Dead Past dffi-4

by Beverly Connor

  “I know, Jin. If we had our own DNA lab, you could have all these done tonight and we’d have everyone’s identity tomorrow.”

  “There’s that, but I was going to suggest that since I have to extract these samples when we get back to the lab, why don’t I go out and help Neva and David get all the remains collected. We’ll get done faster.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Jin pealed off his gloves and slipped off his green lab coat. Just as he started out the door, David entered carrying a box.

  “We found another body.”

  He brought the bones to Diane’s table. His dark eyes sparkled. Diane waited for the other shoe to drop. There was usually another shoe when David looked like that.

  “We found him among metal bed slats, and a partially consumed head and footboard,” he said, “so we think he may have been in bed at the time of the fire. And get this. He was shot in the head.”

  Chapter 13

  “Shot?” said Diane.

  Allen Rankin looked up from the cadaver he was examining. “Someone was shot? In the house? Before the fire?” he said. “That puts a different complexion on the whole thing.”

  David set the box on an unoccupied gurney near Diane’s table and handed her snapshots of the scene. “I’ll get the official pictures to you when I can,” he said.

  Diane took the small photographs of the bones in situ. “This is how you found them?” she asked.

  “Just like that. It looks like the bullet went in the left cheek and out the right side of the head,” said David.

  Diane opened the box and began setting the bones out on the gurney in anatomical position. Up to this point, the bones recovered from the site had been various shades of gray to black in color, depending on how burned they were. This set of bones were charred and blackened, but they didn’t have any of the lighter shades of gray or white; they were mostly a dark rich brown. Nor did they have any bits of charred flesh attached to them.

  Grover came to help Diane lay out the bones. The MEs left their tables to take a look at the murder victim. Like Grover, they wanted to see something that could add a whole new dimension to the investigation. She could see they were as curious as she.

  Diane picked up the skull and examined the bullet wound. It apparently hit dead center in the left infra-orbital foramen-a hole under the left orbit for nerves and vessels-and exited through the right side on the lambdoidal suture where the parietal and occipital meet. The bullet’s exit took huge fragments of skull with it.

  Diane took off her glove and touched a femur with her fingers.

  “This ain’t right, is it?” said Grover.

  “Grover, you know your bones, don’t you?” said Diane. She remembered when he cleaned the bones of a murder victim for her how he had packaged the bones with all the correct sides together, even the ribs.

  “What?” asked Pilgrim. “What is it that you are seeing?”

  “For one thing,” said Diane, “look at the photograph. Look how the bones are arranged.”

  “He looks to have been in a super flexed position when he died,” said David. “You think he was tied up and executed?”

  “No,” said Diane. She smiled at Grover. “What do you notice about the bones, Grover?”

  “They’re mighty brown, Dr. Fallon. Mighty brown.”

  “Um huh,” murmured Diane. She picked up several bones and studied each. She examined the skull again and the teeth and surfaces inside the skull.

  “The bones are awfully clean,” said Jin.

  “Aren’t they, though?” said Diane.

  “A dental chart isn’t going to help much on him,” said Rankin. “He has no fillings, and the poor fellow had more than a few bad dental caries in his molars. That one in his incisor looks like it might have been ready to abscess.”

  “How old is he-or she?” asked Jin.

  “He. The pelvis is clearly male. He was probably in his early twenties.” She showed them the rugged surface of his pubis symphysis-where the two hip bones come together in front. “The older you get, the more worn down it is-among other things. And he’s just getting in his third molars.”

  “So, Grover,” said Lynn Webber, “what’s with the brown bones?”

  “I believe he’s worn down to his bones in a coffin. Don’t you, Dr. Fallon?” he said.

  “I do indeed,” said Diane.

  “In a coffin?” said David. “What are you saying?”

  “Bones in a coffin often get that very brown color to them. Look,” she handed David back the photograph. “This fellow is far too flexed to have been put that way while he was still fleshed out-even if he were bound tight. Look at how the long bones are all parallel and the smaller bones are all in a pile. I believe the skeleton was in a box under one of the students’ bed. I’ll have to run some tests, but these bones are very old, perhaps a hundred years or more.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Rankin. “I guess his killer’s beyond the likes of us now. But that begs the question, just where did a student get the skeleton of a person who appears to have had a proper burial when he died?”

  “Good question. If any of the house’s residents are among the survivors, we can ask if they know,” said Diane. “In the meantime, pack this fellow back up. I’ll take him to the osteology lab and work on him later.”

  “All that’s real interesting,” said Archie. He was standing behind Jin, looking over his shoulder. “Never knew you could tell so much from just bones.”

  “Oh, she can tell you more than that when she gets to really analyzing him,” said Jin.

  “You trying to butter me up, Jin?” asked Diane.

  “Every chance I get, Boss.” He grinned at her.

  Grover began repacking the bones in his careful way-as if the deceased could feel what was happening to them and he wanted to make sure they were comfortable throughout their journey to the afterlife. Everyone else gravitated back to their respective workstations, except Lynn Webber. She hung back. Jin went with David back to the burned-out house site.

