Grave Secrets

by Kathy Reichs

  Galiano declined.

  “May I trouble you for a little water?”

  “Of course.”

  When she’d gone I bolted for the desk, tore a strip of adhesive tape from the dispenser, raced back to Mrs. Specter’s chair, and pressed the sticky side to the upholstery. Galiano watched without comment.

  Mrs. Specter rejoined us carrying a crystal glass filled with ice water, a lemon slice stuck onto the rim. As I drank, she spoke to Galiano.

  “I’m sorry I have nothing else for you, Detective. I am trying. Truly, I am.”

  In the foyer, she surprised me with a request.

  “Have you a card, Dr. Brennan?”

  I dug one out.

  “Thank you.” She waved off a servant who was bearing down. “Can you be reached locally?”

  Surprised, I scribbled the number of my rented cellular.

  “Please, please, Detective. Find my baby.”

  The heavy oak door clicked shut at our backs.

  Galiano didn’t speak until we were in the car.

  “What’s with the upholstery-cleaning routine?”

  “Did you see her chair?”

  He fastened his seat belt and started the engine.

  “Aubusson. Pricey.”

  I held up the tape. “That Aubusson has a fur coat.”

  He turned to me, hand on the key.

  “The Specters reported no pets.”

  10

  I SPENT THE REST OF SUNDAY EXAMINING SKELETONS from Chupan Ya. Elena and Mateo were also working, and updated me on developments in the Sololá investigation. It took five minutes.

  Carlos’s body had been released. His brother had flown in to accompany it to Buenos Aires for burial. Mateo was arranging a memorial service in Guatemala City.

  Elena had been to the hospital on Friday. Molly remained comatose. The police had no leads.

  That was it.

  They also gave me news from Chupan Ya. Thursday night, Señora Ch’i’p’s son had become a grandfather for the fourth time. The old lady now had seven great-grandchildren. I hoped those new lives would bring joy into hers.

  The lab was weekend quiet. No chatter. No radios. No microwave whirs and beeps.

  No Ollie Nordstern pressing for a quote.

  Nevertheless, I found it hard to concentrate. My feelings were like wheels inside wheels inside wheels. Loneliness for home, for Katy, for Ryan. Sadness for the dead lying in boxes around me. Worry for Molly. Guilt for my lack of backbone at the Paraíso.

  The guilt prevailed. Vowing to do more for the Chupan Ya victims than I had for the girl in the septic tank, I worked long after Elena and Mateo called it quits.

  Burial fourteen was a female in her late teens, with multiple fractures of the jaw and right arm, and machete slashes to the back of the head. The mutants who had done this liked working up close and personal.

  As I examined the delicate bones my thoughts swung again and again to the Paraíso victim. Two young women killed decades apart. Does anything ever change? My sadness felt like a palpable thing.

  Burial fifteen was a five-year-old child. Tell me again about turning the other cheek.

  Galiano called in the late afternoon. Hernández had learned little from the parents of Patricia Eduardo and Claudia de la Alda. Señora Eduardo’s one recollection was that her daughter disliked a supervisor at the hospital, and Patricia and the supervisor had argued shortly before Patricia disappeared. She couldn’t recall the person’s name, gender, or position.

  Señor De la Alda thought his daughter had begun losing weight shortly before she went missing. Señora De la Alda disagreed. The museum had called to inform them that they could no longer hold Claudia’s position for her. They would be hiring a permanent replacement.

  By Monday I’d moved on to burial sixteen, a pubescent girl with second molars in eruption. I estimated her height at three foot nine. She’d been shot and decapitated by a machete blow.

  At noon I drove to police headquarters and Galiano and I proceeded to the trace evidence section of the forensic lab. We entered to find a small, balding man hunched over a dissecting scope. When Galiano called out, the man swiveled to face us, hooking gold-rimmed glasses behind chimpanzee ears.

  The chimp introduced himself as Fredi Minos, one of two specialists in hair and fiber analysis. Minos had been provided samples from the septic tank jeans, from the Gerardi and Eduardo homes, and from Mrs. Specter’s chair.

