“More likely she wanted her rose bushes and her ring,” Jenny replied.
Mark stepped down the two feet to the emerging garage floor. He looked. His body went rigid. “Jesus!”
Hilary and Jenny shoved Amy and Hong unceremoniously aside. They would’ve shoved Preston, too, but he was too big. “What?”
“Bones,” said Mark. He fell to his knees. With just the tip of his trowel and the utmost economy of motion, he defined a brownish-black ridge in the dirt. “Whether they’re human or not…. Thoracic vertebrae? Yeah, there’s a rib. There’s the edge of the scapula, the shoulder blade.”
Jenny pulled her trowel from her pocket. “Careful. Burned bone is very fragile. We’re lucky anything is left at all. The fire brigade must’ve been more efficient than the forensics chaps…. Lumbar vertebrae. Wing of the pelvis. They’re human bones all right. Preston, call Zapata.”
“All I wanted,” Preston muttered as he loped away, “was a little dig experience to back up my documentation.”
Amy’s face crumpled with tears. Awkwardly Hong patted her arm. The other students gathered along the edge of the pit like spectators at an accident. “Bummer,” said someone.
“Stop your gawping,” Jenny snapped. “Amy, Hong, go work with Guy.”
The students drifted away. As soon as they fancied themselves out of earshot, they started speculating on the identity of the body, and whether they’d be interviewed on TV. Hilary picked up the drawing board, rolled down Preston’s sketch of the space heater, and started drawing. Her fingers gripped the pencil so tightly her knuckles stood out whiter than the emerging bones. She tried to inhale, but her chest was locked in a vise.
When Preston loomed up behind her she jumped. “Zapata and Yeager are on their way,” he told Jenny. “They said not to touch anything.”
“What do they think I’m going to do, mess it about? I’m an archaeologist, not a navvy.” Jenny’s hand moved firmly and yet delicately over the pelvic arch. “Here, Preston, get the camera….”
“I’ve got it. Say ‘cheese’.”
Mark glanced upward, caught Hilary’s eye, and grimaced. Scooping away only the soil covering the bones, without digging between them, he worked his way down the outflung arms while Jenny worked her way toward the feet. They had exposed the body from nape to knee, when with a screech of brakes and a slam of doors Yeager and Zapata sprinted toward the dig.
The students scattered like chickens before a fox. Preston and his camera skipped aside. Hilary held her ground. “You’re lucky you caught us,” said Yeager. “We were fixing to check out that corpse they found in the stockyards.”
Heedless of her stockings and shoes, Zapata jumped down and crouched beside Jenny. “I asked you not to…” she began, then shook her head. “Crispy critter, huh? We’re not going to lift any prints off this one.”
Daintily Jenny probed the pelvic arch, where the hip bones curved together like a butterfly folding its wings. “A man, I think,” she said. “The pelvis is fairly narrow.”
The bones emerged from the soil like islands from the sea, tiny protuberances of life in an ocean of nothingness. A shaft of sun fell on Hilary’s back, raising goose flesh. The warm scent emanating from the ground was only the smell of dirt, she assured herself.
Mark exposed the end of the left arm. The finger bones were arranged as gracefully and as serenely as the Mona Lisa’s painted hands. The man’s right hand was beneath a black and blistered roof beam. “Healed fracture of the right ulna,” said Jenny. “Broke his forearm, perhaps as a child.”
Preston brought a wooden box with mesh at the bottom. Zapata watched intently as Mark and Jenny scooped dirt into it. Preston shook the sieve, and fine dust sifted through it, gathering in a mound on the mottled cement of the garage floor. Dust to dust, Hilary thought. The man’s funeral pyre had been a spectacular one. No doubt he’d found that very comforting.
With a loud shuffling of papers, Yeager said, “Nobody was reported missing the night of the fire.”
“Either he could’ve been trapped in the fire, or the fire could’ve been set to cover the body,” returned Zapata.
“Then why didn’t the murderer haul Felicia out here, too? It doesn’t fit,” protested Yeager.
“Nothing fits.” Several tiny round shapes bounced atop the dusty screen. Zapata reached out and picked one up. “Rivets? Oh—the man was wearing jeans. No buttons, though.”
