Break No Bones

by Kathy Reichs

  Before her sister’s arrival, Emma and I had had plenty of time to talk. I described all that had happened since Thursday. She reported that the Berkeley County coroner had ruled Susie Ruth Aikman’s death as natural. The old woman had died of a massive coronary.

  Then Emma had told the strange tale of the cruise ship incident.

  A male passenger died while at sea. When the ship anchored in Charleston, the man’s widow authorized cremation, signed the paperwork, then left with the urn. Days later a woman appeared at Emma’s office claiming to be the wife of the deceased and wanting the body. Documents showed that lady number two was, indeed, the missus. Lawsuits were pending concerning disposition of the gentleman’s ashes.

  “This philandering cad had two women fighting over his remains, Tempe. He was one of the lucky ones.” Emma swallowed. I could see that conversation was becoming an effort. “I’m dying, of course. We all know that.”

  Fighting a tremor in my chest, I’d tried to shush her. She continued to speak.

  “My death will not go unnoticed. I have people in my life. I’ll be remembered, maybe even missed. But Marshall and Rodriguez preyed upon society’s outcasts. Those dwelling alone on the edge, those with no one to mourn their passing. Cookie Godine’s disappearance wasn’t even reported. Ditto for Helms and Montague. Thanks to you, Tempe, those bodies did not remain anonymous.”

  Unable to speak, I’d stroked Emma’s hair, one gulping, heaving breath away from full-out sobbing.

  Gullet resumed speaking after his own brief reverie. “Doesn’t seem right.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t.”

  “She’s a fine woman, and a true professional.”

  Gullet stood. I stood.

  “Guess it’s best not to question the good Lord’s ways.”

  There seemed no reply to that, so I gave none.

  “You did a crack-up job, Doc. I learned some things working with you.”

  Gullet held out a hand. Surprised, I shook it.

  The last missing piece went from me to Gullet.

  “The leak to Winborne didn’t come from your office, Sheriff. At Emma’s urging, Lee Anne Miller stirred the pot at the MUSC morgue. Winborne’s informant was a second-year autopsy tech.” Emma had also told me that on Saturday.

  Gullet started to speak. I cut him off. If he was about to offer an apology for having accused me of sabotaging the investigation, I didn’t want one.

  “Was,” I emphasized. “The gentleman is currently unemployed.”

  Gullet thought for a long moment, then turned to Pete.

  “My best wishes to you, sir. Do you want to be kept informed as to charges against Lanyard? I expect he’ll plead.”

  “This is your patch, Sheriff. What’s acceptable to you and the DA is acceptable to me. When it’s done, you might tell me the result, if you don’t mind.”

  Gullet nodded. “I’ll do that.”

  To me, “Seven A.M. Tuesday?”

  “I’ll be ready,” I said.

  Epilogue

  DAWN BROKE WITH A COOL GRAY DRIZZLE THAT continued throughout the morning. The sky went from charcoal to slate to pearl, but the sun remained only a dull white smudge.

  By eight we were on the back of Dewees Island, in a stand of maritime forest five yards in from the high-tide beach. An occasional gust whispered in the glistening wet leaves. Drops ticked the plastic sheeting as I exposed it with my trowel. Miller’s boots squished as she circled, Nikon capturing the melancholy mural.

  Gullet stood above me, face impassive, errant breezes puffing his nylon jacket. Marshall watched from a golf cart, manacled arms crossed, a deputy at his side.

  Beyond the rain and the wind and the camera, there was a stillness about the scene that seemed fitting. Solemn and somber.

  By noon Miller and I were able to free Cookie Godine from her makeshift grave. A mild stench rose, and millipedes skittered back toward darkness as we lifted the sad bundle and carried it to the waiting van.

  In my peripheral vision, I noticed Marshall raise a hand to cover his nose and mouth.

  * * *

  Friday morning I rose at nine, put on a dark blue skirt and crisp white blouse, and drove to St. Michael’s Episcopal. Leaving my car in the lot, I walked to the Old City Market, made a purchase, then returned to the church.

  Inside, the crowd was larger than I’d expected. Emma’s sister, Sarah Purvis, silent and pale. Sarah’s husband and children. Gullet and a number of his staff. Lee Anne Miller and Emma’s employees from the coroner’s office. There were also several dozen people I didn’t recognize.

