Bones of the Lost (4 page)

“My word.” Mrs. Flowers’s upraised hand dropped to her yellow silk blouse.

“It’s a long story,” I said. Don’t ask, I meant.

One carefully plucked brow arched slightly, but she let it go.

“Dr. Larabee wishes to see you.” Southern as Tara. “He’s in the main autopsy room.”

“Thanks.”

Two small hallways, called biovestibules by those who designed them, connect the administrative and public sectors of the building with the autopsy area. I passed through one, pausing briefly to check the erasable board.

Four new cases. A single-vehicle accident near Optimist Park on North Davidson, elderly male driver DOA at Carolinas Medical
Center. A sixteen-year-old female with a gunshot wound to the head, found beside a Dumpster on Shamrock Drive. The Peruvian mummified remains awaiting my assessment. And the teenage hit-and-run victim from Old Pineville Road.

Slidell’s Jane Doe.

I beelined for the ladies’ and did what I could with my hair and dirt-crusted face, then shifted to the locker room to change into scrubs. Last stop, my office for Band-Aids, antiseptic, and the spare Nikes I keep under the coat tree. Ten minutes after arriving, I was ready to roll.

When I pushed open the door of the large autopsy room, Tim Larabee was standing beside one of the two stainless steel tables. He wasn’t cutting or weighing, not dictating, not even looking down at the remains.

Shielding her from me? From Slidell? From the many who would probe and photograph and analyze and dissect her?

Odd thought. But true. The cold process had begun. And I would take part.

X-rays glowed from light boxes mounted along one wall. Cranials. A full-body series.

A pair of boots sat on one counter. Tan vinyl, with high heels and red and blue flowers running up the sides. Soles caked with mud. Cheap.

And small. Maybe size five. Tiny feet striding in very big-girl boots.

Clothing hung from a drying rack. A red blouse. A denim miniskirt. A white cotton bra. White cotton panties with pale blue dots.

Slidell stood by the rack, feet spread, hands clasped and V-ing down over his genitals. He wasn’t assessing the clothes or the body. He didn’t acknowledge my entrance.

I felt a new wave of irritation, squelched it as I kicked into scientist mode. First rule: block mind-set. Don’t suspect, don’t fear, don’t hope for any outcome. Observe, weigh, measure, and record.

Second rule: block emotion. Leave sorrow, pity, and outrage for later. Anger or grief can lead to error and misjudgment. Mistakes do your victim no good.

Nevertheless.

I looked at the bruised and distorted young face, and for a moment pictured the girl alive, slinging her pink kitty purse onto her shoulder. The strap slipping because the meager contents provided no ballast.

A dark stretch of road.

A hammering heart.

Headlights.

White cotton panties with pale blue dots. The kind Katy favored throughout middle school.

“Slidell give you a rundown?”

Larabee’s question snapped me back.

“Hit and run. Not yet identified.”

“Take a look.” Larabee crossed to the X-rays. His face looked drawn and gaunt, even for him, an obsessive long-distance runner with no body fat and hollows in his cheeks the depth of ocean trenches.

I joined him. He slipped a ballpoint out of the breast pocket of his scrubs and pointed at a defect located approximately mid-shaft in the left clavicle.

At the third and fourth ribs inferior to it.

Stepping to the next film, he ran the pen down the arm, over the humerus, the radius, the ulna. The hand.

“Yes,” I said to his unspoken question.

I followed as he moved on, to a posterior angle of the pelvis. He didn’t have to point.

“Yes,” I repeated.

To an anterior-posterior view of the skull. A lateral view.

A cold fist started closing on my gut.

Wordlessly, I returned to the body.

The girl lay on her back. Larabee hadn’t yet made his Y-incision, and, except for the bruises, abrasions, and distortion due to fractures, she might have been sleeping. The hair haloing her head was long and blond, one clump held high with a plastic barrette shaped like a cat. Pink. The kind little girls love.

Focus
.

I gloved and examined the ravaged flesh, ghostly pale and cold to the touch. I palpated the arm, the shoulder, the hand, the abdomen, felt the underlying damage evident on the X-rays in glowing black-and-white.

“Can we turn her over, please?” My voice broke the stillness.

Larabee stepped to my side. Together we tucked the slender arms tight to the body and rolled it by the shoulders and hips.

My eyes traveled the delicate spine and small buttocks. Took in the tread marks imprinted on the flesh of the painfully thin thighs.

The fist tightened.

“What’s this?” I ran one finger over a discoloration on the girl’s right shoulder. Maybe five inches long, the bruise appeared as a series of dashes.

“Hematoma,” Larabee said.

“It’s a patterned injury,” I said. “Any idea what made it?”

Larabee shook his head.

I looked at Slidell. He looked back but said nothing.

“May I see the CSU photos?” Stripping off and tossing, not so gently, my latex gloves.

Larabee collected a stack of five-by-sevens from the counter and handed them to me. Frame by frame I viewed the desolate spot where the girl had lived her last moments.

The photos told the same story.

It was no accident.

The girl had been murdered.

“M
URDERED?” SLIDELL’S BARK RICOCHETED OFF
the stainless steel and glass surrounding us.

“Legally that would imply intent,” Larabee said.

“Screw legal definitions.” I jammed a finger at the devastated body. “Some bastard killed this kid.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Slidell was shifting surprised eyes between Larabee and me.

I gestured Slidell to the X-ray showing the left arm bones. Larabee joined us and offered his pen. I took it and pointed to the humeral shaft, four inches below the shoulder joint.

