Devil Bones

by Kathy Reichs

  “I’m talking about murder, you dumb fuck.”

  Roseboro’s apathy showed its first fault line.

  “What?”

  “Give it up, Kenny. Maybe you skate on freedom of religion.”

  “Give what up?”

  “John Gacy. Jeffrey Dahmer. Rule number one, dumb ass. Never stash body parts in your own crib.”

  “Body parts?” Roseboro was definitely interested now.

  Slidell only glared.

  Saucer-eyed, Roseboro directed a question to me. “What is he talking about?”

  Slidell opened the folder and, one by one, slapped scene photos onto the tabletop. The cauldron. The statues of Saint Barbara and Eleggua. The dead chicken. The goat skull. The human remains.

  Roseboro viewed but didn’t touch the prints. After a full ten seconds, he wiped a hand across his mouth.

  “This is bullshit. I’ve got no way of knowing what a tenant drags into my basement. I told you. I never set foot in the place.”

  Slidell gave him silence. As is common, Roseboro felt compelled to fill it.

  “Look. I got a letter from some pinstripe saying the house was mine. I signed the papers, ran an ad. Guy named Cuervo called, agreed to a one-year lease.”

  “You background him?”

  “I wasn’t offering space in Trump Tower. We agreed on a price. Cuervo ponied up the cash.”

  “When was this?”

  Roseboro searched the ceiling, the fingers of one hand worrying a scab on the back of the other. Finally, “A year ago March.”

  “You got a copy of the lease?”

  “I never got around to writing one up. Cuervo forked over every month, never asked for anything. After a while, I forgot about paperwork. Stupid, as things turned out.”

  “How’d Cuervo pay?”

  “I already said. Cash.”

  Slidell wiggled his fingers in a give-me-more gesture.

  “He mailed it. I couldn’t have cared less if the guy had a bank account, and I wasn’t about to drive to Charlotte each month.”

  “Your little arrangement didn’t have nothing to do with the IRS, now did it?”

  Roseboro’s fingers went into overdrive. “I pay my taxes.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Flecks of crusty endothelium were building on the tabletop.

  “You want to give that a rest,” Slidell said. “You’re turning my stomach.”

  Roseboro dropped both hands to his lap.

  “Tell me about Cuervo.”

  “Latino. Seemed like a nice enough dude.”

  “Wife? Family?”

  Another shoulder hitch. “We weren’t exactly pen pals.”

  “He legal?”

  “What am I, border patrol?”

  Slidell dug a printout from his folder. The photo looked dark and blurry from where I sat.

  “That him?”

  Roseboro glanced at the face, nodded.

  “Go on.” Slidell took up his pen. I suspected the note-taking was mostly for show.

  Again, Roseboro shrugged. He really had the move down.

  “After June, the guy stopped paying, stopped answering his cell phone. By September I was so pissed I drove up here to toss his ass out.” Roseboro shook his head in disillusionment over his fallen fellow man. “Shithead was gone. Really screwed me.”

  “You’re bringing tears to my eyes, Kenny, you being such an honorable guy and all. Cuervo clear out his stuff?”

  Roseboro shook his head. “Left everything. It was crap.”

  “You got his number?”

  Roseboro unhooked his mobile, powered on, and scrolled the address book.

  Slidell jotted down the digits. “Go on.”

  “Nothing else to tell. I hired a Realtor and sold the place. End of story.”

  “Not quite.” After gophering the stack, Slidell slid free a shot of the human skull. “Who’s this?”

  Roseboro’s eyes dropped to the print, snapped back up. “Jesus Christ. How would I know?”

  Slidell removed a copy of the school portrait from his folder and held it up. “And this?”

  Roseboro looked like a man whose mind was racing. For composure? Comprehension? Explanation? A way out?

  “I’ve never seen that kid in my life. Look. I may have tried to scam on a few taxes, but, honest to God, I know nothing about any of this. I swear.” Roseboro’s gaze jumped from Slidell to me and back. “I live in Wilmington. Been there for five years. Check it out.”

  “Count on it,” Slidell said.

