Spider Bones: A Novel

by Kathy Reichs

  Pulled Spider’s file.

  The SS number belonged to John Charles Lowery from Lumberton, North Carolina. Spider.

  But Spider Lowery died in Quebec.

  Forty years after crashing in Long Binh.

  Sweet Mother Mary, could the situation possibly grow more confused?

  “Shall we lay the guy out?” Danny’s voice held little enthusiasm.

  My eyes flicked to my watch.

  Five fifty.

  I was anxious to get home to Katy. And I wanted to learn whether Ryan had found an alternate source of DNA for Spider.

  “Let’s do it first thing tomorrow.”

  “It’s a date.”

  “You’re on, big guy.” I mimicked Danny’s earlier wink. “But we both keep our clothes on.”

  I called out, explored.

  Katy was not in the house.

  At the pool.

  On the lanai.

  I found no note explaining her whereabouts.

  I strolled down to the beach.

  No Katy.

  I was changing to shorts when a door slammed.

  The cadence of conversation drifted to my room. Voices, one male, one female, not my daughter.

  Had Katy made friends?

  “Katy?”

  “She’s gone for a bike ride,” the male voice called out.

  Boing!

  Katy’s texts now made sense.

  Had I asked her opinion?

  I was half asleep, had acted on impulse.

  Bonehead move, Brennan.

  Had I given her a heads-up?

  I’d had none myself.

  Lame.

  Slipping on sandals, I hurried downstairs.

  Ryan’s shirt featured turquoise bananas and lavender palms. His board shorts were apricot and had Billabong scrawled across the bum. Add flip-flops, Maui Jims, a “Hang Loose” cap, and a two-day stubble. You get the picture. Miami Vice meets Hawaii Five-O.

  Lily held a string-handled shopping bag in each hand. By joint effort, her miniskirt and tube top covered maybe twenty inches of her torso. Ninety-inch wedge sandals, Lolita shades, maraschino lips.

  Oh, boy.

  “Aloha, madame.” Ryan crushed me with a bear hug. “Comment ça va?”

  “I’m good.” Freeing myself, I turned to Lily. “How was your flight?”

  Lily shrugged one very bare shoulder.

  “I hope it’s OK that we just showed up,” Ryan said.

  “How did you find us?”

  Ryan grinned and flashed his brows.

  I knew his meaning. “You’re a detective. You detect.”

  “Katy seemed a bit flustered at seeing us,” Ryan said.

  “I may have forgotten to mention your arrival.”

  Rolling mascara-laden eyes, Lily threw out one hip.

  “Everything happened so last-minute, the judge granting permission, booking seats, racing to Dorval,” Ryan said. “In all the rush, I forgot to charge my cell. Damned if it didn’t die at the airport.”

  “They do that,” Lily said.

  “Did Katy get you settled?” I asked.

  “She did. I’m down, Lily’s in the spare bedroom up. This place is killer, by the way.”

  “Can I go?” Lily. Not whiny, but close.

  Ryan looked an apology my way.

  I glanced at my watch. Six thirty. “Katy should be back any minute.” Please, God. “How about we meet at seven thirty and head out for dinner?”

  “My treat,” Ryan said.

  “No way,” I said.

  “I insist,” he said.

  “Katy can hurt you,” I said. “I think she checks the right-hand column, then orders the highest-priced item on the menu.”

  “That’s why God gave us credit cards.” Ryan smiled and tapped his back pocket.

  The choice of restaurant involved stimulating dialogue. Lily wanted steak. Katy was avoiding red meat. Katy craved fish. Lily was over her quota on mercury. Katy suggested Thai. Too spicy. Lily proposed Indian. Katy wasn’t in the mood.

  We compromised on Japanese.

  During dinner, neither Katy nor Lily was overtly rude, but icicles could have formed on our table. Back at Lanikai, each went straight to her room.

  Ryan and I shared a drink on the lanai, Perrier for me, Big Wave Golden Ale for him.

  Ryan apologized for Lily’s insolence. She’d resisted making the trip. He’d insisted, gotten no support from Lutetia. He suspected a love interest, perhaps a man from Lily’s drug rehab group. Or, worse, from her past as a user.

