KATHY REICHS - 206 BONES

“The computer’s down. Listen, why don’t you stop by here? We’ll visit. Then, when the system’s back up, if there are remains that interest you, we’ll pull them.”

I’d planned to spend the day helping Vecamamma arrange snapshots in albums and bake Christmas cookies. But I knew my mother-in-law. She’d want me to help Cukura Kundze.

“Where’s Walczak?” I asked.

“Milwaukee.”

I glanced at Ryan, wondering if he’d need transport to O’Hare. Screw it. His best buddy Gordie could play chauffeur.

“I’ll be there around ten.”

CORCORAN AND I FOUND TWO POSSIBILITIES.

One was a heroin overdose victim, a white male with an estimated age of twenty to twenty-five. The naked body had been found sixteen months earlier on the city’s South Side, near Forty-fifth and Stewart, between the Chicago Western Indiana Railroad tracks and the edge of Fuller Park. No friend or family member had come forward. A records search had led nowhere. Ditto for dentals and prints. The man was still in the freezer.

The other was a skeleton. Descriptors had been entered as: white; male; eighteen to twenty-four years of age. The bones had been in storage for thirty-eight months.

We bombed on both fronts.

Though the information had yet to be entered into the system, Corcoran learned that Freezer Man had finally been IDed two days earlier. Turned out the body was that of a nineteen-year-old student from Ohio State, a schizophrenic who’d dropped out to hit the big city without calling home. What had happened on the mean streets was anyone’s guess. Mom and Dad were awaiting delivery of the body.

By phoning Cukura Kundze, I learned that Lassie stood six-two and weighed roughly 190. Long bone measurements put Skeleton Man’s height at five-six, tops.

I pulled the case to double-check the stature estimate. Right on.

“Not your boy,” Corcoran said.

“No,” I agreed.

We were standing beside a worktable in the CCME storage room. Corcoran was watching as I replaced Skeleton Man’s bones in their box.

“Who does your anthropology?” I asked, snugging the lid into place.

“For years we used a guy out of Oklahoma. Now that he’s retired, it’s pretty haphazard. Sometimes a graduate student. Sometimes a resident doing a rotation here. Sometimes a staff pathologist.”

“People who’ll work for free,” I guessed.

“Walczak claims there’s no money in the budget.”

“One day that approach will bite him in the ass.”

“Hey, don’t jump on me. I agree we should use only board-certified specialists. Would make my job easier.”

“Who analyzed this fellow?” I laid a palm on Skeleton Man’s box.

Corcoran checked the case file.

“AP. That would be Tony Papatados, a doctoral candidate at UIC. Excavates bones in Peru. Or maybe it’s Bolivia. I don’t remember.”

“An archaeologist.”

“Weren’t you an archaeologist?”

“Yes. Don’t get me wrong. Many bio-archaeologists and physical anthropologists are excellent researchers. Many know a lot of osteology, how to estimate age, sex, how to measure bones properly. But they’re not trained in the full range of forensic issues. Most have little experience with modern populations.”

Sudden thought. If Walczak had underqualified people working his anthropology cases, it was possible some remains had been improperly evaluated.

“Mind if I spend a little time in here?”

“Fine with me. Why?”

“Laszlo Tot was military. And reported missing. If he came here, even as a decomp, the ID would have been a snap with dentals and prints. But suppose his body wasn’t found for a while. What if he was skeletonized and the bones were examined by someone with, shall we say, limited skills?”

“We could be overlooking him because the report is misleading.”

“Or flat-ass wrong.”

“I guess it’s possible.” Corcoran sounded dubious.

“Can you search your database for unidentified decomps and skeletons arriving during the past four years?”

Corcoran tapped the computer keyboard, peered at the monitor, tapped some more, then hit a single key.

“Hold on. There’s a printer in my office.”

He returned moments later with a list containing fourteen CCME numbers. He’d also pulled the police incident, morgue intake, and anthropology reports for each case.

Seven corpses had arrived badly decomposed. For those, the flesh had been stripped, then the skeletons cleaned by boiling. One individual had been burned, one mummified. For those, the remains had been left untouched. Five folks had rolled in as nothing but bone.

“They’re all over there.” Corcoran indicated the shelving to which I’d returned Skeleton Man in his absence. “But you’re on your own. A battered toddler just showed up. I caught the autopsy.”

“No problem.”

Corcoran showed me where the necessary equipment was stored, and jotted a number should I have need of a tech. Then he was gone.

Starting with those who’d arrived as skeletons, I constructed a biological profile for each: age, sex, race, and height. When finished, I checked my findings against the case files.

At one fifteen Corcoran came to see if I wanted to break for lunch. Over a machine sandwich of very questionable-looking chicken salad, a six-pack of Oreos, and a Diet Coke, we discussed my intentions with regard to Jurmain. I told him I’d be phoning Edward Allen first thing in the morning, maybe even driving to Winnetka to pay a surprise call.

Corcoran apologized again. As before, I assured him he was not the target of my ire.

At one forty-five I returned to the storeroom.

By four I’d finished the skeletons. One Mongoloid female had been classified as Negroid. One elderly white male had a surgically pinned right “humerus” that was actually a femur from a very large dog.

No Lassie candidate.

Knowing I’d need X-rays, I skipped the mummified and burned individuals and moved on to the cleaned-up decomps. On the third set of bones I hit pay dirt.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Cook County was one of the leading producers of limestone and dolomite in the U.S. The bulk of the stone came from quarries situated in suburbs to the west and south of Chicago: Elmhurst, Riverside, La Grange, Bellwood, McCook, Hodgkins, Thornton. Most was shipped on the Illinois Michigan Canal, later on the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Though the golden age of quarrying has long since passed, the scarred landscapes remain. I’m not talking little dents in the ground. These pits are whoppers.

And great places to off-load bodies.

According to Police Officer Cyril Powers, on July 28, 2005, a decomposed corpse was spotted floating facedown just south of a bridge carrying the Tri-State Tollway over the Thornton Quarry. Powers contacted personnel at the Material Service Corporation, owners and operators of the quarry, then called for grappling hooks and a morgue van.

The remains were logged in as 287JUL05. A staff pathologist named Bandhura Jayamaran was assigned to the case. Jayamaran estimated PMI at two to three weeks.

Due to advanced putrefaction and severe cranial damage, including absence of most of the left side of the face and all of the lower jaw, only three teeth remained, the upper-right premolars and the first molar. None had a unique characteristic or dental restoration.

Fingerprinting was not an option. Concluding that little could be done with the body, Jayamaran ordered it cleaned and the bones stored pending anthropological analysis.

One month later, 287JUL05 was examined by someone identified only by the initials ML, who determined that the individual was a white male, approximately thirty-five years of age, with a height of five foot eight, plus or minus one inch. Age was based on the condition of the pubic symphyses, the small surfaces where the pelvic halves meet in front. Stature was calculated using the length of the femur.