Silent Evidence

by Rachel Grant

  “How can I help?” Sean asked.

  She looked up, and he could tell she was about to brush off his offer, but then she bit her lip and said. “There’s one thing you can do. Put a strip of masking tape across the bottom of each pan and label it with the bag number and all the other information written on the bag. That would save me a lot of time.”

  “Are these the coordinates for the location where the bones were collected?” he asked as he studied an extra large zipper top bag that contained a skull and an assortment of other bones.

  “Yes. UTM coordinates. If I determine the bones are from a legit burial ground of some sort, they’ll be returned to the same spot.”

  He stared into the empty eye sockets. This had been a person once. Flesh had covered these bones. This person had once had hopes and dreams. Now they were a skull in a bag.

  He’d seen his share of death when he was active duty. He’d killed for his country more than once. Yet this was different. Hazel wasn’t casual with her handling of the remains, but at the same time, there was a professional indifference to the bags and numbers.

  He thought of his sister’s medical tests. For her, the results were life and death, but to some lab technician somewhere, she was a series of numbers. One number estimated her odds of beating cancer. Another number predicted whether or not the cancer would return in five years.

  And there was nothing he could personally do to change those numbers.

  He placed a strip of tape in the bottom of the pan and tried to remember what Hazel had said. Something about returning the bones to the lake if she determined it was a legitimate burial ground. “And if the burial ground isn’t legit?”

  “We’ll collect all the bones, and I’ll group these with bones from the same area, hoping to sort out the individuals.”

  Sean had seen the piles of bones when he scooped her from the lake. There was no way they could all be sorted into individuals—not without DNA. “Are the bones going to be sent off for DNA?” he asked.

  “If it looks like there is any. Most of these bones are calcined—burned. They could still contain DNA, but it might be hard to get, and there is no way every single bone could be tested for sorting.”

  “How do you know they’re burned?” It wasn’t as if they had scorch marks.

  “The bright white color and the fragile, friable ends of the long bones. Have you ever thrown a chicken or rib bone into a campfire after eating, then noticed how white the bones were the next day, when the fire was out?”

  “Come to think of it, yeah.”

  “The calcination process turns bones white.”

  As he labeled the trays, she set to work on the first one, starting by clipping a microphone to her collar. The digital recorder, he noticed, was hooked to her waistband.

  She donned surgical gloves, then pulled bones from the quart-size bag one at a time and described each one into the microphone. She used words like distal, lateral, proximal, left, right, fragment, friable, and several other terms he didn’t catch.

  He’d just finished labeling all sixteen trays by the time she moved on to the second tray, which was more interesting because it included the skull that had distracted him. She spent a long time studying it, describing the sutures, measuring the nasal opening and eye sockets.

  He waited for a pause in her examination, so as not to disturb her flow, and asked if there was more he could do.

  “Sorry, no. I’m afraid this is going to be very boring for you. I need to be the only one who handles the bones. It’s a chain-of-evidence thing.”

  Sean wasn’t the least bit bored; he was fascinated. This was Hazel in her element. She was supremely competent and knowledgeable. That shouldn’t come as a surprise given that she had a PhD in the subject, but in all the years he’d known her, he’d never seen this side of her. He’d only seen the sexy, fun party girl. Now she was the intensely focused, expert-in-her-field scientist.

  She wore the thick glasses, and again her long auburn hair was pulled back in a high ponytail, which brought out her cheekbones. She gazed down at the bones in the metal pan and the ponytail shifted, exposing the back of her neck. And now he had a new favorite part of Hazel to stare at. He wanted to run his lips over that sensitive patch of skin. Would she shiver when he did that?

  Damn, now he was lusting after a woman as she analyzed death. But he couldn’t forget how it had felt to hold her last night. He hadn’t been aroused then, and he wasn’t necessarily aroused now. It was more a notion of what he could explore if they took a dangerous leap.

  She pursed her lips as she stared at the skull, her brows furrowing.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Just thinking about how race and gender are going to be a statistics game. It’s going to come down to measurements of different elements and averages. Were I to guess at a glance, I’d say this skull is African American.” Her mouth scrunched to one side. “I’m sorry. The forensic anthropology term is ‘negroid,’ which I hate using as much as I hate the term ‘mongoloid.’ From here on out, I’ll just say Black, and if I mean Native American, I’ll say Native, and Asian if I mean Asian, and European or white instead of Caucasoid.”

  Sean nodded. “Cool.” He studied the skull. “You can tell race from a skull?”

  “To a certain degree. Age is, of course, what we can identify with the most accuracy. After that comes gender, then race. For race, we look at things like the nasal aperture. In Black skeletons, it tends to be wider, but again, it’s statistical. For gender, we look at the frontal bone—the forehead—for the slope and the thickness of the superciliary arch and supraorbital border, which make up the brow ridge. Men tend to have more sloping foreheads with thicker brow ridges than women. We also look at the mandible. Men are more likely to have squared jaws, where women have more pointed chins.”

  He glanced at the skull on the tray. “That one doesn’t have a mandible.”

