Kathy Reichs - Bare Bones

Rinaldi did a slow turn and rolled his eyes in his partner’s direction.

“Skinny can be a bit gruff. But he’s a good cop. Don’t worry, Dr. Brennan. We’ll find the Bankses.”

At that moment Slidell stuck his head through the door.

“Looks like Green Acres ain’t the crime scene for the privy vic.”

Rinaldi and I waited for him to continue.

“CSU shined a LumaLite around the place this morning.” Though Slidell smiled, the corners of his mouth stayed flat. “No blood. Dark as a mall on Christmas Day.”

When Rinaldi and Slidell had gone, I took Hawkins’s envelope to the stinky room and began popping X rays onto the light boxes.

Each film inspired a fresh title for Slidell.

Dork.

Prick.

One-syllable appellations worked best. Unless a corner slipped and the film needed readjustment.

Asshole.

Dickhead.

Plate by plate, I worked my way through the passenger’s infrastructure. Ribs, vertebrae, pelvis, arm, leg, breast, and collarbone.

Other than massive deceleration trauma, the skeleton looked perfectly normal.

Until I popped up the last four plates.

I was staring at the passenger’s hands and feet when Larabee came up behind me. For a full ten seconds neither of us spoke.

Larabee broke the silence.

“Jesus Christ in a blooming pear tree. I hope that’s not what I think it is.”

15

I STARED INTO THE PATTERN OF GRAYS AND WHITES RADIATINGfrom the X ray. Beside me, Larabee did the same.

“Could you see involvement when you examined the nasal bones?” the ME asked.

“One lesion.”

“Active?”

“Yes.”

I heard Larabee’s soles squeak on the tile, his palms rub up and down on his upper arms.

“Are you thinking leprosy?” he asked.

“Sure looks like it.”

“How the hell does someone get leprosy in North Carolina?”

The question hung in the air as I dug through layers at the back of my mind.

Graduate school. Systematics of bone pathology.

A: anatomical distribution.

I pointed the tip of my pen at the finger and toe bones.

“Other than the nasals, the process seems to be restricted to the bones of the hands and feet, especially the proximal and middle phalanges.”

Larabee agreed.

B: osseous modification. Abnormal size, shape, bone loss, bone formation.

“I see three types of change.”

I pointed to a punched-out-looking circle. “Some lesions look round and cystic, like the one on the nasal.”

I indicated a honeycombed pattern in the index finger.

“There’s lacelike coarsening in some phalanges.”

I moved my pen to a phalange whose shape had altered from that of a dumbbell to that of a sharpened pencil.

“Resorption in one.”

“Looks like classic radiology textbook leprosy to me,” said Larabee.

“Did you pick up hints of anything elsewhere in the body?”

Larabee turned both palms up and shrugged in a “not really” gesture. “A couple of enlarged lymph nodes, but they didn’t strike me as any big deal. The lungs were hamburger, so I couldn’t really see much.”

“With lepromatous leprosy, the most obvious skin lesions would have been on the face.”

“Yeah. And this guy didn’t have one.”

Back to my hindbrain.

No macroscopically observable changes in soft tissue.

Diffuse spotty rarefaction, cortical thinning, penciling of at least one phalange.

Down through the mental strata.

Neoplasias. Deficiency diseases. Metabolic. Infectious. Autoimmune.

Slow, benign course.

Hands and feet.

Young adult.

“But you can bet your ass I’ll take a close look at the histo when the slides are ready.”

Larabee’s words hardly registered as I thumbed through possible diagnoses. Leprosy. Tuberculosis. Spina ventosa. Osteochondromatosis.

“Don’t phone Father Damien yet,” I said, clicking off the light boxes. “I’m going to do some digging.”

“In the meantime, I’ll take another look at what’s left of this guy’s skin and lymph nodes.” Larabee wagged his head. “Sure would help if he had a face.”

I’d barely settled at my desk when the phone rang. It was Sheila Jansen.

“I was right. It wasn’t coke burned onto the underbelly of that Cessna.”

“What was it?”

“That has yet to be determined. But the stuff wasn’t blow. Any progress on the passenger?”

“We’re working on it.”

I didn’t mention our suspicion about the man’s health. Better to wait until we were sure.

“Discovered a bit more about Ricky Don Dorton,” Jansen said.

I waited.

“Seems Ricky Don got into a slight misunderstanding with the United States Marine Corps back in the early seventies, did some brig time, got the boot.”

“Drugs?”

“Corporal Dorton decided to send a little hash home as a memento of his time in Southeast Asia.”

“There’s an original thought.”

“Actually, his scheme was pretty ingenious. Dorton was assigned to casualty affairs in Vietnam. He’d slip drugs into coffins in the mortuary in Da Nang, then an associate would remove them on arrival Stateside, before the serviceman’s body was processed on to the family. Dorton was probably working with someone he’d met during his tour, someone who knew the morgue routine.”

“Clever.” Jesus. “Cold, but clever.”

“Except Corporal Einstein got nailed the last week of his tour.”

“Bad timing.”

“Dorton disappeared for a while after his release. Next we see him, he’s back in Sneedville running field trips for the Grizzly Woodsman Fishing Camp.”

“Grizzly Woodsman? Is that one of those outfits that helps accountants from Akron reel in the bass of their dreams?”

“Yeah. Guess the GED education and dishonorable discharge limited Ricky Don’s options with the big Wall Street firms. But not his aspirations. Two years as an angling coach, and Dorton opens his own operation. Wilderness Quest.”

“You don’t suppose Ricky Don got some product across before the Corps discovered his little export scheme?”

“Nah. Fine citizen probably set aside a little from every paycheck, worked a civilian job on weekends, that sort of thing. Anyway, by the mid-eighties, Dorton switched from hip waders to pinstripes. In addition to the fishing camp he owns a sporting goods store in Morristown, Tennessee, and the two entertainment palaces in Kannapolis.”

“A respected businessman,” I said.

“And Ricky Don’s military experience taught him well. If Dorton’s into something illegal, he operates from a distance now. Stays so cool the cops can’t make him flinch.”

Something moved in the sludge at the back of my brain.

“Did you say Dorton’s from Sneedville?”

“Yeah.”

“Tennessee?”

“Yeah. Mama Dorton and about a trillion kin still live there.”

The sludge thought rolled over, sluggish and lazy.

“Any chance Dorton’s a Melungeon?”

“How did you guess that?”

“Is he?”

“Sure is. I’m impressed. Until yesterday I’d never heard of Melungeons.” Jansen may have picked up on something in my voice. “That trigger a line of thought?”

“Just a hunch. Could be nothing.”

“You know how to reach me.”

I sat a moment when we’d disconnected.

Dig.

Upper layers. Recent deposits.

American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Scientific session.

What year? What city?

I turned to the AAFS programs on my shelf.

Within ten minutes I found what I was looking for. Twelve years back. A graduate student presentation on disease frequencies among Melungeon populations.

As I read the abstract, the sludge thought lumbered to its feet and slowly took form.