  “You want, I’ll take a lie detector. Now. I’ll do it now.”

  Wordlessly, Slidell gathered the prints, placed the folder on the tablet, and pushed to his feet.

  I stood.

  Together, we started for the door.

  “What about me?” Roseboro whined at our backs. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Slidell spoke without turning.

  “Don’t schedule no auditions.”

  “Impressions?” I asked when we were back in Slidell’s office.

  “He’s a sniveling little weenie. But my gut says he’s telling the truth.”

  “You’re thinking Cuervo?”

  “Or Auntie.”

  I shook my head. “Wanda died a year and a half ago. I’m almost certain the chicken was killed within the last few months. I’ll phone my entomologist, see if he’ll hazard a preliminary opinion.”

  “If Wanda’s clear, then I gotta like Cuervo. Assuming Roseboro’s not taking us for a ride.”

  “May I see the mug shot?”

  Slidell dug the printout from the folder.

  The quality was, indeed, lousy. The man was all teeth and wrinkles, with thick gray hair swept back from his face.

  “If Cuervo is Latino, Santería makes sense,” Slidell said. “Or that other one.”

  “Palo Mayombe.” I hoped that wasn’t it. If so, I hoped it was not of the Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo variety. “What about Roseboro?”

  “I’ll let him cool his heels, then go in for some more face time. Fear has a way of jogging the gray cells.”

  “Then?”

  “I’ll cut him loose and start looking for Cuervo. Start with his cell phone.”

  “And the INS. Cuervo could be undocumented.”

  Slidell rolled his eyes at my use of the term. “Him being illegal could explain Roseboro’s desire for cash and carry only.”

  “Rinaldi call in?”

  Slidell checked his voice mail and mobile, then shook his head.

  “I’m going to the ME office,” I said. “Let me know if Rinaldi learns anything. If not, maybe it’s time to put the girl’s face out there. I’ll phone when Larabee and I finish with the Lake Wylie torso.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Slidell said.

  We didn’t know that another plan was already unfolding. A plan traveling a deadly collision course with our own.

  15

  WEEKENDS MEAN PAYCHECKS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR KNOCKING back booze. Consequently, the number of brawls, batteries, mishaps, and misfortunes swells from quittin’ time on Friday till church on Sunday. Week’s opening can be bedlam at a morgue. Week’s close, on the other hand, is often tranquil.

  Such was not the case this Friday morning.

  Two blocks out I knew something was wrong. Vehicles filled the few slots fronting the MCME and lined the curbs on College and Phifer.

  Drawing close, I could read logos. WBTV. WSOC. WCCB. News 14 Carolina.

  Gunning into the lot, I threw the car into park, flew out the door, and raced toward the building. TV crews, print reporters, and photographers blocked the front entrance. Head lowered, elbows winging, I charged into the pack.

  “Dr. Brennan,” a voice said.

  Ignoring it, I plowed forward, anger tensing every muscle in my body. After much shoving by me and name-calling by others, I finally broke through.

  Boyce Lingo was holding court at the top of the steps. As before, Crew-Cut-Squirrel-Cheeks was covering his flank. />
  “We are a tolerant society.” Lingo’s kindly smile faded to stern. “But now is not a time for indulgence. An attitude that permits devil worship permits every other brand of evil. Drunkenness, adultery, idolatry, homosexuality. All manner of antifamily moral perversion.”

  I stepped forward, arms raised like a school crossing guard. “This press conference is over.”

  Lenses swiveled in my direction. Microphones shot toward my face.

  I heard murmuring. My name. Anthropologist. UNCC.

  “Your presence here is hampering our ability to do our jobs.”

  Lingo froze, arms V-ed downward, fingers intertwined in front of his genitals.

  “You must all leave.”

  “Is it true Anson Tyler’s head was cut off?” a reporter called out.

  “It is not,” I snapped, immediately regretted being sucked into an answer.

  “What can you tell us about the Tyler case?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “No comment.” Glacial.

  “What about the body found at Lake Wylie?” Yelled from the back of the mob.

  “No comment.”

