The Bone Collection: Four Novellas

by Kathy Reichs

  Terry Flynn is an arrogant ass.

  “Thank you,” Nashawna says.

  “Thank them.” I indicate Slidell and Rinaldi. The cops who are folding Flynn into the backseat of their cruiser.

  Nashawna lifts one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug.

  Slidell is talking to Nehi, his bearing haughty, his tone brusque.

  I think, You are arrogant, Skinny Slidell. But far from an ass.

  Flakes are now swirling in indifferent eddies, not snow, not rain. I watch a few settle and dissolve on the grass.

  Nashawna says something I fail to catch.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Happy holidays,” she repeats quietly.

  I have forgotten.

  It is Christmas Eve.

  Years later.

  Something brushed my shoulder, spiderweb-soft.

  I opened my eyes.

  A silhouette blocked my view of the screens, a dark cutout against the aquamarine glow.

  “How are you doing?” Whispered, voice filled with compassion.

  “I’m good,” I lied.

  Andrew Ryan smiled encouragement. I tried to smile back. Managed only a melancholy tightening of the corners of my mouth.

  “You need a break?”

  I shook my head.

  “How’s he doing?”

  I shook it again, more slowly, not trusting my voice.

  “Want company?”

  “Sure.”

  Ryan disappeared, returned from the corridor with a second chair. Dropping into it, he reached out a hand. I took it. Held tight, overcome with a tangle of emotions.

  Time passed.

  The monitors paraded their bloodless peaks and valleys. Sounded their impartial pinging.

  And then they screamed. And the lines went flat.

  Ryan’s eyes met mine, too blue, too wide.

  Adrenaline snapped through every cell in my body.

  No!

  The door winged open and Nurse V. Sule charged in and grabbed the crash cart, all stainless steel and bright red drawers. On top were a defibrillator and what looked like a tackle box.

  Others raced in with her, color-coded in their scrubs. Faces grim, focused.

  I got to my feet. Sensed rather than saw Ryan rise beside me. My eyes were fixed on the man in the bed.

  Nurse V. Shule threw back the sheet, now motionless as the sea after a wild storm. Ripped open the gown covering his chest. Her eyes skidded to me as she positioned her palms, one atop the other, for CPR.

  “Please.” Tipping her head toward the open door. Arms already pumping.

  Ryan and I hurried out into the corridor. Stood, not knowing what to say. What to do.

  Feeling helpless, and needing to move, I crossed to the window and looked at the city spreading out eleven floors below. The day’s first pale light was tickling the horizon. The skyline of uptown rose out of the gray, a grainy black-and-white version of its daytime self.

  A barrage of memories unspooled in my brain, some immediate, some distant. His voice on the phone. His form bent over a shallow grave. His eyes taking in a ghostly white newborn. His hands traveling over a mummified corpse.

  Guilt swirled in the mix. A sister was coming from Fort Worth. What else did I know of his personal life? There were no children. Had there ever been a spouse? Partners had come and gone. I remembered no names.

  I pictured his goodbye wave the evening before. Casual. Unaware he was living his last day on earth.

  The onslaught was dizzying. The recognition that we would have no final parting. That words left unsaid between us would remain unsaid forever.

  It couldn’t be true.

  Footsteps sounded, heels sharp on the tile. Not the soft-soled tread of the hospital staff.

  I turned.

  Two men were hurrying in our direction. One was dressed all in black, save for a small white rectangle at his throat. The other wore a plaid sport jacket over a grease-stained apricot shirt. Polyester pants.

  Slidell’s hangdog gaze met mine. Our mutual stare lasted what seemed a very long time. Then, eyes downcast, he veered toward Ryan.

  The priest took a chair, laced his fingers in his lap, and closed his eyes.

  It was true.

  Tim Larabee was dying.

  I felt tears burn my lids. Fought them back.

  Behind Ryan and Slidell, through the open door, I saw a nurse slide a clear plastic mat under Larabee’s back as V. Shule tore paper packets, withdrew pads, and attached them to his chest. When she’d finished, both women glanced at the defibrillator screen. V. Shule’s lips formed a single word.

  “Clear.”

  Everyone stepped back from the bed. Larabee’s body arched. Arched again. Lay still. The other blue-clad nurse placed two fingers on his carotid. Checked the pulse in his wrist. The screens. Shook her head.

  V. Shule began a second round of chest compressions.

  Ryan and Slidell were speaking in hushed tones, heads bowed and close. I swallowed, inhaled deeply, and crossed to them.

  “—hopped up on crank. The sonofabitch—”

  Slidell stopped abruptly when I drew near.

  “Larabee was out for a late run?” My voice was calmer than I’d dared hope.

  Slidell nodded, sorrow making his face look older than its legitimate claim. And exhaustion. I knew he’d been working all night, searching for Larabee’s assailant.

  “He was a random victim?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  How often we’d talked of the fickleness of life. Larabee had coined a phrase for its sudden, unpredictable cessation. Death by acute numerical assumption. The victim’s number was up.