“See this dark line?”

“A broken arm don’t mean the kid was capped.” Slidell was peering at the gray-and-white image, doubt crimping his already dubious expression.

“No, detective. It doesn’t.” I shifted to indicate the hand. “Note the medial and distal phalanges.”

“Don’t go all jargony on me, doc.”

“The finger bones.”

Slidell leaned in and studied the illuminated fragments at the tip of my pen.

“The middle phalanges should look like small tubes, the distal ones like tiny arrowheads. They underlie the fingertips.”

“Looks like wood shavings.”

“The bones have been crushed.”

Slidell made a noise in his throat I chose not to interpret.

I moved on to the cranial X-ray.

“There are no skull fractures. But note the mandible, especially the mental eminence.” I would leave discussion of soft-tissue injuries to Larabee.

Slidell pooched air through his lips.

“The chin,” I explained.

“How come it’s called mental when the brain’s up top?”

“Some people think with their mouths.”

Larabee smiled. Almost. My sarcasm was lost on Skinny.

“Fine.” Slidell’s skepticism was turning his tone gruff. “Her chin’s broken, her arm’s broken, and her fingers are smashed. How’s that add up to murder?”

“The tread marks on her thighs tell us this is a vehicular death. But it’s no regular hit and run. The victim wasn’t standing along the side of the road. Not hitchhiking. Not waiting on the shoulder for a ride from a friend. She was hit square in the back.”

Larabee nodded in confirmation of the conclusion he too had reached but had yet to voice.

Slidell continued staring at the film.

“Picture this,” I said. “She’s walking, maybe running. A car comes at her from behind. Maybe she tries to escape. Maybe not. Either way, the car plows into the backs of her legs.”

Slidell said nothing. Larabee kept nodding.

“She goes down hard, arms outstretched. Her chin impacts the pavement. She’s forced beneath the chassis. The left tires roll over her left hand, crushing her fingers.”

“You sure about this?”

I gestured an upturned palm at Larabee.

“Typically, a pedestrian hit by a vehicle is slammed onto the windshield or thrown sideways and outward, receiving injuries to the head, upper torso, or legs,” he said. “This victim has no cranial or thoracic trauma consistent with a windshield impact or rapid deceleration angled to the left or right.”

Slidell still looked unconvinced.

I snatched up the crime-scene photos, chose two, and handed them to him. He studied both, then slowly exhaled through his nose.

“No skid marks.”

“Exactly. The driver never hit the brakes.”

“Sonofabitch.”

I turned to Larabee.

“You’re putting PMI at seven to ten hours?” I was asking about postmortem interval.

“To be safe. The body arrived here shortly after nine this morning. Air temp last night dropped to forty-eight. I observed lividity, but still got blanching. Rigor—”

“Whoa, whoa. Back it up, doc.” Slidell pulled a pen and small spiral from his pocket and began taking notes.

Larabee indicated the body. “Notice the purple mottling on her belly, the fronts of her thighs, the undersides of her arms, and the right half of her face?”

Slidell glanced up, resumed scribbling.

“That discoloration is called lividity. It’s due to the settling of blood in the body’s downside once the heart stops beating. When I pressed a thumb to her flesh, the vessels were pushed aside, leaving an area of pallor.”

Slidell twisted his mouth to one side.

“A white mark,” Larabee simplified. “After about ten hours the red blood cells and capillaries would have decomposed sufficiently so blanching wouldn’t have occurred.”

“And rigor’s when the stiff gets stiff.” Slidell pronounced it
rigger
.

Larabee nodded. “When the body arrived, rigor was complete in the small muscles, but not in the largest ones. Her jaws were locked, but I could still bend her knees and elbows.”

“So she died more than seven hours before she got here, but less than ten.” Slidell did the math in his head. It took a while. “Sometime between eleven and two.”

“It’s not a precise science,” Larabee said.

“What about stomach contents? Once you get her open?”

“Ninety-eight percent of her last meal would have left her stomach within six to eight hours of ingestion. With luck I might find
some fragments, corn, maybe tomato skin, in a rugal fold in the gastric mucosa. I’ll let you know.”

“What about vitreous?” I was asking about fluid drawn from the eye. “Can you test for potassium?”

“I took a sample, but it won’t really narrow the range.”

“How close was she to the light rail?” I asked Slidell.

“She was on the shoulder, on the side opposite the railway.”

“How often do trains pass during those hours?”

“Last one runs by there just after one
A.M
. The next isn’t until five
A.M
.”

“What about metallic spray?” I asked Larabee. “Or oil. Did you find any deposits on her skin or hair?

“K
ILL THE LIGHTS, PLEASE.”

Slidell clumped to the wall, back to the table.

Larabee clicked on a small UV light and directed it toward the girl’s inner left thigh.

A scatter glowed blue-white on her skin.

Semen.

As Larabee slowly moved the beam, some stains fluoresced more intensely than others.

“Multiple donors?” I asked.

“We’ll need DNA to confirm,” Larabee said. “But that’s my impression.”

“We talking rape?” Slidell’s mouth was right at my ear.

“I found no vaginal tearing or abrasions. No sign of anal entry.”

“So we’re back to my first guess.” I heard Slidell straighten. “The kid was on the stroll.”

I bit back a response.

Larabee thumbed off his flash. “Get the switch?”

Slidell did.

“Think you can narrow the age estimate?” Larabee spoke to me as the fluorescents buzzed to life.