Dragonfly Bones (9 page)

Another DPS cruiser sat slantwise across the entrance road to what looked like the beginnings of a housing development. The officer checked Brittles's ID and pulled the bright yellow barrier back so we could pass. Fifty feet or so down the road I could see a backhoe, yards of yellow crime scene tape wrapped around bushes and trees, several men and women sifting dirt through large screened boxes. Somebody in a double-banded Tilley Stampede hat directed them, several of the park's picnic tables pulled up outside the crime scene tape, objects sorted onto each of the tables. Another man saw us coming, waved us over.

Brittles got out to talk to him quickly, talked directly into his ear before I could join them.

“Laura Wilson,” Brittles said. “Zeke Pardee. Another U.S. Marshal.”

“Just spend five minutes with me,” I pleaded. “I don't have a clue why we're here, I don't even
want
to be here, just tell me what you'll do for my daughter.”

“That's in transition.”

“Excuse me?”

“I had something worked out. It won't work now.”

“Why?”

The man in the Tilley hat climbed out of one of the trenches and walked up to us, casually brushing dirt from his encrusted jeans as though he really didn't care if dirt was there or not. It was Rich.

Both of us were astonished to see the other. I started to smile, but he turned quickly to face Brittles. As though I was nobody, which shocked me.

“You the paleontologist?” Brittles asked.

“Rich Thompson. NAGPRA. Remains Repatriation Coordinator. Arizona State Museum, on the AU campus.”

Brittles hesitated only for a moment, shook the offered hand. He didn't bother to introduce Pardee, but Rich grinned at each of us in turn, extending a hand to Brittles and Pardee, repeating his name. Brittles ignored him and strode to the three tables.

“Anything?” he asked Rich.

“Some great stuff. This whole Casa Grande area is built mostly on alluvium ground, not too old, a few hundred thousand years.”

“What's on this table?” Brittles ignored the archeological lesson.

“Pleistocene fossils, maybe mammoth, camel, bison, horse, llama, dire lion, very big tortoise, glyptodont, that's a very cool-looking thing, I've got some pictures in my office.”

“Fossils. This next table?”

“Haven't identified them yet. Probably came down from nearby hills and mountains, probably volcanic or metamorphic.”

“Fossils. Lava. Why have you even bothered collecting them?”

“This is a prime archeological area.”

“This is a crime scene.”

“True, true. But…it's also just outside a famous national monument. There are rules about how to dig through these grounds. They're holy grounds. Sacred grounds.”

“Bones. I just want to hear about the bones,” Brittles insisted.

“Especially bones. Bones are sacred. Bones are assumed to be Indian bones. Under NAGPRA, we have to take special care to retrieve the bones and return them to the proper Indian nation.”

“This is a crime scene. This is evidence.”

Rich pressed his lips together. He started his lecture.

“In 1990, the Arizona legislature passed laws that protect human burials and associated objects on state, county, and municipal lands and private lands. These laws provide Ari
zona's Indian tribes and descendants of Hispanic and Anglo settlers an opportunity to ensure that the remains of their ancestors are treated with respect and dignity. Both laws require that the discovery of burials more than fifty years old must be reported to the Arizona State Museum if the burials are in danger of disturbance. The museum identifies groups that might be related to the dead and coordinates discussions about how the burials should be treated.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Brittles said. “I appreciate your concerns for history, but I don't want history. I need to know about these bones. The housing development can deal with your museum.”

I smiled at that and Rich saw my smile, shot me an amazed look before he pushed a finger into Brittles's chest.

“These laws are often misunderstood,” Rich said emphatically. “The museum is prepared to respond promptly to reports of isolated discoveries and to remove remains and associated objects at its own expense. This housing developer is free to continue construction within a statutory maximum of ten days after discovery. They'll have to begin consultation through the museum before continuing construction and they'll have to make plans either to identify and remove burials before construction begins or to have appropriate personnel available to identify and remove burials as they are found.”

“Is the lecture over?” Pardee asked.

“Just tell us what you've found,” Brittles said. “Will you do that? Please?”

We all gathered around at least four hundred bone fragments scattered on the third table. Rich had made some effort to sort the bones according to size and shape, but it seemed a hopeless task.

“It's a lot of bones,” Rich said.

“Are any of them old bones?” Brittles asked. “Animals?”

