The Keepsake

by Tess Gerritsen

  Maura had just clipped X-rays onto the morgue viewing box, and the dental films of Jane Doe Number Three glowed against the backlight. She looked at the two detectives. “So what do you think of these?” she quizzed them.

  “Those look like pretty good teeth,” said Jane.

  Maura nodded. “There are two amalgam fillings here, plus one gold crown on the lower left molar. I see no caries, and there’s no alveolar bone loss to indicate any periodontal disease. Finally, there’s this detail.” Maura tapped a finger on the X-ray. “She’s missing both pre-molars.”

  “You think they were pulled?”

  “But there are no gaps between the teeth. And the roots of these incisors have been shortened and blunted.”

  “And that means?”

  “She’s had orthodontic work. She’s worn braces.”

  “So we’re talking a well-to-do victim.”

  “Certainly middle class, at the very least.”

  “Hey, I never got braces.” Jane bared her teeth, revealing an irregular bottom row. “These, Doc, are middle-class teeth.” She pointed to the X-ray. “My dad couldn’t afford to pay for something like that.”

  “Madam X had good teeth, too,” said Frost.

  Maura nodded. “Both women had what I’d guess were privileged childhoods. Privileged enough to pay for good dental care and orthodontics.” She pulled down the dental film and reached for a new set, which twanged as she shoved them under the clips. The bones of the lower extremities now glowed on the light box.

  “And here’s what else the two victims had in common.”

  Jane and Frost simultaneously sucked in startled breaths. They needed no radiologist to interpret the damage they saw on those X-rays.

  “It was done to both of her tibias,” said Maura. “With a blunt instrument of some kind. A hammer maybe, or a tire iron. We’re not talking about mere glancing blows on her shins. These were brutal and purposeful, meant to shatter bone. Both tibias have transverse diaphyseal fractures, with scattered fragments embedded in the soft tissue. The pain would have been excruciating. She certainly couldn’t have walked. I can’t imagine how she must have suffered over the days that followed. Infection probably set in, spreading from open wounds into soft tissues. Bacteria would have infiltrated bone, and eventually blood.”

  Jane looked at her. “Did you say days?”

  “These fractures wouldn’t have been fatal. Not immediately.”

  “Maybe she was killed first. These could be postmortem mutilations.” Please make them postmortem, and not what I’m imagining.

  “I’m sorry to say that she lived,” said Maura. “For at least several weeks.” She pointed to a ragged outline, like a puff of white smoke surrounding the fractured bone. “This is callus formation. It’s the bone healing itself, and this doesn’t happen overnight, or even over a few days. It takes weeks.”

  Weeks during which this woman had suffered. Weeks when it must have seemed far better to die. Jane thought of an earlier set of X-rays she’d seen hanging on this same light box. Another woman’s shattered leg, the fracture lines blurred by a fog of healing bone.

  “Just like Madam X,” she said.

  Maura nodded. “Neither of these victims was killed immediately. Both suffered crippling injuries to their lower extremities. Both lived for a while. Which means someone brought them food and water. Someone was keeping them alive, long enough for the first signs of healing to show up on these films.”

  “It’s the same killer.”

  “The patterns are too similar. This is part of his signature. First he maims them, maybe to ensure they can’t escape. Then as the days go by, he keeps them fed. And alive.”

  “What the hell is he doing during that time? Enjoying their company?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jane stared at shattered bone and felt a twinge in her own legs, just a shadow of the agony this victim must have endured. “You know,” she said softly, “when you first called me that night about Madam X, I thought it would be an old murder. A cold case, with a perp who was long dead. But if he’s the one who put this body in Ms. Pulcillo’s car…”

  “He’s still alive, Jane. And he’s right here in Boston.”

  The door to the anteroom swung open, and a silver-haired gentleman stepped in, tying on a surgical gown.

  “Dr. Vandenbrink?” said Maura. “I’m Dr. Isles. I’m glad you could make it.”

