The Weight of Night

by Christine Carbo

  “Get what?”

  “That guys like Minsky just want to be left alone. It don’t mean they’ve done something wrong. They just don’t want to be bothered, especially by the likes of you. He probably left because he simply thought it was time. Hell, maybe he knew you came by.” Chiles lifted his chin to point to me. “Maybe you spooked him. That’d be enough to drive a guy like Minsky off.”

  “What’s there to be spooked about?” Ali asked, absentmindedly placing her hands back on the table. Crook dove over and got her other hand, and she let out a few more choice epithets. Chiles simply shrugged and smiled wryly.

  “Mr. Chiles.” I repeated her question. “Agent Paige asked you what there is to be scared about?”

  “The hell I know.” Chiles shrugged.

  “You mind if we take a look at where he set up?” I asked.

  “Help yourself.”

  • • •

  We left Chiles to his cabin and his exotic bird and drove the access road as far as it would take us. Chiles’s property stretched back into the woods for at least a mile and a half, and we were able to drive about two-thirds of the way before having to stop and walk the rest.

  “That bitch went after me twice,” Ali said after she shut the car door.

  “It’s a male,” I reminded her.

  “Whatever,” she said. “It didn’t need to do that.”

  “No, it did not,” I agreed.

  “And Mr. Handi Wipes enjoyed it.”

  I was beginning to gather that she liked to give people nicknames, even if she was the only one who used them. We walked, taking in the forest—the chipmunks scurrying in the brush off to the side of the path, the sky beginning to turn from blue to milky white, since the high smoke from the east had begun to spread back over just during the short time we were in the cabin.

  When we got to the general area I remembered spotting the yurt, it didn’t take long to find it. Dead yellowed grass suffocated under the round Turkish structure, which lay flattened on the forest floor. A fire pit was nearby, encircled by medium-size tan rocks that reminded me of the skull we’d found the day before. The day before. It felt like a week had passed.

  “Gone, all right. Didn’t leave much here.” I said. “What now?”

  “I think it’s strange that he’s gone. Don’t you?”

  “Guys like him, could be any number of reasons for leaving. Two months might just be his limit anywhere.”

  “Might be,” Ali said. “But I don’t like it. How did he get this thing back here? It’s definitely bigger than a tent.”

  I pointed to the ground off to our side. “Looks like he just did a little off-road driving. Looks like something big, maybe a truck with a flatbed. Mr. Kelly said he saw some sort of dark-colored truck. Should we get some plasters?”

  Ali considered that for a moment. “Yeah,” she said. “We should definitely do that.”

  9

  * * *

  Gretchen

  WHEN RAY AND I were back at the lab, Ray went straight to his station to finish treating the scraps of tire impressions we had managed to pull while I put a call in to Lucy in Bozeman to see how things were going with the bones. If the trip went smoothly, she should have had the packages by noon and had the rest of the afternoon to examine the evidence. I knew Monty would be calling her as well, but I wanted to get the information myself. Monty would be tied up with efforts to find the boy, and the excavation had gotten under my skin. I wouldn’t be able to settle my nerves without hearing Lucy’s conclusions.

  “The skull,” she told me. “The sagittal suture and coronal suture are not fused, which means this was a young person.”

  “I noticed that. I was hoping I was incorrect.”

  “Unfortunately, you were correct. It belongs to a sub-adult.”

  I’d met Lucy once before, when I attended a lecture she gave at MSU on forensic anthropology. Ray, Paxton, and I went, leaving Wendy in case anything came up locally. Ray had teased Lucy about being like the gal on the TV show called Bones, although Lucy was on the large side with short, curly hair and looked somewhat matronly. She had cracked up at Ray’s suggestion and commented that the only difference between her and the TV star was that the star made a lot more money and could afford a better hairstylist and a penthouse in LA.

  “Do you have a range?” I asked now.