  “Correct. Doesn’t mean it isn’t in the lake. The rising and lowering of the water table or fish activity, among other things, could have separated the different cranial elements.”

  “So what, exactly, are you doing here?”

  “This is all preliminary, to determine if more work needs to be done or if this is a prehistoric burial ground we’re disturbing. If it’s prehistoric, we’ll return these bones to their final resting place and won’t disturb them again.”

  “But you said that skull looks Black, so it wouldn’t be prehistoric.”

  “Exactly, but it could be historic. It remains possible it’s a slave burial ground. In which case, I have questions, like, why were all the remains burned? It’s possible these are all victims of a fire, but how did the remains end up in the reservoir?”

  “You think this is evidence of a crime?”

  She glanced at the bones laid out in the metal trays. “This is such a small sample of what’s out there, it’s hard to say. One or two burned individuals could easily be explained away in an historic or prehistoric context. But this many? Not so much.”

  “How many do you think are in the lake?” he asked.

  “Yesterday, I counted twenty-six skulls. But it could easily be more—those were just the intact craniums. There could be shattered skulls mixed in the piles of bones. Given the fact that they were all burned, I think these people were murdered. The real question is, when?”

  9

  Hazel hung up the office phone. She took a deep breath, enjoying a moment of privacy. She and Sean and spent every minute together yesterday until he’d gone home at seven to spend the evening with his mom. This morning, he’d arrived at seven sharp, and they’d shared breakfast in the main house before crossing the yard to the annex, where he sat in the corner while she worked, talking to her bones.

  Sean was good company, but she wasn’t used to constant companionship, especially not from someone she needed to hide her feelings from. When it came time to call the Virginia medical examiner to share her preliminary assessment, she’d glomme
d onto the call as a reason to retreat into Alec’s old office and use the phone in private.

  This would be so much easier if every moment spent with him didn’t make her just want him more.

  She stood from the desk and stretched. Time to get her game face on. She had a fake boyfriend she needed to shower with disinterest.

  Her life had gotten really weird of late.

  She stepped out of the office to find Sean standing over one of the trays, looking at the bones. His hands were clasped behind his back, likely to prevent himself from touching the bones in a moment of forgetfulness.

  He was so wonderfully responsible and conscious of the rules and boundaries she’d set. Did he have to be so damn perfect?

  He glanced up. “What did the ME say?”

  “She’ll forward my preliminary assessment to the proper authorities—Sheriff Taylor, the FBI, the utility company, district attorney. She wants me to go back and collect all the bones I can today, given that inundation is supposed to start tomorrow. There’s no way we can collect them all and get three-point provenience, but at least I can get the skulls and pelvic bones and other diagnostic elements. I’ve only done a preliminary evaluation of what I collected so far, and she wants me to do an intensive exam—scanning every surface under magnification to look for wounds or anomalies that could give us a cause of death. The specialist she has in-house is busy and wouldn’t get to this case for a month or more.” She shrugged. “I’ve got the bones and the time.”

  Hazel hadn’t been surprised by the request; it made sense for her to continue the work. She had the expertise and was known to the ME. As a grad student, she’d interned at the ME’s office, and later, after she had her PhD, she’d provided expert testimony at a few trials in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Transferring the analysis to someone else would only waste time at this point. What she wasn’t sure of was if she was happy with the request or not.

  Her client was no longer Talon & Drake, it was the medical examiner’s office, and she couldn’t say no without risking her reputation. This would be intensive work, and she had to do it whether she was ready or not.

  Her gaze scanned the trays of bones. “I’m afraid this will mean several days of babysitting me while I work. You’d have to take more leave from Raptor like Alec suggested.” Officially, Sean had already taken personal days yesterday and today.

  “There’s another option we haven’t considered. It will keep you protected and we’d both be able to work. And I think Rav will be onboard with it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Move the bones to the lab in the basement of the Raptor compound. The security there is even better than here. It’s a large space with plenty of tables to lay out the trays. Plus the cameras and other equipment are state-of-the-art, mounted on tracks above the table so you can record everything. You can work in the basement, and I can go back to helping out with the trainings, and no one would wonder why I’m suddenly glued to your side like a possessive boyfriend.”

  She considered the idea. Her commute would get a lot longer, but it would be much kinder for Sean, who had upended everything to do this job. Plus, with more room to work and better camera systems, documentation would go much faster. “What’s security like? Could anyone in the compound just walk in and mess with the bones?”

  “No. The lab is heavily restricted—which is why it hasn’t been used in the five years Rav has owned the place. Frankly, the bones would be safer there over the weekend while we’re gone than they would be here.”

  “Sold. If Alec says okay, let’s do it.”

  Less than five minutes later, they had permission, and Hazel began loading trays in the back of Sean’s SUV. “After we drop these in the lab, we need to go back to the reservoir and collect what we can before dark.” She’d planned to start the intensive analysis today, but that would have to wait, which was probably for the best. Tomorrow, they’d head for West Virginia and the wedding. She’d get three days off to clear her head before she needed to immerse herself in the missing skin of the dead.