  “The commissioner says satanic symbols were carved into the flesh.”

  “No. Comment.”

  I glared at Lingo, fury firing from nerve ending to nerve ending.

  “Why not admit the truth, Dr. Brennan?” Lingo, the concerned activist.

  “You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you on the ass.”

  A small, collective gasp. A few nervous giggles.

  “The people of Charlotte deserve answers.”

  “The people of Charlotte do not deserve you generating baseless fears.” Compared to Lingo’s syrupy baritone, my voice sounded shrill.

  Lingo smiled benignly, a loving parent observing an ill-tempered child. I wanted to kick the sanctimonious bastard right down the steps.

  “Is it LeVay? Church of Satan?” Shouted.

  “Is it true these people are torturing and killing animals?”

  “How big is the Charlotte coven?”

  “Disperse now or the police will be called to clear the premises.”

  My threat was ignored.

  “Do the cops have a suspect?”

  “Why the cover-up?”

  A mike veered close. I slapped it aside. The boom winged back, scraping my cheek.

  I lost it.

  “There! Is! No! Cover-up! There is no goddamn conspiracy!”

  Lenses clicked furiously.

  “You are being manipulated!” Stepping forward, I grabbed a television camera and turned it onto the crowd. “Look at yourselves. This is a scalp hunt!”

  Behind me I heard the glass door swing open.

  “Hit the road!”

  Fingers wrapped my wrist.

  Yanking free, I made underhanded sweeping gestures with my fingers.

  “Quick! Maybe you can find a nun who’s been raped. Or a bludgeoned granny eaten by her poodle.”

  “Easy.” Whispered. Turning my shoulders, Larabee nudged me toward the entrance.

  Before the door closed, I managed to toss off one last suggestion.

  Ten minutes later I’d regained my composure.

  “How bad was it?”

  Larabee recapped the highlights.

  “Clusterfuck?”

  Larabee nodded.

  “The mikes caught it?” A headache knocked at the back of each eyeball.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Him, too. Let’s hope word doesn’t reach the chief.”

  North Carolina has a statewide medical examiner system, with the chief ME’s office in Chapel Hill.

  “He’ll be pissed.”

  “He will,” Larabee agreed.

  “What now?”

  “You and I autopsy the Lake Wylie kid.”

  And that’s what we did.

  By three, X-rays glowed from light boxes, fingerprint forms covered one countertop, organ slivers floated in jars, and bone specimens lay in stainless steel bowls. Liver, pancreas, lung, stomach, kidney, and brain for the ME. Clavicular extremities, pubic symphyses, cervical vertebrae, and a two-inch plug of femoral shaft for me.

  The pentagram and 666 signs hung ghostly pale in their formalin bath. Gray-pink craters marked the excision sites in the chest and belly.

  Normally, when all cutting and weighing and observing is completed, an assistant closes the body, organizes the specimens, and cleans up so the pathologist can proceed to other aspects of the postmortem.

  Today, Larabee and I lingered, baffled and frustrated.

  “It’s ass backwards.” As Larabee spoke, Hawkins returned organs to the open chest cavity. “There’s more aerobic decomposition than anaerobic putrefaction.”

  “As though the body had decomposed from the outside in, rather than the inside out,” I said.

  “Exactly. And there’s too little of either, given a minimum PMI of forty-eight hours.”

  “Temperatures have been in the eighties all week,” I said. “That stretch of shoreline gets full sun for more than ten hours a day. The corpse was loosely wrapped. Given that combination, things should have headed south fast.”

  “Very fast,” Larabee agreed.

  “And there should be signs of animal scavenging.”

  “Yes.”

  Hawkins transferred the liver. It made a soft, wet plop.

  “And there’s nothing to indicate this body spent time in the lake.”

  “Zip.”

  “So what’s going on?”

  “Got me.”

  Hawkins hooked a short curved needle into the boy’s chest. The skin tugged up as he drew together the edges of the Y incision.

  “Stomach contents suggest the kid ate several hours before death. Beans. Peppers. Some kind of citrus, lemon, maybe lime.”

