by Erin Hart
Nora felt the beginning of a vibration, as if someone had touched a tuning fork to her solar plexus. “Where was this patch of swamp exactly?”
“Up under the bluffs north of the falls.”
Nora knew the place—one of a dozen sites the police had searched along the river five years ago, looking for evidence to pinpoint a primary crime scene, the place where Tríona had been attacked. There was nothing to say that this was the same wooded area—nothing, that is, except another body. Cordova’s eyes met hers, and the same frisson passed through her again.
“How long had she been there?”
“Hard to say exactly. The ME said he’s never seen anything like it. Half the body was reduced to bone, but the side buried deeper in the swamp was—”
“What?”
“Mummified, I guess—I don’t know what else to call it. The doc said it was probably something to do with the wet ground. He was guessing she’d been there three or four years, maybe longer.”
“And the cause of death?” Somehow she knew what Frank was going to say even before he opened his mouth.
“Somebody smashed her face in. I’m stopping over to pick up the final autopsy report this morning—”
“Take me with you.”
“What?”
“I need to see her, Frank. If the ME has a problem with me being there, you can say I’m a specialist on preserved human remains.”
His eyes narrowed. “Is that true?”
“It’s part of what I’ve been doing in Ireland, studying Iron Age remains recovered from peat bogs.”
Cordova smiled faintly and shook his head, as though it was difficult to process this new information. He stood and gestured for her to lead the way. “Okay, Dr. Gavin, let’s go.”
2
The Ramsey County medical examiner worked out of a low, nondescript building adjacent to the regional medical center in downtown Saint Paul. Nora hadn’t been to the building since she’d identified Tríona’s body. She tried to steel herself as Cordova parked in the small lot in front of the building.
Buck Callaway, the former ME, had been a colleague at the university, and a good friend who’d seen her through some rough times. They had kept in touch. Since his retirement, Buck and his wife had set off traveling the world. Nora was never surprised to receive their postcards from far-flung locales—the Peruvian Andes, Greenland, or the steppes of Mongolia. Buck’s travel had a serious purpose; in his retirement, he was compiling an epidemiological library of the ancient world. It was Buck Callaway who’d first urged her to take up the study of ancient bog remains in Ireland. She had yet to meet his replacement.
“What’s the new guy like?” she asked Frank.
“Solomon’s good,” Cordova said. “Very enthusiastic. Although that pretty much goes without saying for you pathology types.”
They signed in at reception, and Cordova led the way down the hall and through the wide double doors leading into the autopsy room. Not much had changed since she’d last been here; the place still had the look of a combination laboratory and operating room, albeit with some rather unorthodox surgical instruments. Three of the five stainless-steel tables were occupied. At the first two, the mortuary technicians were washing a pair of pale corpses, preparing them for the next step. On the last table was an articulated skeleton belonging to the county’s latest Jane Doe.
Nora’s first thought was that she might be back in Dublin, looking at one of the National Museum’s ancient specimens. The skull had been reduced to bone, along with one side of the body, just as Frank had described. Moving closer, she saw that the right side was mostly intact, from the shoulder down to the slightly darkened toenails and the sole of the foot. Taken as a whole, the image was grisly and surreal: a grinning, gap-toothed skeleton half veiled in tattered flesh.
Cordova said: “Something else, isn’t it?”
Nora let her gaze travel slowly across the face—what was left of it. The nasal bones had all but disappeared, and the exposed frontal bone bore evidence of several shallow, dishlike compression fractures. The maxilla was badly broken and a handful of teeth lay loose on the table. Whoever this young woman was, her face had been destroyed, exactly as Tríona’s had been. Nora reached out to grasp the edge of the stainless-steel table and felt Frank Cordova move incrementally closer behind her. He was about to speak when a voice sounded behind them.
“Hey, Frank. I’ve got that report for you, and personal effects are here somewhere—”
Nora turned to see a stocky, bearded figure in blue scrubs. She had to concentrate on putting on a professional face as Frank introduced her.