  “I hope you haven’t started yet.”

  “We were waiting for you.”

  The man came forward to shake her hand. He was in his sixties, cadaverously thin, but his deeply tanned face and eager stride revealed not sickness but lean good health. As Maura made the introductions, the man gave scarcely a glance at Jane and Frost—his attention was riveted instead on the table where the victim lay, her twisted form mercifully concealed by a drape. Clearly it was the dead, not the living, that most interested him.

  “Dr. Vandenbrink is from the Drents Museum in Assen,” said Maura. “He flew in last night from the Netherlands, just for this autopsy.”

  “And this is her?” he said, his gaze still on the draped body.

  “Let’s take a look at her, then.”

  Maura handed him a pair of gloves, and they both snapped on latex. Maura reached for the drape, and Jane steeled herself against the view as the sheet was peeled back.

  Naked on stainless steel, exposed by bright lights, the contorted body looked like a charred and twisted branch. But it was the face that would forever haunt Jane, the features glossy as black carbon, frozen in a mortal scream.

  Far from horrified, Dr. Vandenbrink instead leaned closer with a look of fascination. “She’s beautiful,” he murmured. “Oh yes, I’m glad you called me. This was certainly worth the trip.”

  “You call that beautiful?” said Jane.

  “I refer to her state of preservation,” he said. “For the moment, it’s almost perfect. But I’m afraid the flesh may start to decay now that it’s exposed to air. This is the most impressive modern example I’ve encountered. It’s rare to find a recent human subject that’s undergone this process.”

  “Then you know how she got this way?”

  “Oh yes. She’s very much like the others.”

  “Others?”

  He looked at Jane, his eyes so deep-set that she had the disturbing impression a skull was gazing back at her. “Have you ever heard of the Yde Girl, Detective?”

  “No. Who is she?”

  “Yde is a place. A village in the northern Netherlands. In 1897, two men from Yde were cutting peat, something that was traditionally dried and burned as fuel. And in the bog, they found something that terrified them. It was a female with long blond hair who had clearly been strangled. A long band of fabric was still wrapped three times around her neck. At first, the people of Yde didn’t understand what they were dealing with. She was so small and shrunken, they thought she was an old woman. Or perhaps a demon. But over time, as scientists came to look at her, they were able to learn more about the corpse. And they discovered that she was not an old woman when she died, but a girl of only about sixteen. A girl who had suffered from a crooked spine. A girl who was murdered. She was stabbed beneath the collarbone, and a band was tightened around her neck until she strangled. Then she was placed facedown in the bog, where she lay for centuries. Until those two peat cutters found her and revealed her to the world.”

  “Centuries?”

  Vandenbrink nodded. “Carbon fourteen dating tells us she’s two thousand years old. When Jesus walked the earth, that poor girl may already have been lying in her grave.”

  “Even after two centuries, they could tell how she died?” said Frost.

  “She was that well preserved, from her hair to the cloth around her neck. Oh, there was damage done to her body, but it had been inflicted far more recently, when she was dredged up with the peat. Enough of her was left intact to form a portrait of who she was. And how she must have suffered. That’s the miracle of bogs
, Detective. They give us a window back in time. Hundreds of these bodies have been found in Holland and Denmark, Ireland and England. Each one is a time traveler, an unfortunate ambassador of sorts, sent to us from people who left no written records. Except for the cruelties they carved into their victims.”

  “But this woman”—Jane nodded at the body on the table—

  “she’s obviously not two thousand years old.”

  “Yet her state of preservation is every bit as exquisite. Look, you can even see the ridges on her soles and her finger pads. And see how her skin is dark, like leather? Yet her features clearly tell us she’s Caucasian.” He looked at Maura. “I completely concur with your opinion, Dr. Isles.”

  Frost said, “So you’re telling us this body was preserved in the same way as that girl in the Netherlands?”

  Vandenbrink nodded. “What you have here is a modern bog body.”