  I explained that Katy was still dejected over Coop’s death, but that she seemed to be on the mend.

  We agreed that our daughters were champs at the use of the sugar-coated dig. And that my sisterhood-bonding therapy did not look promising.

  I brought Ryan up to speed on developments at the CIL. The Mongoloid craniofacial traits of 2010-37. Spider Lowery’s Native American ancestry. Luis Alvarez, the maintenance specialist who went down with Spider in ’68. 1968-979, the decomposed body found near Long Binh eight months after the crash. Spider Lowery’s dog tag in 1968-979’s box.

  Ryan filled me in on developments in Montreal. And Lumberton. Turned out my suggestion about Beasley, though a good one, was nonproductive. The sheriff was cooperative but, to date, had offered nothing of value.

  Listening to Ryan describe his exchange with the sheriff triggered a Ping! moment. A comment of Plato’s during our scrapbook conversation.

  “Ryan, listen. Spider’s mother died of kidney failure five years ago. It’s a long shot, but maybe the hospital where she was treated still has some samples on file, you know, a path slide or something. And Spider had a brother who was killed a couple years before that.”

  “A long shot is better than no shot at all. I’ll call first thing tomorrow, ask Beasley to poke around.”

  Ryan proposed taking Katy and Lily to Pearl Harbor the following day. I wished him luck.

  At eleven, we too retired to our separate rooms.

  Through my wall, I heard Lily talking on her cell.

  THE SUNSHINE SISTERS WERE STILL SLEEPING WHEN I ENTERED the kitchen at eight the following morning. Ryan was lacing on Nikes for a run on the beach. The plan was that he and our daughters would spend the day at Pearl Harbor, visiting the USS Arizona monument and touring the USS Missouri battleship and the USS Bowfin submarine. I wished him luck in dealing with the dim and murky realm of female resentment. Then I was off to the CIL. I thought of the dog tag the whole drive. It just made no sense.

  Dimitriadus was on my bumper as I turned in at JPAC. We crossed the lot together. In silence. I wondered how an examiner of unidentified bones could miss a dog tag in a box. Ten feet from the building, he accelerated his pace and shot inside, letting the door slam in my face.

  Last night, Lily’s cold shoulder. This morning, Dimitriadus. I was beginning to feel like the class pariah.

  Danny was in his office.

  “Dimitriadus is acting like I killed his puppy.”

  “Come in.” Danny’s smile faded. “Close the door.”

  Puzzled, I did.

  “We’re cutting Dimitriadus loose.”

  “Jesus. The guy’s been here, what, twelve years? Why?”

  “A number of reasons. Most recently, he failed his ABFA exam again.” Danny referred to the American Board of Forensic Anthropology examination for certification, a credential essential for qualification in the field.

  “The dog tag?”

  “The decision was made before that came up, so no.”

  “What will he do?”

  Danny spread both hands. Who knows?

  “That info is for your ears only. So far only Dimitriadus, Merkel, you, and I know.”

  I nodded.

  A beat passed.

  “Today’s good news is that J-2 has Alvarez’s IDPF.”

  J-2, the joint command records section, has access to information on deceased personnel going back to World War I.

  “I was j
ust about to walk over and pick it up. Jackson asked about you. Come along, make the man’s day.”

  “Corporal Jackson? The guy who convinced everyone the phone lines were scheduled for cleaning by a steam blast, and that all handsets had to be sealed in plastic bags for an hour?”

  “It’s Sergeant Jackson now.”

  “He’s been here a long time.”

  “He’s just been reassigned back, actually.”

  “I no longer have clearance to J-2.”

  “Follow me, little squaw.”

  Little squaw?

  Danny and I took the corridor past the general’s staff offices to a door at the back of the building and entered a large room furnished with cubicles containing desks, most occupied by civilians I knew to be analysts and historians. At the far end, a second door led to a secure area filled with movable shelving similar to that used for bone storage in the CIL lab. Instead of bones, these shelves held hundreds of small gray filing boxes, each identified by a sequence of numbers. The REFNOs.