“Shirt buttons would be underneath him,” Jenny said.
“He might’ve been wearing a T-shirt. Then there wouldn’t be any buttons.” Preston put the rivets into a plastic bag.
Jenny traced the lower leg bones to the feet, exposing several carbonized stripes. “Leather shoes,” she stated.
Mark dug down over the skull. When he sensed bone, he switched to a brush. Yeager and Zapata bracketed him. He said, “You’re in my light.” Neither of them moved. His hand slipped, sending a spray of dirt into Zapata’s shoe. “Sorry.” The detectives stepped back.
Jenny forced her way between them and produced her own brush. The excavation was enclosed by a bubble of silence so profound that the soft swish of the brushes was gratingly loud. Hilary kept on drawing, copying the casual sketch of life—or rather, she thought, a sketch of the casual anonymity of death.
The mound of the skull appeared from the dirt. The face was turned to the side, toward the fallen beam. Carefully, one grain of dirt at a time, Mark cleared the zygomatic arch, the edge of the eye socket, and the connection of lower jaw into upper. A gold molar glinted, as though the skull were about to speak. Hilary’s pencil slipped. She erased, began again. She had to breathe through her mouth to get any air at all.
“Cause of death?” asked Zapata. “A knife might slice a bone, or your sieve could find a bullet, but if he simply asphyxiated in the fire….”
Jenny’s brush pointed to the arch of the skull. “See that fracture of the parietal? That’s your cause of death.”
“He was hit by that falling beam?”
“No. That would’ve left a long, crushed area. This is roughly oval and deep like a puncture wound. I daresay one of those spanners over there could’ve turned the trick.”
Yeager and Zapata considered the rack of charred and tumbled wrenches. The largest was as big as a man’s forearm, the smallest the size of a woman’s little finger. “Murdered?” Yeager hazarded.
“A right-handed bloke coshed him from behind,” said Jenny. “He’s lying on his stomach, that’s consistent with his falling forward.”
“Have you ever done any forensic work?” Zapata asked.
Jenny sat back on her heels. “Now and again. There was a case in Devon last year. The police were trying to match a set of child’s bones with a boy who’d gone missing in 1981—the mum’s boyfriend was suspected of doing away with him. Turned out it was the same child. But his death was an accident. He’d been clambering over a drystone wall when it collapsed on him. I was quite sorry not to shop the boyfriend—he was a nasty piece of work.”
“Think you can identify this body?” asked Yeager.
“The mastoid process—behind the ear—and the brow ridge are heavy enough to make this a man. Comparing the development of the bones in right and left arms, I’d say he was left-handed.”
“Only about seventeen per cent of the population is left-handed,” Hilary interjected.
“He was a mature man,” Jenny went on. “The sutures in his skull are completely closed. I’ll have to check the pelvis and the long bones, that’ll give us a range. And his height can be determined by measuring the femur. Ante-mortem medical and dental records would show the healed fracture and the gold tooth, but for that we’d need to have some idea who he was.”
Mark reamed out an eye socket. Preston reached into the sieve and pulled out two coins. Zapata snatched them from him. “A nickel, dated 1974. Well, we already knew when he died. And a fifty-peso piece.”
“Maybe he was one of Arthur’s illegal aliens,” said Hilary.
Both Yeager and Zapata turned to her, Zapata’s frown making her feel like a schoolgirl caught throwing spitballs. Well, who had a better right to talk about a case than its potential victims? She filled them in on Lucia’s roundtable last night, concluding, “Lucia said Arthur was possessive of his workshop, but so much so he’d kill someone for it?”
Zapata nodded reflectively. “Mrs. Hernandez did say something about the Coburgs hiring illegal aliens. Which means their names wouldn’t be on the tax rolls. Frank, go call her and ask if anyone was unaccounted for the night of the fire.” Yeager took off across the debris, the dried leaves crunching. Preston took a picture of him.
While she was at it, Hilary took the now creased and fingerprinted photos of Felicia’s sweater from her pocket and showed Zapata the patterns. The detective’s jaw tightened. “It’s a shame all those great minds at work last night didn’t come up with a solution.”
“Do you want this case solved or not?” Mark demanded.
“It’s my case. It’s my responsibility.”