  “It’s wookie, right?” Galiano.

  Minos looked puzzled.

  “Chewbacca?”

  No glint.

  “Star Wars?”

  “Oh yes. The American movie.”

  In Minos’s defense, the joke sounded lame in Spanish.

  “Never mind. What did you come up with?”

  “Your unknown sample is cat hair.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “That it’s hair, or that it’s cat?”

  “That it’s cat,” I jumped in, seeing Galiano’s expression.

  Minos rolled his chair to the right, and selected a slide case from a stack on the counter. Then he rolled back to the scope and slipped one specimen under the eyepiece. After adjusting focus, he got up, and indicated that I should sit.

  “Take a look.”

  I glanced at Galiano. He waved me into the chair.

  “Would you prefer that I speak English?” Minos asked.

  “If you don’t mind.” I felt like a dunce, but my Spanish was shaky, and I wanted to fully understand his explanation.

  “What do you see?”

  “It looks like a wire with a pointed end.”

  “You’re looking at an uncut hair. It is one of twenty-seven included in the sample marked ‘Paraíso.’”

  Minos’s English had an odd up-and-down cadence, like a calliope.

  “Notice that the hair has no distinctive shape.”

  “Distinctive?”

  “With some species shape is a good identifier. Horse hair is coarse, with a sharp bend near the root. Deer hair is crinkly, with a very narrow root. Very distinctive. The Paraíso hairs are nothing like that.” He readjusted his glasses. “Now check the pigment distribution. See anything distinctive?”

  Minos was fond of the word distinctive.

  “Seems pretty homogenous,” I said.

  “It is. May I?”

  Withdrawing the slide, he moved to an optical scope, inserted it, and adjusted the focus. I rolled my chair down the counter and peered through the eyepiece. The hair now looked like a thick pipe with a narrow core.

  “Describe the medulla,” Minos directed.

  I focused on the hollow center, the region analogous to the marrow cavity in a long bone.

  “Resembles a ladder.”

  “Excellent. Medullar form is extremely variable. Some species have bipartite, or even multipartite medulla. The llama group is a good example of that. Very distinctive. Llamas also tend to have large pigment aggregates. When I see that combination, I immediately think llama.”

  Llama?

  “Your samples have a single-ladder medulla. That’s what you’re seeing.”

  “Which means cat?”

  “Not necessarily. Cattle, goats, chinchilla, mink, muskrat, badger, fox, beaver, dog, indeed many forms can have a single-ladder medulla in the fine hairs. Muskrat has a chevron-scale pattern, so I knew it wasn’t muskrat.”

  “Scales?” Galiano asked. “Like fish?”

  “Actually, yes. I’ll explain scales shortly. Cattle hairs frequently have a streaky pigment distribution, often with large aggregates, so I eliminated cattle. The scales didn’t look right for goat.”

  Minos seemed to be talking more to himself than to us, reviewing verbally the thought process he’d used in his analysis.

  “I also excluded badger because of the pigment distribution. I ruled out—”

  “What could you not rule out, Señor Minos?” Galiano broke in.

  “Dog.” Minos sounded wounded by Galiano’s lack of
interest in mammalian hair.

  “Ay, Dios.” Galiano puffed air out of his lips. “How often would dog hair turn up on clothing?”

  “Oh, it’s very, very common.” Minos missed Galiano’s sarcasm. “So I decided to double-check myself.”

  He walked to a desk and pulled a manila folder from a slotted shelf.

  “Once I’d eliminated everything but cat and dog, I took measurements and did what I call a medullary percentage analysis.”

  He withdrew a printout and laid it on the counter beside me.

  “Since cat and dog hair is so frequently encountered at crime scenes, I’ve done a bit of research on discriminating between the two. I’ve measured hundreds of dog and cat hairs and set up a database.”

  He flipped a page and pointed to a scatter graph bisected by a diagonal slash. The line divided dozens of triangles above from dozens of circles below. Only a handful of symbols crossed the metric Rubicon.