  I watched the mourners throughout the service, but didn’t sing or join in the spoken prayers. I knew I’d weep if I dared open my mouth.

  At the cemetery I stood back from the grave site, observing as the casket was lowered and the attendees filed by, each tossing down a handful of dirt. When the group had dispersed, I approached.

  For several long moments I stood over the grave, tears streaming down my cheeks.

  “I’m here to say good-bye, old friend.” A tremor shook my chest. “You know you will be missed.”

  With trembling hands, I dropped the bouquet of baby’s breath and everlasting life onto Emma’s coffin.

  * * *

  It is now Friday night, and I am lying alone in my too empty bed, aching with regret that Emma is gone. Tomorrow, I will take Birdie and Boyd and return to Charlotte. I will be sad to leave the Lowcountry. I will miss the smell of pine, and seaweed, and salt. The ever-changing play of sunlight and moonlight on water.

  In Charlotte, I will help nurture Pete back to health. I could not do that for Emma, could not will good cells into her body or drive out the Staphylococcus that finally took her life. I will still think about my husband’s unfaithfulness, and about my perplexing continued attachment to him. I will try to separate those feelings from the feeling of tenderness engendered by the child who is as much him as she is me.

  In a few weeks I will pack my bags, drive to the airport, and board a flight to Canada. In Montreal, I will pass through customs, then take a taxi to my condo in centre-ville. The next day, I will report to my lab. Ryan will be eleven floors down. Who knows?

  One thing I do know. Emma is right. Whatever the outcome, I am among the lucky. I have people in my life. People who love me.

  From the Forensic Files of Dr. Kathy Reichs

  At times I scratch my head in puzzlement. After years of obscurity, my field of endeavor is suddenly hot.

  When I completed my grad studies, it was the rare cop or prosecutor who’d heard of forensic anthropology, and the rarer one who used it. My colleagues and I formed a tiny club, known to few, understood by fewer. Law-and-order professionals knew little about us. The general public knew nothing.

  Awareness and utilization have increased over the years, but there are still only a handful of board-certified practitioners in North America, consulting to law enforcement, coroners, and medical examiners. The military employs a platoon or so.

  Suddenly, though, notoriety has overtaken us. Popular literature came first: Jeffery Deaver, Patricia Cornwell, Karin Slaughter, and, of course, Kathy Reichs. Then came television: The breakthrough forensic sleeper C.S.I. attracted millions of viewers, and forensic science was in the air. And on the air. Cold Case. Without a Trace. We’d had Quincy in the seventies, but pathology now dazzled. Crossing Jordan. DaVinci’s Inquest. Autopsy. All over the airways scientists were slicing and scoping and simulating and solving. And now there is Bones.

  Bones is TV’s newest forensic show and the nickname of the series’ lead character, Temperance Brennan, the fictional forensic anthropologist I created ten years ago in my first book, Déjà Dead. In the series, Tempe is at an earlier point in her career, employed by the Jeffersonian Institute, and working with the FBI. And rightly so. The bureau was one of the first agencies to recognize the value of forensic anthropology, calling on Smithsonian scientists for help with skeletal questions way back at the beginnin
g of the twentieth century.

  Things were looser then, unstructured. Not so today. Forensic anthropology gained formal recognition in 1972, when the American Academy of Forensic Science created a Physical Anthropology section. The American Board of Forensic Anthropology was formed shortly thereafter.

  Throughout the seventies, forensic anthropologists expanded their activities to the investigation of human rights abuses. Labs were set up and mass graves were unearthed in Argentina and Guatemala; later Rwanda, Kosovo, and elsewhere. Our role also grew in the arena of mass disaster recovery. We worked plane crashes, cemetery floods, bombings, the World Trade Center site, and most recently the tragedies of the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

  Now, after decades of anonymity, we are stars. But the public remains confused concerning the labels. What’s a pathologist? What’s an anthropologist? What does forensics mean?