  Sean watched Hazel collect the bones in the shallow waters. They’d gotten off to a rocky start with the bodyguard thing in this very spot, but in the last two days, they’d settled into a working relationship that was much smoother. Now that he’d spent days watching her in her element, he almost couldn’t reconcile this Hazel with the party girl.

  He’d liked the party girl just fine—too much, really. But this Hazel, she fascinated him. He could watch her all day… He couldn’t help but grin. Good thing, because that was exactly what Rav was paying him to do.

  He was starting to forget the reasons he’d kept his distance from her over the years. But the job thing had been front and center and very valid that first night they met. No way could he hook up with the boss’s cousin in the garden just hours after meeting her—and he’d known that was exactly what Hazel had wanted.

  Part of him had been a little angry with her that night, that she didn’t consider what it could mean for his job.

  One did not bang the boss’s cousin hours after meeting her, especially when the job itself was brand-new. But for Hazel, he’d just been a guy her cousin brought home. There were no consequences for her beyond failed birth control or risking exposure to STDs.

  On the flipside for him, she’d been the first person to make him feel in those first weeks after his father died. She’d made him laugh that night. He’d felt warm and excited and experienced a rush of joy and pleasure that had seemed impossible in the well of grief.

  She’d been a light in the darkness. And a temptation he’d barely managed to resist, if only because a tryst in the garden would have been another way to forget his grief.

  But she didn’t know any of that. He hadn’t told her that night that his father had passed away just weeks before. He’d avoided all conversation about his family so he wouldn’t have to mention the grief that nearly choked him, but strangely, that had led to him always avoiding the topic of his family with her. It was as if the subject was forbidden in his mind, or he’d have to explain the complicated emotional landscape he’d wandered the night they met.

  Telling her about Katrina’s cancer had felt weird. Foreign. Katrina was the part of his life he’d walled off from this one particular woman for a reason he wasn’t sure he quite understood himself.

  Proof Hazel wasn’t the only one who needed a psychotherapist. He’d never really worked out his issues surrounding his dad’s death. Might be time to actually deal with that. He wasn’t sure he’d ever quite realized he’d somehow managed to wrap Hazel into the pain at that time. Her only crime was being the sexy, sweet, fun emotional break he’d so desperately needed, and the pleasure he’d felt at meeting her had become a source of guilt.

  He shook his head. He needed to focus on the reservoir and the woman he was guarding and not take these mental breaks that served no purpose. He was looking for an excuse to drop his rules. To make a move he’d only end up regretting.

  He scanned the water and the shoreline, looking to the north end of the lake where Raptor had acreage. He’d spent many hours there in the last four years in simulated war games designed to train operatives and military personnel. His gaze traveled south to the property adjacent to Raptor land and the large house that overlooked the lake. The boundary between the two properties was defined by dozens of No Trespassing signs on both sides. Reasonable, considering the trainings Raptor conducted.

  But who was the mysterious landowner? In all the time Sean had been coming here, he couldn’t remember seeing any activity at the house. The large veranda overlooking the lake had, to the best of his knowledge, always been empty.

  He returned his attention to Hazel and the bone garden. He wasn’t to touch the bones, but he had free rein to walk the area and drop pin flags if he saw something interesting. All he saw were bones, piles and piles of bones. But he marked the skulls and pelvic bones and anything else he thought she might want to collect.

  “The sun
will be setting in about forty-five minutes, Haze. We need to wrap this up.”

  She nodded and carefully placed yet another zipper-topped bag with a skull inside into a large mesh bag that held her gruesome collection of plastic-wrapped humans. “Twenty-seven skulls total, not including the fragments we’re likely missing in our hurry.”

  “And they’re all male?”

  “There’s one that might be female. Even the long bones in the vicinity are gracile, so I collected those too. But all the other bones are…shockingly similar.” She met Sean’s gaze. “I don’t like what happened here. This is so much like many mass graves I’ve seen before. We want to think the US is above this. But here we are, in Virginia, just miles from our nation’s capital. It does happen here.” Her voice trailed off as she stared across the lake. After a lengthy pause, she said, “Did you know ICMP is still searching for three hundred and twenty-eight prison inmates who ‘disappeared’ during Hurricane Katrina?”

  He frowned. “No. Never heard of that.”

  “It’s true. And no one is talking about it. People—massive groups of people—can disappear even here in the US, and no one talks about it, no one does anything about it, if they’re in a marginalized group. Prison inmates, who cares, right?”

  He looked at her and for once could answer that question. Hazel MacLeod cared.

  As if he needed another reason to fall hard for the woman.

  10

  The fake boyfriend charade started in earnest at nine a.m. on Friday, several hours earlier than Hazel would have liked. She’d wanted the four-hour drive alone with Sean to prep herself for looking her sister in the eye and lying to her, but no such luck.

  The problem was, Ivy was more than a sister. She was Hazel’s best friend. They were only fourteen months apart in age, one year apart in school. When no other kids could tolerate their nerdiness, they’d had each other.