  “OK, Grover,” Lynn asked her diener, “how did you know about the bones turning brown in a coffin?”

  “Like Raymond was always saying,” he replied, referring to his cousin who had been Lynn’s assistant before him, “there are some questions it’s just best not to ask.” He gave her a rare smile, and Lynn laughed out loud.

  Diane got the idea that this was the first joke Grover had ever made.

  Diane packaged and labeled the bones, which she had tentatively identified as those of Donald Wallace, pending DNA confirmation. How awful for the parents to have raised a son or daughter to adulthood with all their hopes and dreams for that child, and in just one moment of disaster to have nothing left but a few bones-no face to look upon, nothing to see or hold. She did not envy the people whose job it was to inform the parents that their child’s remains had been identified.

  By the end of the day all the bodies had been autopsied, and all but eight were identified. Of those remaining eight, the forensics team felt they would be able to ID most of them when everyone had been reported missing. It was, after all, still soon after the tragedy and it might be a week or more before some people were confirmed missing and forensic evidence could be collected for comparison.

  Diane had yet to determine how many individuals the disarticulated bones represented. Those would be the hardest to identify. Now that the recovered bodies had been processed, she was going to take the remaining bones back to her lab, which was a more efficient operation than this tent city and had much less distraction.

  Toward the end of the day when one of the last bodies was being wheeled in by Pilgrim’s diener, a reporter managed to get inside the tent by waiting until one of the rear entrances was unguarded. He crept in with his camera before anyone noticed him but froze when he saw a charred body in the characteristic pugilistic pose roll past him on a gurney. When the stronger flexor muscles shrink and contract from the fire, the arms and hands strike the pose
of a boxer. It is a disturbing sight. The burned flesh is bad enough, but the posed appearance of the cadaver looks all the more horrifying. The reporter stared transfixed with his camera in his hand until one of the policemen led him away.

  Diane guessed him to be new to this type of story-apparently he’d never seen firsthand a fiery accident or the aftermath of a house fire. She felt sorry for him. These were images no one wants in their head.

  “I guess he’ll never do that again,” said Rankin, the ME the body was headed for.

  “But his description of what we’re doing in here is going to be worse,” said Lynn.

  “How could he possibly describe anything worse than this has been,” said Brewster Pilgrim.

  “You have me there,” said Lynn. She took off her lab coat and gloves. “I’m going to sit down by Archie here and do some paperwork, go home, and soak in a hot bath for several days,” she announced. “Or until we get some more dental charts and x-rays to look at.”

  “You know what we haven’t seen?” said Rankin.

  “What’s that?” asked Pilgrim.

  “Meth mouth. Even if most of the students at the party didn’t know what was going on in the basement, which I think may be true, and were not methamphetamine users, what about the cooks in the basement or some of the residents? Or surely there were some buyers at the party. I haven’t seen anybody with the diseased mouth of a serious crystal meth addict.”

  “Neither did I,” agreed Pilgrim.

  Lynn looked up from her paperwork. “What are you saying that means, exactly?” she asked.

  Rankin shrugged his thin shoulders. “I guess maybe if this was just someone cooking for themselves and a few addicted friends, I’d expect to find some of those friends at the party. All I’ve seen is some pretty good dentition. The worst teeth I’ve seen are in our hundred-year-old fellow. If it was a large-scale operation and the meth was going to a distributor, then there might not be many addicts at the party. That’s all. I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “It’s a good thought,” said Diane. “The teeth I’ve seen have only been damaged by fire-no signs of methamphetamine use.”

  “It’s an idea,” said Pilgrim. “I’m not sure I like the implications. It speaks of a much greater problem.”

  “It’s a big problem any way you look at it,” said Archie. “We’re just over an hour from Atlanta. What makes anybody think that Rosewood’s immune to drugs? Let me tell you, we’re just like every other place in the country. I wish we weren’t.”

  Diane didn’t like that thought. But he was probably right. Right now, however, her problem was identifying bodies, not finding evildoers. She happily left that to Garnett and others. She took off her lab coat and checked out for the evening, leaving orders for all the bones to be delivered to the crime lab.

  It had stopped sleeting several hours earlier and was now hard cold. Diane hurried her pace toward the crime scene to check on David, Jin, and Neva. They must be exhausted, sifting though that huge mess of charred detritus.

  They were packing up the crime scene van, about ready to leave the site to the night watchmen.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “It’s going as well as can be expected,” said Neva. Her face was rosy from the cold. She took a Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose. “McNair’s men took most of the evidence away in a truck. Not much we can do. David’s doing a slow burn-pardon the pun.”

  David’s features were frozen in a frown. “We were outnumbered and Neva and I were at the coffee tent when they did it. Jin didn’t know about the issue, or he would have called you. They didn’t get the smaller stuff; it was locked in our van.”

  Diane could relate to the slow burn David must be doing. Her cheeks were aflame. “I’ll talk to McNair and Garnett,” said Diane. “And whoever else…”

  She was interrupted by three vehicles pulling up behind their crime scene van. Doors opened and people started piling out. Diane couldn’t see them clearly for the glare of the headlights in her eyes, but their aggressive movement toward her gave her the distinct feeling she was about to be arrested.