  “I calculate medullary percentage by dividing medullar width by hair width. This graph plots that figure, expressed as a percentage, against simple hair width, expressed in microns. As you can see, with few exceptions, cat values cluster above a certain threshold, while dog values lie below.”

  “Meaning that the medulla is relatively wider in cat hairs.”

  “Yes.” He beamed at me, a teacher pleased with a bright student. Then he pointed to a clump of asterisks in the swarm of triangles above the line.

  “Those points represent values for randomly selected hairs from the Paraíso sample. Every one falls squarely with the cats.”

  Minos fished in the folder and withdrew several color prints.

  “But you asked about scales, Detective. I wanted a good look at surface architecture, so I popped hairs from the Paraíso sample into the scanning electron microscope.”

  Minos handed me a five-by-seven glossy. I felt Galiano lean over my shoulder.

  “That’s the root end of a Paraíso hair magnified four hundred times. Look at the outer surface.”

  “Looks like a bathroom floor.” Galiano.

  Minos produced another photo. “That’s farther up the shaft.”

  “Flower petals.”

  “Good, Detective.” This time Galiano was the recipient of the proud smile. “What you’ve so aptly described is what we call scale pattern progression. In this case the scale pattern goes from what we call irregular mosaic to what we call petal.”

  Minos was what we call a jargon meister. But the guy knew his hair.

  Print number three. The scales now looked more honeycombed, their margins rougher.

  “That’s the tip end of a hair. The scale pattern is what we call regular mosaic. The borders have become more ragged.”

  “How is this relevant to cats and dogs?” Galiano.

  “Dogs show wide variation in scale pattern progression, but, in my opinion, this progression is unique to cats.”

  “So the hairs on the jeans came from a cat.” Galiano straightened.

  “Yes.”

  “Are they all from the same cat?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen nothing to suggest otherwise.”

  “What about the Specter sample?”

  Minos leafed through his folder.

  “That would be sample number four.” He smiled at me. “Cat.”

  “So everything comes up feline.” I thought a moment. “Is the Paraíso sample consistent with any of the other three?”

  “That’s where it gets interesting.”

  Minos selected another page, scanned the text.

  “In sample number two, the average length of the hairs was greater than in any of the other three samples.” He looked up. “Over five centimeters, which is quite long.” Back to the report. “Also, the hairs were more consistently of the fine variety.” He looked up again. “As opposed to coarse.” Back to the report. “And the surface architecture of each hair showed a mixture of smooth-edged regular mosaic and smooth-edged coronal scale types.”

  Minos closed the folder, but offered no explanation.

  “What does that mean, Señor Minos?” I asked.

  “Sample two derives from a different cat than the other three samples. My guess, and it’s only a guess, won’t go into my report, is that cat number two is Persian.”

  “And the other samples are not from Persian cats?”

  “Standard shorthairs.”

  “But the Paraíso sample is consistent with the other two samples?”

  “Consistent, yes.”

  “How was sample two labeled?”

  Again Minos consulted the folder.

  “Eduardo.”

  “That would be Buttercup.”

  “Persian?” Minos and I asked simultaneously.

  Galiano nodded.

  “So Buttercup wasn’t the donor of the Paraíso hairs,” I said.

  “A Persian cat wasn’t the donor of the Paraíso hairs,” Minos corrected.

  “That puts Buttercup in the clear. What about the Gerardi or Specter cats?”

  “Definite candidates.”

  I felt a sudden surge of optimism.

  “Along with a million other shorthairs in Guatemala City,” he added.

  The optimism plunged like an elevator in free fall.

  “Can’t you determine if one of the other samples matches the hairs from the jeans?” Galiano asked.

  “Both display similar characteristics. Individualization is impossible based on hair morphology.”

  “What about DNA?” I asked.

  “That can probably be done.”

  Minos tossed the folder onto the counter, removed his glasses, and began cleaning them on the hem of his lab coat.

  “But not here.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s a six-month backlog on human tissue cases. You’ll have a birthday waiting for results on cat hair.”

  I was wrapping my mind around that when Galiano’s cell phone sounded.

  His face tensed as he listened.

