Ridley Pearson - The Angel Maker

"Dead or alive?" Boldt asked in a whisper. "Would the victim have been dead or alive?"

"Prior to surgery, I can't say." Dixon looked at the gaping hole in the rib cage. "But after this technique," he said, "definitely dead."

Dixon crossed the room, returning with several jars that he placed under the harsh light. He talked quickly. "The next piece of the puzzle we went after was timing. In order to identify her we need to know as precisely as possible when she died-when she was buried," he corrected himself, "in order to match her with missing persons for the same period." He asked Boldt, "How are you with bugs? Larvae? Maggots? That sort of thing?" Before Boldt answered, Dixon said, "I hate it when people toss their cookies in these little rooms."

"I've never been a real fan of maggots. And I hate things with lots of legs. Can we speed this up?"

"You'll live." Dixon frowned and pointed to the jars. "These are courtesy of our entomologist who helped out." Each was labeled, but Boldt wasn't wearing his reading glasses. "Forensic entomology is an exploratory field," he warned. "The courts have not made it clear exactly where they stand, but thankfully that's Bob Proctor's problem. Tissue decomposition is the first thing you look for when trying to date remains. Lacking any tissue, as in this case, we turn to bugs-insects living and dead. Graves within graves."

Dixie drummed on the lid of the first jar. "We found a breeding colony of woodlice on the bones. They feed off a fungus that grows only on bone. It takes woodlice two years to establish a breeding colony." "Two years?" Boldt asked, thinking he had a date. Pushing.

Dixon raised a finger. He tapped the second jar. "We also-discovered a past infestation of phorid fly maggots, a close relative of the coffin fly. The phorid fly consumes decaying flesh. We're estimating the weight of the deceased, judging by skeletal size, at between one-hundred-ten and one-hundred-forty pounds. At that weight, it would take the phorid flies no less than two years, no more than three, to consume her." Boldt felt himself blanch. "Woodlice will not coexist with phorid flies, so we add the times together: two plus two-four to five years, minimum. To further substantiate this estimate, we have evidence of a beetle that would not attack the body for at least three to four years after burial."

"So we can safely say that she was in the ground at least four years, maybe as long as five?"

"Correct."

Dixie hoisted the third jar to eye level and said, "Meet the blue bottle fly. The blue bottle lives above ground and lays eggs in decaying flesh. These eggs form larval cases that house pupae that grow to adult blue bottles. I discovered ten such cases blowfly puparia-in the soil samples. No colony of blue bottle, just ten such larval cases. Lack of a colony is important. The body was exposed to air long enough for the blue bottle to deposit its eggs, but not long enough to form a colony. That means her body remained above ground for three to four days prior to burial. Whoever buried her has a strong stomach that's consistent with a veterinarian-and he had to have someplace to keep a decaying body for at least four days that didn't raise suspicion." He added, "And that's not easy; she wasn't pretty by the time she went in the ground." Dixon asked, "You okay?" Boldt said, "A four-year-old homicide with an unidentified victim? It's interesting stuff, Dixie, don't get me wrong, but it's an investigator's nightmare, and like I said, I'm pressed for time."

Dixon encouraged, "Would I drag you over here for bad news? I can give you bad news over the phone. Would I waste your time?"

He waved Boldt out of the room and led him through the offices to a distant storeroom that had recently been converted into an office.

A video camera atop a tripod was aimed at a skeletal skull that sat on a pedestal in front of a backdrop of white oaktag. To the left, within range of the camera, photographs of women had been tacked to the wall. Boldt said, "Missing persons."

"Yes," Dixie acknowledged.

Dixie switched on the computer screen. "Caucasian women aged eighteen to twenty-six. All nearly the same height. All went missing not less than four, not more than five years ago. All remain missing to this day." He added as a caveat, "All but one." That awakened Boldt. Gooseflesh raced up an arm and tingled his scalp. The screen was divided in half. To the left was a freeze-frame of this same skull. "It's a new technology developed by the Brits we're calling Cranial Imaging. It isn't infallible; it may not even hold up in our courts, but it knocks months off of clay reconstruction. We superimpose properly sized images of the missing person's photographs on top of the skull and look for a perfect fit. Remember, all eleven went missing during a six-month period four years ago. That's where the entomology helped us." Dixon took control of the computer's mouse. "On the left is a frontal of the skull recovered from the river site. On the right, a frontal of one Peggy Shulte." She was an average-looking woman. Not glamorous, not taken to fussing over her looks. "Miss Shulte went missing in the Tolt River area two years ago, not four. The county police suspected these were Shulte's remains, but: Voila!" The photograph of Peggy Shulte overlapped with the skull, but the fit was bad, the shape of the head all wrong. Dixon made several adjustments attempting to improve the fit. "No matter how we work this," he explained in an excited voice, "we just can't make them fit. See? There's no way that this skull we dug up belonged to Peggy Shulte."

Boldt inched his way up to the edge of his chair. We tear people's lives apart right down to the bone, he thought, all in an effort to explain their deaths. "Who is she?" he asked impatiently.

Dixon snapped his head away from the screen. Light flashed from his excited eyes. Once again, he worked with the keyboard and mouse. The photograph of Shulte disappeared, replaced by a different, even more innocent,face. She had a number below her face. How many missing each year? Boldt wondered, knowing that it was so many that the police and FBI flushed their active files after twelve months to make room for the new. Too many for milk cartons. You counted these people-mostly young women in graves.

Sliding the color photo over the skull, Dixon said, "She was number eight of eleven." Remarkably, the two images-the face and the skull-joined like a hand inside a glove. Dixon described the fit in technical detail, his finger spitting static sparks as he touched the screen. Boldt wasn't listening. This picture was indeed worth a thousand words: one and the same woman. Dixon concluded proudly, "This woman went missing while working in the Seattle area fifty-one months ago-which fits our window of time. Furthermore, her dental records, faxed to us this morning, show fillings in the exact same uppers that had been chiseled out from our victim's remains. This guy would have been smarter to knock out a few other teeth as well. As it is, in a roundabout way he's actually helped us to identify her."

"By knocking out a few teeth? How so?"

"By knocking out the same nine teeth." Dixon pointed at him. "I knew you would ask me about this. Picky, picky. But I'm prepared for you." He fished a piece of note-paper out of his chest pocket. "I called a mathematician friend at the U-Dubasked him the probability of the same nine teeth, and only nine teeth, having had dental work. You ready for this?" He slipped on some glasses and read: "One in twenty-eight million, forty-eight thousand, eight hundred. Ergo: Odds are there's only one of her in this city." He added, "Lou Boldt, meet Anna Ferragot. "Anna," Boldt said, leaning forward. He placed a hand on Dixon's back. "Always a thorough bastard, aren't you?"

"Goes with the turf." Dixon pressed his face close to the screen. In a tired but proud voice he said, "The harvester kept you around for four days and then buried you-why? He harvested your liver-for whom? Can you help us? Did you know your killer? Was he a stranger?"