“It’s not your ass on the line.”
Mark! Hilary protested silently.
The arrogant angle of Zapata’s head could have been due either to her personality or the weight of her bundled hair; she looked like an Aztec priestess considering a victim’s still-beating heart. Her voice was crisp. “Not physically, no.”
“Political pressure to hurry up and find a killer?” Jenny asked. “Or political pressure to hush everything up?”
“Y’all just try to live long enough to testify at a trial—after I find the killer.”
“Thanks,” Mark and Jenny said simultaneously. Hilary bent over her drawing and corrected a crooked line.
A patrol car pulled up in the driveway and disgorged two uniformed officers and a tall, thin man carrying an attaché case. Behind it came a television van. Zapata uttered a four-letter word and called to the man, “Where’s the rest of the M.E.’s team?”
“Back in the morgue trying to get all those bodies waiting in the hallways autopsied,” he replied. “This guy didn’t sound like a good candidate for an autopsy, so I came alone.”
Hilary would’ve called the man cadaverous, but compared to the real corpse he looked like Santa Claus. He climbed down into the pit and opened his case. Zapata leaned over one shoulder, Jenny over the other. Preston went to sit beneath a tree and change the film in his camera.
A navy-blue Lexus skimmed around the television van and boxed in the patrol car. With resigned gestures, the officers waved Kenneth and Dolores, Sharon and Vasarian, toward the dig, and continued making crowd-control motions at the reporters. Yeager emerged from the house, saw the advancing Coburgs, and set off on an intercepting course.
Mark brushed himself off and offered Hilary a hand up. “Let’s go throw our bodies in front of the juggernaut.”
“Great image, Mark.”
Vasarian’s expression was, as usual, that of a gentleman out for an afternoon constitutional. Dolores flared her nostrils like a thoroughbred confronted with an inferior brand of sugar cube. Kenneth looked as though he had a little dark cloud over his head. Sharon glanced nervously right and left and flinched when Yeager stepped in front of them and held up his hand. “Would y’all mind waiting here?” he said.
“Yes,” said Dolores. “This is my property. What’s going on?”
“We found a body, a skeleton, in the ruins of the garage,” Mark said.
Vasarian arched a brow, as though finding a speck in his teacup. Kenneth and Sharon exchanged a glance more hostile than bewildered. Dolores said, “It’s the person who set the garage on fire, obviously.”
“Was the garage set on fire?” Yeager asked.
“Someone murdered Felicia and stole a very fine collection of ceramics,” Dolores went on. “I’m delighted to hear he didn’t escape, after all. What a shame poor innocent Arthur had to suffer through a trial.” She didn’t look at Yeager as she spoke but considered the three heads bent close together in the excavation. Beyond them the students made pecking motions at the ground and eyed Force Coburg over their shoulders.
The shame, Hilary thought, is that the Coburgs made such haste in bulldozing the garage, almost as though they had something to hide. And yet covering the garage had preserved its incriminating evidence. Someone had been hoisted with his—or her—own petard, and it hadn’t been the dead man.
Yeager said, “There’s nothing y’all can do here. We’ll give you a call when we know something.”
Dolores gave him the haughty look of the chairman of the board denied admittance by a doorman. Interesting how thin her veneer had become over the last few days—the polished figure at the Lloyd reception was starting to show the scratches and smudges of hard use. She stalked back to the car, Kenneth at her side, Sharon sulking behind, Vasarian wafting nonchalantly in the rear. “How dare he,” said Hilary to Mark, “act like he has a clear conscience?”
“He’s probably had lots of experience.” Mark turned to Yeager. “You realize that this is another motive for the attacks on us Thursday night—to keep us from finding the body in the garage.”
“Them?” Yeager asked. He jerked his head toward the Lexus, its doors slamming on various microphones. “They let you excavate.”
“When the Historical Society insisted,” replied Mark. “I doubt if they realized just how much a trained archaeologist could learn from the ruins. And they’ve been hurrying us along.”
The forensics investigator shut his attaché case, shrugged, and headed back toward the police car. The television crew came to attention and presented minicams. Zapata and Jenny conferred, gestures brisk, going toe to toe on some point of procedure. At last they climbed out of the pit and joined Yeager, Mark, and Hilary.
