Bones to Ashes

by Kathy Reichs

  “White and Indian.”

  “Or Asian.” A teacher correcting a dull pupil. “Any interest in age indicators?”

  “Hit me with the high points.”

  I indicated a roughened area on the base of the skull. “The basilar suture is fused.”

  “The wisdom teeth aren’t fully out,” Ryan observed.

  “Correct. The third molars have emerged but aren’t yet in alignment with the tooth row.”

  Moving farther down the table, I ran my finger over an irregular line curving below the upper edge of the right pelvic blade. “The iliac crests are partially fused.” I picked up a collarbone and pointed to a similar irregularity on the throat end. “Same for the medial clavicular epiphyses.” I waved my hand over the arm and leg bones. “Growth caps on the long bones are in various states of fusion.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She stood about five foot three.”

  “That’s it?”

  I nodded. “No abnormalities or anomalies. No new or healed fractures.”

  “LaManche thought the hyoid was intact.”

  Ryan referred to a tiny U-shaped throat bone often damaged during manual strangulation.

  I gathered a small ovoid disc and two slender spurs in the palm of one glove. “At her age the hyoid wings and body aren’t yet ossified. That means there’s elasticity, so the bone can undergo considerable compression without breaking.”

  “So she could still have been strangled.”

  “Strangled, smothered, poisoned, gut-stabbed. I can only tell you what the bones tell me.” I replaced the hyoid.

  “Which is?”

  “She wasn’t shot or bludgeoned. I found no bullet entrance or exit wounds, no fractures, no cuts or slash marks anywhere on the skeleton.”

  “And the autopsy revealed zip.”

  LaManche and I had discussed his findings at lunch. There hadn’t been much to discuss.

  “The lungs were too far gone to know if she was breathing when she went into the water. Marine scavengers took care of her eyes, so there’s no way to check for petechiae.”

  Petechiae are red pinpoint hemorrhages caused by leaky capillaries under increased venous pressure. Since sustained compression of the neck causes the backup of blood returning to the heart, the presence of petechiae on the skin of the face, and particularly around the eyes, is strongly suggestive of strangulation.

  “So she could have been dead when she went into the water.”

  “I could try playing around with diatoms.”

  “I know you’re going to tell me what those are.”

  “Unicellular algae found in aquatic and damp terrestrial habitats. Some pathologists believe the inhalation of water causes penetration of diatoms into the alveolar system and bloodstream, with subsequent deposition in the brain, kidneys, and other organs, including the bone marrow. They see the presence of diatoms as indicative of drowning.”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “I’m not convinced diatoms can’t make their way into any submerged body, drowned or not. Neither is LaManche. But there is another application. Many diatom species are habitat specific, so assemblages found in or on bodies can be compared with assemblages found in control samples taken from different locations. Sometimes specific microhabitats can be identified.”

  “Use diatoms to narrow where the body’s been. Salt water. River bottom. Swamp. Estuary.”

  “That’s the general idea. But it’s a long shot.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Before boiling I removed bone samples for DNA testing. I could have a marine biologist check the marrow in those. Also the sock.”

  Ryan spread both hands, palms up. “Case practically solved.”

  I raised questioning brows.

  “The girl died near the river or someplace else. She was alive or dead when she entered the water. If alive, she fell, jumped, or was pushed, so manner of death is suicide, homicide, or accidental.”

  “Unless she had a stroke or heart attack,” I said, knowing the only categories left were “natural” and “undetermined.”

  “Unless that. But this is a teenager.”

  “It happens.”

  Ryan did show up that night. I’d showered and blow-dried my hair. And, yes, I confess, applied mascara and lip gloss and a spritz of Alfred Sung behind each ear.

  The buzzer warbled around nine. I was reading about FTIR spectroscopy in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Birdie was performing his evening toilette on the far end of the couch. Losing interest in intertoe spaces, he padded along to the foyer.