  Pathologists are specialists who work with soft tissue. Anthropologists are specialists who work with bone. Freshly dead or relatively intact corpse: pathologist. Skeleton in a shallow grave, charred body in a barrel, bone fragments in a wood chipper, mummified baby in an attic trunk: anthropologist. Using skeletal indicators, forensic anthropologists address questions of identity, time and manner of death, and postmortem treatment of the corpse. “Forensics” is the application of scientific findings to legal questions.

  And no one works alone. While TV glamorizes the individual heroics of the lone scientist or detective, real police work involves the participation of many. A pathologist may analyze the organs and brain, an entomologist the insects, an odontologist the teeth and dental records, a molecular biologist the DNA, and a ballistics expert the bullets and casings, while the forensic anthropologist pores over the bones. Numerous players place pieces in the jigsaw puzzle until a picture emerges.

  My training was in archaeology, with a specialty in skeletal biology. I first found my way into forensic anthropology through a request for help in a child homicide investigation. The tiny bones were identified. A five year old girl, kidnapped, murdered, and dumped in a forest near Charlotte, North Carolina. The killer was never found. The injustice and brutality of that case changed my life. A little girl’s life cut short with vicious indifference. Abandoning ancient bones for those of the recent dead, I switched to forensics and never looked back.

  I like to think that my own novels played some small part in raising awareness of forensic anthropology. Through my fictional character, Temperance Brennan, I offer readers a peek into my own cases and experiences. Déjà Dead is based on my first serial murder investigation. Death du Jour derives from work I performed for the Catholic Church, and from the mass murder–suicides that took place within the Solar Temple cult. Deadly Décisions stems from the many bones that came to me thanks to les Hells Angels du Québec. Fatal Voyage is based on my disaster recovery work. Grave Secrets was inspired by my participation in the exhumation of a Guatemalan mass grave. Bare Bones sprang from moose remains I examined for wildlife agents. Monday Mourning grew from three skeletons discovered in a pizza parlor basement. Cross Bones draws on my visit to Israel, weaving strangely unreported Masada bones, a burial box purported to be that of Jesus’ brother James, and a recently looted first-century tomb into a modern murder plot.

  Break No Bones is a bit of a departure from my usual modus operandi in that the story arises not from a single or a pair of cases but from disparate professional encounters and experiences. Prehistoric burial sites excavated early in my career. An archaeological field school taught at UNCC. A coroner case hand-carried to me in a large plastic tub. Cut marks analyzed for a homicide investigation. Vertebral fractures examined for the reconstruction of a pedestrian hit-and-run. A suicide victim found skeletalized, hanging from a tree.

  As with all my books, this latest Temperance Brennan novel draws on decades of personal involvement at crime labs and crime scenes. Add a pinch of archaeology. Stir in an urban legend or two. Toss in media reports of stolen body parts. Season with summers on the beach at Isle of Palms. Voila! Break No Bones.

  Scribner proudly presents

  BONES TO ASHES

  Kathy Reichs

  Available Now

  Turn the page for a preview of Bones to Ashes . . .

  BONES TO ASHES

  CHAPTER 1

  Babies die. People vanish. People die. Babies vanish.

  I was hammered early by those truths. Sure, I had a kid’s understanding that mortal life ends. At school, the nuns talked of heaven, purgatory, limbo, and hell. I knew my elders would “pass.” That’s how my family skirted the subject. People passed. Went to be with God. Rested in peace. So I accepted, in some ill-formed way, that earthly life was temporary. Nevertheless, the deaths of my father and baby brother slammed me hard.

  And Evangeline Landry’s disappearance simply had no explanation.

  But I jump ahead.

  It happened like this.

  As a little girl, I lived on Chicago’s South Side, in the less-fashionable outer spiral of a neighborhood called Beverly. Developed as a country retreat for the city’s elite following the Great Fire of 1871, the hood featured wide lawns and large elms, and Irish Catholic clans with family trees more branching than the elms. A bit down-at-the-heels then, Beverly would later be gentrified by boomers seeking greenery within proximity of the Loop.

  A farmhouse by birth, our home predated all its neighbors. Green-shuttered white frame, it had a wraparound porch, an old pump in back, and a garage that once housed horses and cows.