  “I do,” Lucy said. “Judging by the skull sutures, which are slightly fused, this skull belongs to an older adolescent or younger teen. The development and union of the separate bone parts is not complete. For example, the tibia and fibula have partially fused growth plates. All of these things plus a few others, like the size of the clavicle, tell me this is an adolescent anywhere from ten to fifteen years old. Skull shape and pelvis tell me it’s a male. White.”

  “And you can tell this because . . . ?”

  “Orthognathous shape, the way the teeth and the jaws don’t slope or angle outward. White faces are flatter than black. What, it surprises you? A white person in Montana?”

  “Ha,” I said. “Just making sure. This part of my training was a long time ago.”

  “Here’s the catch, though,” Lucy said more seriously. “I’m sure you noticed the caved-in gap, almost a cleave, on the left side of the temporal bone above the left ear opening—a large enough chunk that makes me think this youngster didn’t meet a very cheerful ending.”

  “What could have caused it?”

  “Something substantial, firm, sharp. Something able to cause a cleaved separation: possibly something like a crowbar, but more likely, I hate to say, an axe. Falling on a rock or something of that nature would have crushed the skull differently. And a baseball bat, a fist, or the butt of a rifle or a hammer all would have left a more rounded depression and wouldn’t have caused such a cleave.” An image of a fire iron slamming into Per’s skull flashed through my head and a shudder went through me. I refocused on what Lucy was saying. “It’s the left temporal region that has been affected and that’s a pretty easy place to fatally injure someone anyway, but whatever crushed through this skull was sharp and hard enough to not only create blunt-force trauma but cleave the skull and break through the frontal bone, the temporal bone, the sphenoid, and even part of the parietal bone.”

  I paused before going on, taking it in. Lucy waited. I could hear a tapping sound and wondered if she was rapping her pen on her desk. “Okay,” I said. “What about the time frame, the year?”

  “Harder to say,” Lucy sighed. “I’m going to need some more time to run the soil samples to try to figure out how long these bones have been buried. I can tell you from a glance and experience that it’s been longer than five years.” She paused before continuing. “I have to say, you’re very interested in this one. Usually I just hear from the investigator, since you guys are busy with processing other stuff.”

  “Yeah, the dig was hard. The ribs and all. I felt awful having to rush it, and I’m no expert like you. I just feel a bit responsible.”

  “You don’t need to worry. The ribs, in this case, weren’t so vital. You got the skull and pelvis; if you’d gotten the ribs over those, I’d be fuming. So don’t worry, you did great under the circumstances. I have all I need here and you saved me a trip to the Flathead.”

  “When do you think you’ll have some ideas about the soil?”

  “Soon. Maybe by the end of the day or tomorrow.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then the bones will go to Texas. There they’ll see if they can extract physical as well as mitochondrial DNA, but the center prioritizes easy identifications, remains that are relatively fresh or a family connection is already suspected. As you probably know, Gretchen, colder cases with no leads do not take precedence. If you go back even twenty years, there are literally hundreds of thousands of families who have loved ones that are missing. They’ll give these remains a profile num
ber after identifying the DNA. Then they’ll check it against the database of samples that have been sent in.”

  I knew that in 2005, the U.S. Attorney General’s office formed a Missing Persons Task Force to create the National Missing and ­Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, and launched a searchable database in 2007. In 2009, the cross-searchable database system that would automatically match the missing with the dead if the missing had been entered in the first place was formed. All of us in forensics followed these sort of breakthroughs. I thanked Lucy for the information, hung up, then headed to Wendy’s office to see if she’d downloaded all the photos from the gravesite yet. Wendy’s father was coming out of her office, jangling his keys in his hand.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Combs. Good to see you.”

  “Nice to see you too, Gretchen. How’ve you been?”

  “Been good. And you? Any word?” I asked, referring to their hunt for his grandson.

