The Bone Man (3 page)

Medical pathologists, administrative staff, an elite State Police Crime Scene Services unit, and MGAP inhabited The Grief Shop. The building contained a state-of-theart forensic pathology center, one immense autopsy theater, two cold storage facilities, a trace evidence room, and specialized rooms for family counseling and identifying human remains.

In addition, OCME had one of the top forensic anthropologists in the country—Dr. Dorothy Cravitz. Addy was right. Of course I had to see Didi’s hard work. She was old and crotchety, and I adored her. The eminent doctor had no kids of her own. Her reconstructions were her children. She was at her happiest when a skull began looking human again.

And now she had one from
A.D
. 1100 to work on. Of course she was proud. Honestly, I couldn’t wait to see the reconstruction of an ancient Puebloan ancestor. A couple of my Zuni fetishes were replicas from that era, not to mention that the Old Ones were said to be the ancestors of the Zuni.

And their pottery?
Spectacular
was an inadequate word for the beauty they’d imbued in such serviceable vessels. I just wished I hadn’t heard that rumor about Hank’s “adventure” until after I’d seen Didi’s work. Boy, I needed to process Hank’s latest move.

I walked down OCME’s halls at a fast pace. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that Addy Morgridge was a reincarnation of Veda. Sure Veda had been old, and Addy was only in her fifties. Veda had been Jewish, and Addy sure as hell wasn’t. But I’d never consciously realized how alike they were. Shook me up. That and the “little” tidbit she’d dropped about Hank.

I sighed. I thought Hank and I had gotten over the hump I’d caused by my ill-conceived romantic foray with CSS sergeant, Rob Kranak. I’d explained to Hank where my feelings had come from—Kranak was my good buddy, and he was there when my need for safety and security in a world falling apart blotted out all else. Hank was in Maine, and Rob was here. Wrong headed, but honest.

I thought Hank understood. For heavens sake, he was a county sheriff in rural Maine. Okay, so he’d once been an NYPD homicide detective, but that was . . .

“Hey, Ms. Whyte!”

I stopped short. A young man in his twenties, fresh-faced and eager with piercing blue eyes, looked across the lobby at me. I had no idea who he was. “Um, hello.”

His smile was self-effacing. So why didn’t I believe it?

“I’m Adrian,” he said. “We met at a party. I’m the Harvard grad who’s working in MGAP now. You know, for my doctorate.”

“Ah, of course.” I held out my hand, and we shook. “Nice to see you. How’s it going?”

He frowned. “Okay. You’re missed.”

I smiled. For some reason, the kid was annoying me. “If I know Gert, she’s doing twice the job I ever did.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, sure.”

“Sorry, I’ve got to run.”

He petted Penny behind the ears and followed me to the reception desk.

“Hey, Sarge,” I said. “Would you punch me inside?” I’d always known the code. Not anymore.

“Can I come?”

I turned. Adrian was still there.

“Sorry, Adrian,” I said. “No can do. Sarge?”

The buzzer sounded, and I pulled open the heavy door that led to the autopsy suites.

I looked back. Adrian stood there, hands on hips, with a petulant frown marring his face.

Gert had to have her hands full with that one onboard.

The first thing I noted was the impeccable cleanliness and order where there had been chaos a year earlier when Veda was taken ill. The linoleum floor glistened, and not a single corpse on a steel gurney lay in the hall awaiting autopsy. I looked through the window into the large refrigeration room. The dead were carefully lined up in a rectangle around the four walls, the way Veda had preferred they be arranged.

All the order was bugging me, too. I sighed. I guess I wasn’t in the mood for exploring, or even for reflection.
Emotionally, things were finally easing for me. At last I was settling into a good rhythm. No point in bringing up memories of dead children and murdered loved ones.

I hooked a sharp left and walked toward Didi Cravitz’s office-lab. The room I remembered was small. Forensic anthro was a late-comer to OCME. Just outside her office door sat a table with one of her earliest reconstructions—a handsome young man whose skeletal remains had been a mystery at OCME for nearly a decade, until Didi came on the scene.

I knocked, peered inside the darkened office. Didi had no window, and I could only see the clutter in silhouette from the light pouring through the office door.

“Didi?”

“In here.”

“Can I flip on the light?”

“No!”

I walked inside the small office. No Didi. “Where the hell are you?”