  The security screen showed Ryan in the vestibule, birdcage at his feet. I buzzed them in, welcomed both warmly. After greeting and ear scratching the cat, Ryan accepted my offer of a beer.

  While I poured Moosehead and Diet Coke, Ryan settled Charlie on the dining room table. Birdie assumed his sphinx pose on one of the chairs, head up, paws in-curled, every sense fixed on the cage and its occupant.

  Charlie was in top form, perch hopping, seed spewing, head cocking right then left to eyeball the cat. Every now and then he’d fire off a line from his repertoire noir.

  Ryan took Birdie’s end of the couch. I took mine, feet tucked under my bum. Again, we established that our daughters were good. Lily was waiting tables at Café Cherrier on Rue Saint-Denis. Katy was doing a summer Spanish course in Santiago, Chile.

  My Montreal condo is small. Kitchen, bedroom, den, two baths. Only the main living area is spacious. French doors open from opposite sides, the north set to a central courtyard, the south to a Lilliputian-sized patch of grass.

  Stone fireplace. Glass dining table. Yellow and blue Provençal sofa and loveseat. Cherry-wood moldings, window trim, and mantel.

  As we talked, Ryan’s eyes roved from object to object. Pictures of Katy. My younger sister, Harry. My nephew, Kit. A ceramic plate gifted from an old woman in Guatemala. A giraffe carving purchased in Rwanda. Rarely did his gaze meet mine.

  Inevitably, we drifted into shop talk. Safe, neutral ground.

  Ryan had been working special assignments since the death of his partner several years earlier. He described his current investigation.

  Three girls missing. Two others found in or near water. And now there was the Lac des Deux Montagnes floater. Six in all.

  I told Ryan about the burn victim, the Doucets, and the Rimouski skeleton en route to my lab. He asked who was responsible for the latter. I described my meeting with Hippo Gallant.

  Ryan said Hippo was inputting on his missing persons and DOA’s. Thus, we drifted into the inevitable Hippo stories. The time he left his gun behind in a gas station men’s room. The time he pulled a suspect from a culvert and ripped his pants up the ass. The time a collar took a dump in the back of his cruiser.

  Conversation was genial and friendly. And brotherly as hell. No mention of the past or future. No body contact. The only references to sex were those made by Charlie.

  At ten-thirty Ryan rose. I walked him to the door, every cell in my brain screaming that what I was debating was a lousy idea. Men hate being asked what they’re feeling. I hate it, too.

  Not for the first time, I ignored the advice of my instincts.

  “Talk to me, Ryan.” I laid a hand on his arm.

  “Right now Lily—”

  “No,” I blurted. “It’s more than Lily.”

  The cornflower blues refused to meet mine. A beat passed. Then, “I don’t think you’re over your husband.”

  “Pete and I have been separated for years.”

  Ryan’s eyes finally locked home. I felt something hot coil in my belly.

  “Operative word,” he said, “‘separated.’”

  “I hate lawyers and paperwork.”

  “You were a different person when you were with him.”

  “The man had been shot.”

  Ryan didn’t reply.

  “My marital status never mattered in the past.”

  “No. It didn’t.”

  �
��Why now?”

  “I hadn’t seen you together.”

  “And now that you have?”

  “I realize how much you care.” Before I could speak Ryan added, “And how much I care.”

  That stunned me. For a moment I could think of nothing to say.

  “Now what?”

  “I’m trying to get by it.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not well.”

  With that he was gone.

  As I lay in bed, emotions battled inside me. Resentment at the feeling that Ryan had suckered me in. All the asking. Then the striving to keep things light.

  Annoyance at Ryan’s cowboy-done-wrong act.

  But Ryan had one valid point. Why didn’t I divorce Pete?

  I take offense slowly, store insult until the end of time. Ryan is the opposite, affronted quickly, but quickly forgiving. Each of us reads the other well.

  Ryan was light-years beyond feeling slighted or piqued. His signals were unmistakable.

  So, mostly, I felt sadness. Ryan was pulling away.

  A tear slid from the corner of one eye.

