my shoulders. I leaned back and felt his warmth. “Sorry,” he said softly. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”
Having finished with Nina, the medical examiner calmly stood up and closed the bag.
“Who—or what—in
hell’s
name did that?” I wailed.
“That’s what we all want to know,” said the detective as he helped the medical examiner zip the bag back over the corpse’s head.
“Now I understand why you guys have been so upset,” I said. “I haven’t seen a mauling like that since a mountain lion got one of our calves.”
No one answered.
Nina had rolled onto her side and was moaning.
I bent and held her in my arms. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Oh, Nina, if I’d had any idea how bad that could be, I would never have suggested we come.”
Nina trembled. “Dear Heavenly Father, help me,” she whimpered. “Help me, Father. Take away my thoughts. Take me home with You
now!”
“What thoughts, Nina?” the detective asked.
Nina’s shaking increased to the level of near convulsions.
“Let’s get her out of here,” the medical examiner said congenially. “She’ll feel better upstairs where it’s warmer.”
 
 
NINA HAD NO more words to give the police. Grace had given way to raw fear, and she couldn’t have gotten words out from between her clenched teeth if she’d tried. A discussion ensued among the detective, the medical examiner, Officer Raymond, and myself regarding what to do with and for her next. Finally, I said, “Ray, why don’t you and I take her down to Temple Square so she can pray, or whatever Mormons do. I mean, the woman’s lost her husband and had a nasty shock; don’t you think she might like to seek a little comfort from the Almighty?” I almost corrected myself by amending that to Heavenly
Father, but something about patriarchal imagery was sticking in my craw just then.
The detective spoke. “We have a little problem here. None of us knows where Mrs. Dishey resides. She clearly does not live at the deceased’s. She was carrying no identification when we found her, and …”
I turned to her. “Where do you live, Nina?”
Nina squeezed her eyes tightly shut and shook harder.
“Okay, no joy there,” I said. “Back to the Temple. Want to go to Temple Square with me, Nina?”
She nodded uncertainly, thought, then nodded again with vigor. “I’ve heard about the Salt Lake Temple. Can I really see it?”
The detective took us all back to the station, where Ray led us to his vehicle, which still held my bags. When shown the car, Nina moved automatically toward the backdoor and climbed into the backseat, where she sat bolt upright like a schoolgirl waiting to be asked to recite. I reassessed her age. Eighteen going on twelve.
Ray drove and I sat in the backseat with Nina, holding her hands. As we turned north on Main Street and the Salt Lake Temple of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints came into view, Nina at last relaxed just a hair. I greeted the sight more doubtfully.
The Temple is six stories of massive gray granite capped by another fifty feet or so of tall triangular spires, a wedding cake of big ones, medium ones, and little ones, the tallest one to the east surmounted by a gilded statue of a man blowing a horn. It’s hard for me to quantify what there was about it that unnerved me. It was something in its architectural style, something I couldn’t quite characterize, something that failed, to my prejudiced eyes, to say
church.
I was not raised as a churchgoer, but I’d been to a few and seen pictures of hundreds of others,
large and small, in art history books and such, and this one somehow did not fit with the rest. It was too heavy, too forbidding, more like a mausoleum than a place of worship. I looked away.
“You … ah, we can’t get into the Temple,” Ray said.
“That’s okay,” Nina said. “I just want to sit in the Temple grounds awhile and take a little comfort. Prayer is a private thing. ‘Ye must pour out your souls in your closets, and your secret places, and in your wilderness … .’” Her voice trailed off, her recitation complete.
I looked questioningly at Ray.
“Alma thirty-four: twenty-six,” he said, and when I still looked mystified, he added, “Book of Mormon. Or, if you prefer, Matthew six:six, ‘But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.’”
“Oh.”
Ray parked the vehicle and led us into the Temple grounds. Nina moved quickly to a bench beside a tall statue of Christ, sat down, and lifted her face toward her God.
Ray took up a position behind her, feet apart, eyes scanning Temple Square. Every inch of him said
protection.
I wondered if it bothered him to find himself worrying about such things in his holy place.
A woman wearing sensible shoes and a dark blazer moved toward us. A badge on her left breast read SISTER HARGROVE. She said, “Would you like to take a tour today?”
“No, thank you, Sister,” said Officer Raymond.
Sister Hargrove’s eyes brightened and her spine straightened prettily. “Oh, Brother Raymond, I didn’t see it was you.”
Ray nodded and kept his eyes moving.
Sister Hargrove persisted, looking my way. “Who are your friends?” As her examination dropped to my legs and feet, her expression went blank. I was clearly not dressed for the occasion, and neither was Sister Dishey, but at least my face was
clean. I gave Sister Hargrove a winning smile and said nothing.
Ray said, “We’ve just come for a moment of silent contemplation.”
“Certainly,” said Sister Hargrove, turning and moving away toward the next stray visitor.
When she was out of earshot, I whispered, so as not to disturb Nina, “So, Ray, where do we go from here?”
Ray said, “You got me.”
“We got a murder investigation that’s two days old with no real suspects. Certainly by now, you know it was neither of us. Even if you still think either of us capable of such a crime—emotionally capable, because certainly neither one of us had the strength or the stomach to do anything like that to a human body—the forensic evidence will by now have eliminated us from your list. He can’t have had a drop of blood left in him. Those wounds were dealt from close range, and with great force. George was not a little guy. Neither Nina nor I could have pulled that off physically, let alone mentally. Besides, whoever did that would have stepped in the blood that butchering job shed and left a trail of footprints. Even if the footprints are my size, you’ve been all through my gear and found nothing, so please cut the nonsense and tell me you know I’m clean!”
Ray stared painfully into space.
“So we got young George’s second wife here,” I continued, “and if you think she’s a fake, you’re out of your mind. She made her own clothes, she gets her hair cut by someone with dull scissors, she rides in the backseat, and she’s never seen a television set. Add all that together with the kid you see sitting inside that getup and you know damned well this is no act. You got some pretty rural parts of Utah here, so I’m guessing Nina lives way out in the back of nowhere, where they don’t ask questions of big families with a surplus of adult females.”
A deep blush rose up from Ray’s collar. When I moved
around in front of him so he could no longer evade eye contact, he stepped around me, and, leaning over so he could speak into Nina’s ear without touching her, and said, “Are you about ready? It’s time for us to go.”

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