“Steve Solomon,” the newcomer said, extending his hand. “Buck Callaway has mentioned your name. And he told me a little about your work—in Ireland, right?” He turned his attention to the body on the table. “I’m glad to have you here. To be honest, I haven’t really seen much of this sort of thing, so I’m happy to have an expert—”
“Not exactly an expert,” Nora demurred. “Just trying to understand bog preservation a little better.”
Solomon said: “I do have a little experience with wet burials—did my residency at Tulane, and my first job was with the Orleans Parish coroner. But I never encountered anything quite like this. So how does our Jane Doe compare to what you’ve seen?”
“Most of the bodies I’ve examined were much older—about two thousand years older, actually. But there was one case recently, a young man who’d been buried in peat for only about twenty-five years.” Danny Brazil, whispered the small voice in her head. His name was Danny Brazil and he kept bees. Aloud she said: “Even after that short exposure to the bog environment, the similarity to ancient remains was pretty amazing.”
Nora turned back to the body and studied the edges of the flesh where the right leg must have been submerged in water; the visible tendons and ligaments looked frayed, and she could see a layer of adipocere beneath the skin—ordinary body fat transformed into a yellowish, waxy material—a common feature of preserved remains. “The darkening of the skin is just a basic Maillard reaction. It starts quickly, but takes a long time to become really well established. There’s some recent research from Canada, studies of fetal pigs buried in peat for different intervals, and some of them showed a slight change in coloration after only a few years. Sometimes it depends on the age of the individual, and the quality of their skin—how receptive it was to the chemical changes. Frank said you thought she might have been in the ground three or four years at least. From the degree of coloration, I’d probably agree with that.”
Nora could feel Frank checking her expression, gauging her reaction to the body.
She asked: “No evidence that animals had disturbed the site?”
Solomon shook his head.
“At first I thought that was strange, since people run dogs down there all the time. But it’s a floodplain—things shift around in high water. There’s quite a lot of debris, and very little undergrowth in the area where she was found, and I wondered if the body might have been buried deeper by sediment and floodwater. Might be a contributing factor to the state of preservation—and it could be one reason she didn’t turn up before now.”
“The gravesite itself—the surrounding material—what was that like?”
“Primarily organic,” Solomon said. “Lots of peat. The crime scene folks took plenty of samples. It seemed very wet for this late in the year—the ground all around her was completely sodden.”
“Probably a spring or a seepage area nearby. There are spots like that all over at Hidden Falls. It makes a huge difference in preservation, the water levels and temperature. Do you mind if I take a closer look?”
Solomon pulled the lighted magnifying glass into position for her. “Be my guest.”
Nora studied the broken edges of bone through the plate-sized lens, gently probing with gloved fingers and noting the angle of the breaks—the inward slope suggested impact from a convex shape, a rounded weapon. A fleeting impression flas
hed through the synapses in her brain: a raised hand, a heavy weight delivering a crushing blow. And not just once, but over and over again. Asking the next question meant straying from her consultant role. “Frank said you were thinking blunt force as the cause of death?”
“Looks that way,” Solomon said. “From the uniform weathering, it looks like the fractures occurred perimortem.”
“What about defensive wounds?”
“No marks indicating use of a sharp weapon, no trauma to the hands or forearms that would indicate defense against blunt force. Chances are the first blow was fatal and everything after that was unnecessary. Overkill.”
Overkill.The same word Buck Callaway had used about Tríona.
Nora asked: “How long will it take to find out who she is?”
“We’ve got eight missing women still on the books,” Cordova said. “Most don’t fit her description, so that helps narrow it down.”