  “Hopefully we’ll get a hit off the prints,” I said.

  “You’re putting his age at sixteen to eighteen?”

  I nodded. My preliminary was based on the clavicle, the pubic symphyses, and the X-rays.

  “Could be a pisser. Teenagers vanish every day.” Larabee tipped his head in the general direction of uptown. “Most are right out there, living on the streets. Parents start looking, a kid goes to ground. Someone stops showing up, the gang figures the kid’s moved on.”

  Hawkins turned to Larabee. The ME nodded.

  Hawkins shifted the body from the table to a waiting gurney, covered it with plastic, released the foot brake, and rolled it into the corridor. The door clicked into place behind him.

  “I’ll check the vertebrae,” I said. “If there’s an arrest, cut marks could prove useful.”

  “Assuming the perp kept his tool and the cops find it. You thinking saw?”

  “Striations suggest a toothed or serrated blade. I’ll examine everything under magnification.”

  Larabee stripped off his gloves. “I’ll contact Slidell, get the prints into the system.”

  I remembered. “Have you looked at the brain?”

  Larabee nodded. “I’m no neuroanatomist, but the organization looks human to me.”

  “Could try a precipitin test.”

  I referred to a procedure in which anti–human antibodies, produced by injecting a rabbit with human blood, are placed on a gel diffusion plate with an unknown sample. If a precipitin line forms where the two samples meet, then the unknown sample is not from a human being. The test can be performed using antidog, antideer, or anti–whatever species is in question. Though usually done with blood, I suspected it might work with brain matter.

  “Worth a try,” Larabee said.

  “I’ll get on it.”

  Circling the empty table, I picked up my bowls and headed for the stinky room.

  I was right about the cut marks.

  Though neck bones are not ideal for preserving blade characteristics, the fourth cervical vertebra had been sliced transversely, preserving a series of striae exhibiting concave bending with fixed-radius curvature sweeping
away from, not around, the breakaway point. The fifth vertebra had a single false start measuring .09 of an inch in width. Every cut surface had a uniform, almost polished appearance. I found little entrance or exit chipping.

  Everything suggested a power circular saw.

  After photographing the sawn vertebrae, I called the entomologist to whom I’d sent the Greenleaf cellar specimens on Tuesday morning. He had them. He’d looked at them.

  He talked about coffin flies from the chicken and empty puparial cases from the goat head. He went on about Collembola, Dermestidae, and cockroaches in the dirt. He gave me numbers and statistical probabilities.

  I asked for a bottom line.

  Pending final observations, in his opinion, the chicken had been dead roughly six weeks.

  I outlined the facts of the Lake Wylie case, and told him another set of samples was en route to his lab.

  He said hot damn.

  I told him we suspected a body dump, but wanted to rule out that the victim had come from the lake. He said send the plastic wrapping. I agreed.

  I bolted a quick sandwich, then began making thin sections from the bone plug removed from the Lake Wylie corpse. If Slidell bombed with the prints, I hoped histology would help me refine my age estimate.

  Normally the procedure is grindingly tedious. Using a very sharp diamond blade, you cut cross-sectional slices of bone measuring one hundred microns in thickness. Or, at least they used to. The micron was officially abolished in 1967 by the CGPM, the intergalactic council on weights and measures. The micron is now the micrometer. No matter. The little bugger is still .00004 of an inch. That’s why the slices are called thin sections.

  Once placed on slides, the thin sections are eyeballed with a light microscope at a magnification of 100X. Then you count stuff.

  Here’s the premise. Bone is a dynamic tissue, constantly repairing and replacing itself. Throughout life, the microscopic bits increase in number. Therefore, a tally of osteons, osteon fragments, lamellae, and canal systems provides a means of evaluating adult age.

  My scores supported my initial estimate of sixteen to eighteen years. No surprise.

  But something else was.

  While counting, I noticed odd discolorations in several of the Haversian canals, the tiny tunnels that allow nerves and vessels to traverse a bone’s interior.

  Some sort of invasive microorganism? Soil staining? Mineral deposition? Microfracturing?