Kathy Reichs - Bare Bones

I took a sip of my coffee. It was good.

“Good coffee.”

“Thank ya, ma’am.”

No doubt about it. This was going to be a cowboy day.

“Where did you get the bacon and eggs?”

“Hooch and I went for a run. Hit the Harris-Tooter. Weird name for a grocery store.”

“It’s Harris-Teeter.”

“Right. Makes more sense for product recognition.”

I noticed an empty pizza box on the counter.

“I’m really sorry about flaking out last night.”

“You were exhausted. You crashed. No big deal.”

Ryan gave Boyd a strip of bacon, turned, and locked his baby blues onto mine. Slowly, he raised and lowered both brows.

“Not what I had in mind, of course.”

Oh, boy.

I tucked hair behind my ears with both hands. The right side stayed.

“I’m afraid I have to work today.”

“Hooch and I expected that. We’ve made plans.”

Ryan was cracking eggs into a frying pan, tossing shells into the sink with a jump-shot wrist move.

“But we could use some wheels.”

“Drop me off, you can have my car.”

I didn’t ask about the plans.

As we ate, I described the crash scene. Ryan agreed that it sounded like drug traffickers. He, too, had no idea about the odd black residue.

“NTSB investigator didn’t know?”

I shook my head.

“Larabee’ll autopsy the pilot, but he’s asked me to deal with the passenger’s head.”

Boyd pawed my knee. When I didn’t respond he shifted to Ryan.

Over second, then third cups of coffee, Ryan and I discussed mutual friends, his family, things we would do when I returned to Montreal at the end of the summer. The conversation was light and frivolous, a million miles from decomposing bears and a shattered Cessna. I found myself grinning for no reason. I wanted to stay, make ham and mustard and pickle sandwiches, watch old movies, and meander wherever the day might take us.

But I couldn’t.

Reaching out, I pressed my palm to Ryan’s cheek.

“I really am glad you’re here,” I said, smiling a smile with giggles behind it.

“I’m glad I’m here, too,” said Ryan.

“I have a few animal bones to finish up, but that shouldn’t take any time at all. We can leave for the beach tomorrow.”

I finished my coffee, pictured the shards of skull I’d extricated from the charred fuselage. My cupcake smile drooped noticeably.

“Wednesday at the latest.”

Ryan gave Boyd the last strip of bacon.

“The ocean is everlasting,” he said.

So, it would turn out, was the parade of corpses.

8

RYAN COULDN’T DROP ME OFF. I HAD NO CAR.

I called Katy. She arrived within minutes to taxi us downtown, cheerful about the early-morning errand.

Yeah. Right.

The air was hot and humid, the NPR weatherman negative on the subject of a temperature break. Ryan looked overdressed in his jeans, socks, loafers, and chopped-sleeve sweatshirt.

At the MCME I handed Ryan my keys. Across College, a kid in an extra-large Carolina Panthers jersey and crotch-hangers headed in the direction of the county services building, bouncing a basketball to a rhythm he was hearing from his headphones.

Though my mood was gloomy, I couldn’t help but smile. In my youth jeans had to be tight enough to cause arteriosclerosis. This kid’s drawers would accommodate a party of three.

Watching Katy then Ryan drive off, my smile collapsed. I didn’t know where my daughter was going, or what plans Ryan shared with my estranged husband’s dog, but I wished I were heading out, too.

Anywhere but here.

A morgue is not a happy place. Visitors do not come for pleasant diversion.

I know that.

Every day greed, passion, carelessness, stupidity, personal self-loathing, encounters with evil, and plain bad luck send otherwise healthy people rolling in with their toes up. Every day those left behind are sucker punched by the suddenness of unexpected death.

Weekends produce a bumper crop, so Mondays are the worst.

I know that, too.

Still, Monday mornings bum me out.

When I came through the outer door, Mrs. Flowers waved a chubby hand and buzzed me from the lobby into the reception area.

Joe Hawkins was in his cubicle speaking to a woman who looked like she might have worked at a truck-stop counter. Her clothes and face were baggy. She could have been forty or sixty.

The woman listened, eyes glazed and distant, fingers working a wadded tissue. She wasn’t really hearing Hawkins. She was getting her first glimpse of life without the person whose corpse she’d just viewed.

I caught Hawkins’s eye, motioned him to stay at his task.

The board showed three cases logged since yesterday. Busy Sunday for Charlotte. The pilot and passenger had checked in as MCME 438–02 and 439–02

Larabee already had the pilot on the main autopsy room table. When I peeked in he was examining the burned skin through a hand-held magnifier.

“Any word on who we have here?” I asked.

“Nothing yet.”

“Prints or dentals?”

“Fingers are too far gone on this one. But most of the teeth are intact. Looks like he might have seen a dentist at some point in this millennium or the last. He definitely saw his tattoo artist. Check out the artwork.”

Larabee offered the lens.

The man’s lower back must have been protected from the flames by contact with the seat. Across it writhed the south end of a snake, taloned and winged. Red flames danced through the coils and around the edges of Mr. Serpent.

“Recognize the design?” I asked.

“No. But someone should.”

“Guy looks white.”

Larabee sponged upward on the tattoo. More snake emerged from the soot, like a message on a Burger King scratch-and-win. The skin between the scales was pasty white.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “but check this out.”

Snugging a hand under the pilot’s shoulder, Larabee eased the man up. I leaned in.

Black patches clung to the man’s chest like tiny charred leeches.

“That’s the same stuff that’s all over the passenger,” I said.

Larabee let the pilot’s shoulder drop to the table.

“Yep.”

“Any idea what it is?” I asked.

“Not a clue.”

I told Larabee I’d be working in the other room.

“Joe’s got the X rays up on the box,” he said.

I opened a case file, changed to scrubs, got a small cart, and walked to the cooler. When I pulled the handle on the stainless-steel door, a malodorous whoosh of charred and refrigerated flesh blasted my nostrils.

The gurneys were parked in two neat rows. Seven empty. Four occupied.

I checked the tags on the body bag zippers.

MCME 437–02. Ursus and company.

MCME 415–02. Unknown black male. We called him Billy in recognition of the site of his discovery, off the Billy Graham Parkway. Billy was a toothless old man who’d died under a blanket of newspapers, alone and unwanted. In three weeks no one had come forward to claim him. Larabee was giving Billy until the end of the month.

MCME 440–02. Earl Darnell Boggs. DOB 12/14/48. I assumed the unfortunate Mr. Boggs went with the lady in Joe Hawkins’s cubicle.

MCME 439–02. Unknown. The passenger.

I unzipped the pouch.

The body was as I remembered, headless, charred, upper limbs curled into the pugilist pose. The hands were shriveled claws. There would be no prints on this one either.

Hawkins had centered my plastic tubs in a clump above the passenger’s shoulders, as though trying to simulate the shattered head. Transferring the tubs, I rezipped the bag and wheeled the cart to the small autopsy room.

The X rays glowed black and white like the test patterns in the olden days of television. The second film showed two metallic objects mingled with teeth and chunks of jaw. One object looked like a fleur-de-lis, the other like Oklahoma.