Cross Bones (2 page)

“It seems I need your assistance, Temperance.” Only Pierre LaManche cal ed me by my ful name, hitting hard on the last syl able, and rhyming it with

“sconce” instead of “fence.” LaManche had assigned himself a cadaver that I suspected might present decomposition issues.

“Advanced putrefaction?”

“Oui.”My boss paused. “And other complicating factors.”

“Complicating factors?”

“Cats.”

Oh, boy.

“I’l be right down.”

After saving the Bel emare report on disk, I left my lab, passed through the glass doors separating the medico-legal section from the rest of the floor, turned into a side corridor, and pushed a button beside a solitary elevator. Accessible only through the two secure levels comprising the LSJML, and through the coroner’s office below on eleven, this lift had a single destination: the morgue.

Descending to the basement, I reviewed what I’d learned at that morning’s staff meeting.

Avram Ferris, a fifty-six-year-old Orthodox Jew, had gone missing a week earlier. Ferris’s body had been discovered late yesterday in a storage closet on the upper floor of his place of business. No signs of a break-in. No signs of a struggle. Employee said he’d been acting odd. Death by self-inflicted gunshot wound was the on-scene assessment. The man’s family was adamant in its rejection of suicide as an explanation.

The coroner had ordered an autopsy. Ferris’s relatives and rabbi had objected. Negotiations had been heated.

I was about to see the compromise that had been reached.

And the handiwork of the cats.

From the elevator, I turned left, then right toward the morgue. Nearing the outer door to the autopsy wing, I heard sounds drifting from the family room, a forlorn little chamber reserved for those cal ed upon to identify the dead.

Soft sobbing. A female voice.

I pictured the bleak little space with its plastic plants and plastic chairs and discreetly curtained window, and felt the usual ache. We did no hospital autopsies at the LSJML. No end-stage liver disease. No pancreatic cancer. We were scripted for murder, suicide, accidental and sudden and unexpected death. The family room held those just ambushed by the unthinkable and unforeseen. Their grief never failed to touch me.

Pul ing open a bright blue door, I proceeded down a narrow corridor, passing computer stations, drying racks, and stainless steel carts on my right, more blue doors on my left, each labeledSALLE D’AUTOPSIE . At the fourth door, I took a deep breath and entered.

Along with the skeletal, I get the burned, the mummified, the mutilated, and the decomposed. My job is to restore the identity death has erased. I frequently use room four since it is outfitted with special ventilation. This morning the system was barely keeping up with the odor of decay.

Some autopsies play to an empty house. Some pack them in. Despite the stench, Avram Ferris’s postmortem was standing room only.

LaManche. His autopsy tech, Lisa. A police photographer. Two uniforms. A Sûrété du Québec detective I didn’t know. Tal guy, freckled, and paler than tofu.

An SQ detective Idid know. Wel . Andrew Ryan. Six-two. Sandy hair. Viking blue eyes.

We nodded to each other. Ryan the cop. Tempe the anthropologist.

If the official players weren’t crowd enough, four outsiders formed a shoulder-to-shoulder wal of disapproval at the foot of the corpse.

I did a quick scan. Al male. Two midfifties, two maybe closing out their sixties. Dark hair. Glasses. Beards. Black suits. Yarmulkes.

The wal regarded me with appraising eyes. Eight hands stayed clasped behind four rigid backs.

LaManche lowered his mask and introduced me to the quartet of observers.

“Given the condition of Mr. Ferris’s body, an anthropologist is needed.”

Four puzzled looks.

“Dr. Brennan’s expertise is skeletal anatomy.” LaManche spoke English. “She is ful y aware of your special needs.”

Other than careful col ection of al blood and tissue, I hadn’t a clue of their special needs.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said, pressing my clipboard to my chest.

Four somber nods.

Their loss lay at center stage, plastic sheeting stretched between his body and the stainless steel. More sheeting had been spread on the floor below and around the table. Empty tubs, jars, and vials sat ready on a rol ing cart.

The body had been stripped and washed, but no incision had been made. Two paper bags lay flattened on the counter. I assumed LaManche had completed his external exam, including tests for gunpowder and other trace evidence on Ferris’s hands.