  “That’s why I called Dr. Vandenbrink,” said Maura. “He’s been studying bog bodies for decades.”

  “Unlike Egyptian mummification techniques,” said Vandenbrink, “there’s no written record of how to make a bog body. This is a completely natural and accidental process that we don’t entirely understand.”

  “Then how would the killer know how to do it?” Jane asked.

  “Within the bog body community, there’s been quite a bit of discussion about just this topic.”

  Jane gave a surprised laugh. “You have a community?”

  “Of course. We have our own meetings, our own cocktail parties. A great deal of what we discuss is purely speculative. But we do have some hard science to back up the theories. We know, for instance, that there are several characteristics about bogs that contribute to corpse preservation. They’re highly acidic, they’re oxygen-poor, and they contain layers of sphagnum moss. These factors help arrest decomposition and preserve soft tissues. They darken the skin to the color you see in this body here. If allowed to steep for centuries, eventually this corpse’s bones will dissolve, leaving only the preserved flesh, leathery and completely flexible.”

  “Is it the moss that does it?” asked Frost.

  “It’s a vital part of the process. There’s a chemical reaction between bacteria and the polysaccharides found in sphagnum moss. Sphagnum binds bacterial cells so they can’t degrade organic materials. If you bind the bacteria, you can arrest decomposition. The whole process happens in an acidic soup that contains dead moss and tannins and holocellulose. In other words, bog water.”

  “And that’s it? Just stick the body in bog water, and you’re done?”

  “It’s a little more exacting than that. There’ve been several experiments using piglet cadavers in Ireland and the UK. These were buried in various peat bogs, then exhumed months later for study. Since pigs are biochemically similar to us, we can assume the results would be the same for humans.”

  “And they turned into bog pigs?”

  “If the conditions were just right. First, the pigs had to be completely submerged or they would decompose. Second, they had to be placed into the bog immediately after death. If you let the corpse sit exposed for just a few hours before you submerged it, it would go on to decompose anyway.”

  Frost and Jane looked at each other. “So our perp couldn’t waste any time once he killed her,” said Jane.

  Vandenbrink nodded. “She had to be submerged soon after death. In the case of European bog bodies, the victims must have been walked into the bog while still alive. And only then, at the water’s edge, were they murdered.”

  Jane turned and looked at the brutally shattered tibias on the X-ray light box. “This victim couldn’t have walked anywhere with two broken legs. She’d have to be carried in. If you were the killer, you wouldn’t want to do that in the dark. Not if you’re walking through a bog.”

  “So he does it in broad daylight?” said Frost. “Drags her from his car and hauls her to the water? He’d have to have the location picked out ahead of time. A place he knew he wouldn’t be seen, and close enough to a road so he wouldn’t have to carry her far.”

  “There are other conditions required,” said Vandenbrink.

  “What conditions?” asked Jane.

  “The water must be deep enough and cold enough. Temperature matters. And it would have to be remote enough so the body wouldn’t be found until he was ready to claim her.”

  “That’s a long list of conditions,” said Jane. “Wouldn’t it be easier just to fill a bathtub with water and peat moss?”

  “How can you be certain you’d properly replicate the conditions? A bog is a complex ecosystem that we don’t fully understand, a chemical soup of organic matter that has to steep over centuries. Even if you manage to make that soup in a bathtub, you’d need to initially chill it to four degrees Celsius and hold it there for at least several weeks. Then the body would need to soak for months, perhaps years. How would you keep it concealed that long? Would there be odors? Suspicious neighbors?” He shook his head. “The ideal place is still a bog. A real bog.”

  But those broken legs remained a problem. Whether the victim was alive or dead, she would need to be carried or dragged to the water’s edge, over terrain that might be muddy. “How big was she, do you think?” Jane asked.

  “Based on skeletal indices,” said Maura, “I estimate her height at around five foot six. And you can see she’s relatively slender.”

  “So maybe a hundred twenty, a hundred thirty pounds.”