  “No, we haven’t found him.” He looked down with disappointment. “But I need to get back to Hungry Horse. I have a community fellowship group to lead.” I knew Mr. Combs was a pastor at a small church in Hungry Horse and he’d just returned from a meeting in Great Falls. Wendy was proud of her father, of the work he’d done to bring goodwill and faith to rural communities in northwest Montana. Her mother had died from cancer when she was an adolescent and she was an only child. “Wish I could help her continue to look, but it will have to wait a few hours. It’s not like he’s never pulled this before. He’s probably just holed up at some new friend’s house.” He gave me a faint smile and we said good-bye.

  Wendy sat at her desk with her head in her hands, pressing the bottoms of her palms into her eye sockets. I gently tapped on the door. “Need some coffee? Tea?” I offered.

  She looked up, dropped her hands, her eyes tired and a little red from rubbing them. “Oh, hi,” she said. “No, thanks.”

  “No luck, huh?” I wondered where they’d gone to look. Wendy had shared with me several months ago that Kyle had begun shooting up. She’d found needle tracks on the inside of his arms, and he’d recently gotten tattoos up and down them, she figured, to disguise the marks.

  “No. We looked in all the usual places, went to several of his friends’ houses, their garages, down by their hangout near the river, near the old bridge. There’s one place though, we didn’t go. I . . .” She paused and looked to down to her side at the floor by her desk and bit her top lip. “I don’t know, I just couldn’t take my dad there. Couldn’t bear the thought of finding Kyle at such a place while he was with me. I’m going to have to go there myself.”

  “For goodness’ sake, where?” I asked.

  “You know the abandoned, boarded-up hotel on the south end of town, the Ridgeline?”

  I knew exactly where she was talking about. It was known for housing druggies and runaways. There’d been a drug bust there two months before. Several youngsters had taken over one of the filthy rooms and almost burned the place down trying to cook some meth. Anyone looking for drugs could probably go there and pick up some nasty concoction.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  Wendy looked at me. “No, no, I know you have work.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go with you.” I remembered the photos of the place. There was no way I could let her go there alone.

  • • •

  Wendy and I drove to the south of town, where the streets had a lazier feel and the houses turned from gentrified to ramshackle, some of them clearly abandoned. I felt a twinge of unease as we parked in front of the dilapidated, empty hotel. It’s not that I hadn’t seen a fair share of shitholes in my line of work, because I had: rodent-­infested sheds, slime- and trash-filled ditches, scuzzy basement meth labs in shabby houses and garages, derelict apartments, drained swampy sloughs, run-down warehouses, musty crawl spaces, and dusty attics. It’s that this time, it felt entirely different. We weren’t going in with our hazmat suits and the police backing us. We were simply going as two concerned women looking for a screwed-up teenager. Still, there was something else edging up my spine, some vague notion that I couldn’t quite identify.

  The heat from the pavement radiated to the soles of my shoes the second we stepped out. Wendy and I quietly shut our car doors and looked at each other. “Are you sure you want to come in with me?” she said.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re already here. This is nothing compared to some of the creepy places I’ve worked. You’re just not used to it—­always tucked away in your clean lab studying prints,” I teased her, trying to get her to smile. She gave me a faint one, but I could tell she was worried about finding her son inside.

  Weeds reached up through the cracks in the parking lot, and dirty dried leaves, cigarette butts, used flattened paper cups, candy wrappers, and other trash littered the area. Some of the doors remained boarded up, though and one leading to the main part of the hotel had been pried off, the planks dangling loosely to its side. It looked like you could enter through it if you wanted.

  “Should we knock?” Wendy whispered.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think we just go in.” The lock on the door had been broken, so I pushed it open and took a step through, partly wishing we’d brought our gear so we wouldn’t be exposed to any chemicals. I knew that the cops periodically came, cleared the place out, and reboarded it up. But they couldn’t monitor it on a daily basis, and the homeless and the drug-addicted simply moved back into different parts of the huge, sprawling complex, which spanned an entire block.

