Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  “She was in the crawl space underneath a neighbor’s porch,” he said.

  She was filthy from head to toe, her pale blond hair dingy with dirt and cobwebs. Her clothes were gray. I couldn’t see her face, because she had pulled herself up into a tight ball, hugging her slender knees to her chest as she scrupulously held the hem of her skirt down to her ankles with one hand. Her knuckles were white. A female detective sat in the room with her, going over her notes, reading them aloud in a drab monotone. “Suspect was asked her name. Suspect did not answer. Suspect was asked to state her residence. Suspect did not answer. Suspect—”

  “Get her out of there!” I said.

  “Want to help?” asked a voice behind me.

  I turned. It was Detective Bert. Two other men stood beside him. I had been so shocked by Nina’s appearance that I hadn’t heard them enter the room. One was a kind of nondescript middle-aged white guy and the other I had seen before. He was Tom Latimer, the dark-eyed guy with the salt-and-pepper crew cut who had tried to strike up a conversation with me at the conference. —the guy who had told me he was an illustrator of children’s books. Just as I had thought, the police had positioned plainclothes cops up in Snowbird to work the crowd.

  I fought to control my anger—anger at the police for not believing my innocence, anger at these detectives for incarcerating pathetic little Nina, anger at Bert for being the shithead he was, and anger at Ray for reasons I didn’t care to name. To Bert, I said, “Yeah. Sure. You got some other damn thing you want out of me, you just name it. Just get that girl out of that room!”

  “We can’t hold her much longer anyway,” the nondescript man said calmly. “We were just wondering if you’d like to talk to her. Maybe she’d tell you something. What you see in there is all we’ve got. She has no ID Her clothes are even handmade. No labels.”

  I was ready to explode. The bland tone of this man’s voice somehow made me even madder than Bert’s usual insinuating, snide notes. “How long has she been in there?” I demanded.

  No one said anything, which meant she’d been in there for quite a while. “What are the rules for retaining citizens without a warrant?”

  No one answered.

  I spoke again. “Okay, so you want me to go in there and get her to talk, have a real girl-to-girl tête-à-tête and get her to spill her guts. Lovely.”

  The nondescript man nodded. “Yes, we do. We were hoping you’d like to help us with this; get this whole George Dishey situation buttoned down.” Bland, bland, bland—like let’s get this done so we can all go home a bit early.

  I fantasized that if I’d had a bat in my hands just then, I would have started swinging. I wanted to hit someone real bad, and not just out of righteousness. I wanted to get even with them for dropping me into this hall of mirrors just as surely as they had dropped in Nina Dishey. We were just two bugs being examined under glass.

  But the true horror was that I wanted to know what Nina had to tell just as much as they did. Between my teeth, I said, “Let me in.”

  NINA DID NOT look up when I entered the room. She just sat there, unmoving, as if she were made of stone.

  I turned to the woman detective and said, “Could you leave us, please?”

  She did.

  I pulled a chair away from the table and sat down.

  Nina was so still that she did not appear to be breathing. I began to think she was some sort of three-dimensional photograph.

  I sat and thought for a while about what I was going to say, and what I was going to ask. Finally, I said, “Nina, my name is Em Hansen. You mistook me the other day for someone named Heddie. I’m sorry I didn’t straighten out that misunderstanding then. I’m just going to talk for a while, and maybe you’ll have something you’ll want to say and maybe you won’t. Be assured that whatever you say or do is being observed, and not just by me. I’ve sent the woman out of the room, but at least four men are standing on the other side of that mirror, watching, and they can hear everything we say in here. We’re also being filmed and our voices are being recorded. It’s what police do.”

  Nina’s hands clenched her leg and hem, pulling the skirt even more tightly across her. I saw that the side seam had been hand-stitched with tiny, if somewhat irregular, stitches.

  I took a breath and continued. “I am not with the police. I am a geologist, like George. I had just arrived in Salt Lake City the night I met him. I am here for a conference he was going to attend. I guess they’ve told you by now that George is dead.”