“Behind the screen,” came the disembodied voice. “Hang on for a minute, all right?”

“Sure!” Didi always loved the mysterious. I walked over to her worktable. There were the pot shards, or potsherds, as I’d been taught to call them. Beautiful things, even broken. These were a deep reddish brown with designs in black of mazes and cross-hatchings and spirals. Next to the potsherds, Didi had sketched a diagram of the pot, before it had been broken. Her notes read twelve inches at the base, eighteen inches where it bowed out, and around six inches at the neck. Sort of like a blowup beach ball, round and full.

The ancient pot had to have been built around the skull. I wondered about its purpose. In all my reading about the Anasazi, I’d never heard of that.

I slipped on some latex gloves from Didi’s dispenser and touched each of the potsherds. I’d never been to Chaco
Canyon, the most revered of the Ancient Ones’ sites, nor had I ever held any Chaco potsherds. So this was a real treat.

“I’m amazed at how vivid the markings are on the potsherds,” I hollered to Didi.

“I know,” she said back. “New Mexico’s dry air has really preserved an incredible number of pots and petroglyphs and pictographs. But I’m over the moon about this skull, my dear. She’s precious. Wait until you see this woman!”

“I can’t wait,” I said. “Hurry up!”

“Just a few more minutes,” Didi said. “I’ve got to tweak her nose a bit. My calculations tell me it’s off.”

I lifted the largest potsherd, which was about the size of a deck of cards. From all the pieces on the tray, I saw where Didi got her sketch for the pot. “It’s a shame that the pot’s broken.”

“But without that, we’d never have found the skull.”

“True.” The most sacred site of the Anasazi, Chaco was abandoned around
A.D
. 1200. I’d often wondered why. A legion of others did, too, yet the mystery was yet to be solved. Nowadays, it was believed that the Hopi and Zuni and other modern tribes were their descendents.

I’d been to the fabulous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and others near Sedona, Arizona, but I knew someday I’d see Chaco’s sandstone cliffs and ancient city. I wished Hank had more of an interest. Ah, well.

I lifted another potsherd. A rust hunk of rock sat beneath it. To my eyes, it resembled a primitive fetish carving. Maybe a wolf, maybe a mountain lion. The stone was warm in my hand, like the sun on the desert rock. I turned it over. It was maybe three inches long, an inch high. I didn’t think it was from the Chaco era at all, but much later.

“Where’s the rock from, Didi?” I said.

“What rock?”

“The one that was with the potsherds?” It felt heavy in
my hand, too heavy for sandstone. “What’s it made of, do you know?”

She leaned around the edge of the screen, gray hair askew, clay streaking her face. “What’s with you this morning, twenty questions?”

I made a goofy face. “Sorry. I’ve been collecting Zuni fetishes for a long time, but this past year, I’ve really gotten into it. This looks like a fetish to me, one that started life as a concretion.”

“What’s that?”

“Y’know, a found rock shaped like an animal that the carver enhances. I just wonder where it came from.” I held up the rock.

“No idea.” She disappeared behind the screen. “It came in with the pot and skull. Come on in.”

My blood quickened. This was going to be very cool.

The gray folding screen blended perfectly with the office’s cinderblock walls. I walked around the screen. Didi was in her lab coat, her back to me. Her arms moved in a smooth rhythm, like a symphonic conductor, and her gray hair shot out in all directions, as if following the music of her arms. A narrow beam of light shined on what I guessed was her reconstruction of the ancient skull found in the Anasazi pot.

“Glad you came!” she barked over her shoulder.

“So this is the famous American Indian skull that you’re reconstructing.”

She nodded. “Wish it wasn’t so damned famous.”

I moved closer and tried to peer around Didi to see the reconstruction. There wasn’t enough room. “Why the screen?”

“It’s been hell,” she said without turning. “Goddamned hell. Press. Indians. Smithsonian boobies. The woman’s getting no peace.”

“So it’s a woman. I’d like to see.”

“Just one sec.” Her hands flew over the face molded
with clay and resin and intuition, and she moved them lightly, tweaking here and massaging there.

“God, I’m tired.” She swiped the back of her hand across her hair, leaving a streak of clay. The color blended perfectly. “I’m too old for this crap.”

“No way. But what about that 3-D computer stuff? I hear it’s pretty good at reconstructing.”