“It helps that she took good care of her teeth,” Solomon said. “The incisors have come loose, but we recovered all of her teeth from the site. Just one filling. The forensic odontologist was here yesterday. She’s comparing dental records from missing persons right now. And this particular consultant is also an expert on facial trauma, so she should be able to provide information on the degree of force, maybe even the sort of weapon used. I’m guessing she’ll have an answer for us today or tomorrow.”
“You said you had clothing and personal effects?” Cordova asked.
“Right here,” Solomon said, reaching behind him for the marked evidence bags, which he handed over. “Running clothes, shoes and socks, a watch. No ID. Everything’s there.”
Solomon’s glance tracked over Cordova’s shoulder to the doorway, where the receptionist was signaling a call for him. “Sorry, that may be the odontologist. I asked them to track me down if she called.”
After he left the room, Nora spoke under her breath: “These injuries, Frank, they’re identical—exactly the same as Tríona’s. And the location—a black ash swamp—it can’t just be coincidence.”
“As soon as we figure out who she is—”
Solomon came back through the door, looking satisfied. “Looks like you won’t have to wait. The odontologist is faxing over her report right now. The dental chart matched one of your missing persons, a twenty-two-year-old female—”
Frank Cordova finished the sentence for him: “Natalie Russo. I’ve been going through the missing persons files, too. Natalie disappeared the third of June—five years ago.”
The words sent a cold knife down Nora’s spine. She had often been gripped by the paralyzing notion that her sister would not be Peter Hallett’s final victim. But for some reason it had never occurred to her that Tríona might not have been the first.
3
Cormac stood at the window of the hospital room, looking in at his father. No one had ever been able to explain what had prompted Joseph Maguire to leave Ireland. Perhaps he didn’t fully understand the reasons himself. Now he lay in a hospital bed on the other side of the glass, breathing steadily with the help of a ventilator, as the nurse checked intravenous lines, his pulse, his oxygen level.
An insult to the brain, the doctors kept calling it, as if mere effrontery could trigger physical disaster. But his father was in no immediate danger, they said, and could leave the hospital once he could breathe on his own, provided he had adequate care at home. Adequate care. The blithe assumption in those words struck him, and Cormac suddenly felt short of breath. He turned and made his way to the ward entrance, past the nurse’s station and the visitors’ lounge, the canteen area with vending machines for tea and biscuits. He pushed open the lobby door and felt the cool, damp air hit him in the face. The flight from Shannon to New York left in less than twelve hours. He could leave now, not tell anyone where he was going; he could still make it—
A voice at his elbow brought him back to reality: “I thought I saw you headed out here,” the nurse said, the same one who’d been taking his father’s temperature. “You can go in to him if you like. Just for a few minutes. Some say it doesn’t help, but I think they know you’re there, even if they can’t say. Go on, speak to him. You’ve nothing to lose.”
Gazing into the woman’s kind brown eyes, Cormac felt his prospect of escape collapse like a sail suddenly robbed of wind. He walked slowly back to the ward and slid into the chair beside his father’s bed. Speak to him? He hadn’t even figured out how to address the man. Calling him “Da,” or “Father”—anything remotely along those lines—seemed ridiculous at this stage. And using his given name seemed even more preposterous. Easier just to sidestep the whole issue. Call him nothing at all.
Cormac had long ago realized that the word father, whatever it conjured up for other people, held no association at all for him, unless it was a void, an absence. As a child, he had built a sturdy box around that void and buried it, tried to concentrate on filling his life with other things. But absence was something he understood, at least. It was his father’s sudden presence that was so bewildering. Cormac let his gaze wander across the man in the bed: the ropelike veins in the backs of the hands, the broken blood vessels visible through the papery skin at the temples, the unruly shock of white hair. This man looked so small, so insignificant, Cormac thought, for someone who had cast such a looming shadow. In dreams, Joseph Maguire had taken up a great deal more space.
