Beverly Connor - Dead Past

“All them poor babies,” he had said on his first glance of the scene. “Them poor, poor babies.”

Grover was probably in his forties, but it was hard to tell. His dark skin was unlined and his hair had no gray. He was a big guy with big hands and a face so solemn that he looked perpetually melancholy. He had absolute respect for human remains and a good knowledge of anatomy.

“We have a match,” Rankin said from his seat at his field desk.

The first match. The first “this is someone. Not just human features roughly carved in charcoal.” Not a John or Jane Doe. No longer anonymous.

Rankin rose to give his report to the officer in charge of the records, a heavyset policeman with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a bloodhound face, and a body that looked both sturdy and agile-Archie Donahue, Diane believed his name was. As she recalled, he had been on the Rosewood police force for a long time and worked in the evidence locker. Well suited for this work, filing and cataloging the artifacts of lives that loved ones hoped would identify them in death.

Archie sat at the long evidence table and looked up from the stack of antemortem records he’d just accepted from the intake desk in the coffee tent. He was about to enter them into the computer program that kept track of all the incoming details of missing students-anything that would help identify them. Archie seemed to hesitate reaching for Rankin’s report. Probably dreaded the thought that one of the dead would be a child or grandchild of someone he knew. Rosewood wasn’t that big a town. And if it were true that there are only six degrees of separation between everyone in the world, then in the town of Rosewood the number of degrees was probably one or two. Many local children stayed to attend the local university. Everyone in Rosewood would know someone touched by this.

Diane saw his hands shake as he looked at the report.

“Bobby Coleman… I know his daddy,” he whispered in a cigarette-and-whisky voice. “We go to the same church.”

They all stopped, Pilgrim, Webber, Diane, even the assistants-a spontaneous moment of silence for his grief-for Bobby’s family’s grief.

Brewster Pilgrim broke the silence. “I need your opinion here, Diane,” he said.

Pilgrim was the coroner of the county to the north of Rosewood. He was inclined toward being heavy, and looked like everyone’s ideal grandfather with his white hair and white brush moustache.

“I can’t tell the sex,” he said. “Looks too close to call to me.”

Diane changed gloves, walked over to Brewster’s work area, and looked down in the open cavity of the charred cadaver.

“We should have given this to you,” he said. “Hardly any flesh left. Must have been in the hottest part of the fire. And look at this. I believe a beam or something fell on him. Look at the crushed pelvis here.”

The cadaver was charred black down to the bone. There was flesh, but it had been so consumed by fire that the hard bone underneath the flesh was exposed over the entire body. The head was gone, probably exploded in the heat. Pieces of skull lay in a shallow box near the remains with blackened flesh still clinging to them. Obviously found nearby and probably from the same body.

“I believe you’re right about the break.” She examined the broken right ilium and left pubis. It looked like something heavy had fallen across the pelvic region and crushed the bones. “It is a rather androgynous pelvis, isn’t it,” agreed Diane.

She carved flesh away from the pelvis to look at the various markers for gender. What she saw was a wide subpubic angle, wide sciatic notch, and the presence of the preauricular sulcus.

“Female,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Pilgrim. “I’d have probably called it male. Looked like a male pelvis to me.”

As he spoke, Diane teased a bit of bone away from the pubis with a pair of tweezers and put it in the palm of her hand.

“What’s that?” asked Pilgrim, leaning over her shoulder to look at the delicate piece.

“Fetal bone,” said Diane. “She was pregnant.”

Brewster Pilgrim looked for a long moment at the bone so tiny and fragile it could have come from a bird.

“Them poor babies,” whispered Grover who stood behind them shaking his large head.

Pilgrim snatched off his latex gloves, threw them in the trash. “I need a break,” he said, and headed out of the tent. “I don’t know why we can’t convince kids to keep out of drugs…” was the last thing Diane heard him say before he disappeared into the cold.

Diane bagged and labeled the fetal bone and went back to her station. Lying before her on the table were assorted fragments of a skull that had burst from the heat of the fire that incinerated the body. She pulled up a stool, sat down, and began her next task-fitting together the pieces of the bone puzzle. Jin was helping Lynn Webber sample the marrow of a femur for DNA profiling.

Rankin suddenly looked up from the charred and bloated remains of the corpse on his table. “We can’t stop kids from getting drugs because there is an army of dealers working against us,” he said. “And we’ll never stop them because it’s a trillion-dollar business. There’s just too much money-more money than any of us can wrap our brains around.” He paused for the briefest moment. “And no one can go up against that kind of money. Don’t kid yourselves that we can do anything but pick up the pieces from the carnage.” He stopped speaking just as suddenly as he had begun and continued his autopsy.

They had all paused to watch Rankin as he ranted. Diane had a sick feeling that he was right. They couldn’t do anything. Her gaze met Lynn Webber’s briefly and she knew that Lynn had the same sick feeling. Grover was still shaking his head.

Just a few more pieces of the skull puzzle and she too would go to the coffee tent and relax for fifteen minutes. It occurred to her that she wasn’t that far from her apartment. She could just go the short distance through the woods and sit down on her own sofa with a hot cup of her own coffee. The thought sounded heavenly. She placed two pieces of occipital together-the thick bone that made up the back of the head. From the prominent nuchal crest, the skull looked like a male.

The morgue tent was void of conversation for several minutes. Only the sounds of work-the clinking tools, shuffling of movement, creaking trolleys-filled the silent space where Rankin’s rant still hung in the air. Everyone was silent, thought Diane, because like her they realized that Rankin was right-there was nothing that any of them could do but pick up the pieces.

Archie, the policeman in charge of evidence, stood and said to no one in particular that he was also going to take a break. Diane watched him leave with two other policemen. They must feel the weight of Rankin’s words most, she thought. They were like the little Dutch boy trying to hold back the water with his finger in the hole in the dike. They were supposed to do something, but they too were powerless against so much money.

Lynn finally broke the ensuing silence in what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

“So, Jin,” she said, “what do you do in your spare time?”

“I scuba dive,” he said. “Diane’s been teaching me caving. I’m getting pretty good, aren’t I, boss?”

Both Jin and Webber’s voices were muffled by the nuisance masks they wore.

“You’re a real natural,” said Diane.

She looked among the fragments of skull scattered on her table for a triangular shaped piece that fit on the frontal just above the orbit. As she sorted through the remains, she noticed the absence of any part of the maxilla, the bone that holds the upper teeth. Identification would be easier if she had teeth to work with.