  “OK, wrangler.” Spoken aloud in my party-of-one bed. “Adios.”

  7

  H ARRY HAS LIVED IN TEXAS SINCE DROPPING OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL her senior year. Long story. Short marriage. Her concept of phone etiquette goes something like this. I’m up. I want to talk. Dial.

  The window shade was oozing toward gray when my cell phone sounded.

  “You awake?”

  I squinted at the clock. Six-fifteen. Like a pilot whale, Harry needs approximately five hours of sleep nightly.

  “I am now.”

  My sister once had this motto printed on a T-shirt: Never complain, never explain. While she’s lax on the front end, she’s crackerjack on the back, following her whims and offering no apologies for the outcome.

  She offered none now.

  “I’m going to Canyon Ranch.” Harry is blond, leggy, and trying hard to look thirty. Though that checkpoint was cleared a decade ago, in kind light, in the right clothes, she succeeds.

  “That makes how many spas this year?”

  “Rump’s dragging, tits are starting to look like thirty-eight longs. Gotta eat sprouts and pump iron. Come with me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m selling the house.”

  The abrupt shift left me off balance. “Oh?”

  “Butt-pie was an egregious error.”

  I assumed Butt-pie was husband number five. Or was it six? I dug for a name. Donald? Harold? Gave up.

  “I think I hinted the man wasn’t a girl’s dream come true.”

  “You hinted he was stupid, Tempe. Arnoldo isn’t stupid. Problem is he’s got just one string on his fiddle.”

  Harry loves sex. Harry is also easily bored. I didn’t want to hear about Arnoldo’s violin.

  “Why sell the house?”

  “It’s too big.”

  “It was too big when you bought it.”

  Husband number something was an oil man. I never quite learned what that meant, but their brief nuptials left my sister well oiled, indeed.

  “I need a change. Come help me look at real estate.”

  “I really can’t.”

  “Working on a juicy one?”

  I considered, decided against mentioning the Rimouski skeleton. Once ignited, Harry is nonextinguishable. Besides, there was no evidence of an Évangéline Landry connection.

  “It’s my busy season.”

  “Need sisterly support?”

  Please, God. “You know I love your visits, but right now I’m so slammed we wouldn’t be able to spend time together.”

  Silence hummed across the line. Then, “What I said about Arnoldo’s not really true. Fact is, I caught the bastard coyoting around.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry.” I was. Though I wasn’t surprised.

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  After slipping into jeans and a polo, I fed Birdie and filled Charlie’s seed and water dishes. The bird whistled and asked me to shake my booty. I moved his cage to the den and popped in a cockatiel-training CD.

  At the lab, there was nothing in my mailbox. No flashing light on the phone. A mini-avalanche had taken place on my desk. No pink message slip lay among the wreckage.

  I called down to the morgue. No bones had arrived from Rimouski.

  OK, buster. You’ve got until noon.

  At the morning meeting I was assigned one new case.

  The purchasers of a funeral home had discovered an embalmed and fully clothed body in a coffin in a basement cooler. The previous operators had closed their doors nine months earlier. The pathologist, Jean Pelletier, wanted my input on X-rays. On the request form he’d written: All dressed up and nowhere to go.

  Returning to my office, I phoned a biology professor at McGill University. She didn’t do diatoms, but a colleague did. I could deliver the Lac des Deux Montagnes specimens late the next afternoon.

  After packaging the sock and bone plug, and preparing the paperwork, I turned to Pelletier’s lingering corpse case.

  Antemortem-postmortem X-ray comparisons showed the deceased was a childless bachelor whose only living brother had moved to Greece. The man’s funeral had been paid for by money order two years earlier. Our ID chucked the ball into the coroner’s court.

  Back at my lab, Geneviève Doucet’s bones had finally come out of the cooker. I spent the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon examining each with my new Leica stereomicroscope with magnified digital display. After years of bending over a dinosaur that I’d had to herniate myself to position, I was now equipped with state of the art. I loved this scope.