  “A reasonable guess.”

  But even a slender woman would weigh a man down after a short distance. And if she were already dead, time would be of the essence. Delay too long, and the corpse would begin its inevitable journey to decay. If she were still alive, there would be other difficulties to contend with. A struggling and noisy victim. The chance of being heard while you dragged her from the car. Where did you find this perfect spot, this killing place?

  The intercom buzzed, and Maura’s secretary said over the speaker: “Dr. Isles, there’s a phone call on line one. It’s a Scott Thurlow from NCIC.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Maura. She pulled off her gloves as she went to the telephone. “This is Dr. Isles.” She paused, listening, then suddenly straightened and shot a look at Jane that said, This one’s important. “Thank you for letting me know. I’ll take a look at that right now. Hold on.” She crossed to the lab computer.

  “What is it?” said Jane.

  Maura opened one of her e-mails and clicked on the attachment. A series of dental X-rays appeared on the screen. Unlike the morgue panograms that showed all the teeth at once, these were spot films from a dentist’s office.

  “Yes, I’m looking at them now,” said Maura, still on the phone.

  “I see an occlusal amalgam on number thirty. This is absolutely compatible.”

  “Compatible with what?” said Jane.

  Maura held up a hand to keep her silent, her focus still on the phone conversation. “I’m opening the second attachment,” she said. A new image filled the screen. It was a young woman with long black hair, her eyes narrowed against the sunlight. She was wearing a denim shirt over a black tank top. The deeply tanned face, devoid of makeup, suggested a woman who lived her life outdoors, who thrived on fresh air and practical clothes. “I’m going to look over these files,” Maura said. “I’ll call you back.” She hung up.

  “Who’s the woman?” Jane asked.

  “Her name is Lorraine Edgerton. She was last seen near Gallup, New Mexico, about twenty-five years ago.”

  Jane frowned at the face smiling back at her from the computer screen. “Am I supposed to remember that name?”

  “You will now. You’re looking at the face of Madam X.”

  SIXTEEN

  Forensic psychologist Dr. Lawrence Zucker had a gaze so penetrating that Jane usually avoided sitting straight across from him, but she’d arrived late to the meeting and had been forced to take the last remaining seat, facing Zucker. Slowly he perused the photographs spread out on the tabl
e. They were images of a vibrant young Lorraine Edgerton. In some shots she wore shorts and T-shirts; in others, jeans and hiking boots. Clearly she was an outdoorswoman, with the tan to prove it. He turned next to what she looked like now: stiff and dry as cordwood, her face a leathery mask stretched taut across bone. When he looked up, his eerily pale eyes focused on Jane, and she had the uneasy feeling that he could see straight into the dark corners of her brain, into places she allowed no one to see. Though there were four other detectives in the room, she was the only woman; perhaps that was the reason Zucker focused on her. She refused to let him intimidate her, and she stared right back.

  “How long ago did you say Ms. Edgerton vanished?” he asked.

  “It was twenty-five years ago,” said Jane.

  “And does that period of time account for the current condition of her body?”

  “We know this is Lorraine Edgerton, based on the dental records.”

  “And we also know it doesn’t take centuries to mummify a body,” added Frost.

  “Yes, but could she have been killed far more recently than twenty-five years ago?” said Zucker. “You said she was kept alive long enough for her bullet wound to begin healing. What if she was kept a prisoner for far longer? Could you turn a body into a mummy in, say, five years?”

  “You think this perp could have kept her captive for decades?”

  “I’m merely speculating, Detective Frost. Trying to understand what our unknown subject gets out of this. What could drive him to perform these grotesque postmortem rituals. With each of the three victims, he went to a great deal of trouble to keep her from decaying.”

  “He wanted them to last,” said Lieutenant Marquette, chief of the homicide unit. “He wanted to keep them around.”

  Zucker nodded. “Eternal companionship. That’s one interpretation. He didn’t want to let them go, so he turns them into keepsakes that will last forever.”