Michael Baden - Remains Silent

At the end of the room was a massive oak desk, so big Manny couldn’t imagine how it got through the door. In the far corner stood the skeleton. “It’s a real one, from the Ganges River,” Jake explained. “The plastic ones they use in medical school may be adequate, but the weight of the bones is all wrong.” Although one entire wall was lined with shelves displaying more books, bones, and specimens, the desktop was bare.

Jake set the paper bag on the desk, offering Manny the leather swivel chair. He pulled out samples of hair in separate envelopes, then a thin oval-shaped piece of gray metal.

“What’s that?” Manny asked.

“James Lyons had a plate in his skull. Pete found it.”

He handed it to her. The plate was perforated with tiny holes; she held it up to the light. Manny Manfreda, Private Eye. “There are letters punched into this.” She squinted. “A.V.E.”

“Probably the initials of the neurosurgeon who inserted it.”

She suppressed a shudder. “Why would anyone do that? A plate in the head is bad enough- but an autograph?”

“Skull,” Jake corrected. “It’s not unheard of. The doctor might have done it so he could be located. More probably, it was out of vanity. Some doctors can’t resist playing God. In one of the bodies I autopsied, a surgeon had carved his initials into a lobe of the liver. He was showing off for the operating room nurse.”

“That’s assault. You guys are weird.”

“The initials on this plate could come in handy,” Jake continued, ignoring her attack.

“You think we can use them to identify the other bodies?”

“That’s what I’m hoping. If we can track down the surgeon, or at least his records, maybe he’d know who else was in those graves.”

“Why would Lyons have a plate in his head anyway?” Manny asked. “Could he have been in an accident?”

“Sure, but I’m inclined to think it was a treatment for his trauma-induced epilepsy from a war wound.”

“By cutting a hole in his head?”

“There was once a theory that removing part of the skull could prevent seizures by reducing intracranial pressure. Nobody believes it anymore. The practice is barbaric, like frontal lobotomies.” He caressed the metal softly, deep in thought.

That same gentle touch. I can almost feel it.

“Must have been done after he was discharged from the army,” Jake went on. “He’d have been rejected otherwise. It’s funny. I thought the treatment stopped in the forties. But Lyons fought in Korea. Maybe the army medics continued to use outdated procedures to save money.” He began to pace.

When he’s thinking, that’s what he does. So did Sherlock Holmes.

Jake’s voice was the one he used when he was autopsying Mrs. Alessis. “Lyons didn’t die right after the plate was put in. The cut bone had been healing for some months.”

“Significant?”

“I have no idea.” He sat down and took out another bone. “The label’s still on this one. It’s the first and second cervical vertebrae of Skeleton Three. See, the broken edges are irregular- no healing.” Next he pulled out the humerus of Skeleton Two. It looked normal, just like it had the day he and Harrigan had removed it from the ground.

Once more he reached into the bag and held up his discovery. “Skeleton One, the ulna, the forearm bone. And the metacarpal with the anomaly.”

“Why would Harrigan save that?”

“We’ll have to figure it out.”

“Anything else in there?”

“Other bones.” He put the remains into a clean banker’s box and rubbed his eyes. “There’s a safe downstairs. I’ll store them overnight.”

Manny felt a stab of disappointment. I’d been hoping- for what? “Let’s start again in the morning,” Jake said. “I’m due a sick day. Do you have the time to help me?”

Time? No. “Try and keep me away.”

“Good. I’ll tell Sam about tonight and ask him to come over, too. You can go over the other stuff from Pete’s house while I get these hair and bone samples to a private lab owned by my friend Hans Galt. I need to take new X-rays, too. Pete never gave me his. And I’ve got to see a dentist about a mandible.”

Meaning he’ll be gone while I work with Sam. Such is the detective business.

“How and why could the deaths of four patients at a mental hospital be kept secret for more than forty years?” Manny asked. “Somebody would leak it, no?”

“Not if they wanted to live,” Jake said, remembering his last conversation with his friend. “That’s the point. Pete knew he was about to die. What was it to him if he knew something he shouldn’t? That’s why he was killed. And why, by knowing him, we’re all in danger.”

DR. GEOFFREY RENKO was one of the foremost forensic dentists in America. Jake had consulted with him many times on forensic matters and as few times as possible when it came to his own teeth.

The dentist greeted him warmly. “Sit, sit. You’re not here for your checkup, I take it.”

“Next month,” Jake said, struck by how a man so big could have such delicate hands. They were seated in Renko’s office. Jake handed him the mandible. “I was wondering if you would take a look at this.”

Renko turned it over in his hands. “You have dental records for comparison?”

Jake shook his head.

“The rest of the skull?”

“What you see is all there is.”

Renko smiled. “I like a challenge.”

“Good, because I’m hoping you can tell me something that might help identify the victim. All I know is that it’s a woman in her late teens or early twenties who probably died in the mid-sixties, when she was a patient at the Turner Psychiatric Hospital.”

Renko raised his eyebrows. “O-ho. A mental hospital. They’re often butchers when it comes to dental care.” He took up the mandible. “Bones and teeth are formed when you’re young, so we could examine the carbon isotopes to determine whether she spent her childhood eating cane sugar versus beet sugar. That’d narrow down the region where she grew up. Of course, you’d need a nuclear reactor-”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Jake said, “but it might.”

Renko pulled down a magnifying lamp attached to an arm at the corner of the desk and looked at the jawbone with the concentration of a diamond merchant. “Well… here’s something.” He held out the bone for Jake to examine. “See those four fillings on the edges of the teeth? They’re Class Three gold-foil between-teeth fillings. Popular in the fifties, before dentists moved to silicate cement and acrylic. If the work was done in the sixties, it was behind the times. And it’s amateurish anyway. They got the job done, but it’s messy.”

“So it might have been a sloppy old guy upstate using outdated materials.”

“Or a sloppy young guy. In the sixties, a dental student still had to be able to do this kind of filling to pass the New York State boards.”

“Maybe she was from a poor family and had to go to a clinic.”

“There were only three dental schools in New York State then: Albany, NYU, and Columbia. Sometimes state institutions like prisons or mental hospitals had a day set aside for students to work on-site.”

“You think a dental school would have records that old?”

“Sure, if they have archives. Copies might be in the asylum, too. In either case, it’s a needle in a haystack.”

“At this point,” Jake said, “I’ll take what I can get.”

“Sam, it’s Manny. Office emergency. I’m running a little late.”

“I can’t talk now.”

“Is something wrong?”

“It’s yoga hour.”

“Why are you doing yoga at Jake’s?”

“There’s a nice vibe here.”

Oh. “Have you even started?”