“The police are letting us uncover the body,” Jenny said to Mark. The note of triumph in her voice reflected Zapata’s slightly smug expression. Good compromise, Hilary thought. They both think they’ve won—Jenny gets to dig, Zapata doesn’t have to commit any of her people.
“What did Mrs. Hernandez say?” Zapata asked Yeager.
“Two men, Mexican nationals, disappeared after the fire. The remaining workmen said those two were afraid the fire and the murder would call Immigration’s attention to them, so they lit out for home.” He checked his notebook. “I’ve got two names to check on.”
“Good,” said Zapata. “We’d better be getting on over to the stockyards. Jenny, keep us posted.”
Jenny watched, her expression every bit as inscrutable as Graymalkin’s, as the two detectives made terse statements to the reporters and departed northward. Hilary and Mark exchanged a thoughtful look. Just because Jenny didn’t want Arthur to be a murderer didn’t mean he wasn’t. The body was found in his workshop; that didn’t look good. Perhaps he and Dolores had agreed on his standing trial for Felicia’s murder as a smokescreen to cover the murder of the workman. But no matter whether Arthur had killed anyone, he was beyond justice now….
Or was he? Hilary glanced at the tower of the house. It glinted in a ray of sun, as though winking at her. Supposedly guilt could bind a ghost to the living world. Guilt, dishonesty, murder—it was all a virus, infecting everyone it touched. She shivered.
Mark and Jenny picked up their trowels. Hilary went back to the drawing board. Another patrol car arrived with more officers. The television crew hung around long enough to get various incoherent statements from the students as they departed for lunch, then disappeared. Another crew materialized in time to question Preston as he returned with sacks of hamburgers for everyone else’s lunch. Hilary’s french fries tasted of dust.
Every TV channel, radio station, and newspaper in the Metroplex came and went over the course of the afternoon, but weren’t permitted any closer than the driveway. By quitting time the body was fairly well exposed, except for the hand beneath the fallen beam. They’d have to set up a block and tackle for that, Jenny announced. She and Mark sprayed the bones with fixative, then helped Preston peg a plastic sh
eet over them. Two police officers assumed sentry positions.
Hilary asked Jenny to join her and Mark for dinner at the condo. Graciously she declined and strode toward Osborne without a backward look. She opened the kitchen door, bent, and stood up again holding Graymalkin across her shoulder. The cat shot a narrow look at Mark and Hilary: Hey, we’re survivors. Don’t sweat it.
*
Another policeman cruised down Hilary’s street, pausing as her Caprice and Mark’s van parked outside the condo. They waved. He waved back.
While Mark was showering, Hilary took a phone call from Lucia and explained to her just why Yeager had been asking about the workmen. “Good grief!” Lucia groaned. “All I have to do is call my cousin in Mexico City, the one at the Bureau of Statistics—he’ll find those men before any official inquiry can unroll its red tape.”
“We need all the help we can get,” Hilary told her. “Thanks.”
Mark passed the evening sifting through the box of newspaper articles while Hilary knitted. In response to his inquisitive bedtime caress, she confessed, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid of freaking out again.”
“Yeah, well, I am too.” Wistfully Mark rolled off the bed and headed toward the bathroom. “Just let me take a cold shower.”
Hilary laughed, and when a damp and very clean Mark returned, she snuggled into his embrace and slept better than she had for weeks. In fact, she was sleeping so deeply, she didn’t even hear him leave the next morning, and awoke to find an empty pillow next to her.
He and Jenny were soldiering on at Osborne, Sunday or no Sunday. Feeling disconcertingly domestic, Hilary baked chocolate chip cookies, made lemonade, and packed sandwiches, and at noon drove to the dig. The streets were deserted. She figured that everyone was at church until she turned on York Boulevard and saw that everyone was at Osborne.
Fortunately one of the cops on guard recognized her and ran interference for her through the sightseers. She found Mark and Jenny removing the dirt matrix around the skeleton grain by grain, a slow and agonizing task made slower and more agonizing by the difficulty of keeping the fragile bones from collapsing as dirt was removed from beneath them. Gratefully they set aside their brushes and dug into Hilary’s picnic basket.
Garden of Thorns Page 32