  A casual goodbye wave. A late-night jog in Freedom Park.

  Behind the men, a nurse in green injected meds into an IV line. A bubble of space opened around the bed. Larabeee lurched, lurched again. Then a nurse in blue checked for a pulse. A man in white made notes in a file.

  “Who’s the doer?” Ryan was in cop mode. Keeping his emotions buckled down.

  Ditto Slidell. “A street kid name of Garret Hearst. A real piece of work.”

  “Meaning what?” I asked.

  “Hearst’s a tweaker with too few brain cells left to wipe his own ass.” Angry. Harsh. “Who the hell mugs a jogger? What’s he gonna do? Carry a wad in his shorts?”

  “You’re sure he’s the shooter?” Ryan asked.

  “Surveillance video puts him in the park around the time a wit recalls hearing shots. The dumbshit left the gun at the scene. His prints are all over it. Ballistics will show a match.”

  To the bullets that ripped through Larabee’s belly.

  “When was that?” I had to know.

  “Eleven-fifteen.”

  “The dog walker discovered him just past midnight?”

  “Yeah.”

  Our little group fell silent, appalled by the ghastly image. Horrified by the possibility that quicker intervention might have saved Larabee’s life.

  “Where’s Hearst now?”

  “In the can.”

  V. Shule was again pumping Larabee’s chest. My mind had done the math. Two minutes of CPR, then a vitals check, followed by defib. I glanced at my watch. Thirty minutes had passed since Larabee flatlined. I wondered how long the lifesaving efforts would continue.

  “Have you interviewed the kid?” Ryan.

  “The little prick’s too fried to know his own name.”

  As suddenly as it began, the desperate dance stopped. In the room at our backs, everyone froze.

  Larabee lay unmoving. Like the mourned and unmourned dead he’d tended to so gently for so many years.

  The man in white looked at the clock. Spoke aloud. Entered time of death in his file.

  The priest rose.

  V. Shule circled the bed and drew the sheet up over Larabee’s face.

  Goodbye, old friend.

  And then the tears had their way.

  Seeing my distress, Slidell stepped forward and wrapped me
in a crushing bear hug. Our cheeks touched. To my shock, his were salty-wet like mine.

  Standing awkwardly, off-balance, I realized something for the first time. Through all the years—the triumphs and failures, the sorrows and joys, the harrowing rescues and the heartbreaking deaths—Skinny and I had never once embraced.

  I leaned against him and wept on the apricot shirt.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  An origin story. That sounded like fun.

  As I began to write about Tempe’s start in the lab, it made me think of my own beginnings in forensics. In the early 1980s I was on faculty at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte, focusing on bioarchaeology. The ancient dead. One day, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD detective asked me to examine bones discovered beneath a house. I was teaching courses on human evolution and skeletal biology, but had never worked with law enforcement. It sounded intriguing. I agreed to do the evaluation.

  The remains were those of a dog. Case closed. The police brought me other skeletal material from time to time and I told them what they had. Then I got a call that would change my life. The detective spoke of a missing five-year-old girl named Neely Smith. He wanted me to visit the scene. To determine if the small bones could be human. If they could be Neely’s.

  They were. Her murder hit me hard. She’d been the same age as one of my daughters. I wanted justice. Didn’t get it. The prime suspect, an eighth-grade dropout, was never charged. He’s currently serving a life sentence for eight counts of child molestation and the murder of a ten-year-old girl who’d lived one block from Neely.

  The lack of closure was frustrating. I resolved to contribute what skills I had toward the resolution of such crimes. After retraining and earning certification by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, I began consulting for law enforcement, coroners, and medical examiners. ID. Manner of death. Postmortem interval. Anything to provide answers for families and to help nail the guilty.

  People in towns that have suffered crimes against children remember the names of those victims for years. Charlotte, North Carolina; Soham, England; Praia da Luz, Portugal. All have been scarred by violence against the helpless. The innocent.

  A sad but true fact is that, unlike in fiction, not every killer is caught. In Neely’s case, her bones were identified but her aggressor was not charged. I carry the names of several such children in my memory, and I am burdened by the knowledge that there will always be new murders, not all of which will be solved.

  While Neely’s case propelled me into forensics, the majority of deaths I investigate are not those of children. The victims in First Bones are adult males. Their murders take place in the 1980s, a time when the country was facing a different type of killer. The AIDS/HIV epidemic. For those of us working with the dead, AIDS and HIV posed a new and real danger.

  The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and related acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) were little understood in the early 1980s. The disease was initially thought to affect only gay men. Few preventive public health measures were in force. The medical community was slow to appreciate the widespread danger and did little to guard against it. But as evidence about the deadly nature of AIDS accumulated, drastic changes in procedure were introduced.

  Medical examiners, forensic anthropologists, and laboratory technicians donned special masks and aprons and goggles and gloves. We avoided unsafe contact with the bodily fluids of corpses. We followed strict new guidelines for the handling and disposal of blades and needles. The threat was real and we were taking it seriously.