“No.” Rich took off his hat, clutched it with both hands
over his chest. “No. They're all human. The oldest haven't been here more than a few years.”

“Why are they all broken up?” I asked.

“
Fargo,
” Rich said.

“The wood chipper?” I said.

“Yes.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Pardee said.

“In the movie.
Fargo.
One of the bad guys stuffs the other bad guy's body into a wood chipper.” Rich shuffled his feet, apologetic but firm. “I've heard through the Internet it's something the Mexican drug cartels do to dispose of bodies. When they can't just dump the bodies in the desert, I mean.”

“So, these bones,” Brittles said, poking his finger at a three-inch fragment.

“Don't touch them. Please.”

“Okay. I'll call in a forensic anthropologist, see what he thinks.”

“That's a rip, man. I've spent fifteen years looking at bones of pretty much anything, dead or alive, that's ever walked or crawled.”

Rich pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves, carefully separated half of the tabletop of bones from the other. I could see a pattern in what was left. Not immediately noticeable, but piles, more like groupings of similar bone fragments.

“Totally raw guess,” Rich said. “We're looking at a dozen people.”

“A dozen?”

“Give or take. It's my gut talking here, but…these just feel like different people. These twelve piles…these fragments.”

“Gut.” Brittles snorted at Pardee. “Zeke. Call Tucson. Get a forensic pathologist up here.”

“All women,” Rich said with a grimace. “I mean, probably. You can tell. This fragment, from a pelvis, it's not full-grown, it's female.”

“How many women?” I said.

“Women. Girls. Who knows? You wanted my take. That's it.”

“Altogether,” Brittles said, licking his lips, trying to avoid the obvious question, “how many people are we talking about?”

“Best guess?” Rich said to himself. “I'd say you've got a real nightmare here. At the
least,
a dozen bodies. At the most…I can't even say.”

W
illiam Little Bill Marriott stripped down for a full body cavity search. Bending over, he watched, not protesting, not making any facial expressions or sounds, while the Correctional Officers tossed his lockdown cell. Some COs didn't hassle the inmates while doing this. A few COs were kickstarters, out to make trouble, not at all happy when humiliated by an inmate using the CO as a target for urine or feces.
All
COs got things hurled at them. Most survived the indignities by publicly ignoring them. A few couldn't restrain their anger and humiliation, occasionally taking it out on the inmates, often griping to other COs. Kickstarters. Usually male COs, macho alpha-dog males, sniffing for trouble, baring their teeth. In some backward state prisons and jails, nearly all the COs were kickstarters. A way of life, but not one tolerated in the Arizona prison system.

Odd, that they'd spend so much time searching him, when he was the person who feared attack from somebody else.

Little Bill had been shanked before. Once in the right thigh, once a glancing strike across his rib cage, the last time a serious attempt to disembowel him.

Shanks are prison knives.

Totally improvised, hand-manufactured from silverware, metal scraps, including bits of motors from razors and tape recorders, from bits of wood, plastic, Plexiglas shards, sharpened toothbrushes or toothbrushes with the heads broken off,
cafeteria cutlery, or just about anything that could be turned into a stabbing weapon.

For most inmates, some degree of intelligent information comes from the physical characteristics of the shank: what it was made from; who made it; how it got passed from one inmate to another; even the gift of design balanced against the quality of the shank and how long it took to be made.

Simple shanks come from a piece of found material. A sliver of wood or glass, for instance, a metal shaving from a machine shop, a discarded toothbrush melted enough so the con can jam a razor blade in a carefully filed slot at the end. Most shanks aren't even sharpened by design. A sliver of Plexiglas or a razor blade needs no sharpening. A random piece of metal
must
be honed to an edge, usually by days of continually rubbing the metal against something as simple as a concrete floor, although COs look on cell floors and walls for signs of rubbing.

Inmates never ever have the opportunity to get a sliver of glass because they just don't exist in prison. Toothbrush handles are available, even though inmates only get special super-short-handle toothbrushes, about one and a half inches long, and razor blades always are available from their single-use-type razors, which are supposedly counted when given out and then collected every time they shave.

Supposedly collected. Not always.