Eight eyes tracked me as I crossed to the deceased. Observer number four reclasped his hands in front of his genitals.

Avram Ferris didn’t look like he’d died last week. He looked like he’d died during the Clinton years. His eyes were black, his tongue purple, his skin mottled olive and eggplant. His gut was distended, his scrotum bal ooned to the size of beach bal s.

I looked to Ryan for an explanation.

“Temperature in the closet was pushing ninety-two,” he said.

“Why so hot?”

“We figure one of the cats brushed the thermostat,” Ryan said.

I did a quick calculation. Ninety-two Fahrenheit. About thirty-five Celsius. No wonder Ferris was setting a land record for decomposition.

But heat had been just one of this gentleman’s problems.

When hungry, the most docile among us grow cranky. When starved, we grow desperate. Id overrides ethics. We eat. We survive. That common instinct drives herd animals, predators, wagon trains, and soccer teams.

Even Fido and Fluffy go vulture.

Avram Ferris had made the mistake of punching out while trapped with two domestic shorthairs and a Siamese.

And a short supply of Friskies.

I moved around the table.

Ferris’s left temporal and parietal bones were oddly splayed. Though I couldn’t see the occipital, it was obvious the back of his head had taken a hit.

Pul ing on gloves, I wedged two fingers under the skul and palpated. The bone yielded like sludge. Only scalp tissue was keeping the flip side together.

I eased the head down and examined the face.

It was difficult to imagine what Ferris had looked like in life. His left cheek was macerated. Tooth marks scored the underlying bone, and fragments glistened opalescent in the angry red stew.

Though swol en and marbled, Ferris’s face was largely intact on the right.

I straightened, considered the patterning of the mutilation. Despite the heat and the smel of putrefaction, the cats hadn’t ventured to the right of Ferris’s nose or south to the rest of the body.

I understood why LaManche needed me.

“There was an open wound on the left side of the face?” I asked him.

“Oui.And another at the back of the skul . The putrefaction and scavenging make it impossible to determine bul et trajectory.”

“I’l need a ful set of cranial X-rays,” I said to Lisa.

“Orientation?”

“Al angles. And I’l need the skul .”

“Impossible.” Observer four again came alive. “We have an agreement.”

LaManche raised a gloved hand. “I have the responsibility to determine the truth in this matter.”

“You gave your word there would be no retention of specimens.” Though the man’s face was the color of oatmeal, a pink bud was mushrooming on each of his cheeks.

“Unless absolutely unavoidable.” LaManche was al reason.

Observer four turned to the man on his left. Observer three raised his chin and gazed down through lowered lids.

“Let him speak.” Unruffled. The rabbi counseling patience.

LaManche turned to me.

“Dr. Brennan, proceed with your analysis, leaving the skul and al untraumatized bone in place.”

“Dr. LaManche—”

“If that proves unworkable, resume normal protocol.”

I do not like being told how to do my job. I do not like working with less than the maximum available information, or employing less than optimum procedure.

Ido like and respect Pierre LaManche. He is the finest pathologist I’ve ever known.

I looked at my boss. The old man nodded almost imperceptibly.Work with me, he was signaling.

I shifted my gaze to the faces hovering above Avram Ferris. In each I saw the age-old struggle of dogma versus pragmatics. The body as temple. The body as ducts and ganglia and piss and bile.

In each I saw the anguish of loss.

The same anguish I’d overheard just minutes before.

“Of course,” I said quietly. “Cal when you’re ready to retract the scalp.”

I looked at Ryan. He winked, Ryan the cop hinting at Ryan the lover.

The woman was stil crying when I left the autopsy wing. Her companion, or companions, were now silent.

I hesitated, not wanting to intrude on personal sorrow.

Was that it? Or was that merely an excuse to shield myself?

I often witness grief. Time and again I am present for that head-on col ision when survivors face the realization of their altered lives. Meals that wil never be shared. Conversations that wil never be spoken. Little Golden Books that wil never be read aloud.

I see the pain, but have no help to offer. I am an outsider, a voyeur looking on after the crash, after the fire, after the shooting. I am part of the screaming sirens, the stretching of the yel ow tape, the zipping of the body bag.

I cannot diminish the overwhelming sorrow. And I hate my impotence.

Feeling like a coward, I turned into the family room.