“I need my fingers,” she said. “I need to feel it, Tally. To see the individual come alive beneath my hands. I need to sense it, to find the face. I can’t do any of that with a computer. Not a bit.”

“I understand, Didi. I do.”

Her shoulders slumped. “Almost there. Try like hell, I can’t make an Indian out of this skull. You look.”

Didi backed off, and the light beamed down onto a strikingly beautiful face.

I squeezed the rock in my hand so tightly it hurt. I suddenly felt dizzy. I knew that face. “Ohmigod.”

I walked closer to Didi’s clay reconstruction. It seemed to pulse beneath Didi’s single spotlight. I raised my hand, but didn’t touch. The hair was pulled back, tight, and she wore bangs. Her cheekbones were high, her whole face angular, right down to her jutting chin. Her lips were thin and sculpted and wore an almost-kiss. Her large eyes tilted up at the corners, just a bit. She was exquisite in every way, and I knew her.

The lights blazed. Addy Morgridge and Didi Cravitz sat across from me. I sat on a tall lab stool as I sipped bourbon from a coffee mug and tried to steady my heart rate. It wasn’t working.

“I know her, Addy,” I said. “I know her well.”

She sighed. “You can’t possibly know a thousand-year-old woman.”

I rolled my eyes. “I understand that. Believe me. That’s why what I’m seeing makes no sense. This woman, my
friend, is our contemporary. She’s obviously not from
A.D
. 1100.”

Didi turned to Addy. “I told you she didn’t look like an Indian!”

Addy snorted. “Not
your
image of one. Of course she’s an American Indian, and she’s been dead for almost a thousand years.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Didi said. “There was a huge protest when we tried to carbon date the skull. The governor found the idea disrespectful. So we had to let it drop.”

Addy brushed a hand across her clipped Afro. “I need some of that bourbon.” She sighed. “We’d better test it, no matter what the governor says. That this woman—”

“We can’t test the skull,” Didi said. “It’s absolutely forbidden by the federal government.”

I poured Addy two fingers of Wild Turkey, splashed it with water from Didi’s sink, and handed her the glass.

“Remember,” Addy said. “The pot was broken during a Peabody installation. Salem’s Peabody has one of the best American Indian collections in the U.S. The pot is old. No doubt about it.”

“Aren’t either of you listening to me?” I said. “This poor woman’s skull was somehow put into an ancient pot. I don’t know how or why. I recognize her, for heaven’s sake. I doubt she put her skull in there of her own free will.”

Addy knocked back her bourbon. “No matter who she is, you’re right about that one, Tally.”

Didi draped some moist cheesecloth over the reconstruction, then washed her hands. “I
knew
it. She was too good to be true. From the very first. She never felt right.”

“Oh, come off it, Didi,” Addy said. “You can’t buy into Tally’s fiction. I’m telling you, this is the real deal. She just
looks
like someone Tally knows.”

Addy made some sense. “It’s possible, I guess,” I said. “I
remember an ancient skull they found out in Washington State.”

“You mean the guy,” Addy said, “who looked like Star Trek’s . . . What’s his name?”

“Patrick Stewart,” I said. “The reconstruction really did look like him. I remember.”

Addy wrapped her hand around my arm. “The museum found her
inside
that damned pot.”

Didi lifted a bony hand to the covered face. “Morgridge has a point, for once.”

Addy snorted.

“I see your point,” I said. “But what’s unnerving is that I know the woman. I recognized her. She’s a friend.”

“There easily could be a resemblance between the two women, that’s all,” Addy said. “You’re mistaken, Tally. The pot’s almost a thousand years old. Think about it.”

I slid my glass onto the counter and stood. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Seeing it . . . her . . . just spooked me. Sure. I’ll call her. She owns a shop on the Vineyard. We’ll chat, and I’ll feel about a million times better.”

Shouts from outside in the hall. “What the hell . . .”

Gert appeared at the door. “Hey! National Geographic’s here. And they’re makin’ a big brouhaha.”

“Shit!” Addy said. “I forgot the Geographic people were coming today to look at her. They planned to do some filming.”

“The governor said that was a bad idea,” Didi said.

“His problem.” Addy waved at the cheeseclothed head. “Now they can’t anyway. They absolutely must not see her until we’re sure she an old Indian. I mean, I know she is, but I’ll feel better once Tally has talked to her friend. The magazine’s doing a piece on the skull, The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Didi, me, the Ancient Ones. Cripes.”