Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

He was quiet a moment and then said the very thing that I found myself thinking, day after day. “Thirty years isn’t that long ago, Gemma. The Woodsman could not only still be alive, he could be living here in town. Maybe he never left.”

I pulled the Jeep into the parking lot of the medical examiner’s office, a smaller building annexed to the newer hospital, Saint Thomas’s, and turned off the ignition. The old engine grumbled for a moment and then fell silent and I looked at Sam. He was a quick study and would go far as a cop.

“Now you know why I dream about them. Let’s go see about a dead clown.”

Dr. Ravi Hussen was impatient. She greeted us outside the morgue door with a pointed look at her wristwatch and a tight smile.

“My fault, Ravi. The baby was starving and I can’t think these days if I don’t eat,” I said, and rubbed my belly. Her face softened and she jerked a thumb at Sam.

“Who’s the kid?”

“Dr. Ravi Hussen, meet Sam Birdshead. He joined the department a few weeks ago,” I said.

Sam extended a hand and Ravi shook it, a bemused look on her strong Iranian features.

“He’s here to watch,” I added, and pushed him toward the men’s locker. “Suit up in one of the blue outfits you’ll find hanging in the locker marked ‘Visitors.’”

Ravi smiled as she led me into the women’s room. “Cute.”

“Young.”

She helped me find an extra large suit to pull over my belly and then changed into her own dressing gown. We added head caps, goggles, masks, gloves, and booties and met Sam back in the corridor. He followed us into the lab.

After the warmth of the August heat outside, the Death Room was freezing. Steel shafts in the ceiling pumped in gusts of icy air, and I shivered as I passed beneath one of the vents. An assistant waited silently by the long, narrow sink that ran the length of one wall, his face as pale and gaunt as the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

At our feet, discreet drains dotted the floor, ready to catch any wayward fluids.

Reed Tolliver’s body lay on a metal table in the middle of the lab. Under the fluorescent lights, the white stage makeup on his face glowed a sickly green. The black blood at his neck glistened as though it was, impossibly, still wet. His cheery clown suit, complete with suspenders and squirting flower, added a sense of the macabre, like we’d stumbled through a fun-house door into some kind of sick, twisted carnival act.

Sam swallowed hard. I patted him on the back.

“Please, Sam, if you are going to be sick, use the sink in that corner,” Ravi instructed.

She pulled the neon orange wig off Tolliver’s head, exposing a generous mess of dark strands, and deposited the wig into a large evidence bag, which she promptly sealed. The crime scene investigators would go over the wig and Tolliver’s clothes at length; Ravi’s job was to strip him down and expose him at his more base molecular levels.

Leaning close to Tolliver’s scalp, Ravi peered at the dark strands and then pulled back a few, exposing pale yellow roots. She nodded to herself.

“He’s a towhead. I thought as much when I saw the eyes. You rarely see blue like that on a brunette. His hair has been dyed repeatedly. As a result, it’s very damaged, the follicles have almost no elasticity.”

Ravi soaked a sponge in a small yellow bucket of water and began wiping Tolliver’s face. The makeup coated the sponge with a thick layer of grease, just as it had coated Tolliver, and she had to repeatedly soak and wring the sponge and then begin again.

After ten minutes, Tolliver’s face was clean but it was not unstained.

The right side of his face was covered with tattoos. What looked like pagan and Celtic symbols in blue and black danced across his cheek, his eyebrow, half of his forehead, even the corner where his upper and lower lips met. A cascade of inky knots and circles wove here and there, trailing at times up into his hairline. In contrast, the left side of Tolliver’s face was stitched with piercings: half a dozen tiny silver and gold studs and hoops crisscrossed his skin like flags on a map.

“Jesus,” I breathed. “Are those real?”

Ravi gently tugged a few of the hoops. They pulled away from the skin and then slowly sagged back into place, the elasticity of the living replaced by the rigor mortis of the dead. She examined the tattoos and piercings at length and then stepped away from the body and snapped off her gloves. At the sink, she scrubbed her hands and pulled down her mask to splash water on her face. She dried off with a paper towel and then spoke.

“Many of these were done by an amateur; perhaps even by Tolliver himself. Scarring and recently healed infections indicate they were done quickly and without clean instrumentation. These days, the pros go out of business real quick if they don’t use proper hygiene.”

“You gotta be kidding me. He did that to himself?” Sam gasped. “Fuck.”

I stepped on his toe and whispered “recorded” and pointed at the ceiling-mounted voice recorder.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “But seriously?”

Ravi nodded and slid on a fresh pair of gloves. “That, or a buddy did it for him.”

“Some buddy,” I muttered.

Ravi carefully cut away the rest of Tolliver’s costume and placed the clothes in another of the large evidence bags. Without the oversize outfit, he seemed frail and small, much more a boy than a man. His chest was smooth and the hairs on his arms and legs and pubis the same pale blond as the roots on his head. His body was free of markings; I didn’t see so much as a scar on him below the neck.

Evidently, he had decided to limit the self-mutilating to his face, or perhaps he simply hadn’t lived long enough to start in on the rest of his natural canvas.

In striking contrast to his clean and naked body, Tolliver’s throat gaped open, obscene and violent. The cut extended far enough back that Tolliver’s head had been almost completely severed from his body. White bone matter and cartilage gleamed through the blood and muscle.

Beside me, Sam gagged.

I patted him on the shoulder and pointed him in the direction of the sink. He swallowed hard and then shook his head, remaining at the side of the table. Ravi poked and prodded at the wound for a few minutes and then spoke.

“I’ve never seen a cut like this, Gemma. I actually don’t think it’s a cut at all.”

I stared at her. “I don’t understand. If it’s not a cut, what is it?”

“A tear. Around noon today, someone literally tore open the throat of this poor kid.”

Two hours later, Ravi was finished with her preliminary study of the body. Aside from the injury and the facial tattoos and piercings, there were no more surprises. To be thorough, though, she would still do a complete autopsy and examine the organs and other matter for whatever else might help the investigation. Her assistant, the man with the long pale face and somber air, fingerprinted Tolliver. If he was a street kid, chances were good he’d been caught at some point for shoplifting or busting a car.

If we could get a match on his prints, we might be able to find a next of kin.

“Neosporin baby,” Ravi surmised as she tossed her gloves into the bin by the door. Sam looked at her in surprise, and she continued.

“Somebody cared for this boy. They fed him, kept him sheltered, probably discouraged him from playing competitive sports. They bandaged skinned knees, applied Neosporin to prevent scarring, and got him braces when his teeth came in crooked. He wasn’t always a street kid. Somebody out there, somewhere, loved him once.”

Ravi walked us back to the locker rooms.