  As I said this last, Nina took one long, shaky breath.

  I cleared my throat and spoke again. “So they’ve asked me to talk to you and they hope you’ll say something to me. You surely don’t have to say a word. I’m going to tell you something I don’t like about myself, and it’s this: I don’t necessarily have your best interest at heart. I’m in here because they don’t know who killed George and so they may as well think I did it. Until we find out who killed him, I’m on the hook, just because it looks suspicious that I Was at his house the night before he died. And so you don’t have the anxiety of worrying about what I was doing with your husband alone in that house; I was there as a guest of the conference and nothing more. I had never met George before. Our acquaintance was strictly professional.

  “Now about you,” I continued. “You told me you’re his wife, and I believe you. They’ve been bugging you to tell how that can be when you didn’t live in his house, haven’t they?”

  Nina did not respond to my question.

  “Yeah,” I said, “so they’ve had you in here awhile, and that’s just awful. Have they given you anything to eat?”

  Nina still did not answer me. I was beginning to wonder if she was in an ordinary state of consciousness.

  I buried my face in my hands. I said, “I bet I’m beginning to sound like them. First they try food and then they try veiled threats. Who knows what other little intimidations they put to you. Bah. Dear God in heaven, help us both.”

  I felt a movement in the room and looked up. Nina had turned her dirt-grimed face toward me, laying her cheek gently on her knees. Her face was swollen from crying. She moved her lips, just one word with no sound, but I could make it out: Amen.

  Tears slid out of Nina’s pale eyes as she continued to look into mine. I began to cry, too. It was the only sane thing to do.

  Nina ungrasped and regrasped her knee. I saw fingerprinting ink on her fingertips.

  So they ran a check on her and found nothing, I thought. She’s absolutely clean. No ID, no labels in her clothes. She came out of nowhere. It’s like she doesn’t really exist. “You’re like a missing part of George,” I whispered.

  Nina shifted her head slightly, so that her face was not fully visible to those who stood behind the mirror. Her lips moved again. I loved him, they said.

  I considered taking one of her hands in mine, then thought better of it. “Have they let you see him?” I asked.

  She shook her head, just a tiny wobble.

  I stood up and rapped on the glass with my knuckle. “Hey! You want to let a widow lady see her husband?” I asked angrily. “No more sideshow until Nina gets to see George!”

  A moment later, the door opened and the unnamed, nondescript detective showed his head. “This way,” he said.

  I said, “Where are your glasses, Nina?”

  She looked up at the detective.

  “Give the lady her glasses,” I demanded, once again on the edge of hollering.

  The detective produced a large envelope, which held Nina’s thick, ugly glasses.

  “Sign for this, please,” said the detective.

  “The hell you say,” I seethed, snatching the envelope from his hands. “That’s child abuse, keeping her glasses from her,” I added, wondering how old Nina truly was. “You should be ashamed, mister.”

  Hands trembling, I opened the envelope and put the enormous glasses on her tiny face. Her eyes appeared to pop larger behind their magnification.

&n
bsp; I helped Nina to her feet and guided her through the door and down the hall after him. Officer Raymond fell into step behind us and the two men took us down elevators, outside, and into a car, and through the gathering evening traffic to another public building. There, they took us downstairs into an atmosphere thick with the scent of disinfectant. The medical examiner, a woman in her fifties, presented us with forms to sign and asked for identification. “Here’s mine,” I said, presenting my driver’s license. Just to hear what she’d say, I said, “Nina, you don’t have anything, do you?”

  Nina shook her head.

  “It is irregular to show the remains to anyone who can’t identify themselves as next of kin,” said the medical examiner.

  The detective spoke. “I’ll vouch for them,” he said. He turned to Nina. “A signature will do it,” he said casually. I heard a note of seduction in his voice; he was luring her, leading her along the path to giving up just this one little clue about herself. I could see him running to a handwriting expert with the results.

