Kathy Reichs - Spider Bones

“I assume the two of you don’t get along.”

“Let’s just say Hadley Perry won’t be dining at my house real soon. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help her.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I don’t like her, it’s mutual, we’ll leave it at that.”

Danny strode to the table. I followed. He added his freshly scrubbed tibia to the man from Lumberton.

For a moment we both stared at the half-cleaned skeleton.

“What did you want to show me?” Danny asked.

“It may be nothing.” I scooped up the occipital fragment. “Look at the suture.” I pointed to the squiggly line.

“Complex, with lots of accessories.” Danny meant tiny islands of bone trapped within the suture.

I passed him the chunk of maxilla that had produced the mushroom-duck thing.

“Broad palate. Straight transverse suture, not bulging up over the midline.” He viewed the bone face-on. “The zygomaxillary suture is angled, not S-shaped.” He rotated it so the missing nose would have pointed skyward. “Cheekbones probably had some flare.”

Danny’s eyes rolled up to mine.

“You’re thinking this guy might be Vietnamese?”

I shook my head. “You’re right those traits say Mongoloid ancestry. But others suggest Caucasoid. The high nasal bridge, the narrow nasal aperture, the moderately shaped skull, neither long and narrow nor short and broad.”

“So, mixed race?”

“European-Asian or European–Native American.”

“We had troops who would fit that bill. American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Filipinos. Not many, but they were over there fighting for us.”

“What about the missing crew member? Did you learn if the fourth body was ever found?”

“Not yet.”

“What was the man’s name?”

“I’m still waiting for a response to my inquiry.”

For the rest of that day we teased charred tissue and moldy fabric from bone.

By five a fully cleaned skeleton lay on the table.

The exposed bone produced no breakthrough moment.

Honolulu’s medical examiner operates out of a curvilinear white structure on Iwilei Road just a short walk from Chinatown. Next door is the largest Salvation Army facility I have ever seen.

At precisely five thirty I pulled under an arch and into a small lot beside the building. Hadley Perry answered my buzz in person. The pictures I’d seen in the Honolulu Advertiser hardly prepared me.

Perry was a slim woman with disproportionately large breasts and a penchant for what Katy called “haute hooker” makeup. Her short black hair was gelled into spikes, several of which were fire engine red.

“Hadley Perry.” She shot out a hand.

I offered mine.

Perry’s grip could have molded forged steel.

“Thanks so much for coming.”

“I’m not sure I can help.” Wiggling my fingers to check for fractures.

“But you’ll give it the old one-two, eh?” Perry launched a punch to my biceps that really hurt. “Let’s have at it.”

Good Lord. Who was this woman?

I followed Perry through double doors down a polished tile corridor, resisting the urge to massage my throbbing muscle. Bypassing a large, five-table autopsy room, we entered a small chamber not unlike salle 4 at the LSJML. Glass-fronted cabinets, side counter, dissecting scope, hanging scale.

The stainless steel gurney held a plastic-covered mound. Small and lumpy, the shape looked wrong for a human being.

Wordlessly, we both donned aprons and gloves.

Like a waiter presenting the table d’hôte, Perry whipped off the sheeting.

I SWALLOWED HARD.

The remains consisted of five amorphous lumps and an eighteen-inch segment of human lower limb. The skin was puckered and celery green, the underlying tissue gray and textured like pot roast.

Stepping to the table, I bent for a closer look.

The severed leg was sparsely populated with short, dark hairs. Bones were visible deep in the flesh, a partial femur up, a partial tibia and fibula below. All three shafts terminated in jagged spikes. Bones, skin, and muscle were scored by gouges, cuts, and parallel slashes.

“It’s a knee, right?” Perry asked.

“Left. This came from the ocean?”

“Yeah. Check out the X-rays.”

Perry crossed to a double-tiered illuminator, flipped two switches, and tapped a film lying on the box’s horizontal surface. I joined her.

An object glowed white within a segment of flesh. Bean-sized, it looked like a cartoon whitecap.

“Shark tooth,” I said.

“Yeah. There are others.” A blue-lacquered nail jabbed two more films.

“You’re thinking death by shark attack?”

Perry waggled a hand. Maybe yes, maybe no. “I see no hemorrhage in the tissue.”

Dead hearts don’t pump. Bleeding at a trauma site usually means the victim was alive when injured. No blood usually means the hit was taken postmortem.

“Could the absence of hemorrhage be explained by immersion in salt water?”

“Sure.”

“So the dismemberment could have resulted from postmortem scavenging.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

I scanned the films, each taken at a different angle. Like the knee, three other hunks of flesh contained portions of skeleton.

“That’s the pubic bone and a bit of ischium.” I indicated a plate showing part of the pelvic front.

“Good for sex?”

“Not tonight.”

“Hardy fucking har.”

I braced for an arm-punch. Didn’t come.

“The V-shaped subpubic angle, blocky pubic body, and broad ischio-pubic ramus suggest male.”

Perry nodded.

“That’s a bit of iliac crest.” I pointed to a section of the curving upper border of a left pelvic half. “It’s only partially fused to the iliac blade. Assuming male gender, to be on the safe side, I’d say you’re looking at an age of sixteen to twenty-four.”

“Sonovafrigginbitch.”

“That’s a portion of proximal femoral shaft, from just below the head and neck. Left, like the knee and pelvis.” I was pointing at a plate clipped to the light box’s vertical surface. My finger moved to the one beside it. “And that’s part of the left foot and ankle. Those are remnants of distal tibia, talus, and some smaller foot bones, I’d say the navicular and the third and second cuneiforms.”

“Can you get height from them?”

I considered. “No. I could do a statistical regression off measurements taken from the partial leg bones, but the range would be almost uselessly broad.”

“But you could say if the kid was very big or very small?”

“Yes. The muscle attachments suggest a robust build.”

“What about race?”

“No way. The skin appears pale, but that could be the result of postmortem bleaching or skin sloughing due to immersion in salt water.”

Human pigmentation is contained solely in the epidermis, the skin’s outer layer. Lose the epidermis, we all look Scandinavian, a fact often misinterpreted by those unaccustomed to seeing bodies recovered from water.

Perry knew that. I knew that she knew that. The answer was strictly reflex. My attention was focused on the remains.

Returning to the table, I examined each mass in turn. Then, “Where was this found?” I waved a hand over the grisly assemblage.

“Come on, I’ll loop you in.”

Degloving, Perry led me back up the corridor. We encountered only one person, an elderly Hawaiian with a bucket and mop. The man dropped his eyes when we passed. Perry did not acknowledge his presence.

The chief ME’s office looked like Danny Tandler’s on uppers. Files and papers occupied every horizontal surface—desktop, coffee table, chair seats, windowsill, file cabinets, floor. Books, magazines, and reprints teetered in stacks. Open journals lay with spines cracking under the weight of overlying issues.