He had no recollection of his father leaving, but they must have been living in Dublin at the time. There was only a vague memory of arriving in Clare, first to stay with his grandparents, then eventually settling, just himself and his mother, in the house along the sea road. No one ever talked about his father in those days—not to him at least. Over the next ten years, all he’d ever learned had to be gleaned from the few bits of conversation he might overhear after a letter arrived in the post. They came only sporadically—once, sometimes twice a year—but he’d felt the eyes of the village upon him for days after each delivery. In a small place like Kilgarvan, his family’s circumstances accounted for at least half the local scandal. Once the postmistress spotted a foreign stamp, the news spread, passed along in whispers and glances, and everyone in the town would know about his father’s letter before it ever arrived at their house. Cormac had felt the excitement each letter generated in the air around him—a volatile compound of curiosity, pity, and envy. At first he’d been unable to fathom the envy, but gradually realized that most of it came from schoolmates whose fathers were all too present, loading them with work, and ready with the strap if they dared shirk or disobey. Because his father was absent, they no doubt imagined him as free from all that—free to be coddled and cosseted by his mammy, with no manly interference.
He remembered watching the subtle change in his mother’s face when the post came bearing one of those striped air mail envelopes. She would retreat to her room, appearing still and composed when she emerged an hour or so later, but her eyes were always red. No one said the letters were from his father, but they didn’t have to—he knew. There was never a separate note for him, no word of greeting or even a postscript. After the third or fourth one, he had tried very hard not to care. At one point, he’d tried hating his father, focusing all his energy steadily on that one thing for a few weeks. But he found that loathing required a certain depth of feeling, which he had difficulty mustering against someone who barely existed. Eventually, he began to let people believe that his father was dead. It seemed true enough.
The old man’s first resurrection had come unexpectedly, when he was away at university. It might never have happened, if his mother had not fallen ill. Returning home one weekend to help care for her, he had found his place occupied by a white-haired man claiming to be his father. His parents had decided—without consulting him—that he should stay at his studies. But he had refused to go back to Dublin. He’d taken off the rest of the term, and they had all lived together for a few weeks in the house on the sea road, maintaining a veneer of civility for his mother’s sa
ke. When she died, the charade had abruptly ended. Rejecting his father’s offer to stay on in Ireland, Cormac had returned to his studies an orphan, and Joseph Maguire, who had presumably gone back to Chile, returned to being dead.
The second resurrection had been as unexpected as the first. Cormac slipped a letter from his pocket, a small pale blue envelope that had arrived through his mail slot in Dublin more than three years ago. The return address had meant nothing then: J. Maguire, Glencolumbkille Post Office, County Donegal. The handwriting was small and compact, the old-fashioned Gaelic script taught in National Schools when the country was new. He occasionally received similar letters from amateur archaeologists, and expected this dispatch to contain an earnest account of a previously undocumented ringfort or souterrain. His expectation was immediately dashed at the salutation. “My dear Cormac,” it began:
I hope you might forgive me for addressing you in such familiar fashion, since we have never met. My name is Julia Maguire; I am your great-aunt, and I am writing today to convey what I hope may be welcome information.
I am an old woman, and you and your father are the only family I have left. Recently, I wrote to your father to let him know that upon my death, the house at Ardcrinn and all its contents will belong to him. He replied promptly, saying that he intended to return to Donegal before the end of March. He has not said whether it will be a brief visit, or whether he plans to stay. Given my current state of health, I can’t be certain that I will be drawing breath when he arrives, and have told him so. I am not at all sentimental about dying; I have lived longer than most reasonable people might wish. I have taken writing this letter to you as my last imperative.
I know you have not seen your father for many years, and I cannot tell you what possessed him to leave Ireland, nor how he chose the path that he has taken. For all I know, you may have no wish to see him ever again. No one would blame you, I daresay. I can only tell you that there has always been a streak of the Wild Geese in Joseph since he was a boy, and no denying it. But one important thing I have learned in living so long is that anger does not diminish love; it has been my experience that the two may live together, side by side, for a very long time.