  Nevertheless, magnification revealed little. Lipping of the interphalangeal joint surfaces of the right middle toe. An asymmetrical raised patch on the anterior midshaft of the right tibia. Other than those healed minor injuries, Geneviève’s skeleton was remarkably unremarkable.

  I phoned LaManche.

  “She jammed her toe and banged her shin,” he summarized my findings .

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “That didn’t kill her.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “It is something.”

  “Sorry I don’t have more to report.”

  “How do you like the new microscope?”

  “The screen resolution is awesome.”

  “I am happy you are pleased.”

  I was disconnecting when Lisa entered my lab carrying a large cardboard box. Her hair was pulled into a curly ponytail, and she was wearing blue surgical scrubs. Wearing them well. Firm glutes, slim waist, breasts the size of the Grand Tetons, Lisa is very popular with cops. And the best autopsy tech at the lab.

  “Say you’re bringing me a skeleton from Rimouski.”

  “I’m bringing you a skeleton from Rimouski.” Lisa often used me to practice her English. She did that now. “It just arrived.”

  I flipped through the paperwork. The case had been assigned morgue and lab numbers. I noted the latter. LSJML-57748. The remains had been confiscated from agent Luc Tiquet, Sûreté du Québec, Rimouski. In the case overview cell, Bradette had written: adolescent female, archaeological.

  “We’ll see about that, hotshot.”

  Lisa looked a question at me.

  “Jerk thinks he can do my job. Are you busy downstairs?”

  “All autopsies are finished.”

  “Want to take a look?” I knew Lisa liked bones.

  “Sure.”

  As I collected a case report form, Lisa set the box on the table. Joining her, I removed the cover, and we both peered inside.

  Bradette was right about one thing. This wasn’t a grown-up.

  “It looks very old,” Lisa said.

  OK. Maybe two things.

  The skeleton was mottled yellow and brown and showed lots of breakage. The skull was misshapen, the face badly damaged. I could see spidery filaments deep in the orbits and in what remained of the nasal opening.


  The bones felt feather-light as I lifted and arranged them in anatomical alignment. When I’d finished, a small partial-person lay on my table.

  I took inventory. Six ribs, most of the finger and toe bones, one clavicle, one tibia, one ulna, and both kneecaps were missing. So were all eight incisors.

  “Why no front teeth?” Lisa asked.

  “Each has only one root. When the gums go, there’s nothing to hold them in place.”

  “There’s a lot of damage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Peri- or postmortem?” Lisa was asking if the injuries had occurred at the time of or following death.

  “I suspect most is postmortem. But I’ll have to study the fracture sites under magnification.”

  “It’s young, yes?”

  Flashbulb image. A girl in a swimsuit on a Carolina beach. Carrying a small white book with pale green lettering. Reading poetry aloud with an odd French accent.

  I pointed to a proximal right humerus, distal right ulna, proximal left fibula, and distal right femur. “See how some long bones look normal on their ends, while these look corrugated and incomplete?”

  Lisa nodded.

  “That means the epiphyses weren’t yet fused to the shafts. Growth was still ongoing.”

  I lifted the skull and rotated the base upward.

  Running between dunes. Dark curls dancing wild in the wind.

  “The basilar suture is unfused. There are no wisdom teeth, and the second molars show minimal wear.”

  I exchanged the skull for an innominate.

  “Each hemi-pelvis starts out as three separate bones: ilium, ischium, and pubis. Union takes place around the time of puberty.” I indicated a faint Y trisecting the hip socket. “See that line? Fusion was just wrapping up when she died. Given the teeth, the long bones, and the pelvis, I’d estimate she was around thirteen or fourteen.”

  Évangéline Landry, eyes closed, hands clasped, blowing out candles. There were fourteen on the cake.

  “And the pelvis shows female?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she white?”

  “Race is going to be tough since the face is smashed and the palate is history, including the incisors.”

  I picked up the skull. And felt a flicker of relief.