  “¡Ay, Dios mío! Dónde?”

  He was silent a full minute, then his eyes met mine. When he spoke again he’d gone back to English.

  “Why wasn’t I called sooner?”

  A long pause.

  “Xicay’s there?”

  Another pause.

  “We’re on our way.”

  11

  AT 3 P.M. THE STREETS WERE ALREADY IN GRIDLOCK. Lights flashing, siren screaming, Galiano snaked forward as drivers edged over to allow us to pass. He kept his foot on the accelerator, barely slowed at intersections.

  Shotgun Spanish crackled over the radio. I couldn’t follow, but it didn’t matter. I was thinking about Claudia de la Alda in her plain black skirts and pastel blouses. I tried to remember her expression in the photos, came up blank.

  But other images flooded back from the past. Shallow graves. Putrefying bodies rolled in carpets. Skeletons covered with fallen leaves. Rotten clothing scattered by animals.

  A sludge-filled skull.

  My stomach knotted.

  The faces of distraught parents. Their child is dead, and I am about to tell them that. They are bewildered, stricken, disbelieving, angry. Bearing that news is an awful job.

  Damn! It was happening again.

  My heart tangoed below my ribs.

  Damn! Damn! Damn!

  Señora De la Alda had received a phone call about the time I was heading out to learn more about cat hair. A male voice said Claudia was dead and told her where to find the body. Hysterical, she’d called Hernández. He’d called Xicay. The recovery team had located bones in a ravine on the far western edge of the city.

  “What else did Hernández tell you?” I asked.

  “The call was placed at a public phone.”

  “Where?”

  “The Cobán bus station in Zone One.”

  “What did the caller say?”

  “He told her the body was in Zone Seven. Gave directions. Hung up.”

  “Near the archaeological site?”
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  “On the back steps.”

  Zone 7 is a tentacle of the city that wraps around the ruins of Kaminaljuyú, a Mayan center that in its heyday had over three hundred mounds, thirteen ball courts, and fifty thousand residents. Unlike the lowland Maya, the builders of Kaminaljuyú preferred adobe to stone, an unwise choice in a tropical climate. Erosion and urban sprawl had taken their toll, and today the ancient metropolis is little more than a series of earth-covered knolls, a green space for lovers and Frisbee players.

  “Claudia worked at the Ixchel Museum. Think there’s a connection?”

  “I’ll definitely find out.”

  A stench filled the car as we sped past the dump.

  “Did Señora De la Alda recognize the voice?”

  “No.”

  As we flew through the city, the neighborhoods grew increasingly tired and run-down. Eventually, Galiano shot onto a narrow street with comedores and convenience stores on all four corners. We sped past ragged frame houses with clothesline laundry and sagging front stoops. Four blocks down, the street ended with a T-intersection which in turn dead-ended in both directions.

  Turning left we faced a bleakly familiar scene. Patrol cars lined one side, lights flashing, radios spitting. A morgue van waited on the opposite shoulder. Beside the van, a metal guardrail; beside the rail, a steep drop into a barranca.

  Twenty yards ahead, the pavement ended at chain linking. Yellow crime scene tape ran ten feet out, turned left, then paralleled the fence on its plunge into the ravine.

  Uniformed cops moved about within the cordoned area. A handful of men watched from outside, some holding cameras, others taking notes. Behind us, I could see cars and a television truck. Media crew sat half in, half out of vehicles, smoking, talking, dozing.

  When Galiano and I slammed our doors, lenses pointed in our direction. Journalists converged.

  “Señor, esta—”

  “Detective Galiano—”

  “Una pregunta, por favor.”

  Ignoring the onslaught, we ducked under the tape and walked to the edge of the ravine. Shutters clicked at our backs. Questions rang out.

  Hernández was five yards down the incline. Galiano began scrabbling toward him. I was right behind.

  Though this stretch of hillside was largely grass and scrub, the grade was steep, the ground rocky. I placed my feet sideways, kept my weight low, and grasped vegetation as best I could. I didn’t want to turn an ankle or stumble into a downhill slide.