  At the counter, we chatted a moment with Sergeant Dix Jackson, a black man with mulberry splotches on his face and arms the size of sequoias. Needless to say, no one ever mentioned the splotches.

  Jackson and I reminisced, each trying to top the other with recollections of practical jokes from the past. He won with a story involving Danny, a toilet stall, a burning bag, and buckets of water raining down from above.

  Feigning annoyance, Danny filled out a request for the file on 1968-979, the unknown recovered near Long Binh in ’68.

  Jackson read the form. “When you need this, Doc?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “You got it.”

  Danny signed for and scooped up Alvarez’s IDPF.

  We started to leave.

  “And, Doc?”

  We both turned.

  “You feel the urge to do your business, relax. We got no fire drills scheduled this month.”

  Back in Danny’s office, we cleared the love seat and coffee table. No banter. We were both very focused on learning everything we could about Spec 2 Alvarez.

  Work space readied, we sat. Danny unwound the string, spread the file, and extracted the contents.

  I swallowed.

  Throughout my years consulting to CILHI, the photos always distressed me more than anything else. Alvarez’s lay smack on top.

  The old black-and-white showed a Latino-looking man in his army uniform. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and lashes that were wasted on a Y-chromosomer.

  A second photo captured nine soldiers, hair sweat-pasted to their temples and brows. All wore fatigues with the sleeves rolled up. One sported a Tilley hat, fishing lure pinned to a rakishly flipped brim.

  The name Alvarez was scrawled in faded blue ink across the chest of the third man from the right. Third kid from the right.

  Alvarez wasn’t big, wasn’t small. Of the group, he alone wasn’t looking at the camera. His face was turned, as though a momentary distraction had caught his attention.

  What, I wondered? A bird in flight? A passing dog? Movement in the brush?

  Had he been mildly curious? Startled? Afraid for his life?

  “¡Ay, caramba!” Danny was looking at Alvarez’s induction record. “The gentleman in question was Mexican-American.”

  “That fits our profile for 2010-37. Any medical or dental records?”

  Danny viewed the stack side-on. “Yep. Let’s save those for last.”

  Danny skimmed a sheet of blue-lined notebook paper, the kind kids use for middle school essays.

  “A letter from Fernando Alvarez, Luis’s father,” he said. “You read Spanish?”

  I nodded.

  Danny handed me the paper.

  The letter was written in a neat, almost feminine hand. No header indicated the recipient’s name. The date was July 29, 1969. The English stopped after “Dear Sir.”

  The message was poignant in its simplicity.

  I’d read many. Every single solitary one had touched me deeply.

  “What’s he say?” Danny asked. Knowing.

  “My son was a hero. Find him.”

  Next came clippings from a Spanish-language newspaper. One announced Luis Alvarez’s graduation from high school. The photo showed a younger version of the man in uniform. Mortarboard. Tassel. Somber grin.

  One story announced Alvarez’s departure for Vietnam. Another reported his status as MIA.

  Danny picked up a telegram. I felt no need to read it. We regret to inform you. Maria and Fernando Alvarez were being notified that their son was missing.

  Next came statements from witnesses who saw the Huey go down. A guard on his way from the Long Binh jail to his barracks. A motorist traveling the road to Saigon. A maintenance worker at the helicopter landing pad. One soldier had provided a hand-drawn map.

  The file also contained a standard DD form recording the loss incident, and unclassified documents compiled by analysts attempting to determine what had happened to Alvarez.

  An hour after leaving the J-2 shop, Danny and I turned to Luis Alvarez’s medical and dental records.

  Only to be disappointed.

  Nothing in the antemorts positively linked the missing Spec 2 to the bones accessioned as 2010-37. Either Alvarez had enjoyed the best health on the planet or, like Lowery, his records were incomplete.

  “Maria Alvarez died in nineteen eighty-seven,” I read aloud. “No other maternal relative provided a DNA sample.”

  “We probably won’t get sequencing on 2010-37, anyway,” Danny said.

  I agreed. “Probably not.”

  “Nothing excludes Alvarez from being your Lumberton guy.”

  I agreed again. “No. Or he could be 1968-979.”

  I thought a moment.