  Hands trembling, Nina picked up the pen and wrote her name, Nina Dishey, in minuscule schoolgirl cursive. I signed my name, too, and we were taken through to a room with a television monitor. On it appeared George Dishey’s face, profile view, reclining, eyes closed. His nose was banged up and his skin was mottled with lividity. It was a dead face, a dull face. George, for all his unpleasant quirks, had been a man of considerable charm, charisma, even; a man whose face had been alert and engaging when he was alive. My stomach tightened.

  “Can you identify this man?” asked the medical examiner.

  I turned and looked at Nina, stifling an urge to retch. Her eyes had grown enormous. with alarm. She approached the monitor and touched it, then quickly withdrew her hand, which then flew to her lips, to her throat. She darted around to one side of the monitor, trying to find another way into it. To me, she whimpered, “Do they have George’s head in there?”

  My God, I thought. She doesn’t know—“It’s just a picture, Nina, don’t worry. George is in another room.” As her agitation continued to grow, I said, “Ray, we have to take her to the real thing or she’s going to blow.”

  Ray stared at Nina incredulously.

  “She doesn’t know what a television is,” I said, enunciating the words sharply to cut through Ray’s confusion. “She’s from Mars, Ray. Get these people to take her into the room where the body is!”

  Ray’s eyes widened but he snapped to and made things happen. The medical examiner groused for a few moments but then led us through into a very cold room in which there was a gurney holding an opaque long plastic bag. Inside the bag rested the form of a man. The first half foot of the bag had been carefully laid back, exposing George Dishey’s inanimate face. I had to push a video camera out of the way so that Nina could approach the corpse.

  As she neared the body, Nina’s hands rose up like tiny wings, fluttering, hovering now to either side of George’s uninhabited cheeks. Silent tears flowed down her face and dropped like pearls into the sunken spaces that held his lidded eyes. “Darling,” she whispered. “I’ll be with you soon. Tell Heavenly Father I’m coming.”

  I told myself I was watching the onset of madness. It frightened me to hear another human speak of death as just a doorway to be walked through. But another part of me knew that Nina was entirely sane. Sane, but naive. Sane, but … more than sane; the Nina who stood before me was joyously sane, vibrantly alive, and in a state of grace, a thing that I could recognize but about which I knew pathetically little. I felt scared and confused. My ignorance, I could accept, but I did not share the corner of the reality from which she spoke. To me, alive was alive and dead was dead; I was in this life and wanted to stay here as long as I could, and above all, I did not want to be dispatched from it even a minute ahead of schedule, especially by violence.

  Nina’s hands came gently to rest on George’s silent cheeks. She stroked his hair, which still lay stretched across his temples, pulled back no doubt into the ponytail he had habitually drawn it into. She flicked a bit of broken leaf from his beard and reached to unzip the bag.

  “Stop there,” the detective said, lunging toward her.

  Nina ignored him and gave the zipper a mighty tug. As the cover came back from the corpse’s chest, I felt my stomach sink past my knees.

  13

  “OH, GOD!” I HEARD SOMEONE GASPING. “OH GOD, OH God, oh—” As I bent over from the hip, my head cleared, the ringing in my ears lessened, and I realized that I had been the one who had been making all the noise. Nina had simply fainted.

  The corpse was naked, undressed for postmortem examination. George had been neatly sliced in places by the medical examiner, but that was not the problem. No, the problem was that his torso had been mutilated. Slashed hideously from side to side, peppered with lines of puncture wounds and ripped hideously by some coarse-toothed sawlike instrument. Bone was visible where the blows had crossed his ribs, but his abdomen was the worst. His abdomen was a mess of spewed guts.

  Waves of nausea swept over me. Nina moaned at my feet as the medical examiner cracked a tiny vial beneath her nostrils. The reek of ammonium carbonate reached my nose as well and I snapped further back to my senses. I felt Ray’s strong hands grasping my shoulders. I leaned back and felt his warmth. “Sorry,” he said softly. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

  Having finished with Nina, the medical examiner calmly stood up and closed the bag.

  “Who—or what—in hell’s name did that?” I wailed.