  We gingerly entered a dark cavelike hallway. The ceiling was high and the hallway wide, but I felt claustrophobic anyway as we were met with a mixture of musty, stale, and rancid smells, presumably piss, pot, and other chemicals. As my eyes adjusted, I made out broken brass lamp fixtures hanging from the hallway walls. In some areas, the ceiling was caved in and drywall and plaster hung down like spilled guts. I hoped it held and didn’t come crashing down upon us at any minute. Trash littered the hallway and the dirty carpet squished under our feet as we slowly walked.

  When we got to the first few rooms, the doors gaped open and we peeked in. Thin cracks of bright afternoon light sliced in through the boarded-up windows and dust floated in the beams, exposing old, broken mattresses and piles of trash swept into the corners. “Nobody in this one either,” I said to Wendy, her face looking ghostly in the dark gloom.

  We continued down the hall and eventually rounded a corner, went down another long hall, pushed open cracked doors, and peered into more empty rooms. One had several blankets scattered around like it had been used the night before to sleep in, but no one was there.

  We kept checking rooms and finally, at the end of the hall, we came to what must have been the lobby at one time. Several shopping carts full of blankets and other junk stood in the corners and some couches and ripped-up armchairs crowded the side walls. Bottles of liquor and cans of beer were scattered on the floor, and a sweaty, musty smell permeated the room. On the couches were several dark shapes—bodies, I thought. People.

  I heard Wendy take a sharp breath. She pressed her hand on her breastbone as if she was stopping herself from going forward.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “It’s okay. If he’s here, we just take him home. If he’s not, well, then we keep looking.” We slowly stepped over something sticky, crunched broken glass, when suddenly we heard a mumble from the corner. “Hey,” the voice said, slurring. “Whaz fuckin’ up?”

  He sounded young, like a teenager, and I felt a sadness course through me. We didn’t answer. I thought about leaving, grabbing Wendy and leading her straight out as fast as I could. Every part of me wanted to run. This was crazy, we shouldn’t have come to this hellhole. But I knew I couldn’t leave. I had to be strong for her, and a part of me didn’t want to go, like a motorist who can’t look away from an accident. Still, that unidentifiable something else squirmed ins
ide me. I briefly wondered if it was fear, but I’d seen far worse, so it couldn’t be. This was different, I thought. These bodies were not dead; they seemed dead, but they were moving, breathing and drugged up, and I certainly wasn’t used to that. As morbid as it may sound, I was used to the dead: people burned up in meth lab explosions, women and sometimes children beaten to death by raging spouses or parents, people shot in drug deals gone wrong.

  We poked our way through the dim light using the flashlights on our phones. I shone mine on the couch where two bodies—a couple—lay tangled up with each other, and the girl put her hand before her eyes and said, “Hey,” when the light hit her young face. She looked no more than sixteen. I moved the beam so I could see the other person’s face, an acne-scarred, greasy-haired male who looked like he was in his midtwenties.

  “Not him,” I said to Wendy. I knew what Kyle looked like because I’d met him before at the office and at her house one time when she had me over for dinner.

  “Not here either,” Wendy said after flashing her light on a boy slouched in one of the old easy chairs.

  We heard a low moan from the next room and the girl who had said “hey” yelled like an angry older sister for the guy to shut up. He began to moan even louder. I looked at Wendy. “Does it sound like Kyle?”

  “Honestly, no, but I don’t know.” She sounded scared to death.

  “Let’s check it out.” I walked toward the moan, to the next room, an even bigger area with a high ceiling. Boards hung across the large front windows, but streaks of light carved up the dark floor. Several more bodies in sleeping bags stretched across the floor and others were lying on old run-down, bug-infested furniture. The moaning boy sat crouched in the corner on the floor and Wendy shone her light on him.

  It wasn’t Kyle. Kyle had dark hair and this boy had wavy blond hair. Like Per. Something turned in my stomach. The boy had a fat split lower lip and swollen eyes. He was holding his stomach and rocking back and forth. There was a puddle of slime on the floor next to him as if he’d recently thrown up.