Two women sat side by side, together but not touching. The younger could have been thirty or fifty. She had pale skin, heavy brows, and curly dark hair tied back on her neck. She wore a black skirt and a long black sweater with a high cowl that brushed her jaw.

The older woman was so wrinkled she reminded me of the dried-apple dol s crafted in the Carolina mountains. She wore an ankle-length dress whose color fel somewhere between black and purple. Loose threads spiraled where the top three buttons should have been.

I cleared my throat.

Apple Granny glanced up, tears glistening on the face of ten thousand creases.

“Mrs. Ferris?”

The gnarled fingers bunched and rebunched a hanky.

“I’m Temperance Brennan. I’l be helping with Mr. Ferris’s autopsy.”

The old woman’s head dropped to the right, jolting her wig to a suboptimal angle.

“Please accept my condolences. I know how difficult this is for you.”

The younger woman raised two heart-stopping lilac eyes. “Do you?”

Good question.

Loss is difficult to understand. I know that. My understanding of loss is incomplete. I know that, too.

I lost my brother to leukemia when he was three. I lost my grandmother when she’d lived more than ninety years. Each time, the grief was like a living thing, invading my body and nesting deep in my marrow and nerve endings.

Kevin had been barely past baby. Gran was living in memories that didn’t include me. I loved them. They loved me. But they were not the entire focus of my life, and both deaths were anticipated.

How did anyone deal with the sudden loss of a spouse? Of a child?

I didn’t want to imagine.

The younger woman pressed her point. “You can’t presume to understand the sorrow we feel.”

Unnecessarily confrontational, I thought. Clumsy condolences are stil condolences.

“Of course not,” I said, looking from her to her companion and back. “That was presumptuous of me.”

Neither woman spoke.

“I am very sorry for your loss.”

The younger woman waited so long I thought she wasn’t going to respond.

“I’m Miriam Ferris. Avram is…was my husband.” Miriam’s hand came up and paused, as if uncertain as to its mission. “Dora is Avram’s mother.”

The hand fluttered toward Dora, then dropped to rejoin its counterpart.

“I suppose our presence during the autopsy is irregular. There’s nothing we can do.” Miriam’s voice sounded husky with grief. “This is al so…” Her words trailed off, but her eyes stayed fixed on me.

I tried to think of something comforting, or uplifting, or even just calming to say. No words formed in my mind. I fel back on clichés.

“I do understand the pain of losing a loved one.”

A twitch made Dora’s right cheek jump. Her shoulders slumped and her head dropped.

I moved to her, squatted, and placed my hand on hers.

“Why Avram?” Choked. “Why my only son? A mother should not bury her son.”

Miriam said something in Hebrew or Yiddish.

“Who is this God? Why does he do this?”

Miriam spoke again, this time with quiet reprimand.

Dora’s eyes rol ed up to mine. “Why not take me? I’m old. I’m ready.” The wrinkled lips trembled.

“I can’t answer that, ma’am.” My own voice sounded husky.

A tear dropped from Dora’s chin to my thumb.

I looked down at that single drop of wetness.

I swal owed.

“May I make you some tea, Mrs. Ferris?”

“We’l be fine,” Miriam said. “Thank you.”

I squeezed Dora’s hand. The skin felt dry, the bones brittle.

Feeling useless, I stood and handed Miriam a card. “I’l be upstairs for the next few hours. If there’s anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to cal .”

Exiting the viewing room, I noticed one of the bearded observers watching from across the hal .

As I passed, the man stepped forward to block my path.

“That was very kind.” His voice had a peculiar raspy quality, like Kenny Rogers singing “Lucil e.”

“A woman has lost her son. Another her husband.”

“I saw you in there. It is obvious you are a person of compassion. A person of honor.”

Where was this going?

The man hesitated, as though debating a few final points with himself. Then he reached into a pocket, withdrew an envelope, and handed it to me.

“This is the reason Avram Ferris is dead.”

2

THE ENVELOPE HELD A SINGLE BLACK-AND-WHITE PRINT. PICTUREDwas a supine skeleton, skul twisted, jaw agape in a frozen scream.

I flipped the photo. Written on the back were the date, October 1963, and a blurry notation.H de 1 H. Maybe.