  “That’s what we all want to know,” said the detective as he helped the medical examiner zip the bag back over the corpse’s head.

  “Now I understand why you guys have been so upset,” I said. “I haven’t seen a mauling like that since a mountain lion got one of our calves.”

  No one answered.

  Nina had rolled onto her side and was moaning.

  I bent and held her in my arms. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Oh, Nina, if I’d had any idea how bad that could be, I would never have suggested we come.”

  Nina trembled. “Dear Heavenly Father, help me,” she whimpered. “Help me, Father. Take away my thoughts. Take me home with You now!”

  “What thoughts, Nina?” the detective asked.

  Nina’s shaking increased to the level of near convulsions.

  “Let’s get her out of here,” the medical examiner said congenially. “She’ll feel better upstairs where it’s warmer.”

  NINA HAD NO more words to give the police. Grace had given way to raw fear, and she couldn’t have gotten words out from between her clenched teeth if she’d tried. A discussion ensued among the detective, the medical examiner, Officer Raymond, and myself regarding what to do with and for her next. Finally, I said, “Ray, why don’t you and I take her down to Temple Square so she can pray, or whatever Mormons do. I mean, the woman’s lost her husband and had a nasty shock; don’t you think she might like to seek a little comfort from the Almighty?” I almost corrected myself by amending that to Heavenly Father, but something about patriarchal imagery was sticking in my craw just then.

  The detective spoke. “We have a little problem here. None of us knows where Mrs. Dishey resides. She clearly does not live at the deceased’s. She was carrying no identification when we found her, and …”

  I turned to her. “Where do you live, Nina?”

  Nina squeezed her eyes tightly shut and shook harder.

  “Okay, no joy there,” I said. “Back to the Temple. Want to go to Temple Square with me, Nina?”

  She nodded uncertainly, thought, then nodded again with vigor. “I’ve heard about the Salt Lake Temple. Can I really see it?”

  The detective took us all back to the station, where Ray led us to his vehicle, which still held my bags. When shown the car, Nina moved automatically toward the backdoor and climbed into the backseat, where she sat bolt upright like a schoolgirl waiting to be asked to recite. I reassessed her age. Eighteen going on twelve.

&nbs
p; Ray drove and I sat in the backseat with Nina, holding her hands. As we turned north on Main Street and the Salt Lake Temple of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints came into view, Nina at last relaxed just a hair. I greeted the sight more doubtfully.

  The Temple is six stories of massive gray granite capped by another fifty feet or so of tall triangular spires, a wedding cake of big ones, medium ones, and little ones, the tallest one to the east surmounted by a gilded statue of a man blowing a horn. It’s hard for me to quantify what there was about it that unnerved me. It was something in its architectural style, something I couldn’t quite characterize, something that failed, to my prejudiced eyes, to say church. I was not raised as a churchgoer, but I’d been to a few and seen pictures of hundreds of others, large and small, in art history books and such, and this one somehow did not fit with the rest. It was too heavy, too forbidding, more like a mausoleum than a place of worship. I looked away.

  “You … ah, we can’t get into the Temple,” Ray said.

  “That’s okay,” Nina said. “I just want to sit in the Temple grounds awhile and take a little comfort. Prayer is a private thing. ‘Ye must pour out your souls in your closets, and your secret places, and in your wilderness … .’” Her voice trailed off, her recitation complete.

  I looked questioningly at Ray.

  “Alma thirty-four: twenty-six,” he said, and when I still looked mystified, he added, “Book of Mormon. Or, if you prefer, Matthew six:six, ‘But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.’”

  “Oh.”

  Ray parked the vehicle and led us into the Temple grounds. Nina moved quickly to a bench beside a tall statue of Christ, sat down, and lifted her face toward her God.

  Ray took up a position behind her, feet apart, eyes scanning Temple Square. Every inch of him said protection. I wondered if it bothered him to find himself worrying about such things in his holy place.

  A woman wearing sensible shoes and a dark blazer moved toward us. A badge on her left breast read SISTER HARGROVE. She said, “Would you like to take a tour today?”