  Improved medical methodology has slowed the spread of the disease. Education of at-risk populations. Better pharmaceuticals—drugs a long time coming.

  Though much progress has been made, we still haven’t “removed the pump handle,” as Tempe says to Pete in First Bones. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 1.2 million people are living with HIV in the United States, with fifty thousand newly infected each year. Only 87 percent are diagnosed.

  In 1985, a small group of people conceived a project to commemorate those who had died of AIDS. Known as the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the blanket is a patchwork of three-by-six-foot panels, each recording the name of a decedent.

  I first saw the quilt in the early 1990s, during a visit to Washington, D.C., to see my daughter. It stretched from the Capitol Building to the Washington Monument, inviting us to sit down and learn about the disease.

  When I saw it again in 1996, rectangles representing over eighty thousand people covered the entire Washington Mall. Today the quilt has more than forty-eight thousand panels containing names from all fifty U.S. states and forty-three countries. If laid end to end, they would stretch for miles.

  It is the storm of illness-related emotions that drives First Bones. The daily anxiety of those with HIV. Their fear that the condition will progress to AIDS. Their worry that they may have transmitted the sickness to others. Their struggle with the duty to disclose. Far worse is the agony of those diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Their heartbreaking knowledge that the virus will kill them. That the death will not be pretty. In my story, these feelings grow strong enough to result in murder.

  I sometimes think of my own “quilt.” The bones to which I could not put names. The victims of violence whose perpetrators remain unknown. Or unpunished. I try to keep my work separate from my personal life. Try to leave the stories at the morgue. Still, in unguarded moments, the unsolved cases break into my thoughts.

  I take satisfaction in knowing that most Jane and John Does go home to their families. That most killers are caught. I believe in the power of science. To battle disease. To solve crime. I will continue to apply my expertise in forensic anthropology toward the pursuit of justice.

  For more information on the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, visit aidsquilt.org/​about/​the-aids-memorial-quilt.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe huge thanks to Roger Thompson, the former director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department crime laboratory. Together, we reconstructed how it was “back in the day.”

  For

  Fred Weber

  July 14, 1945–April 21, 2016

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE BONE COLLECTION

  Writing is a team sport. I receive a great deal of help from many people. Thus, as usual, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those who contributed their knowledge and experiences to the stories in The Bone Collection.

  First and foremost, I must thank my daughter and fellow author, Kerry Reichs. Her ideas and insights are pure genius.

  My sincere thanks to my agent, Jennifer Rudolph-Walsh, and to my meticulous and skillful editors, Jennifer Hershey and Susan Sandon.

  I also want to acknowledge all those in the industry who work so hard on my behalf. At Random House in the United States: Gina Centrello, Kim Hovey, Scott Shannon, Susan Corcoran, Cindy Murray, Kristin Fassler, Cynthia Lasky, and Anne Speyer. Across the pond: Rob Waddington, Aslan Byrne, Glenn O’Neill, and Georgina Hawtrey Woore. At Simon & Schuster, north of the forty-ninth: Kevin Hanson. At William Morris Endeavor Entertainment: Katie Giarla, Elizabeth Goodstein, Tracy Fisher, and Raffaella De Angelis.

  I appreciate the support of my tireless aide-de-camp, Melissa Fish.

  To my readers, thank you for continually putting off sleep, filling (and photographing) your shelves with the series, and taking Tempe along on your own adventures. I love that you make the effort to find me at my signings and appearances, visit my website (kathyreichs.com), share your stories on Facebook (kathyreichsbooks), follow me on Twitter (@KathyReichs) and Pinterest (kathyreichs), and tag me in your photos on Instagram (kathyreichs). Because of you, I continue to do what I love. Thank you!

  By Kathy Reichs

  The Bone Collection (novellas)

  Speaking in Bones

  Bones Never Lie

  Bones of the Lost

  Bones Are Forever

  Flash and Bones

  Spider Bones

 
206 Bones

  Devil Bones

  Bones to Ashes

  Break No Bones

  Cross Bones

  Monday Mourning

  Bare Bones

  Grave Secrets

  Fatal Voyage

  Deadly Decisions

  Death du Jour

  Déjà Dead

  Young Adult Fiction (with Brendan Reichs)

  Virals

  Seizure

  Shift (novella)

  Code

  Swipe (novella)

  Shock (novella)

  Exposure

  Terminal

  Trace Evidence (short story collection)

  Spike (novella)

  About the Author

  KATHY REICHS is the author of eighteen New York Times bestselling novels featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Like her protagonist, Reichs is a forensic anthropologist—one of fewer than one hundred ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. A professor in the department of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she is a former vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and serves on the National Police Services Advisory Council in Canada. Reichs’s own life, as much as her novels, is the basis for the TV show Bones, one of the longest-running series in the history of the Fox network.

  kathyreichs.com

  Facebook.com/​kathyreichsbooks

  @KathyReichs

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