  My memories of that time and place are happy. In cold weather, neighborhood kids skated on a rink created with garden hoses on an empty lot. Daddy would steady me on my double blades, clean slush from my snowsuit when I took a header. In summer, we played kick ball, tag, or red rover in the street. My sister, Harry, and I trapped fireflies in jars with hole-punched lids.

  During the endless Midwestern winters, countless Brennan aunts and uncles gathered for cards in our eclectically shabby parlor. The routine never varied. After supper, Mama would take small tables from the hall closet, dust the tops, and unfold the legs. Harry would drape the white linen cloth, and I would center the decks, napkins, and peanut bowls.

  With the arrival of spring, card tables were abandoned for front-porch rockers, and conversation replaced canasta and bridge. I didn’t understand much of it. Warren commission. Gulf of Tonkin. Khrushchev. Kosygin. I didn’t care. The banding together of those bearing my own double helices assured me of well-being, like the rattle of coins in the Beverly Hillbillies bank on my bedroom dresser. The world was predictable, peopled with relatives, teachers, kids like me from households similar to mine. Life was St. Margaret’s school, Brownie Scouts, Mass on Sunday, day camp in summer.

  Then Kevin died, and my six-year-old universe fragmented into shards of doubt and uncertainty. In my sense of world order, death took the old, great aunts with gnarled blue veins and translucent skin. Not baby boys with fat red cheeks.

  I recall little of Kevin’s illness. Less of his funeral. Harry fidgeting in the pew beside me. A spot on my black patent leather shoe. From what? It seemed important to know. I stared at the small gray splotch. Stared away from the reality unfolding around me.

  The family gathered, of course, voices hushed, faces wooden. Mama’s side came from North Carolina. Neighbors. Parishioners. Men from Daddy’s law firm. Strangers. They stroked my head. Mumbled of heaven and angels.

  The house overflowed with casseroles and bakery wrapped in tin foil and plastic. Normally, I loved sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Not for the tuna or egg salad between the bread. For the sheer decadence of that frivolous waste. Not that day. Never since. Funny, the things that affect you.

  Kevin’s death changed more than my view of sandwiches. It altered the whole stage on which I’d lived my life. My mother’s eyes, always kind and often mirthful, were perpetually wrong. Dark-circled and deep in their sockets. My child’s brain was unable to translate her look, other than to sense sadness. Y
ears later I saw a photo of a Kosovo woman, her husband and son lying in makeshift coffins. I felt a spark of recollection. Could I know her? Impossible. Then realization. I was recognizing the same defeat and hopelessness I’d seen in Mama’s gaze.

  But it wasn’t just Mama’s appearance that changed. She and Daddy no longer shared a pre-supper cocktail, or lingered at the table talking over coffee. They no longer watched television when the dishes were cleared and Harry and I were in our PJ’s. They’d enjoyed the comedy shows, eyes meeting when Lucy or Gomer did something amusing. Daddy would take Mama’s hand and they’d laugh.

  All laughter fled when leukemia conquered Kevin.

  My father also took flight. He didn’t withdraw into quiet self-pity, as Mama eventually did. Michael Terrence Brennan, litigator, connoisseur, and irrepressible bon vivant withdrew directly into a bottle of good Irish whiskey. Many bottles, actually.

  I didn’t notice Daddy’s absences at first. Like a pain that builds so gradually you’re unable to pinpoint its origin, I realized one day that Daddy just wasn’t around that much. Dinners without him grew more frequent. His arrival home grew later, until he seemed little more than a phantom presence in my life. Some nights I’d hear unsteady footfalls on the steps, a door banged too hard against a wall. A toilet flushed. Then silence. Or muffled voices from my parents’ bedroom, the cadence conveying accusations and resentment.

  To this day, a phone ringing after midnight makes me shiver. Perhaps I am an alarmist. Or merely a realist. In my experience, late-night calls never bring good news. There’s been an accident. An arrest. A fight.

  Mama’s call came a long eighteen months after Kevin’s death. Phones gave honest rings back then. Not polyphonic clips of Grillz or Sukie in the Graveyard. I awoke at the first resonating peal. Heard a second. A fragment of a third. Then a soft sound, half scream, half moan, then the clunk of a receiver striking wood. Frightened, I pulled the covers up to my eyes. No one came to my bed.