  “Think it would be worthwhile trying to track down the witnesses? Maybe one saw something that never made the files.”

  Danny returned to the statements. Read.

  “The maintenance worker was a guy named Harlan Kramer from Abilene, Texas. Kramer was regular army. If he stayed in, it would be fairly easy to find him.”

  Danny made a note.

  “Ready to hit it?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  Danny and I moved to the lab.

  Though some bones were damaged by erosion, trauma, or animal scavenging, most of 1968-979’s skeleton was in pretty good shape. While Danny opened an anthropology update file, I laid out my usual stick figure man.

  Skull. Jaw. Arms. Legs. Sternum. Clavicles. Ribs. Vertebrae. Only the kneecaps and some hand and foot parts were missing.

  Didn’t matter. I knew straight off that 1968-979 was neither Spider Lowery nor Luis Alvarez. So did Danny.

  “This dude was a tree-topper.”

  I nodded agreement. “Lowery and Alvarez were both five-nine. This man was much taller.”

  “What the hell is he doing with Spider Lowery’s tag?”

  I had no explanation.

  “We’ve got dentition.” Danny checked the jaw. “Two molars and a second bicuspid on the right. Two molars on the left.” He rotated the skull to sit palate up. “Two molars on the right, two on the left, and a second bicuspid. Ten teeth. I’ll get X-rays.”

  Feeling a vibration at my hip, I checked my BlackBerry.

  “It’s Katy.”

  “Take it. I’ll do inventory.”

  “Hi, sweetie.”

  “I am so outta here. First flight I can get.”

  Great.

  “Lily is a complete wack job.”

  “Where are you?” Anticipating a less than pleasant exchange, I put distance between myself and Danny.

  “Pearl Harbor.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Where should I start? First, there’s the trip into town. Ms. Head Case has to ride in front so she won’t get sick. Guess who ends up stuffed in back? Then we get to the park and at least a million people are waiting in line. Guess who has to sit on a bench so her feet won’t hurt? Big surprise, island girl! You’
re wearing heels that would kill the average pole dancer. Then—”

  “Katy.”

  “—we have to eat at this totally gross ptomaine haven because Lily can’t handle—”

  “Katy.”

  “What?” Snapped.

  “She’s going through a rough patch.”

  “I’m not?”

  “Is Lily really so bad?”

  “She’s a freak show. This was supposed to be our time together.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy Lily’s company.”

  “Oh, yeah. The bitch is so cool I may vomit from sheer envy.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have asked your opinion before inviting them to join us.”

  “You think?”

  Danny passed me holding the skull and jaw. I assumed he was going for X-rays.

  “Where is Ryan?” I asked.

  “Paying the bill.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  I was answered by the silence of unspoken anger.

  * * *

  After a quick lunch, Danny and I constructed a biological profile for 1968-979.

  Gender: male.

  Race: white.

  Age: twenty-seven to thirty-five years.

  Height: six-one, plus or minus two inches.

  Unique skeletal identifiers: possible healed fractures of the right mandibular ramus, right clavicle, and right scapula.

  Unique dental identifiers: fragment of a restoration in the first upper left molar.

  By three we’d taken X-rays and confirmed the dental work and the old jaw and shoulder trauma.

  Danny was on the phone with J-2 when my BlackBerry buzzed again.

  Hadley Perry.

  The ME skipped all preliminaries.

  “Divers found another hunk of leg.”

  “Where?”

  “Halona Cove, lying on a coral ledge about twenty feet down.”

  I checked the time. Five thirty. I was living the movie Groundhog Day. New day, same scene.

  “Have Tuesday’s remains been cleaned?”

  “Down to nice shiny bone.”

  “Have you contacted a shark expert?”

  “The National Marine Fisheries Service has an office on Oahu. I called a guy I know over there. He’s off-island, but a Dr. Dorcas Gearhart is coming by tomorrow at nine.”

  “I’ll be there. But—”

  “I know. You can’t stay long.”

  THAT NIGHT WE OPTED FOR AN EVENING AT HOME. AT LEAST Ryan and I did. Lily and Katy added little but tension to the decision-making process.