  Chapter 14

  Diane blinked her eyes when the headlights finally switched off. What in the world, she thought. She felt David, Neva, and Jin walking up beside her. A united front-against what?

  “Diane.” One of the individuals was Chief Garnett.

  She felt a silly sense of relief. “Chief,” she said as he came into the circle of light cast by the streetlamps.

  She could see by the set of his jaw that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. That feeling was reinforced by the presence of the police commissioner and McNair with him, along with two men she didn’t know who seemed to be with McNair.

  The police commissioner was a small man who looked as if he would be more at home doing anything but police work. He wore rimless glasses and earmuffs. Part of a gray lapel matching his gray pants peeked out from the front of his black fur-trimmed topcoat. He was shivering. Diane didn’t wonder that he was cold; he wore no hat and he had only a thin layer of hair.

  McNair wore his usual smirk, but it had more of a look of triumph to it now.

  “We’ve reached a compromise,” said the commissioner.

  “I’m taking the evidence you’ve collected,” McNair said.

  The commissioner cast him a scowl, but McNair didn’t notice because he was looking at Diane. It was obviously a done deal. Diane was afraid that what they were going to do was compromise the evidence.

  If McNair was expecting a howl of protest, he was disappointed. Diane said nothing. She decided to treat them pretty much the way she had treated the Stantons at the hospital-let them confess.

  “What he means,” said Garnett, “is that the arson investigation unit will handle all nonhuman evidence and your unit will handle all the bones and nontissue human remains. The medical examiners will handle any tissue samples.”

  “That sounds logical,” said the commissioner. He made it sound as though he was asking Diane a question.

  She felt like saying it might be logical if anyone but McNair were handling the evidence.

  “I’ll take the evidence now,” said McNair.

  “If I’m not mistaken, you have already taken most of it,” said Diane.

  “Now, I’m taking the rest of it.” McNair nodded to the two strangers and they started for the van.

  David stepped in front of the door, blocking their access.

  “Commissioner,” said Diane, “perhaps Mr. McNair needs to be reminded that we are all required by law to follow strict protocol for the transfer of custody of evidence. Each item must be individually logged out of our inventory and signed for before it leaves the custody of the crime scene forensics unit.”

  “She’s stalling and evading, Commissioner,” McNair snapped. “Giving us a lecture.”

  “Are you refusing to cooperate, Diane?” asked the commissioner. “If so…”

  “No, of course I’m not. I’m simply pointing out that if Mr. McNair’s men enter that van and take the evidence without following the required protocol, they will render the items unusable as evidence in any legal proceeding or criminal prosecution.”

  “I see what you’re saying,” replied the commissioner, then reconsidered. “Exactly what is it you’re saying?”

  “Simply that protocol requires that my crew retrieve each bag containing nonhuman materials from its storage box, enter a record of its transfer into the evidence log, and hand it over to Mr. McNair’s custody as it is signed for by Mr. McNair or a legally authorized member of his staff,” said Diane. “What happens to it after that point is Mr. McNair’s responsibility.”

  “That sounds proper,” the commissioner said.

  McNair’s men looked at him and he nodded for them to stand down. This is ridiculous, thought Diane. They are acting like thugs.

  “I’ll have to look inside all the other bags to make sure I get everything I need for my investigation,” said McNair.
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br />   “Very well,” said Diane. “The commissioner and Chief Garnett are here to sign as witnesses that the seals were broken on site when the evidence is challenged in court.” Diane took a pen from her pocket and handed it to the commissioner.

  “Sign?” he said. “Challenged in court, you say?”

  “Yes, we all remember the O.J. trial and what happens when evidence is not handled according to strict protocol. We will need official witnesses as to who did what and when, and who authorized it, especially if the seals are to be broken for no legitimate forensic purpose in field conditions where evidence can be lost or contaminated.”

  Damn it, thought Diane, if the commissioner is going to cave in, he is going to accept responsibility for the consequences. Her statement had the desired effect. The commissioner didn’t want his name on anything, and there was no graceful way to say he wasn’t going to authorize the diversion from proper protocol.

  “I think we can trust that Diane’s crew know the difference between bone and other material,” he told McNair. “It’s what they do.”

  McNair scowled. It was a small thing, but from the look on his face, McNair wanted to win even the small battles.

  Diane told Neva and David to bring out the bags of evidence containing nonhuman materials.

  “I want to look at the labels on all the bags you don’t hand over,” McNair said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Garnett. “The way you’re acting, you’d think we aren’t all on the same side. What possible reason could they have for withholding evidence? We have an agreement. My people will abide by it.”

  “I agree,” said the commissioner.

  David shot Diane a look that said, “Don’t you think this is damn peculiar?”

  Yes, she thought, very peculiar.

  It took David and Neva more than half an hour to retrieve and log out all the bags they had so carefully packed in the van. Diane hated to see the carefully collected and recorded evidence go to McNair’s custody. On the other hand, all he wanted was the glory, and he had many good people working for him. The evidence should be safe in their hands. He wouldn’t be getting his hands dirty analyzing any of it. He didn’t really know how.