So shanks can be as found, like the occasional Plexiglas shard or sliver of hard wood, or manufactured. Either way, a shank is a deadly weapon if used correctly on the first strike. Even a good shank has to be used just right or it will slip so the victim won't be stabbed, just scraped. COs wear stab vests, but most inmates know the vulnerable spots around the vest and occasionally succeed in wounding a CO. Inmates don't have stab vests, so stabbing is easier. If an inmate goes after his cellmate, stabbing can mean death. One inmate, sentenced to life for three murders, had actually stabbed his roommate forty-seven times, and when the COs came to sub
due him, he said he'd make no fuss if they'd give him some over-easy eggs and an extra link of sausage.

Unlike the movies, Little Bill never worried that somebody would use a shank on him while demanding sex. Or even for murder. Inmates shank other inmates for any reason, usually a gangbanger thing that happens fast, with everybody disappearing even faster. The COs just find a patch of blood on the concrete floor. Most shanked inmates don't even go to the hospital for treatment, insisting that it was an “accident” and refusing to rat out another inmate, which would only lead to being shanked again.

Little Bill knew that shanks rarely survive a shakedown search, but that they are made in such numbers that all searches turned up a fairly large quantity. But a lot more shanks are kept in a neutral place. Hidden in the yard, in the machine shops, in the laundry, the cafeteria, in every common area of the prison, usually hidden by somebody to be used either by a gang or by another individual con.

Anybody in Florence could be shanked.

Inmates, COs, administrative staff, visiting teachers or preachers, even the warden himself. Nobody was exempt, if the conditions were right.

Little Bill heard it whispered down the lane that somebody had a contract on him. Little Bill wouldn't say why he was a target, but he was believed by the warden, who put him in PS, professional segregation, which was essentially being put in the hole. Total lockdown in an individual cell, no contact with anybody except the COs who brought his meals and who supervised his one hour a day out of PS to walk around a walled yard, with nobody else present. Little Bill knew that PS offered him additional protection against being shanked, but there was no absolute protection, no guarantee at all.

The old name was protective custody. PC or PS, when an inmate believed he was in danger from other inmates, he PC's up. In prison jargon that means the inmate demands protective segregation. Many times this is done by the inmate
approaching an officer and quietly saying, ‘I need PC,' or something like that. Or the inmate may make a small sign and sit in the back of his cell until the count officer goes by. Then the inmate gives him the sign without saying anything. The point is that if the other inmates find out he's asked for PC, his ass is grass and he becomes a very serious target; his life is immediately in danger.

Despite his loneliness in PS, Little Bill sometimes refused his one-hour walk in the yard. He knew that most attacks were like a blitzkrieg. Somebody rushed at you, maybe that somebody got passed the shank at the very last moment, he came past you and stabbed, sometimes stabbed many times if no CO was nearby, then the shank got passed off to yet another person and the only real evidence was somebody like Little Bill bleeding to death on some dirty concrete floor.

He felt truly vulnerable. Little Bill had applied to be transferred out of Florence, but even urgent paperwork took its time working through the red-tape cycle. So he finally refused even the hour's freedom from his cell, refused all contact with any other inmates in Florence, even inmates he knew to be friends.

The only people in Florence called convicts were the real old-timers, the professionals. A few old-time white brothers from the South called the black brothers coonmates, but all other people were inmates.

Segregated in PS, even Little Bill had no control over the COs.

One morning CO III Beethoven came to Little Bill's PS cell and said the warden wanted to see him. Little Bill said there was nothing to discuss with the warden and he wasn't leaving his cell anyway, even if Jesus Christ himself wanted a visit. CO III Beethoven had a Taser and shot it twice into Little Bill, the second time a freak where one hook and wire of the Taser stuck into his shirt pocket and the other hook went into his right pants leg, so the heavy voltage went clear
down his body and pretty much drove Little Bill out of his mind.

Unfortunately, Little Bill thought that CO III Beethoven was just another kickstarter, going out of his way to cause trouble. This was a bad mistake.

Fifteen minutes later, he was walking from Unit Three to Unit Six when CO III Beethoven stepped into the hallway, turned toward Little Bill, walked on past him, and that was it. A five-inch-long nail went neatly between two ribs and directly into Little Bill's heart, killing him almost instantly.

The criminal investigators' attention was turned away from CO III Beethoven, who left work early that day, pleading stress and fatigue, drove to the Tucson airport, and paid cash for a one-way ticket to Nome, Alaska.